Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  26. Malone, Jefferson the President: First Term, 155.

  27. AH, Federalist No. 78.

  28. Some historians have claimed that the origins of the modern practice of judicial review can best be found, not in the Court of john marshall, but in the history of the last century or so. Indeed, the term itself was apparently only coined by constitutional scholar Edward Corwin in 1910. For these revisionist studies, see Christopher Wolfe, The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law (New York, 1986); J. M. Sosin, The Aristocracy of the Long Robe: The Origins of Judicial Review in America (Westport, CT, 1989); Robert Lowry Clinton, Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review (Lawrence, KS, 1989). William E. Nelson, Marbury v. Madison: The Origins and Legacy of Judicial Review (Lawrence, KS, 2000) is a sensible account.

  29. Commonwealth of Va. v. Caton and Others (Nov. 1782), in Peter Call, ed., Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Court of Appeals of Virginia (Richmond, 1833), 4: 8. Philip Hamburger, Law and Judicial Duty (Cambridge, MA, 2008), emphasizes the degree to which English and colonial judges already exercised a broad judicial review based on their conventional assumptions about the hierarchal character of law and about the duty of judges to decide in accord with law. Hence, he contends, the American state judges who challenged legislative acts in the aftermath of the Revolution were doing nothing new. But, of course, many people thought the courts were doing something new and protested vehemently.

  30. Commonwealth of Va. v. Caton, in Call, ed., Reports, 4: 17–18.

  31. Richard Spaight to James Iredell, 12 Aug. 1787, in Griffith J. McRee, Life and Correspondence of James Iredell (New York, 1857–1858), 2: 169–70.

  32. Madison’s Observations on Jefferson’s Draft of a Constitution for Virginia, 1788, Papers of Jefferson, 6: 315.

  33. J. W. Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History (Oxford, 1955, 1961), 186–90, 206, 214.

  34. James Iredell to Richard Spaight, 26 Aug. 1787, McRee, Life of James Iredell, 2: 172–76.

  35. Commonwealth of Va. v. Caton, in Call, ed., Reports, 4: 17.

  36. Iredell, “To the Public,” 17 Aug. 1786, in McRee, Life of Iredell, 2: 147.

  37. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911, 1937), 2: 430; JM, quoted in Maeva Marcus, “Judicial Review in the Early Republic,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Launching the “Extended Republic,” 31; JM, “Helvidius No. II,” 1793, in Guillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (New York, 1900–1910), 6: 155; TJ to Spencer Roane, 6 Sept. 1819, Jefferson: Writings, 1425–28.

  38. Federalist No. 49.

  39. Sylvia Snowiss, Judicial Review and the law of the Constitution (New Haven, 1990), 74.

  40. Jeff Roedel, “Stoking the Doctrinal Furnace: Judicial Review and the New York Council of Revision,” New York History, 69 (1988), 261–83.

  41. Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention, 1: 97, 73.

  42. Annals of Congress, 2nd Congress, 1st Session (April, 1792), 3: 557.

  43. Marcus, “Judicial Review,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Launching the “Extended Republic,” 36–37.

  44. G. S. Rowe, “Judicial Tyrant and Vox Populi: Pennsylvanians View Their State Supreme Court, 1777–1799,” Penn. Mag. of Hist. and Biog., 118 (1994), 55.

  45. Hylton v. United States, 3 Dallas 171 (1796).

  46. Cooper v. Telfair, 4 Dallas 18 (1800).

  47. On the common law courts’ traditional authority and duty to distinguish between superior and inferior laws, see Mary Sarah Bilder, “The Corporate Origins of Judicial Review,” Yale Law Journal, 116 (2006), 502–66; Philip Hamburger, Law and Judicial Duty (Cambridge, MA, 2008); and Gordon S. Wood, “The Origins of Judicial Review,” Suffolk Law Review, 22 (1988), 1293–1307.

  48. David Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, UK, 1989), 16–20.

  49. Gerald Gunther, “Judicial Review,” in Leonard W. Levy, ed., Encyclopedia of the American Constitution (New York, 1986), 1055; Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York, 2004), 150, 155.

  50. For the important distinction between judicial review and judicial supremacy, see Kramer, The People Themselves, 139–40, 143, 210.

  51. L. H. LaRue, Constitutional Law as Fiction: Narrative in the Rhetoric of Authority (University Park, PA, 1995), 56–69.

  52. Marbury v. Madison (1803), in William Cranch, ed., U.S. Supreme Court Reports (Washington, DC, 1804), 177.

  53. TJ to Phillip Mazzei, 28 Nov. 1785, to John Brown Cutting, 2 Oct. 1788, Papers of Jefferson, 9: 67–72; 13: 649; to JM, 17 Feb. 1826, Jefferson: Writings, 1513–14.

  54. Opinion, Livingston v. Jefferson, 5 Dec. 1811, Papers of Marshall, 7: 284; Hobson, The Great Chief Justice: Marshall, 37.

