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Empires of Writing: Britain, America and Constitutions, 1776–1848

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2014

Linda Colley
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Approximately 50 years ago, R. R. Palmer published his two volume masterwork The Age of the Democratic Revolution. Designed as a “comparative constitutional history of Western civilization,” it charted the struggles after 1776 over ideas of popular sovereignty and civil and religious freedoms, and the spreading conviction that, instead of being confined to “any established, privileged, closed, or self-recruiting groups of men,” government might be rendered simple, accountable and broadly based. Understandably, Palmer placed great emphasis on the contagion of new-style constitutions. Between 1776 and 1780, eleven onetime American colonies drafted state constitutions. These went on to inform the provisions of the United States Constitution adopted in 1787, which in turn influenced the four Revolutionary French constitutions of the 1790s, and helped to inspire new constitutions in Haiti, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and elsewhere. By 1820, according to one calculation, more than sixty new constitutions had been attempted within Continental Europe alone, and this is probably an underestimate. At least a further eighty constitutions were implemented between 1820 and 1850, many of them in Latin America. The spread of written constitutions proved in time almost unstoppable, and Palmer left his readers in no doubt that this outcome could be traced back to the Revolution of 1789, and still more to the Revolution of 1776. Despite resistance by entrenched elites, and especially from Britain, “the greatest single champion of the European counter-revolution,” a belief was in being by 1800, Palmer argued, that “democracy was a matter of concern to the world as a whole, that it was a thing of the future, [and] that while it was blocked in other countries the United States should be its refuge.”

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Law and History Review , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 237 - 266
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2014 

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References

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2. For lists of written constitutions during the age of revolutions, see Hill, Henry Bertram, “The Constitutions of Continental Europe: 1789–1813,” Journal of Modern History 8 (1936): 82–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Elkins, Zachary and Ginsberg, Tom, The Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 215–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Such (differing) estimates convey only a limited idea of the scale of constitutional activism. In Northern Italy alone, thirteen new constitutions were drafted between 1796 and 1810: Woloch, Isser, ed. Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 222.

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16. See, for example, Charles Willson Peale's 1790 portrait of Timothy Matlack with a copy of the constitution of Pennsylvania, on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. John Singleton Copley had already drawn on this pictorial convention before the Revolution, portraying Samuel Adams in 1772 pointedly gesturing toward a copy of the charter of Massachusetts.

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38. Palmer, Age of Democratic Revolution, I:282. In February 1819, Bolivar urged the Second National Congress of Venezuela to study—without servilely imitating—the British constitution: “a monarchy in system, in which is acknowledged the sovereignty of the People, the division and equilibrium of power, civil freedom, liberty of conscience, and of the press, and every thing that is sublime in politics. A greater degree of liberty cannot be enjoyed in any kind of republic…I recommend that constitution as the best model to those who aspire to the enjoyments of the rights of man.” South American Independence! The Speech of His Excellency Gen. Bolivar (London: G. Young, 1819)Google Scholar, 20.

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40. Some admittedly crude indicators of this can be found by searching Google Books Ngram viewer. This suggests the rarity of the phrase “unwritten constitution” in works published in Britain before 1860, and its widening (though still uneven) use thereafter.

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64. In his Rights of Man (1791–92), Paine described America's new constitutions as being to “liberty what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into systems”: quoted in Mathias, Charles Mc C. Jr., “Ordered Liberty: The Original Intent of the Constitution,” Maryland Law Review 47 (1987)Google Scholar: 178.

65. Quoted in Sorenson, Janet, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 89.

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67. One aspect of this was the growing use, especially among British conservatives, of the phrase “paper constitution” to re-describe and diminish some written constitutions. The phrase seems to have emerged in the early 1780s, but only to have become widespread in Britain after the outbreak of the French Revolution.

68. Perhaps indicatively, this happened the year after the United States Senate voted to admit “stenographers and note-takers” to its debates; Amer, Mildred L., The Congressional Record: Content, History and Issues, (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1993).Google Scholar

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77. I will be developing these points and arguments in a future book provisionally entitled WordPower: Writing Constitutions and Making Empires.

78. Adelman, Jeremy, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 337.Google Scholar

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81. The use of written constitutions to control and indoctrinate fast-moving and expanding pioneer populations was widely canvassed by mid-nineteenth century American and British writers. In 1848, for example, Frederick Grimké, a former Ohio Supreme Court judge, remarked how “the introduction of the most enlightened institutions and laws into the western states, at the earliest possible stage, keeps the minds of men in one track, and trains the whole population to the same habits and manners as prevail among the oldest members of the confederacy. It is the most striking instance I am aware of, of the immense control which the political institutions may be made to have upon the social organization.” Considerations Upon the Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions (Cincinnati: H. W. Derby & Co., 1848)Google Scholar, 486.

82. For a recent survey, see Cochrane, Peter, Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2006).Google Scholar

83. Dunmore Lang, John, Freedom and Independence for the Golden Lands of Australia (Sydney: n.p., 1857)Google Scholar, 339, 349. A searching biography that will situate Lang and his fellow Australian activists in transnational contexts is badly needed.