Jefferson's Declaration Research Articles

Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown

Reviewed by: Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War by Richard D. Brown Kevin Butterfield (bio) Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War. By Richard D. Brown. ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 387. Cloth, $40.00.) When John Jay combined his efforts with those of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to support ratification of the proposed Constitution coming out of the Philadelphia Convention, he devoted his first turn as Publius to an argument as patently untrue in 1787 as it is today: Americans were, wrote Jay in The Federalist, Number 2, "one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government," and so on. Surely a strong national union could be built from a citizenry so similar, Jay suggested. Though there were various "orders and denominations of men among us," which he offhandedly conceded there were, nonetheless "we have uniformly been one people[,] each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection." Even if it was something more asserted than lived, there has been what historian Richard Brown calls a "presumption of equal rights" since the earliest days of this nation's history (27). And what Brown sets out to understand in this wide-ranging, insightful, and utterly readable book are the ways that that presumption of equal rights, in itself, has generated contests, challenges, and consequential change in a nation far more diverse than Jay would ever acknowledge. In many ways, Self-Evident Truths takes the rights talk of the Declaration of Independence as its jumping-off point. And the book does not entirely diverge from the tried-and-true trope of the unfinished Revolution, which, in the standard apologists' version, reads like this: the Founders left many inequalities and injustices unchallenged, but they, sometimes purposefully and sometimes inadvertently, laid the groundwork for those shortcomings to be addressed by future generations. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration did little if anything to confront directly any of a number of forms of persistent inequality—particularly those founded in race and gender—but the use of blanket and inclusive terms in the Revolutionary era's assertions of natural rights and human equality enabled others to expand the scope and scale of the Revolution. Brown's book offers no simple answers along those lines, and it is no apology. He is clear about the ways that white men in the first half of the [End Page 521] nineteenth century "fended off movements to extend equal rights to people of color and to women as they sought exclusive possession of the benefits of the Revolutionary contagion." Those efforts often took the form of deliberate attempts to develop ideas of "natural inequality according to race and sex." Many turned to biology and nature, Brown writes, in their search for "a theory to justify social stratification" (308). Still, Brown agrees with important elements of those who emphasize the idea of the unfinished Revolution, and his reading is persuasive. His account of how ideas of equality had consequences for the American nation between the Revolution and the Civil War is nuanced, deeply informed by recent scholarship, and grounded in many sections in his own research, particularly his work on how judges and juries handled moments where de jure and de facto conceptions of equality did not exactly square up. Indeed, this reads like a senior scholar's meditation on how to grapple with both the failures and the remarkable accomplishments of the American Revolutionary moment—and with the deeds of later generations who sought variously to contain and to extend the radical potential of 1776. Self-Evident Truths covers familiar ground in many places. An early chapter on the emergence of ideas of religious equality, for instance, gives an engaging overview of issues like religious tests for political office and state-level disestablishment in the post-Revolutionary era, with few surprises for anyone familiar with the period. The same can be said regarding sections on the Alien and Sedition Acts, on Dred Scott, on Seneca Falls. One of the reasons Brown is so persuasive in...