  55. AH, Federalist No. 78.

  56. James Wilson, “Lectures on Law” (1790–1791), The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 293.

  57. William A. Robinson, Jeffersonian Democracy in New England (New Haven, 1916), 120.

  58. For the widespread acceptance of judicial review in the 1790s, see William E. Nelson, “Changing Conceptions of Judicial Review: The Evolution of Constitutional Theory in the States, 1790–1860,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 120 (1972), 1166, 1169–70; Marcus, “Judicial Review,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Launching the “Extended Republic,” 25–53; Kramer, The People Themselves, 148.

  59. Marcus, “Judicial Review,” in Hoffman and Albert, eds., Launching the “Extended Republic,” 36–37.

  60. Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (Boston, 1937), 1: 52–53, 110–11.

  61. Anaton-Hermann Chroust, The Rise of the Legal Profession in America (Norman, OK, 1965), 2: 75–77.

  62. Chroust, Rise of the Legal Profession, 2: 36–37, 173–223.

  63. Haskins, “Law Versus Politics,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 130 (1981), 24.

  64. Haskins and Johnson, Foundations of Power: John Marshall, 322–31.

  65. Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807 (London, 1923), 269; C. Peter Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic: The Case of Fletcher v. Peck (New York, 1967).

  66. Carl Brent Swisher, American Constitutional Development, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA, 1954), 153–54; Haskins and Johnson, Foundations of Power: John Marshall, 597.

  67. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 21

  68. Horwitz, Transformation of American Law, 23.

  69. William E. Nelson, Americanization of The Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Cambridge, MA, 1975), 172; Horwitz, Transformation of American Law, 23–26.

  70. On this issue see Gordon S. Wood, “The History of Rights in Early America,” in Barry Alan Shain, ed., The Nature of Rights at the American Founding and Beyond (Charlottesville, 2007), 233–57.

  71. Marbury v. Madison (1803), in Cranch, ed., U.S. Supreme Court Reports, 166, 167;

  72. TJ to JM, 15 March 1789, Republic of Letters, 587.

  73. St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference to the Constitution and Laws of the Federal Government and of the Commonwealth of Virginia (Philadelphia, 1803), I, pt. 1, xxv.

  74. Marshall to C. C. Pinckney, 21 Nov. 1802, Papers of Marshall, 6: 125.

  75. Marshall to Timothy Pickering, 28 Feb. 1811, Papers of Marshall, 7: 270.

  76. Horwitz, Transformation of American Law, 31–62. For Marshall’s conception of property, see Richard A. Brisbin Jr., “John Marshall and the Nature of Law in the Early Republic,” Va. Mag. of Hist. and Biog., 98 (1990), 62–71; Edward S. Corwin, “The Basic Doctrine of American Constitutional Law,” Michigan Law Review, 12 (1914), 247–76.

  77. Haskins, “Law Versus Politics,” 19–20.

  78. When in the
Philadelphia Convention James Madison proposed that the federal government be given the explicit power to grant charters of incorporation, the Framers decided to finesse the issue by saying nothing in the Constitution about incorporations out of fear of arousing popular opposition to “mercantile monopolies.” Frank Bourgin, The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic (New York, 1989), 44.

  79. Pennsylvania Packet, 2, 10 Sept. 1783, 7, 23 Aug., 25 Sept. 1786; Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1983), 90.

  80. [James Sullivan], The Path to Riches: An Inquiry into the Origin and Use of Money; and into the Principles of Stocks and Banks (Boston, 1792), 37–38, 10, 43.

  81. Thomas Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialization in America (New York, 1981), 21; Hartog, Public Property and Private Power, 153; [Samuel Blodget], Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (Washington, DC, 1806), 17; Johann A. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 62.

  82. Oscar and Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (Cambridge, MA, 1947, 1969), 106–33; E. Merrick Dodd, American Business Corporations until 1860, with Special Reference to Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA, 1954); Ronald E. Seavoy, The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784–1855: Broadening the Concept of Public Service During Industrialization (Westport, CT, 1982); Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” WMQ, 50 (1993), 68–69.

  83. Sylvia Snowiss, “Text and Principle in John Marshall’s Constitutional Law: the Cases of Marbury and Mccullough,” John Marshall Law Review, 33 (2000), 990.

  84. In 1776 most of the Revolutionary state constitutions did not provide for just compensation for the public taking of private property; but, following the adoption of the Fifth Amendment to the federal Constitution in 1791, this provision was explicitly added in nearly all the constitutions of states subsequently admitted to the Union, and where it was absent from the constitutions of the original states, judicial interpretation often inserted it. J.A.C. Grant, “The ‘Higher Law’ Background of the Law of Eminent Domain,” Wisconsin Law Review, 6 (1930–1931), 70.

  85. Mathew Carey, ed., Debates and Proceedings of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania . . . (Philadelphia, 1786), 11–12.

  86. AH, “The Examination,” 23 Feb. 1802, Papers of Hamilton, 25: 533. Edward S. Corwin called the protection of vested rights “the basic doctrine of American constitutional law.” Corwin, “The Basic Doctrine of American Constitutional Law,” Michigan Law Review, 12 (1914), 247–76.

