chartered rights of Englishmen, those focusing on universal human rights, and those emphasizing loyalty and duty to Great Britain. The fifth section, “A New Constitution,” will provide materials showing the roots of American constitutionalism in earlier English and colonial codes and charters, as well as the Articles of Confederation. In addition, it will provide important selections dealing with various “plans” or proposed constitutions, debates in the Constitutional Convention, and subsequent debates over ratification. The sixth section, “The Bill of Rights,” will include Federalist and Anti-Federalist arguments concerning the need to protect common law rights as well as the Anti-Federalist insistence that structural changes were needed in the proposed Constitution. The seventh section, “State versus Federal Authority,” will present materials from both sides of issues related to the question of whether the states or the federal government held final authority in determining the course of public policy in America. The eighth section, “Forging a Nation,” will provide materials regarding the debate over internal improvements and other federal measures aimed at binding the nation more closely together, particularly in the area of commerce. The final section, “Prelude to War,” will focus on the political, cultural, and legal issues underlying the sectional differences that led to the Civil War. Debates concerning the morality and necessity of slavery, as well as attempts to secure political compromise regarding the status of “the peculiar institution,” will be highlighted; their character and relative importance will be further illuminated by selections focusing on the relative power and position of various regions within the United States.
The volume ends with the prelude to the Civil War, stopping at that point for three interconnected reasons: (1) the need to produce a volume that does not reach an ungainly length, (2) the prevalence of courses on American history that split that history into the pre–Civil War era and the era commencing with the Civil War, and (3) recognition of the revolutionary changes wrought by the Civil War, making that event the natural stopping point for courses and this volume.
The placement of specific selections within this volume is intended to answer two pedagogical needs: that of chronological consistency and that of issue focus, so that students may see particular topics of importance in sufficient depth to give them serious examination. Consequently, while the sections into which the volume is divided generally follow a chronological order, materials within them at times overlap. For example, most writings presenting the Anti-Federalist critique of the Constitution are found in the section on the Bill of Rights rather than that on the Constitution. This has been done because the strongest Anti-Federalist arguments took the form of calls for revisions to the Constitution—revisions taken up under the rubric of amendments intended to protect the rights of the people. Not all Anti-Federalist concerns were addressed by the first Congress as it considered these amendments. A key question in American history, however, concerns whether Anti-Federalist fears were addressed at all in that Congress or by those amendments we now call the Bill of Rights. Lincoln’s relatively late “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society” also might be seen as coming at an “unchronological” place in the volume—in this case in the section on “Forging a Nation,” before that on the “Prelude to War.” Again, the reasoning is thematic. In this address Lincoln lays out his vision of America and the cultural as well as the economic promise of industrialization. Such issues are closely tied to debates over internal improvements and other concerns separating American regions. These concerns helped polarize the nation, but only after the slavery issue came to the forefront and exacerbated regional polarizations did they help to precipitate the Civil War.
Thanks are owed to the members of this volume’s advisory board. I also thank James McClellan for important suggestions during the early development of this volume and Donald Livingston, Clyde Wilson, and Robert Waters for helpful suggestions. Any mistakes in judgment, selection, or performance are mine alone. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife, Antonia, for her patience and support.
The editor has sought to make only a bare minimum of changes to the texts included in this volume, so as to convey the flavor as well as content of the writings. Changes are limited to the following: The use of asterisks to mark deleted text has been replaced with the use of ellipses. Asterisks inserted without clear meaning or intent have been deleted, as have marginalia, extraneous quotation marks, and page numbers from previous editions that had been inserted in various texts. The letters “f” and “s” have been properly distinguished. Some of the longer titles have been shortened in accordance with modern usage. Headings in which the original text used anachronistic fonts or, for example, all capital letters, have been modernized and standardized.
The work of preceding editors in modernizing punctuation and spelling has not been tampered with. The editors of these previous volumes all expressed a desire to maintain strict fidelity to the original text and thereby incorporated only such minor modernizations in spelling, grammar, and punctuation as were absolutely necessary to promote readability and consistency. Those readers seeking specifics on such issues may find them in the relevant source volumes in the bibliography.
The principal issue of concern to the lay reader will be the inclusion of material in brackets. Such brackets denote material filled in by the editor, material questionable as to its true authorship, or in some instances text missing from the original.
Only those footnotes deemed necessary for understanding of the text have been reproduced here. However, in some instances (e.g., selections from Dickinson, Boucher, Noah Webster, and Story) footnotes are integral to the text, and in others explanatory notes are necessary. Footnotes of earlier editors are marked “Ed.” and those few footnotes added by the current editor are marked “B. F.”
In reproducing the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate it was necessary to standardize fonts and to eliminate headings and subheadings inserted by the previous editors.
The American Republic
PART ONE Colonial Settlements and Societies
No people has a true “beginning.” Just as individuals come from families and neighborhoods, which instill them with certain beliefs and habits from an early age, so peoples come from other places and communities; they do not simply assemble and form themselves out of thin air. But the study of a people’s inheritance must end somewhere. There must come a point at which we say, “Here are the basic, fundamental events and actions that set members of one community on their way to forming another.” With Americans that point is the beginning of formal settlement in the New World.
Settlers brought to America a wealth of traditions, beliefs, habits, and motivations. They did not come to the New World as clean slates, nor did they write upon clean slates in forming new communities. Whether fleeing persecution, seeking wealth, or striving to establish a more godly community, they had to operate within the restrictions established by their charters or grants from the British king. Most obviously, these charters set down what authority would rule over settlers in each colony, whether it was a single proprietor, a governor answerable to the king, or a corporation set up under the king’s auspices that also had to answer to the royal power. But troubles in Great Britain and the difficulties of long-distance travel in an era of wind-powered ships gave the settlers vast leeway in establishing local political, economic, and religious communities. This is not to say that events in Great Britain were irrelevant to those in the New World. The time of settlement was one of great unrest; it included the era of constitutional conflict between King James I and Parliament, followed by the English Civil War (1642–49), which resulted in the beheading of Charles I and was itself followed by more than a decade of dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan army. But settlers in America exercised great freedom in establishing rules by which to govern themselves.
GOVERNING DOCUMENTS
For many centuries, the English people have had a particular faith in the power of the written word, and especially in the power of written documents to establish the means by which they were to be governed. Thus, despite the varying reasons for which English settlers came to America, written documents played a crucial