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“Neither the same Nation Nor Different Nations”: Constitutional Conventions in the United States and Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Lyn Spillman
Lyn Spillman
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

Debates in constitutional conventions in the United States in 1787 and Australia in 1897 reveal similarities and differences that illuminate the process by which nations became increasingly meaningful forms of social organization. Although the tone of these debates tended to be technical and pragmatic, focusing on specific concerns about the machinery of “good government,” convention delegates showed in their assumptions, their omissions, and in the claims and comparisons they repeated, what they were coming to perceive as commonalities. Claims about what identified the new nations were part of the repertoire of debate used by delegates as they addressed their tasks. So the conventions distilled ideas available to political elites about what was taken to be distinctive about and shared by prospective citizens.

Type
The Constitution of the State
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 38 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 149 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1996

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References

Thanks to Jorge Arditi, Sam Blazer, Sung-Chang Chun, Russell Faeges, Anita Garey, Karen Hansen, James Kettner, Alan Mayne, Philip McMichael, Lynda Nyce, Jennifer Pierce, Michael Rogin, Neil Smelser, Terry Strathman, Ann Swidler, Samuel Valenzuela, Kim Voss, and the University of Notre Dame Faculty Research Program for their various helpful contributions to this work. I also acknowledge the help of the late Reinhard Bendix, and the late Leo Lowenthal, in the formative stages of this project.

1 This is part of a larger project in which I examine similarities and differences in the development of national identity in Australia and the United States in a series of public events in each country. Until recently, the historical record that has been most salient in generating general accounts of nation formation included the emergence of the first European nation-states, the spread of national identity as a principle of political legitimacy in the nineteenth century, the mobilization of nationalist claims in anticolonial movements of the twentieth century, and the contemporary nationalist claims within industrialized polities. Influential theoretical overviews of this record emphasize, to different degrees, modernization, state-oriented politics, or the reconstruction of ethnic identifications, and settler countries are treated as peripheral cases, explicitly marginalized, or mentioned only as counterexamples to other theories. See, for example, Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), 9Google Scholar; Smith, Anthony D., Theories of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 84Google Scholar, 183; Gellner, Ernest, Nations and Nationalism (Blackwell: Oxford, 1983), 108Google Scholar; or Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78Google Scholar. Some recent work on nationalism has shown a shift in emphasis, returning to a more direct focus on accounting for meanings associated with national identities, rather than nationalist politics and policies, and does discuss less canonical cases; overviews representing this shift in concerns include those of Smith, Anthony D., The Ethnic Origins of Nations (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar; Armstrong, John A., Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Greenfeld, Liah, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso/New Left Books, 1991)Google Scholar. Anderson discusses “official nationalisms” (ch. 6).

2 Thus, I ask here not how national identities formed in contrast to more particularistic status orders but how national identities were understood as they were mobilized in contrast with more local and cosmopolitan identities. Anderson and Greenfeld, although their arguments are otherwise very different, both contrast national identity with identities based on more particularistic status orders, as “the location of sovereignty within the people and the recognition of the fundamental equality among its various strata” or a “deep horizontal comradeship;” and they agree that the United States early possessed some national identity in this sense. See Greenfeld, Five Roads, 10, 402; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. Although both countries shared this liberal inheritance, the formation of specific national identities involved more than muting the political salience of status orders, as both Greenfeld and Anderson would recognize. Examining the development of national identity by contrast to more local and cosmopolitan identities helps to illuminate how two different national identities develop from similar, comparatively liberal origins.

3 On the identification with liberal political principles in the United States, see for example, Arieli, Yehoshua, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 71 and 1–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim; and Kohn, Hans, The Idea of Nationalism (Toronto: Collier Books, 1967 [1944]), 276–81Google Scholar. Greenfeld, in Nationalism, develops Kohn's distinction between Eastern and Western, more ethnic and more liberal, nationalisms. Smith, in Ethnic Origins, 216, also contrasts the liberal, territorial basis of American national identity with more ethnic national identities but suggests that “a closer examination always reveals the ethnic core of civic nations… with their early pioneering and dominant (English or Spanish) culture in America, Australia, or Argentina, a culture that provided the myths and language of the would-be nation.” If what was ethnic was, to colonists, quintessentially liberal, these are not, of course, mutually exclusive alternatives. Because of the liberal basis of these early identity claims, comparative studies of political culture cast further light on differences in national identity in the settler nations. See Hartz, Louis et al., The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964)Google Scholar; four articles (Louis Hartz, “Comments,” 279–84; Harry V. Jaffa, “Conflicts within the Idea of the Liberal Tradition,” 274–8; Leonard Krieger, “A View from a Farther Shore,” 269–73; and Marvin Myers, “Louis Hartz: The Liberal Tradition in America: An Appraisal,” 261–8) in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5:3 (April 1963)Google Scholar. Australian developments of the Hartz thesis are discussed in Hugh Collins, “Political Ideology in a Benthamite Society,” Daedalus, 114 (Winter 1985), 146–9Google Scholar; and Hirst, John “Keeping Colonial History Colonial: The Hartz Thesis Revisited,” Historical Studies, 21 (1984), 85–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other relevant comparative explorations of political culture include Eddy, John and Schreuder, Deryck, eds., The Rise of Colonial Nationalism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988)Google Scholar, and Lipset, Seymour M., The First New Nation: the United States in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979[1973])Google Scholar.

