POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY

Few Revolutionary concepts are expressed as succinctly as the principle contained in the first three words of the United States Constitution: "We, the people." By this simple phrasing the federal Constitution institutionalized the "revolution principle" that had rejected the sovereignty of king-in-parliament and replaced it with a structure embodying the sovereignty of the people assembled in conventions and implemented in republican political institutions. Trying to condense his lectures on American law into basic principles, the lawyer and politician James Wilson (1742–1798) found it in popular sovereignty. "Permit me to mention one great principle, the vital principle I may well call it, which diffuses animation and vigor through all the others," he explained. "The principle I mean is this, that the supreme or sovereign power resides in the citizens at large." From—or upon—that principle rested the justification for the major achievements of the Revolution: a government that was limited, whose representatives were directly responsible and accountable to their constituents, and in which powers were checked and balanced by function as well as between the states and a central authority.

In its initial practical application in the newly independent states, however, the theory of popular sovereignty had created unanticipated political crises that endangered the survival of republican government. With suffrage expanded, residency required of representatives, and frequent elections, the reformed state legislatures claimed to be a faithful reflection of the popular will. Thus legitimated in their assumption of unmediated political authority based on popular sovereignty, they exercised their powers often erratically and without restraint, threatening property and civil liberties and generating fear for the future of republican government. The cure for the excesses of popular sovereignty was actually more popular sovereignty, though reconstituted in a federal framework that used the concept as a foundation for changes in the structure of government as revolutionary as anything attempted in 1776. Federalists urging ratification of the Constitution thus rallied behind the maxim, "All power is in the people, and not in the state governments."

In so doing, however, they were not simply redistributing political authority between national and local units, but rather simultaneously enhancing and limiting it at both levels. Vesting all power in the undifferentiated "people" and then shaping political institutions to embody their will constituted the American revolution principle. British government was vested in the king-in-parliament, a structure that embodied the body politic as three distinct "orders," the king, the aristocracy, and the democracy. In a system of "mixed government," each order protected its interest, or estate, against the others. This arrangement did not check power, however, because the actual institutions of government operated without effectual restraint. It was against such a concentration of effectively indivisible sovereign authority as achieved by king-in-parliament that Americans had rebelled, and in place of which they had vainly sought to implement popular sovereignty since 1776.

It was the achievement of the Philadelphia Convention to put this concept into practical form in 1787 and to embody the previously amorphous principle of popular sovereignty in a written structure. Wilson tried to assure doubters that all political authority was limited by what he called the "great truth … that in the United States the people retain the supreme power" and reserve the right to restrain or empower government as they see fit. To skeptics who demanded a Bill of Rights, James Madison responded with a proposed declaration that included language "that all power is vested in, and consequently derived from the people." Madison's suggestion was not used, but it had correctly identified the means of putting Revolutionary ideas into practice. Reiterating the American revolution principle that founded all power in all the people, the framers produced a government in which each functional branch of government possessed clearly delimited authority but drew it directly from the sovereignty of the people. The result was government of balanced and limited powers derived from all the people rather than government of mixed social and legal orders possessing ill-defined powers. As "Publius," the pseudonymous author of The Federalist explained, the new American nation was a "compound republic" in which "the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct [state and federal] governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments." To each only a portion of the people's sovereignty was allotted, and each was subject to the people. In justifying judicial review, for example, Alexander Hamilton rejected the criticism that it assumed "a superiority of the judicial to the legislative power. It only supposes that the power of the people is superior to both." Popular sovereignty had established fundamental law, which the courts were to interpose to restrain other branches from exceeding the will of the people.

The legitimizing of government as the genuine expression of popular sovereignty, however, subtly but significantly changed American constitutionalism. In his Farewell Address, George Washington lauded a government as resting on popular sovereignty. But he spoke in a political atmosphere of conflict and challenge to many of the actions of his Federalist Party. Washington's words (written for him by Hamilton) testified to the new mantle of popular sovereignty claimed by government in the new Republic—a claim not accepted by all, and even opposed with violence by some. The sovereignty of "the people out of doors," the collective acts of groups deemed mobs by the British but championed as constitutional expressions of the popular will in the 1770s, now lacked the legitimacy of the people as embodied in formal constitutional institutions created under the mantle of popular sovereignty. Washington thus went on to explain that "the constitution which at any time exists till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government." With popular sovereignty ratified and given form in written constitutions, the conflict of power and liberty was transformed into contests over politics, government, and law in the new nation.

See alsoConstitutional Law; Constitutionalism: Overview; Federalist Party; Government; Politics: Political Culture; Politics: Political Thought .

bibliography

Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: Norton, 1988.

Novak, William. The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Wills, Garry. "James Wilson's New Meaning for Sovereignty." In Conceptual Change and the Constitution. Edited by Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988.

Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969, 1998.

David Konig