Reviewed by Todd Estes | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4

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Reviewed by Todd Estes | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. By Woody Holton. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007. 382 pages. $27.00 (cloth), $15.00 (paper).
Reviewed by Todd Estes, Oakland University
This is an important work, sure to be extensively read, taught, and debated. It will quickly find its way onto graduate reading lists and scholarly bibliographies. Woody Holton argues that historians have too often perpetuated the Madisonian understanding of the early 1780s: that the crisis that precipitated the federal Constitution was caused by irresponsible laws passed by state legislatures that were far too responsive to popular pressures from farmers seeking tax relief. James Madison and others believed that representatives "had shown excessive indulgence to debtors and taxpayers. They had refused to force farmers to pay what they owed" (8). Directly challenging elites such as Madison, "thousands of other Americans contended that the remedy for the recession was not to press harder on taxpayers and debtors but to ease up on them" (100).	1
Holton argues that the framers saw excessive democracy as the cause of tax leniency, which in turn stymied bondholders and discouraged investment. Consequently, when the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, the group deliberately crafted a new government to restrain democracy in ways large and small—and largely invisible. The decision to "extend the sphere" (234) by creating huge election districts was "of all the safeguards against popular influence devised in Philadelphia ... the one that was least visible in the Constitution" (234). Nor was this invisibility an accident. Federalists would have made the new government even more antidemocratic if they had had their way. Only "their desperate desire to get the Constitution through the ratifying conventions had forced them to drop or moderate some of their favorite restraints on grassroots influence" (198). They dissembled when "persuading ordinary citizens to ratify a document that would reduce their power over lawmakers" (212). Thus, Holton concludes that while rebellions and threats by ordinary farmers helped compel the Philadelphia convention, their influence was checked at the door because Madison and others "sincerely believed that during the postwar era the thirteen state legislatures had bungled their way into a vivid demonstration of the perils of popular rule" (274).	2
In forcefully rejecting the Madisonian view, Holton sides with the farmers over the framers. He joins the emerging neoprogressive view of the founding recently articulated by Terry Bouton and Michael A. McDonnell and builds on his own previous book, Forced Founders, which argued convincingly that Virginia's founding fathers were besieged elites, pressured from below in the coming of the Revolution.¹ He presents an important corrective to the Madison-centric view of the crisis of the 1780s and the notion that farmers behaved irresponsibly and governed selfishly. He also offers thoughtful and detailed discussions of the state-level debates over tax policy, paper money, and the responsiveness of government to popular sentiments.	. . .

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