4 I am using the constitutional conventions as indicators of languages of national identity. How valid are these indicators? Most of the debate is legal and political, and in looking at national identity we are reading it to some extent against its intentions. This is an advantage to the extent that claims about the nation are likely to be those most familiar to delegates, preoccupied as they are with furthering other agendas. But while it is true that elites in both settler colonies did conceptualize their commonalities in terms of political values, something of what it means to be American or Australian at this time is likely to be missing. As I will note later, these contexts did not evoke much explicit concern about domestic others who might act as negative referents to the liberal national identities in the process of construction. It is also important to note that the local and the vernacular images of the nation, to the extent that they existed, are not represented here. McLaughlin, for example, argues for the importance of religious self-image in American identity: see McLaughlin, William G., “The Role of Religion in the Revolution: Liberty of Conscience and Cultural Cohesion in the New Nation,” in Kurtz, Stephen G. and Hutson, James H., eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 197–255Google Scholar; and Sandoz, Ellis, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era: 1730–1805 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Broader evidence about how “all political factions in Britain and America… communicate[d] their ideas about the nature of American unity” is also assembled in Olson, Lester C., Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)Google Scholar, xiv. A broader overview of Australian identity of the period, including the popular racism not directly captured in the conventions, is given in White, Richard, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1608–1980 (Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981)Google Scholar. See also Barham, Susan Baggett, “Conceptualizations of Women within Australian Egalitarian Thought,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30:3 (July 1988), 483–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the course of her analysis Barham discusses important vernacular symbols of Australian national identity. But while there was certainly more to national identity than that evoked by the elite and technical context of the conventions, they do represent the most plausible claims about what defines the people which were available to political elites. These claims are significant because in neither case were vernacular claims about national identity directly influential at the time.

5 Greene, Jack P. discusses imperial and confederate examples in Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States 1607–1788 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986)Google Scholar. Rakove, Jack N., in The Beginnings of National Politics: an Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979)Google Scholar discusses the experience of confederacy. Wood, Gordon S., in The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969)Google Scholar shows, inter alia, how natural the solution of a constitutional convention seemed. Onuf, Peter S., “Reflections on the Founding: Constitutional Historiography in Bicentennial Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly (Ser. 3), 47:3 July 1990, 341–75Google Scholar, suggests that continuities with state constitutions and political language were important in promoting the ratification of the Constitution. For previous attempts and precedents in Australian federation, see Allin, C. D., The Early Federation Movement of Australia, (Kingston, ON: Press of the British Whig Publishing Co., 1907)Google Scholar; Crisp, L. F., The Later Australian Federation Movement 1883–1901: Outline and Bibliography (Canberra: Australian National University Research School of Social Sciences, 1979)Google Scholar; La Nauze, J. A., The Making of the Australian Constitution (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; McMinn, W. G., A Constitutional History of Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and Nationalism and Federalism in Australia (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

6 McDonald, Forrest, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 166Google Scholar; Greene, Jack P., “A Fortuitous Convergence: Culture, Circumstance, and Contingency in the Emergence of the American Nation,” in Religion, Ideology and Nationalism in Europe and America: Essays Presented in Honor of Yehoshua Arieli (Jerusalem: Historical Society for Israel and the Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 1986), 243–61Google Scholar, at 259. See also Greene, Peripheries and Center, 162–3, and Zuckerman, Michael, “Identity in British America: Unease in Eden,” in Canny, Nicholas and Pagden, Anthony, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 115–57Google Scholar. On the existence of an earlier sense of American national identity, see Merrett, Richard L., Symbols of American Community 1735–1775 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Hackett, David G., "The Social Origins of Nationalism: Albany, New York 1754–1835,” Journal of Social History, 21 (1987–88), 659–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Greene, Jack P., “Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth Century America,” Journal of Social History, 3 (Spring 1970), 189–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the predominance of state loyalties, see Murrin, John M., “A Roof Without Walls: the Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Richard Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 333–48Google Scholar, and for a survey of significant colonial and regional differences militating against unity, see Josephine F. Pacheco, “Introduction,” 1–23, in Pacheco, Josephine F., ed., Antifederalism: The Legacy of George Mason (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. Among those who note the absence of nationalist claims in the Revolution are Savelle, Max, “Nationalism and Other Loyalties in the American Revolution,” American Historical Review, 67 (July 1962), 901–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Becker, Carl, The Declaration of Independence: a Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960[1922])Google Scholar, ch. 2. Bernard Bailyn stresses the importance of ideas of the British political opposition in Revolutionary thinking, see his The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar and The Origins of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970)Google Scholar. The weakness of eighteenth-century “national” identity is also implied by a number of arguments which attribute any perception of commonalities to the British, or to British influences. As Murrin argues, “America was a British idea” (p. 339), and it was the British who saw, and acted upon, the colonies as a whole. Merrett's study of contemporary newspapers shows, indeed, that British journalists used the collective term before the Americans did. Murrin, as well as Greene in “Search for Identity,” argue, in a way that fits with the argument of this essay, the colonies shared an increasing Anglicization, if anything. Adding weight to the claim that American identity was weak and, to the extent that it existed, a British creation, is Shy's argument that the effects of British campaigning created, directly or indirectly, the beginnings of an American national identity. See John Shy, “The American Revolution: the Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Kurtz and Hutson, American Revolution, 121–56. Among those who argue that national identity did not become generally salient until after reconstruction, see Curti, Merle, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967)Google Scholar; and Kammen, Michael, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1987)Google Scholar.