  87. Harry N. Scheiber, “Public Rights and the Rule of Law in American Legal History,” California Law Review, 72 (1984), 217–51; Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners, 58–64; John S. Whitehead, The Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, 1776–1876 (New Haven, 1973), 16–21.

  88. R. Kent Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (Chapel Hill, 1985), 127–37; Newmyer, Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court, 246–50.

  89. Debates in the Senate of the United States on the Judiciary During the first Session of the Seventh Congress (Philadelphia, 1802), 39; Snowiss, “Text and Principle in John Marshall’s Constitutional Law,” John Marshall Law Review, 33 (2000), 991–92.

  90. TJ to William Plumer, 21 July 1816, in L and B, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 15: 46–47. By the early 1820s Jefferson had come to believe that the federal judiciary, far from being what Hamilton had called “the least dangerous” branch, had “become the most dangerous branch” of the U.S. government, “sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction.” AH, Federalist No. 78; TJ to M. Coray, 31 Oct. 1823, in L and B, eds., Writings of Jefferson, 15: 486–87.

  91. Sandra F. Vanburkleo, “‘The Paws of Banks’: The Origins and Significance of Kentucky’s Decision to Tax Federal Bankers, 1818–1820,” JER, 9 (1989), 480–87; Sandra F. VanBurkleo, “‘That Our Pure Republican Principles Might Not Wither’: Kentucky’s Relief Crisis and the Pursuit of Moral Justice, 1818–1826” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1988), ch. 6.

  92. L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800–1860 (Ithaca, 1988).

  93. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996), 15, 88.

  1. Joel Barlow, Oration, Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809; at the Request of the Democratic Citizens of the District of Columbia (Washington, DC, 1809), 3–6, 9.

  2. Donald J. D’Elia, “Dr. Benjamin Rush and the American Medical Revolution,” American Philosophical Society, Proc., 110 (1966), 70, 101.

  3. Jacqueline S. Reinier, “Rearing the Republican Child: Attitudes and Practices in Post-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” WMQ, 39 (1982), 155.

  4. In a Number of Extraordinary Novels Written in the 1790s the writer Charles Brockden Brown explored what the unreliability of sense impressions could mean for the spread of “falsehood and dissimulation” in America. Colin Jeffery Morris, “To ‘Shut Out the World’: Political Alienation and the Privatized Self in the Early Life and Works of Charles Brockden Brown, 1776–1794,” JER, 24 (2004), 624.

  5. Simeon Doggett, A Discourse on Education (1797), in Frederick Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA, 1965), 155–56.

  6. James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven, 1974), 184.

  7. William Smith, The History of the Province of New York, ed. Michael Kammen (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 194.

  8. Donald Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (New York, 1932).

  9. BR, “Education Agreeable to a Republican Form of Government” (1786), in Dagobert D. Runes, ed., The Selected Writings of Benjamin Rush (New York, 1947), 98–99, 92; Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York, 1980), 116–17.

  10. TJ said as much in a letter to George Wythe, 13 Aug. 1786, Papers of Jefferson, 10: 244.

  11. Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston, 1948), 282–83.

  12. Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), 33–35.

  13. Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America (1790), in Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education, 59.

  14. BR, “Of the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic” (1798), in Runes, ed., Selected Writings of Rush, 90, 88.

  15. J. M. Opal, Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia, 2008), 97, 104–9.

  16. Daniel Walker Howe, “Church, State, and Education in the Young American Republic,” JER, 22 (2002), 1–24.

  17. BR to Richard Price, 25 May 1786, Letters of Rush, 1: 388–90.

  18. Editorial Note, Letters of Rush, 1: lxvii.

  19. George W. Corner, ed., The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (1948; Westport, CT, 1970), 161; D’Elia, “Rush and the American Medical Revolution,” 101–2; BR, “The Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty” (1786), in Runes, ed., Selected Writings of Rush, 209.

  20. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, 1997), 316–17.

  21. Richard L. Bushman, “The Early History of Cleanliness in America,” JAH, 74 (1988), 1215–17; Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, 2009).

  22. Russell B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (New York, 1960), 134; Konstantin Dierks, “Letter Writing, Gender, and Class in America, 1750–1800” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1999), ch. 7.

  23. Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (New York, 1999), 169.

  24. Shields, Civil Ton
gues and Polite Letters, 322–23.

  25. Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 85–118.

  26. Louis L. Tucker, Clio’s Consort: Jeremy Belknap and the Founding of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1990), 95.

  27. Len Travers, “‘In the Greatest Solemn Dignity’: The Capitol Cornerstone and Ceremony in the Early Republic,” Steven C. Bullock, “‘Sensible Signs’: The Emblematic Education of the Post-Revolutionary Freemasonry,” and James Steven Curl, “The Capitol in Washington, D.C., and Its Freemason Connections,” all in Donald R. Kennon, ed., A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic (Charlottesville, 1999), 155–76, 177–213, 214–67.

  28. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1741–1850 (New York, 1930), 28–38.

  29. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 50, 8, 54, 17–18.