Two Tales of Lincoln and the Meaning of Democracy

Two Tales of Lincoln and the Meaning of Democracy Erik J. Chaput (bio) Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons. New York: Viking, 2017. 496 pp. Bibliography and Index. $35.00. Allen C. Guelzo. Redeeming the Great Emancipator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 208 pp. Index. $22.95. Though it was clear that Abraham Lincoln continued to struggle to define exactly what emancipation would mean for the slave, in his December 1862 annual message the president informed Congress that the civil war that had already claimed the lives of thousands of men was being fought to ensure that the American democratic experiment would endure. According to Lincoln, the United States was "the last best, hope of earth" for democracy. As historian Sean Wilentz has noted, "given the blows dealt to democratic governments in the Old World, it was easy enough for Lincoln and others to see America as a singular and even providential nation."1 The protection and promotion of a government by and for the people was as important to Lincoln as saving the Union and ending slavery. However, unlike John Adams or James Madison, Abraham Lincoln never put forth a detailed blueprint for how the tenets of democracy and republican government were to be structured. He was not an original policy thinker in that regard. He simply but forcibly maintained that slavery and democracy were incompatible, and the "fiery trial" of the war would eventually lead to a polity in which all men would be equal to one another. His job, as he had noted in the secession winter, was to protect the words "fitly spoken" in Jefferson's Declaration. Historians of the Civil War era, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Edward Ayers, generally give Lincoln high marks for his steadfast commitment to preserving a conception of democracy predicated on human equality. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, however, believes that historians need to adopt a more balanced and holistic approach to the study of the Lincoln presidency and how "Lincoln's republic was a government of, by, and for only some of the people" (p. 3). Pryor portrays a president whose vision [End Page 65] of democracy was limited and who repeatedly missed opportunities to aid not only the cause of freedom for black Americans, but also for women and Native Americans. Pryor, who was tragically killed just before her latest book went to press, is not afraid to attack the hallowed image of the sixteenth president. Lincoln's "saving grace is that he upheld a system that allowed for change even when he was not its champion" (p. 9). Overall, Six Encounters with Lincoln is one of the harshest assessments of the Great Emancipator to appear in recent years. "What we must question," the author writes "is whether in doing his best, he did the best for the country" (p. 8). Pryor, a prodigious researcher who examined hundreds of manuscript collections, paints a portrait of an embattled president, unsure of how to handle the pressures of office. Indeed, Pryor's harangue of Lincoln resembles a characterization Reverdy Johnson sketched for George McClellan at the height of the 1864 presidential campaign: His infirmity of purpose, his unsteadiness in any policy, his once expressed dislike to radicalism, his subsequent adoption of its worst features, his ignorant and mischievous interference with our military campaigns, his appointments, often against the advice of high military officers, of notorious incompetency—his frequent and nearly fatal changes of commanders.2 Pryor reconstructs six meetings Lincoln had during his presidency with figures who, while well known in some historical circles, are often not part of either biographical accounts or general narratives of the Civil War era. The author uses the "six encounters" with Lincoln in the White House in order to discuss the contours of American democracy, including civilian control of the military, civil liberties, the politics of emancipation, the fate of Native Americans, the role of women in the war, and the politics of reconstruction. Pryor curiously fails, however, early in the narrative to offer up an account of the ways in which Lincoln understood and used the word "democracy" in his political career, a...

Decorrupting Government -- The United States Board of Overseers

This essay considers whether the organizational arrangements established by the Constitution of the United States remain effective in promoting “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” which are the purposes of government according to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. I conclude that they are no longer effective, and explore organizational reforms to address this failure. Specifically, the Constitution lacks a provision for substantive review of laws and regulations for consistency with the purposes of government—a function known in the private sector as quality assurance. The judicial power deals with legislative threats to life and liberty, but we need a better way to interdict threats to well-being. I propose the creation of a new branch, provisionally called the United States Board of Overseers, with responsibilities and powers analogous to those of the Supreme Court, but focused chiefly on the people’s opportunities for well-being rather than protecting life and liberty through the rule of law. For reasons of political legitimacy the eleven Overseers are chosen by lot from a College consisting of millions of citizens qualified by age, education and (middle) income. In political terms, the proposal is intended to counter the current power of the oligarchy over the legislature and the administrative state with a strongly democratic institution representing the principal victims of oligarchic power, the middle class. Given the difficulty faced by the oligarchy in containing the destabilizing and inefficient excess greed of its members, the proposal is also in the collective interest of the one percent. Protection for the poorest is included in the proposal. Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Jason Bade, Bruce Cain, Seth Cooper, David Crane, Josh Freedman, Harold Furchtgott-Roth, Justin Hefter, Sam Larson, Randolph May, John P. McCormack, Roger Noll, Teryn Norris, Jo Owen, Peter Owen, Sam Rebo, Otis Reid, Greg Rosston, Barry Weingast and many participants in seminars and conferences for helpful suggestions on prior versions of this paper. DECORRUPTING GOVERNMENT: THE UNITED STATES BOARD OF OVERSEERS 1

Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870. Trish Loughran . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+537.