7 See Allin, Early Federation Movement, 58–417, passim; Crisp, Later Federation Movement, 1–8; McMinn, Constitutional History, 92–118; La Nauze, Australian Constitution, chs. 1, 2, 6, and passim; Gollan, R. A., “Nationalism, the Labour Movement and the Commonwealth 1880–1900,” in Greenwood, Gordon, ed., Australia: a Social and Political History (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1955)Google Scholar; B. K. de Garis, “1890–1900,” in Crowley, F. K., ed., A New History of Australia (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974)Google Scholar; Cole, Douglas, “‘The Crimson Thread of Kinship’; Ethnic Ideas in Australia 1870–1914,” Historical Studies, 14 (April 1971), 511–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. G., British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1993), 252Google Scholar. McMinn, in Nationalism and Federalism, provides the most recent overview of the story of Australian unification: see especially chapter 10. For a more radically nationalist line than appears in the conventions, see Anderson, H., ed., Tocsin: Radical Comments against Federation 1897–1900 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and for a more conservative line, see Blackton, Charles, “Australian Nationality and Nationalism: the Imperial Federationist Interlude 1885–1901,” Historical Studies, 7 (1955), 1–16Google Scholar.

8 On the legal ambiguity of the American union, see Stampp, Kenneth M., “The Concept of Perpetual Union,” Journal of American History, 65 (June 1978), 5–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the slow attenuation of the constitutional and legislative dependence on Britain in Australia, see Hudson, W. J. and Sharpe, M. P., Australian Independence: Colony to Reluctant Kingdom (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

9 Brown, Richard, “The Founding Fathers of 1776 and 1787: A Collective View,” William and Mary Quarterly (3rd ser.), 33 (July 1976), 466CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Farrand, Max, The Framing of the Constitution of the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1913)Google Scholar, ch. 2; and Rossiter, Clinton, 1787: The Grand Convention (New York: Macmillan, 1966)Google Scholar, pt. 2. McDonald, Forrest, in We the People: the Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)Google Scholar argues, against Beard's thesis, that delegates in Philadelphia did not act according to personal economic interest, but he does not contradict the claim that they were elites. See also his later description in Novus Ordo Seclorum, 217–24. For a sense of the range of political opinion beyond the convention, see Wood, American Republic: Lloyd, Gordon, “Let Justice Be Our Guide: A Reconsideration of ‘True Federalism’ at the Constitutional Convention,” Political Science Reviewer, 17 (Fall 1987), 131–74Google Scholar; see also Storing, Herbert J., What the Anti- Federalists Were For, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Storing finds that antifederalists usually used the term “nation” to refer to the United States, as did their opponents: see pages 86–87 n.4. Their sense of identity does not appear to have been very different from that of the Federalists; however, they feared more an overemphasis on national glory. On analyses of federalist and antifederalist thought, see Hutson, James H. in “Country, Court, and Constitution: Antifederalism and the Historians,” William and Mary Quarterly (3rd ser.), 38:3 (1981), 339–68Google Scholar; Cornell, Saul, “Aristocracy Assailed: The Ideology of Backcountry Anti-Federalism,” Journal of American History, 76:4 (March 1990), 1148–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pacheco, Anti Federalism. Federalist and anti-federalist projects are linked to social position by attitudes to the states’ taxation weaknesses in Brown, Roger H., Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. The federalist cause was the better promoted: Most press coverage was Federalist and “a campaign was mounted to convince the people to accept whatever the delegates produced short of monarchy,” and “essayists who cast doubt on the convention… rarely appeared in print… [and]… seldom got reprinted.” See Alexander, John K., The Selling of the Constitutional Convention: A History of News Coverage (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 8, 9Google Scholar. The social background of Australian convention delegates is summarized in L. F. Crisp, Later Federation Movement, 19–23; see also Crisp, , Federation Fathers, Hart, John, ed. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Nauze, J. A. La, “Who Are The Founding Fathers?,” Historical Studies, 12 (October 1968), 333–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Norris, R., The Emergent Commonwealth: Expectations and Fulfillment 1889–1910 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 222–30Google Scholar. Norris also discusses the Australian “proto- Beardian” debate, between Geoffrey Blainey and R. S. Parker, pp. 165–71. Contributions to this debate can be found in Eastwood, J. J. and Smith, F. B., comp., Historical Studies (1st ser.) (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1964), 153–225Google Scholar. See also McMinn, Nationalism and Federalism, 128–95.

