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Review
| Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and their Legacy, by William J. Watkins, Jr. New York: Palgrave, 2004. 264 pages. $45.00, cloth.
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| Watkins starts his book by describing the differences between Democratic-Republicans and Federalists in the United States in the 1790s. Democratic Republicans adhered to a strict view of the Constitution, hoping to preserve a federal system of national government based on both horizontal checks and balances and important vertical checks dependent on a state's ability to validate the actions of the national government. Federalists, on the other hand, tended to interpret the Constitution more loosely as they moved the country toward a more national system of government. Watkins, who has also written for the neo-Confederate magazine Southern Partisan, sees the Federalist view as a move away from the true spirit of the American Revolution. It would expand the national government's scope of power and consolidate executive, legislative, and judicial power in the national government in a way not intended by the Constitution. These two perspectives came to a head when Federalists passed the Naturalization Act, the Alien Friends Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and the Sedition Act in the late 1790s. The acts were designed to limit the power of the Federalists' opponents, specifically Thomas Jefferson. These harsh laws prompted Jefferson and James Madison to write the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves. Madison wrote the most conservative Resolve, arguing that it was the people of the several states that had ratified the Constitution, but he did not advocate nullifying the Acts. Jefferson's more radical version, the Kentucky Resolution, grew out of his notion that the individual states had entered into a compact with the federal government to form a nation. The Constitution was that compact, and thus, in Jefferson's view, a state could nullify an act of Congress and prevent the enforcement of the nullified law. Taken together, Watkins maintains, these documents "represent a reaffirmation of the spirit of 1776. At core," he continues, "the Resolutions are intrepid statements in favor of self-government and limited central authority" (p. 1). |
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Watkins spends the remainder of the book describing how various groups have invoked the language and the spirit of the Resolves to fend off the consolidation of power at the federal level. In several examples, ranging from South Carolina's nullification of the tariff to the Patriot Act, Watkins pits the people he sees as perverting the Constitution by consolidating executive, legislative, and judicial power in the national government against those who struggled to safeguard the Constitution by preserving federalism. Two examples illustrate his method and reasoning. While some have lauded Abraham Lincoln for freeing slaves and preserving the Union, Watkins excoriates him for taking "dictatorial measures" (p, 147) to create a "centralized government that involved itself in multiple facets of American life" (p, 144). On the other hand, Watkins sees hope for good in the current Supreme Court because it is showing a new "respect for state sovereignty, especially when examining congressional legislation passed pursuant to the commerce power" (p. 150). From this point the book becomes a polemic. Watkins argues that a commission should be formed to decide questions of constitutionality and turn the country away from consolidation toward federalism. The commission, should consist of one person from each state elected from two candidates selected by the state legislature, and would receive no pay. |
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Instructors might find Watkins's description of the Resolves and the events that led up to them useful, but they would be hard pressed to find an appropriate class for the book. Primarily, problems would arise because Watkins insists that Madison's view of the Constitution was the right one even though other men at the Convention interpreted the document differently. It was those differences that in part spurred political conflict in the 1790s. Thus, Watkins's argument that the country needs to return to the spirit of the Constitution depends on who one thinks espoused that spirit, a subtle comparative point he fails to make. Other historians have struggled with these issues before, but Watkins does not. Such reluctance reveals a less than thorough knowledge of the historiography of the topics under discussion. For instance, Watkins relies on forty-year-old literature to criticize Lincoln even though one of the authors he cites has written a more recent and sympathetic biography of Lincoln. In the end, while Watkins makes the historical topics of the Resolves and the Alien and Sedition Acts relevant to contemporary debates over political power, he limits the classroom usefulness of the book when he presents a factional view as the view of an entire era or people while making an impassioned plea for what he thinks is the spirit of the Constitution. |
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| Cleveland State University |
Thomas J. Humphrey |
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