<i>Trish Loughran,</i> The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870<i>The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870</i>. Trish Loughran . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+537.

Milton and the Pursuit of Happiness

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence famously claims as a self-evident truth that all men are endowed with the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Analysis of Jefferson's familiarity with Milton's writings suggests that the distinctively American and emphatically secular right to the pursuit of happiness might be indebted, somewhat surprisingly, to England's Godly poet. Jefferson found in Milton's writings not only the assertion that republics enjoy far greater happiness than monarchies, but also a concept of happiness derived from classical republicanism and Baconian science. Defining happiness in terms of civic virtue and progress, Milton fused private and public interests in such a way that enabled Jefferson to articulate a new conception of polity, one that would be self-determining and require active participation, freed from the traditional orientation to the past and open to the possibilities of the future. Somewhat paradoxically, much of the strongest evidence for this relation lies in the way Mark Twain rejected Jeffersonian optimism by satirizing Paradise Lost.

Milton and the Pursuit of Happiness

ABSTRACT Jefferson's Declaration of Independence famously claims as a self-evident truth that all men are endowed with the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Analysis of Jefferson's familiarity with Milton's writings suggests that the distinctively American and emphatically secular right to the pursuit of happiness might be indebted, somewhat surprisingly, to England's Godly poet. Jefferson found in Milton's writings not only the assertion that republics enjoy far greater happiness than monarchies, but also a concept of happiness derived from classical republicanism and Baconian science. Defining happiness in terms of civic virtue and progress, Milton fused private and public interests in such a way that enabled Jefferson to articulate a new conception of polity, one that would be self-determining and require active participation, freed from the traditional orientation to the past and open to the possibilities of the future. Somewhat paradoxically, much of the strongest evidence for th...

Five Uneasy Pieces: American Ethics in a Globalized World (review)

Reviewed by: Five Uneasy Pieces: American Ethics in a Globalized World Theodore S. Orlin (bio) Five Uneasy Pieces: American Ethics in a Globalized World (Rowman and Littlefield, Mark Gibney ed., 2005), 203 pp. In this era of terrorism, when perceived fear and actual exigency have driven American policies and practices to an extreme that would have been unthinkable just a short time ago, it is appropriate to assess our responses against our fundamental principles. The urgency of the review is necessitated to insure that these principles do not become so shallow as to lose, via governmental pragmatics, their moral efficacy. [End Page 284] It should be recalled that the United States' very beginnings were premised on ethical considerations. Jefferson's Declaration appealed to international public opinion: "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which compel them." Just as it mattered in 1776, the opinions of mankind (both of our own electorate and of the international community) should continue to matter two centuries later. If the United States is to remain true to its principled beginnings, it is essential to determine if the course taken in the name of supposed pragmatism has so injured our foundations that our proclaimed commitment to democracy has become a hypocritical justification for realpolitik devoid of the very principles we claim to cherish. The message of Mark Gibney, international lawyer and the Belk Distinguished Professor of Political Science (University of North Carolina–Asheville), in this book is that an ethical assessment of our policies, both domestic and international, are important and should shape our policy. He states in his preface, "the ethical system we have devised for ourselves has actually given us license to act" in a "harmful, selfish" way. The hypocrisy he explores is an appropriate wake-up call to address the wrongs of unethical policies that are destructive of the very goals America proclaims to obtain. The relevancy of this book is further justified by the Bush Administration's heavy public reliance on "values" to justify its policies. When a US president hawks the value of the globalization of democracy in justifying our war policy, when we sacrifice the lives of our soldiers and those of our allies and civilians in the name of that policy, is it not appropriate to consider the ethical implications of our foreign policy, let alone our domestic and legal policy to protect the security of the homeland? Does not this "value laden policy" mandate that we assess the moral implications of our legal decisions as well as our immigration and aid policy to see if we are actually doing what we outwardly and proudly proclaim? Rightfully, Professor Gibney reminds us that we are at a moral crossroad and asks whether 9/11 has made Americans less moral and more accepting of unethical policy in response to this insecure era. Gibney does not limit his discussion of ethics to the Iraqi war. Among the "five uneasy pieces" are: 1) the overseas operation of US multinational corporations; 2) the narrow interpretive confines of American constitutional law; 3) the ethics of our foreign policy; 4) the ethics of US refugee policy; and 5) the ethics of US foreign aid policy. In the first "uneasy piece" Gibney explores the inconsistency of the application of the extraterritoriality of American regulatory law as it applies to the operation of US multinational corporations. In providing examples of how the law protects US interests to the detriment of foreign citizens (e.g., the sale of a glue to Central America that contains an addictive agent used by street children, the operation of a Peruvian smelter plant that "spews" sulfur dioxide in the air that would be illegal under US environmental law), Gibney suggests a review of critical ethical questions. How ethical is our application of law if we protect ourselves, but feel free to threaten others in the name of self-interest and profit? To further compound the issue, where are the ethics of an interpretation of a regulatory law that protects our commercial interests by applying US monopoly, trademark, securities, tax, and bribery laws, but not environmental, health and safety, or labor laws? [End Page 285] Correctly...