10 Official Report of the National Australian Convention Debates (Adelaide: C. E. Bristow, Government Printer, 1897), 193Google Scholar [hereafter, Debates]. Ramirez, Francisco O., “Institutional Analysis,” in Thomas, George et al., Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987), 319Google Scholar, and Anderson, Imagined Communities, 63–64, note the importance of timing for constitutions and for nationalisms respectively. The difference of a century also has a methodological significance for this comparison, creating some incommensurability between Australian and American records. The proceedings of the Philadelphia convention were secret, and the existing records are notes, commentaries, and letters written privately by the delegates, most notably Madison. These records are extensive but are not verbatim, unlike the Australian records taken as Hansard under the system of the colonial parliaments. This means that the overall effect of the Philadelphia records, by comparison to those of Adelaide, may be skewed to the more nationalist of those involved in the debate (thus adding a second filter to the already nationalist tendencies of most of those who attended the convention). Neither convention is fully representative of its context, and the state of the records means there is an additional skew to the range that I include from Philadelphia. The comparison thus sacrifices representative range for the direct comparability of the institutional context in which talk of the nation is evoked. For the United States, representative range would require further examination of the claims here in Jensen, Merrill et al. , eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, 16 vols. to date (Madison, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976–)Google Scholar. For Australia, complete coverage would require analysis of records from later conventions, as well as press commentary: The Australian constitutional conventions were held in three cities over two years and run to four volumes of 1,500 pages each. I have used only the records of the first convention, in Adelaide. The later conventions, in Sydney and Melbourne, dealt only with some of the important issues or painstakingly reviewed suggestions from the colonies on revisions to the draft produced in Adelaide.

11 Arjomand, Said Amir, “Constitutions and the Struggle for Political Order: A Study in the Modernization of Political Traditions,” European Journal of Sociology, 33:1 (1992), 75Google Scholar; Hunt, E. M., in American Precedents in Australian Federation (New York: A. M. S. Press, 1968[1930]), 254Google Scholar.

12 McMichael, Philip, “Incorporating Comparison within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method,” American Sociological Review, 55 (June 1990), 392CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McMinn, Constitutional History, 90; Burke is quoted by Savelle, in “Nationalism and Other Loyalties,” 902; see also Burke, Edmund, “Speech on Conciliation with America” (03 22 1775), 40–43Google Scholar, in 1765–1875, vol. 1 of Great Issues in American History: A Documentary Record, Hofstadter, Richard, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1958)Google Scholar; B. K. de Garis, “The Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Constitution Bill,” in Martin, A. W., ed., Essays in Australian Federation (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1969), 94–121Google Scholar; and Hind, Robert J., “‘We Have No Colonies’—Similarities within the British Imperial Experience,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:1 (January 1984), 7Google Scholar. McMichael, , in “State Formation and the Construction of the World Market,” Political Power and Social Theory: A Research Annual, no. 6 (1987), 187–237Google Scholar, analyzes changes in international political economy in the nineteenth century with special reference to Australia. Although his focus is on structural context rather than cultural repertoire, his analysis provides important background for the differences in interpretation of national identity between American and Australian conventions. And his point that world historical context is “not an external dimension so much as immanent dimension” of state formation fits with the argument here about repertoires of national identity claims.

13 Farrand, Max, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, rev. ed., 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966Google Scholar), 1:343 (June 20), 1:301 (June 18), Debates, 301 [the Farrand edition of the Philadelphia convention will be cited hereafter as Records]. On the various aspects of the “Grand Compromise,” see Rossiter, Grand Convention, 186; and McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, ch. 7. On the Australians’ expectations that Federal government would not overshadow that of the states, see Norris, Emergent Commonwealth, 199–200.

14 Records, 1:258 (June 16); 1:340 (June 20). There is much discussion of the positions of delegates, but Lansing and Martin represent state against nationalist interests however the range of positions is described. Forrest McDonald calls these two “state particularists.” See “Ne Philosophos Audiamus: The Middle Delegates in the Constitutional Convention,” The Political Science Reviewer, 17 (Fall 1987), 177–8Google Scholar. For the Australian claims later in the paragraph, see Debates, 430, 1163.

15 Records, 1:66 (June 1); 1:186 (June 9); Debates, 381.

16 Records, 1:161 (June 7), 1:153 (June 7), 1:66 (June 1). Wilson was expressing here what was, in the thought of the time, something of an extended oxymoron: It was generally believed that republican theory applied to small, intimate polities and would not work in large areas. There are frequent references to this problem of “extent” in the convention. Land is viewed through this lens: as providing various sorts of political threats. At the height of the deadlock on representation, Franklin introduced the idea of empire that would become a resolution to the contradiction between extent and republican principles:

God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? (Records 1:451 [June 28], emphasis in original.)

