America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State Constitutions, 1820-1850

-- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, friends and fellow statesman, had radically different views about constitutionalism. While Madison worried that public tampering would after the security of rights, Jefferson recommended subjecting constitutions and their embedded principles to regular popular scrutiny. In the post-founding generation, a period when the people first considered themselves part of a democratic republic, Americans joined together to rewrite their state constitutions, documents whose purpose was in the Jeffersonian manner, to empower the people.

Through careful analysis of hundreds of speeches for and against the greater empowerment of ordinary citizens, Scalia examines constitutional reform in seven states: Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Ohio, and Iowa. While reflecting the country's geographical, political economic, and social diversity, these states demonstrate a surprising unity in republican ideology.

Exploring the wider implications about the nature of liberalism, Scalia shows how these state constitutional not only remade that states but also expressed careful deliberation about citizenship, popular sovereignty, individual rights, and America's political identity. America's Jeffersonian Experiment will appeal to those readers interested in politics, the early. American republic, constitutional history and law, liberalism, and republicanism.