The Federal Principle in American Politics, 1790–1833

Abstract

Andrew C. Lenner believes that Jeffersonian constitutionalism has been misrepresented and oversimplified by historians. In this detailed study of the federal principle in American politics, Lenner seeks to vindicate Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their political heirs as having been neither dogmatic and inflexible in belittling federal power nor narrowly opportunistic in frustrating Federalist policies, but rather “principled and consistent” in their resistance to federal incursions into the domestic and internal affairs of the states. The Jeffersonians' frequent recourse to federal power to advance their own policies was not (Lenner suggests) simple hypocrisy, but rather the product of a coherent constitutional philosophy that distinguished domestic (state) concerns from international (federal) affairs. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and Thomas Jefferson was not a little man, so Lenner's gallantry on his behalf is neither necessary nor entirely accurate; but it does capture one fundamental truth about Americans' understanding of their Constitution between 1790 and 1833—that no serious politician of any party denied the separate sovereignty of the states and the federal government within their own proper spheres of power. Conflicts arose not over the existence of separate state and federal sovereignties, but in drawing the line between them and deciding what should count as a state's own “domestic” or internal affairs. The later southern turn to nullification and to absolutist conceptions of state sovereignty represented a radical departure from the intentions of the framers of the United States Constitution and from fifty years of American constitutional tradition.