See Wood, American Republic, 499–500. Pocock has argued that it was the occupation of new territory which actually generated the new sovereignty, in the sense that this power grounds the unification impulse and, thus, that “empire” is from the beginning “part of the rhetoric of American nationality” (see Pocock, J. G. A., “The Politics of Extent and the Problems of Freedom” [Paper presented in the General Aspects of Law Series, University of California Berkeley Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, March 18, 1989])Google Scholar. More specifically, McCoy has argued that Madison uses the popular belief that population in the Southwest would grow to counter fears of Eastern dominance. See Drew McCoy, “James Madison and Visions of American Nationality in the Confederation Period: A Regional Perspective,” in Beeman, Beyond Confederation, 226–58. The importance of the Western lands issue in the Confederation period has been widely noted: See, for example, Henderson, “Continental Congress,” in Kurtz and Hutson, American Revolution, 157–96. Both countries here differ from other more standard examples of nationalism because for both the land was assured before state formation and for both the land was extensive. The occupation of the land was not much contested with other political centers, as in irredentist and modern ethnic nationalisms. What is of interest here is the way in which the references to land as part of American identity, which occur frequently, were always phrased politically. For the Australians, the continent was also an uncontested national attribute. For example, O'Connor could claim that “we all feel that no federal union can be complete which does not embrace the people of the whole continent” (Debates, 52). But in Adelaide, the talk of the continent was framed in a different way. It did not represent political but rather economic constraint. It occurred mostly in the context of debates about infrastructure—about the sharing of precious river water, and about railways—“the arteries of our continent” (Debates, 928). Debates about how to deal with water in a river passing through several states were as involving to the delegates as any of the tense American debates over foreign influence. The much-debated frontier thesis is one of the ways by which similarities have been drawn between “settler colonies” like the United States and Australia. But it is clear that the existence of land to be occupied by white settlers needs to be understood in terms of the pre-existing polity: “We cannot get new States except by subdivision. In America they were able to get states by aggregation, by addition,” as Higgins, one of the few to express admiration for the United States, pointed out (Debates, 647). See Thompson, Leonard and Lamarr, Howard, “Comparative Frontier History,” in The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 3–13Google Scholar

17 Records, 1:339 (June 20), 1:432 (June 26), 1:206 (June 11). Of course, delegates had long been committed to republicanism: Many historians have identified classical republicanism as a major source of ideas for the political innovation of 1776–87. Representative government and the absence of monarchy were overlaid with notions of public virtue, public good, and fear of corruption, to give a “moral dimension, a Utopian depth… that involved the very character of their society” (Wood, American Republic, 47). Here I am concerned with what the delegates think is distinctive about the nation, rather than their political values per se; but it is not unexpected that national identity was associated with republicanism. It is important to note, though, that this political commitment was selected as characteristic of the nation rather than other available political, religious, or social symbols. It could have been otherwise: Scottish moral philosophy, also an important part of founders' political language, leaves its mark in characterizations of the people more indirectly, for example, in an unwillingness to trust good government to public virtue, and in the “concern with unintended outcomes” in constitutional design. See Howe, Daniel Walker, “Why the Scottish Enlightenment Was Useful to the Framers of the American Constitution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:3 (July 1989), 584Google Scholar. On republicanism, see Wood, American Republic, chs. 2 and 3; and Pocock, J. G. A., The Macchiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. For an argument that classical republicanism was –an idea whose time had come and gone by 1787,” see Diggins, John Patrick, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-interest and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 13Google Scholar. Diggins argues that language and rhetoric, replete with republican claims, do not represent realities (Appendix 1). He also conflates republican government and republican virtue in denying the influence of republicanism and rejects the Constitution's representativeness of “America's first principles” (p. 7). But Forrest McDonald points out that “the Framers were politically multilingual.” What is significant here is the appeal to republican practices as distinctive of the people. See McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 235. On four distinguishable political idioms used in 1787, see Kramnick, Isaac, ”The “Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787,“ William and Mary Quarterly (Ser. 3), 45:1 (January 1988), 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 On the distinction between democracy and republicanism for the founders, Storing concludes that “both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists used the term ‘popular government’” to refer to “a range of ideas from simple, direct popular rule to a regulated, checked, mitigated rule of the people.” Both sides tended to use “the term ‘democracy’ for the former end of the scale and ‘republic’ for the latter” (see Storing, Anti-Federalists, 90, n. 19, and Wood, American Republic, 222–6, 586). Saul Cornell, in “Aristocracy Assailed,” argues that elite and populist antifederalists also differed in this way in their interpretations of democracy and that grass-roots antifederalists espoused a version of representative democracy against a concept of natural aristocracy that is also more evident in the convention.