“To Close the Circle of our Felicities”:Caritasand Jefferson's First Inaugural

Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence defends an inherent and individual right to the pursuit of happiness. For Jefferson, this right dramatically limited Christianity's role in politics. In any case, when drafting the Declaration, Jefferson thought Christianity largely irrelevant, if not inimical, to America's well-being. However, shortly before becoming president, several events transformed Jefferson's private thoughts about Christianity and its public utility. Careful attention to both the text and context of Jefferson's First Inaugural (a significant Jeffersonian document, but one that has never been examined in great detail by political theorists and intellectual historians) reveals that Jefferson came to embrace the teachings of a rationalized version of the New Testament in a way that lightly amends the liberal paradigm of his Declaration. Without significantly altering his commitment to a rights-based government of limited proportions, Jefferson's First Inaugural bespeaks the new political importance he placed on widely cultivating a largely demystified sense of Christian charity.

Jefferson's First Declaration of Independence: A Summary View of the Rights of British America Revisited

This essay examines Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America as evidence of his craft as a storyteller. Specifically, I argue that Jefferson deploys a series of narrative renderings, the rhetorical effect of which is to eliminate the possibility of any genuine reconciliation with the English government. On the basis of this interpretation I conclude that the Summary View represents Jefferson's first declaration of independence.

