The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s–1830s by Gerald Leonard

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s–1830s by Gerald Leonard Andrew W. Robertson The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s–1830s. By Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell. New Histories of American Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 257 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. Constitutional history has long been the province of legal and intellectual historians, but Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell's The Partisan Republic takes a new approach in examining how social dynamics forced what the authors call "the fall of the Founders' Constitution" in the 1830s. Their sweeping new perspective describes a vision of constitutionalism as, beginning in the early 1790s, shaped "by an expanded public sphere and an emerging practice and theory of party politics" (4). For Leonard and Cornell, a complete understanding of early American constitutional development incorporates such figures as the whiskey rebels, Judith Sargent Murray, James Forten, and Martin Van Buren along with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall. At the same time, the democratic forces they discern in the early republic were intent on establishing hierarchies by gender, race, and ethnicity, and they show how this process produced an "exclusionary understanding of citizenship that limited political access and legal personhood to white men" (4). The intertwined analysis of constitutional, political, and ideological history is one of the significant strengths of this book. Leonard and Cornell argue that the 1790s were characterized by increasing democratic inclusion. As they recount, the Jeffersonian wing of a partyless elite—prompted by popular democratic movements—accepted the necessity of party formation and then, along with their democratic allies, abetted patchy but broad political participation. The Federalists followed suit. Over the course of the next three decades, however, democracy was redefined by party, by ideology, and by a popular prerogative for constitutional interpretation. This reinterpretation of democracy marginalized and then excluded "constitutional outsiders" (3) such as people of color, women, and Indigenous nations. This fine book presents the history of democracy as a "work in progress" (223) but in fact shows there to be little progress. Leonard and Cornell begin by describing the 1787 Constitution that replaced the Articles of Confederation as "a constitution of compromises" (15). These compromises determined the balance of power between federal and state prerogatives and between large and small states, ordered the extent and power of the executive branch, and shaped the institution of slavery. The ratification debates, they argue, "gave the nation its new Constitution in roughly the form it would hold until the Civil War" (40). Yet the conflicts [End Page 336] revealed in the ratification conventions did not disappear. Instead they were transformed into constitutional questions; as Leonard and Cornell put it, "virtually every contentious issue … would become constitutionalized" (41) in the 1790s. Americans thus faced the necessity of defining "with greater precision their constitutional ideologies and legal agendas" (41). By bringing together the constitutional and political histories of the early republic, Leonard and Cornell produce a much richer understanding of each. They assign a leading role to the efforts of democratic forces—that is, advocates of democracy and democratic societies—in provoking the expansion of public deliberation and voter participation in politics. This movement also laid the foundation for party politics, and the emergence of this style of politics in the legislative and executive branches shaped the "distribution of the powers of government" (42), while also driving party newspaper networks to become a powerful new force.1 Leonard and Cornell's emphasis on social dynamics departs from the conventional view that the party competition that overthrew the partyless, elite governance characteristic of the "Founders' Constitution" arose from personal rivalries cleaving Hamilton from Jefferson and Madison. The authors write that "it is easy to forget that Madison and Jefferson shared" Hamilton's wariness of party politics and "a veneration for law as a constraint on democratic excess," and that all three held a "faith in a virtuous governing elite" (57). The profound threat posed by "the Hamiltonian statist agenda" (57), however, propelled Jefferson and Madison to ally themselves more directly with democratic forces. Hamilton's proposals favoring a national bank and direct...