19 Records, I:288(June 18); 1:101 (June 4); 11:225 (August 8); 1:403 (June 25); 1:51 (May 31); 1:512 (July 12); 1:56 (May 31). On Gorham, see Farrand, Framing, 174. On distance from “the people,” see McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum, 161–5. But it also seems true that, as Alfred Young argued, “the people out of doors” were indirectly influential in forming the constitution. Delegates, in Adelaide as well as Philadelphia, were constantly imagining and responding to the constraints set by the opinions of the “people outside.” They were constantly concerned in their formulations with the question of legitimacy. As Young argues, “conservatives recoiled from extreme proposals for which they knew they could not win popular support.” See Smith, Barbara Clark et al., “Moving Beyond Beard: A Symposium,” Radical History Review, no. 42 (September 1988), 10Google Scholar. Onuf, in “Reflections on the Founding, also notes that “the Antifederalists played a much more positive role than is customarily allowed” (p. 368) in their indirect influence on constitutional debate. For an example of popular resistance to constitutional ratification, see Cornell, “Aristocracy Assailed.” But as several commentators have remarked, in qualification of Young's thesis, the “people out of doors” were mostly white men: There were people beyond the people out of doors, as I will note below.

20 Records, 1:390 (June 25); 1:402 (June 25); 1:398 (June 25).

21 Records, 1:442 (June 26). Hartz identified a “liberal absolutism” in American political culture that abstracts liberalism from its context of opposition to feudalism and radicalism and makes it absolute and universal. He dismisses references to stratification by the convention delegates as “ideological smoke” obscuring a unique sort of equality and unity. Hartz is thus enthusiastic about Pinckney's assertion of equality, unlike most delegates, who did talk of stratifications, indeed clung to them, even while characterizing their nation as lacking some of the social distinctions of Europe. See Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 81–86. See also Katz, Stanley N., “The Strange Birth and Unlikely History of Constitutional Equality,” Journal of American History, 75:2 (December 1988), 747–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Records, 11:268 (August 13), 11:123 (July 26), 11:606 (September 13). See also Wood, American Republic, 421–3. For clarification of the significance of accusations of aristocracy in this context, see Huston, James L., “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth 1765–1900,” American Historical Review, 98:4 (October 1993), 1079–1105CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Debates, 651, 721, 1033, 382, 28, 51. On the development and meaning of responsible government, see McMinn, Constitutional History, 40–91; Weiler, Patrick and Jaensch, Dean, eds., Responsible Government in Australia (Richmond, Victoria: Drummond Publishers, 1980)Google Scholar; I. D. McNaughton, “Colonial Liberalism, 1851–1892,” in Greenwood, ed., Australia, 98–114; J. M. Main, “Making Constitutions in New South Wales and Victoria 1853–1854,” in Beever, Margot and Smith, F. B., Historical Studies: Selected Articles (2nd ser.) (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1967), 51–74Google Scholar; Hind, “British Imperial Experience,” 7–8; and Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 234–43.

24 Debates, 213, 997, 110.

25 Debates, 1163, 619, 629, 309.

26 Debates, 293, 78.

27 Debates, 316, 618. Cole discusses an important “ethnocentric continuum” in Australian thinking about identity in this period. The continuum ranges from racism to Anglo-Saxon identity to ideas about a new Australian “type,” linking racism to imperialism to nationalism. In fact, he argues, the ideological linkages to Anglo-Saxon and Caucasian identities weakened the nationalism in Australian identity (see Cole, “Crimson Thread,” 511–25, and White, Inventing Australia, 63–84).

28 Debates, 353, 986, 987, 975. As in one colony a decade earlier, the colonists spoke as though “their common experiences were British, their common sense of identity was as Britons, not Australians.” See Shortus, Stephen P., “‘Colonial Nationalism’: New South Welsh Identity in the mid-1880's,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 59 (March 1973), 38Google Scholar (emphasis in the original). Greene argues that a similar identity existed in the American colonies: “Their incorporation into the larger Anglophone world was an essential component of colonial self-esteem: for the colonists a positive sense of identity prior to 1775 was dependent upon their ability to identify themselves as “free Englishmen” (Greene, “Fortuitous Convergence,” 253.)

29 Records, 1:107 (June 4); 1:206 (June 11); 11:370 (August 22); 11:364 (August 21); 11:364 (August 21). See also, for instance, Pateman, Carole, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Rogin, Michael, “Liberal Society and the Indian Question,” in Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Kettner, James H., “Birthright Citizenship and the Status of Indians, Slaves, and Free Negroes,” ch. 10, in The Development of American Citizenship 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

30 Debates, 33. See also Oldfield, Audrey, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or A Struggle? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar. But on women in Australian nationalist mythology more generally, see Barham, “Conceptualisations of Women.”