The US Citizen-Soldier's Past, Present, and Likely Future

Recent problems in recruiting and retention of US military personnel have prompted some to ask a series of questions: What was of American citizen-soldier, and how much change in this tradition has occurred? Have basic changes in American culture occurred recently that have led to a narrowing definition of citizenship and its responsibilities and, related to this, are we justified in describing current problems in recruiting an all-volunteer force as ones that signal demise of tradition of citizen-soldier? What might be significance to recruitment of recent changes in purposes for which United States employs its power, and what consequent policies should Administration consider? [1] In this article I propose some answers to these questions based on my reading of historical and sociological records as we understand them today. Tradition of Citizen-Soldier Let's begin stepping back to 17th and 18th centuries, when Whigs on both sides of Atlantic--men like Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Shaftesbury), Colonel Algernon Sidney, John Trenchard, Joseph Warren, James Lovell, and Samuel Adams--wrote with passion about dangers of armies. Listen, for example, to fears expressed future martyr-of-Bunker-Hill, Dr. Joseph Warren, in his Boston Massacre memorial oration, 5 March 1772: Our houses wrapt in flames, our children subjected to barbarous caprice of raging soldiery, our beauteous virgins exposed to all insolence of unbridled passion, our virtuous wives, endeared to us every tender tie, falling a sacrifice to worse than brutal violence, and perhaps like famed Lucretia, distracted with anguish & despair, ending wretched lives own hands. [2] Inspired what they understood from Thucydides, historians of Rome, and Florentine champion of citizen-soldiers, Niccolo Machiavelli, they worried about fate of polity's collective civil and political rights (often expressed as liberty & property) at hands of what they perceived to be an ever-growing threat of encroachments upon those rights from a monarch (or un-royal chief executive like Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell). Such a person could control affairs of state with a army and officer-placemen, seated from one of Parliament's rotten and pocket boroughs. [3] These advocates of the citizen-soldier called on free adult men of property to respond to sense of duty, to sense of political obligation, serving for a period of time in militia of community. Thus military service, indeed, compulsory service in militias, was deemed appropriate under what has come to be known as theory of government. [4] Throughout 1760s, '70s, '80s, and '90s, republican essayists insisted that responsible men should respond to sense of obligation in order to protect their private property and political rights. [5] Jefferson's Declaration of Independence speaks of governments deriving their just powers from consent of governed, but this theory cut both ways: That is, a justly-derived government, such as that of United States, can in turn expect military service from youth who would (by 1890s) pledge allegiance in publicly funded schools and enjoy other such free social benefits, as well as more general advantages like rule of law, prosperity, prestige of citizenship in The Great Republic, and capacity to elect own lawmakers, franchise (by age of 18 in 1971 for all, earlier for some). [6] An alternative vision of national defense of community's interests was proposed in late 18th century New Whigs like Adam Smith and his American Federalist Party counterparts, who reasoned that replacing militia with a regular military force (the True Whigs' dreaded standing army) made good economic and political sense: Keeping state militia system of citizen soldiers in an adequate state of readiness, Federalist Secretary of War James McHenry argued in 1800, would cost United States more by abstraction from labor or occupation of militiamen than cost of a regular army. …

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology

Two hundred twenty years after the second Continental Congress approved the American Declaration of Independence, its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, is more and more frequently labeled radical. His words are even used to validate the agendas of today's right-wing militias. But his unorthodox religious views, which permeate the Declaration, are most deserving of the appellation. Allen Jayne analyzes the ideology of the Declaration - and its implications - by going back to the sources of Jefferson's ideas. Jayne emphasizes several sources, especially Bolingbroke, Kames, and Reid, by giving a detailed examination of portions of their writings in relation to the better-known contributions of Locke. His conclusion is that the Declaration must be read as an attack on two claims of absolute authority: that of government over its subjects and of religion over the minds of men. Today's world is far more secular than Jefferson's, and the importance of philosophical theology in eighteenth-century critical thought must be recognized in order to understand fully and completely the Declaration's implications. Jayne addresses this need by putting concerns about religion back into the discussion. Sure to be controversial, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence will contribute substantially to the contentious, ongoing debate concerning Jefferson's intentions and sources when writing the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology.

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology.

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in the Spanish Political Tradition

The American Declaration of Independence has never been very popular in Spain. This is somewhat surprising since one of the basic Jeffersonian ideas is an old and accepted Spanish thesis: in De Rege et Regis Institutione (On kings and kingship), published in 1598, the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana maintains that under conditions the overthrow of a tyrant and even killing him is justifiable. Since Mariana is no revolutionary, he does not make it easy for would-be tyrannicides. But neither does Thomas Jefferson, who certainly was a revolutionary: He not only calls for prudence Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes but also reminds us that all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer than to recur to expedited ways of righting their wrongs. Jefferson did know of Mariana; a copy of Mariana's Historia de Espana appears among the many books in Spanish listed by E. Millicent Sowerby in the catalog of Jefferson's library. And there is no doubt that Jefferson was able to read Spanish, as he himself said, but it is doubtful that he knew of Mariana's defense of tyrannicide. At least, I have never found any indication of it, and I have been working on Jefferson's knowledge of Spain and Spanish culture for the last few years.1 That the Declaration of Independence was so seldom translated into Spanish may be due to various causes. One might be Jefferson's inclusion of the pursuit of Happiness among the certain unalienable rights, which goes against the Spanish understanding of the Catholic teaching on happiness, since this was always understood as attainable only in the other world. This world, as a popular Catholic prayer says, is only a valley of tears through which we are only transients on our way to the other world. Even Spaniards who profess to be outside the church and her teach-

