Thomas Isern’s Reviews > The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 > Status Update

“Legislation in such a society could not be the transcending of the different interests but the reconciling of them. Despite Madison’s lingering hope, the public good could not be an entity distinct from its parts; it was rather ‘the general combined interest of all the state put together, as it were, upon an average.’”

“It was an imposing conception--a kinetic theory of politics--such a crumbling of political and social interests, such an atomization of authority, such a parceling of power, . . . creating such a multiplicity and a scattering of designs and passions, so many checks, that no combination of parts could hold, no group of evil interests long cohere.”

“In America a constitution had become, as Madison pointed out, a charter of power granted by liberty rather than, as in Europe, a charter of liberty granted by power.”

“The Constitution had become the climax of a great revolution.”

“In a crucial sense the Antifederalists had lost the struggle over the Constitution when the New Jersey plan, embodying the essential character of the Articles of Confederation, was rejected in the Philadelphia Convention in favor of a national republic stemming mostly from and operating on individuals.”

“Relocating sovereignty in the people by making them ‘the fountain of all power’ seemed to make sense of the entire system.”

“From the moment, often at the very beginning of the Revolution, that various Americans realized that their separate states were no to be homogeneous units, they sought to adjust their thoughts and their institutions to the diversity.”

"Throughout all the states spokesmen for 'the poor and middling orders' were directly challenging the eighteenth-century assumption that social authority was a necessary prerequisite to the wielding of political power. . . . 'A democratic government like ours,' said John Smilie of Pennsylvania . . . 'admits of no superiority. A virtuous man, be his situation what it may, is respectable.'"

"Most American leaders . . . were not opposed to the idea of social movement, for mobility, however one may have decried its abuses, lay at the heart of republicanism. . . . Republicanism represented equality of opportunity and careers open to talent."

"By the 1780's many had come to believe that the principle of separation of powers was 'the basis of all free governments' . . . one, in Jefferson's words, 'in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.'"