31 Debates, 718; Debates, 731. See Norris, Emergent Commonwealth, 43–65. As Eddy and Schreuder among others suggest, colonial nationalism, in Australia as elsewhere, was intrinsically “exclusionist” and the attachment to the empire “connotes the defensive cooperation of white nations.” See Eddy and Schreuder, Colonial Nationalism, 135. See also, for instance, Cole, “Crimson Thread”; White, Inventing Australia; Stretton, Pat and Finnimore, Christine, “Black Fellow Citizens: Aborigines and the Commonwealth Franchise,” Australian Historical Studies, 25:101 (October 1993), 521–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yarwood, A. T. and Knowling, M. J., Race Relations in Australia: A History (North Ryde: Methuen Australia, 1982), ch. 10Google Scholar.

32 Records, I: 18 (May 25); I: 133 (June 6). Greene examines the use of models in American identity formation, and claims that positive, normative models “exercise a more powerful influence in the process” than negative models. This does not appear to be the case in the convention debates (Greene, “Search for Identity,” 191 n.4). Hartz also notices the use of comparative models and argues that, despite the erudition of the founders, they did not “learn how much they differed from the Greeks and modern Europeans” but “put themselves in a category with both” (see Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 82–83). The frequent use of comparisons at the convention as warnings, or (for Britain) as models, generally supports him: The English model is also often dismissed, however, as irrelevant, for the reasons concerned with social distinction mentioned earlier, in a way that contradicts Hartz's argument. Indeed, the use of this contrast with Britain arises precisely where delegates attempt to speak of the nation; they do show an awareness of the distinctiveness of their country, though it is with reference to Europe rather than with any fully developed analysis of their society in its own right. This awareness somewhat undermines Hartz's theses about national identity, if not political culture.

33 Debates, 87.

34 Records, 1:492 (June 30); 1:493 (June 30). Some historians have argued that weakness in foreign relations was an important motive for the convention. Marks has detailed a number of problems of trade and security and shown how they influenced the climate of opinion before the convention. See Marks III, Frederick W., Independence on Trial: Foreign Affairs and the Making of the Constitution (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1986)Google Scholar. Onuf (“Reflections on the Founding,” 358) has also noted the neglected influence of foreign affairs for convention issues, suggesting that “no neat distinction between domestic and foreign politics could then or should now be drawn.” It is part of the argument of this essay that this is true for discussions of national identity too.

35 Records, 1:172 (June 8); 1:285 (June 18); 1:473 (June 29).

36 Records, 11:68 (July 20); 11:216 (August 8); 11:268 (August 13); 11:238 (August 9). The characterization of English government as corrupt and the fear of American corruption was a common theme in the political thought of the time. See for example Wood, American Republic, 107–14. Superficially, there seems little ground for the strength of the suspicion of foreign corruption. Although foreign policy had been a weakness of the Continental Congress, Jack Rakove, in Continental Congress, 249–55 and 342–52, describes little that is the direct result of foreign corruption in his recounting of the problems of the Congress. However, Greene shows how latent tensions and a changing structure of expectations in the pre-revolutionary relation with Britain might account for the conspiracy theme, concluding:

Clearly, the kind of conspiracy many colonists thought existed did not…. Since 1748 however, there had been an unmistakable and continuing effort … to bring the colonies under tighter regulation…. Given the colonists’ customary expectations … this effort, and its many specific components seemed to the colonists—and was in fact—a fundamental attack upon the extant moral order within the empire as they conceived of that order.

See Jack P. Greene, “An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution,” in Kurtz and Hutson, American Revolution, 79 (emphasis in original). See also Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins, note to ch. 4.

37 Records, 1:172 (June 8); 11:236 (August 9).

38 Records, 11:268 (August 13), 11:236 (August 9); 11:237 (August 9).

39 Tarver, Heidi, “The Creation of American National Identity 1774–1796,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 37 (1992), 91Google Scholar. On the revolutionary war as a process of political education, see Shy, “The American Revolution: The Military Conflict considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Kurtz and Hutson, American Revolution, 121–56; see also Lipset, First New Nation.

40 Records, 1:519 (July 2), 1:108 (June 4); 1:426 (June 26); 1:332 (June 19); 1:424 (June 26). Olson, in his study of revolutionary images, found that “all major motifs of the period displayed pervasive concerns about whether Americans held the same status as the English. To judge from the pictorial record, these concerns were as fundamental in Britain and America as any apprehensions of conspiracy” (see Olson, Emblems, xv).

41 Records, 1:485 (June 30).

42 Records, 1:484 (June 30); 1:254 (June 16); 1:66 (June 1). On the English model in the thought of the founders, see McDonald, Novus Or do Seclorum, ch. 2, passim.

43 White, in Inventing Australia, 47–62, describes how much Australia likened itself to America throughout the later nineteenth century, identifying as a “4newer” new society. However, from the 1850s a distinction between British-Australian and American democracy developed. It is this more ambivalent aspect of the perceived similarity to the United States that dominates the convention and is probably an aspect of the bias to elites, as Higgins, one of the more radical delegates, is the only participant to speak admiringly of the American democratic example. See also Hunt, American Precedents, ch. 6.

