| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Calvin H. Johnson. Righteous Anger at the Wicked States: The Meaning of the Founders' Constitution. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xv, 294. $75.00.

The U.S. Constitution granted the federal government the power to tax the American people directly, without intervention by the state governments. The new federal government used its fiscal power to restore public credit and to support an active foreign policy, acquiring territory and waging war against European and neighboring nations. In this way, the power to tax greatly strengthened the national government. Studies of the framing and adoption of the Constitution have largely ignored issues of taxation, however. The dominant interpretation sees the Constitution as the crowning achievement of a conservative movement to stifle the democratization of American social and political life that began with the revolution. Others have argued that the Constitution was simply a means for public creditors to safeguard their investments in public bonds or for slaveowners to safeguard their property in fellow humans. Calvin H. Johnson dismisses these and other interpretations as misleading or simply wrong. Instead, he argues that the founders first and foremost aimed to provide the national government with the power over taxation. This was also the most important issue in the ratification debate as Federalists and Antifederalists battled for and against the Constitution.

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