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology. By Allen Jayne. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 245 pp. $39.95

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy and Theology. By Allen Jayne. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 245 pp. $39.95

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: origins, philosophy and theology

Jefferson's Declaration of Independence: origins, philosophy and theology

Dishonest Abe?: Garry Wills on the Gettysburg Address

Garry Wills has never been an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. In 1964, when he was closely associated with Willmoore Kendall and wrote for William F. Buckley's National Review, he published an essay in which he distinguished dangerous dreamers who embraced inspirational political theories and conceived of government as the order of justice from really great conservatives who stood against enthusiasms that commanded power centers of their day because they perceived state as the order of convenience. Among former, he included Lincoln alongside Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Paine, Lenin, Mao, Castro, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; among latter, this native of Atlanta gave prominent place to none other than John C. Calhoun.' Well before 1978, when he published Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Wills had parted company with his friends from The National Review. He may by then have altered his assessment of John C. Calhoun, but he had not changed his mind about Lincoln. He had come to see Thomas Jefferson as a proponent of what he had once called the order of convenience. In accord with this conviction, he sought to distinguish thinking of Virginian on political questions from that of John Locke and to align him with putatively less doctrinaire participants in Scottish Enlightenment.2 In book's prologue and epilogue, he similarly tried to drive a wedge between eighteenth-century empiricist, opposed to generalizations and concentrating on particular realities, who drafted Declaration of Independence and nineteenth-century romantic living in full glow of transcendentalism (that school of faintly necrophiliac spirituality) who authored Gettysburg Address. In process, he denied that Jefferson would ever have encouraged people to yearn back toward some ideal of perfection delivered to their forebears, and he blamed Lincoln for messianic character of American politics in age of Cold War.3

Improving Political Science Education in the Schools: College-School Connections

Diggins, John P. 1984. The Lost Soul of American Politics, Virtue, Self-Interest and the Foundations of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books. Hartz, Louis. 1955. The Liberal Tradition in America, An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Kramnick, Isaac. 1982. Republican Revisionism Revisited. The American Historical Review, 87: 629-664. McCoy, Drew R. 1980. The Elusive Republic, Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Matthews, Richard K. 1984. The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Murrin, John. 1980. The Great Inversion, Court Versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1771) and America (1776-1816). In J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Pocock, J. G. A. 1975. The Machiavellian Moment, Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shalhope, Robert. 1972. Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography. William and Mary Quarterly, 29: 49-80. Wills, Garry. 1978. Inventing America, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Garden City: Doubleday. Wood, Gordon. 1969. The Creation of the American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. anning, Lance. 1986. Jeffersonian Ideology Improving Political Science Education in the Schools: College-School Connections

The American Ideal of Equality: From Jefferson's Declaration to the Burger Court. By Charles Redenius. (New York: Kennikat Press, 1981. Pp. iii + 166. $17.00.)

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Reviews of Books

Journal Article Reviews of Books Get access Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. By GARRY WILLS. (London: The Athlone Press, 1980. £12.50); The First American Constitutions. Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era. By WILLI PAUL ADAMS. (Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1980. $23.50). MALCOLM F. MORRISON MALCOLM F. MORRISON University of Reading Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume XCVII, Issue CCCLXXXV, October 1982, Pages 853–856, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/XCVII.CCCLXXXV.853 Published: 01 October 1982