The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774-1804. By Douglas Bradburn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. xiv, 415 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-2801-2.)

Abstract

This book and several others like it written over the last decade fall into the category of niche histories: they explore a specific subject in great depth and simultaneously use this detailed information to tie together and explain an entire period. Joanne Freeman's Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2002) is a good example of this approach. Although the authors of niche histories usually overestimate the importance of their subject in the grand scheme of things, they often provide valuable detail and insightful perspective. That is certainly the case with Douglas Bradburn's The Citizenship Revolution. Broadly speaking, Bradburn focuses on two issues—how American colonial subjecthood morphed into revolutionary citizenship and how national citizenship briefly rose during the War for Independence, lapsed under the weak Articles of Confederation, rebounded during the debate over the ratification of the new Constitution, solidified during Federalist dominance in the 1790s, only to be replaced by state citizenship after the election of 1800, which prevailed until the Civil War. Between the first Continental Congress and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Bradburn states, “assertions of rights and popular sovereignty in the midst of war and state creation had created citizens from subjects, while necessity and desire had crafted a Union from a collection of colonies” (p. 273). Throughout the 1790s, Federalists used various domestic and international crises to enact laws that, coupled with a national common law interpreted by a friendly federal judiciary, benefited their vision of “a homogeneous citizenry united against foreign ideas, disaffected immigrants, and sectional ambition” (p. 274). Federalist policies, particularly under the John Adams administration, stimulated a loose opposition coalition of planters, small farmers, urban ethnic groups, artisans, and the commercial class in the middle states. After the election of 1800, victorious Jeffersonians implemented their vision of a highly decentralized, loosely connected union of states where citizenship remained the problem and responsibility of the individual states. The federal government would retain its powers, but these were limited and defined in the Constitution to those objects reflecting international and “mutual” relations. (p. 281)