44 Debates, 769, 296.

45 Debates, 380–1, 666, 543.

46 Debates, 382, 118.

47 Debates, 662. Hopes of future international glory, while rare in Adelaide, were more commonly expressed than in the recorded Philadelphia debates. However, Kramnick, in “National Discussion” suggests that Hamilton, especially, imagined a “powerful state in the world of states” (p. 27) and drew on a generally intelligible language of state power.

48 Debates, 568, 1177, 353, 393. Concern that Australian interests were not properly considered in London was especially salient in the 1880s and was a major motive for moves to federate at the time, although the motivation had receded and been overtaken by the benefits of economic unification in the 1890s. See G. L. Buxton, “1870–1890,” in Crowley, New History, 199–203; Geoffrey Serle, “The Victorian Government's Campaign for Federation 1883–1889,” in Martin, Federation, 1–56 and Luk, G., “External Threats as a Factor in Australian Politics 1870–1900,” (Ph.D. disser., University of Sydney, 1973)Google Scholar. Shortus, in “Colonial Nationalism,” 34–35, discusses family metaphors for the relations of New South Wales to the empire. Family metaphors were often used to describe the relationship, as well as the nature of the tensions between, the American colonies and England. See Savelle, “Nationalism and Other Loyalties,” 901–23, and Greene, “Uneasy Connection,” 33–35. Olson, Emblems, ch. 3, finds that the image of the American colonies as child was one of the three most common images used from 1754 to 1784 and that “during the Revolution, the image of America's stature was redefined in that the child attained adulthood” (p. xv). From the imperial point of view, the colonized were also frequently viewed as children (see Hind, “British Imperial Experience,” 25). Mary Lowenthal Felstiner analyzes familial metaphors in the Chilean colonial context, and her conclusions offer many insights for comparative analysis see “Family Metaphors: The Language of an Independence Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25:1 (January 1983), 154–80Google Scholar.

49 Debates, 318, 374. Only rarely were international economic issues addressed directly in Philadelphia. Madison did mention a fear that Britain would not make a commercial treaty because it believed the country to be unstable. See Records, 1:426 (June 26). Lance Banning argues that Madison was preoccupied with strengthening unified action to counter British naviga interpretation laws, which were having marked economic effects; and Marks suggests that international economic problems were highly significant to a range of groups in creating the demand for a stronger union. See Banning, , “James Madison and the Nationalists 1780–1783,” William and Mary Quarterly (3rd sen), 40 (April 1983), 227–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Marks, Foreign Affairs, passim. Brown, in Redeeming the Republic, 21, 143–6, argues that foreign issues were the result of states’ taxation failures. But economic insecurity is little expressed in the Philadelphia convention by comparison with the talk in Adelaide. Indeed, the economic dimension of federation seems much more important to the Australians than the Philadelphia delegates. Whereas the national “power of regulating commerce” is not given much comment by the Americans at this time, for the Australians, intercolonial tariffs had long been a matter of dispute and standardizing the gauge of railways was important. In one of the pithier statements of an oft-repeated claim (Debates, 374), Barton said that “intercolonial trade must be free or Federation is a mockery.” See McMichael, “State Formation,” and Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, for the background explaining this difference in the importance of economic issues in constitutional talk. Cain and Hopkins note that “the dependence of Australian prosperity after 1850 upon the international economy, and upon links with Britain in particular, was very marked” (p. 254) and that federation “was shaped in important particulars by the need to soothe the fears of British investors” (p. 253 n.85).

50 Debates, 671. The responses to Dobson's conservative political analysis might be said to define the range of political opinion of the time. Trenwith, the labour representative turned politician, asks quickly, “Does not bone and sinew represent wealth?” Deakin, the pre-eminent liberal, responds just as quickly and more assertively: “The mass of the people with us have a good deal of property.”

51 Benedict Anderson, for example, notes the importance of blocked “Creole pilgrimages"”as “meaning-creating experiences” for nation-formation in colonies (Imagined Communities, 53). Reinhard Bendix early stressed the importance of extra-national politics for early nationformation in Europe see Kings or People: Power and the Mandate to Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 266, 273Google Scholar. Studies of anti-colonial nationalisms in the twentieth century also, of course, treat them as primarily relational (see, for example Chatterjee, Partha, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, 2nd ed. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993])Google Scholar. For an extended argument for the importance of the world polity in generating the authority of the nation-state, see Thomas, Institutional Structure. By contrast, Smith, in an important claim which is challenged, at least for the settler colonies, by the evidence here, asserts that “the differentiating aspect follows from the integrative one” in identity formation (see Ethnic Origins, 97, and passim). I suggest here that nationality in settler colonies illustrates that what might be nationally integrative might be situational differentiation.

52 Greenfeld, Five Roads, 15, 426.

53 Debates, 970, 971, 973, 977, 979.

54 Records, 1:552 (July 5).