Whose Original Intent? Expanding the Concept of the Founders

Brendan McConville, These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. 318. $45.00 (ISBN 0-8014-3389-4).

Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. 327. $55.00 (ISBN 0-8078-4786-0); $18.00 paper (ISBN 0-8078-4786-0).

Who were the Founders? Most likely, the names Washington, Madison, and Hamilton jump immediately to mind. During the last several decades, however, the issue has become more complicated, thanks in part to renewed debate over the "original meaning" of the Constitution. In the course of this debate, the concept of the Founders has become more elusive. The Founders are identified alternatively as drafters, framers, ratifiers, adopters, or even "we the people." To be sure, most scholars still identify the Founders as the delegates to the Philadelphia convention in the summer of 1787. Most also include the hundreds of men who participated in state ratifying conventions. Some have expanded the definition to encompass those who raised their voices in the public debates over the Constitution, but this last category, public debate, is shadowy. Scholars often refer to ratification as a public process that gave public sanction and imbued public meaning to the Constitution and the new nation. But citations to public debate are limited and the selection of public voices sometimes seems arbitrary. At times, citations to public debates over ratification often appear more a matter of expediency than of genuine historical or legal inquiry.	1
What if we took the inclusion of ordinary Americans as Founders more seriously? How would this change our understanding of the nation's founding drama and the constitutions it produced? Such a perspective raises a host of conceptual and methodological questions. How did most Americans of the founding generation conceive of constitutional government? What did they think the role of government should be? How do we determine what the public thought? To what sources do we turn? Whose voices do we include as participants in public debate? Whose do we exclude? How is that choice to be made?	2
This extended review does not purport to offer a comprehensive answer to such questions. Rather it assesses the recent work of several scholars who either implicitly or explicitly expand the concept of the Founders to include a broader array of people. The terrain covered is varied: colonial New Jersey, Revolutionary Virginia, and the ideological world of Anti-Federalism. Yet, together, these authors demonstrate that a broader conception of public debate and the contributions of ordinary people to that debate can change how we think about the nation's founding. At the same time, these books also highlight the pitfalls that attend any effort to discern a political ideology of "the people."	3
Of the three, Saul Cornell's The Other Founders most directly grapples with the question of how we define the Founders. Cornell places himself among those attempting to resuscitate Anti-Federalism as a source for interpreting constitutional thought. At the same time, he chastises existing scholarship on Anti-Federalism for its emphasis on a handful of elite writers and a few key texts. That work tends to "homogenize and reify Anti-Federalism" by "assuming that it was an unchanging construct" and by "focusing on a single strain of Anti-Federalism as an expression of the true voice of the opposition to the Constitution" (9, 7). In The Other Founders, Cornell broadens our understanding of Anti-Federalists, identifying those below the level of the elite and deciphering their constitutional thought. He also argues that a more complete social, economic, and intellectual context is critical for appreciating the evolving meanings and significance of the overlapping, sometimes conflicting constellation of ideas that made up Anti-Federalism.	4
Cornell widens Anti-Federalism to include three strands of constitutionalism, roughly associated with different social classes: elite, middling, and plebian. Although they often used similar rhetoric, these groups developed dramatically different visions of what constitutional government should look like and how it should function. For example, elite Anti-Federalists espoused a vision of governance that, in many respects, mirrored their Federalist counterparts. They adhered to classical republican ideals, demanded deference from the lower classes, and perceived the democratic forces unleashed by the Revolution as a threat. Unlike Federalists, however, elite Anti-Federalists saw the states rather than the national government as the best check on the democratic aspirations of those below. Middling Anti-Federalists, by contrast, had a more democratic agenda. They generally rejected republican notions of economic and political disinterestedness and instead espoused a liberal procommercial ideology. While they supported state sovereignty, middling Anti-Federalists had more faith in democratic reforms and local control. Yet, these men were not entirely egalitarian. Like elite Anti-Federalists (and elite Federalists), they believed that propertied men should govern and they feared the debt-ridden masses, popular economic programs like paper money, and the specter of "mobocracy."	5
The third strain of Anti-Federalism, the one Cornell labels "plebian," was by far the most democratic and egalitarian (at least from the standpoint of the interests of white men). Plebian Anti-Federalists—a broad group that Cornell identifies as being composed of society's lower sort—feared concentrations of both political and economic power. While not hostile to economic development, plebians advocated a producer ideology and supported policies that promoted a more equitable distribution of wealth. Unlike elite and middling Anti-Federalists, plebians did not trust state assemblies or elite-controlled newspapers to voice their concerns. They believed that ordinary people should assert their notions of the public good through direct action. They also believed that power should reside in local institutions like the jury, the militia, and the crowd so the public could retain a broad range of democratic controls and prerogatives. Plebian Anti-Federalists argued that local juries should determine matters of fact and law—ideas considered abhorrent by most middling and elite Anti-Federalists as well as by most leading Federalists.	6
Cornell is at his most innovative when analyzing plebian Anti-Federalism. Here he supplements the traditional tools of constitutional scholarship with those of social history. Especially compelling is his use of popular protest—notably the Carlisle, Pennsylvania riots protesting the state's ratification convention—as a "social text" for reading the constitutional ideas of ordinary citizens. Through their actions and pronouncements, Cornell argues, Carlisle Anti-Federalists demonstrated their convictions that "the community enjoyed extensive power to regulate behavior to promote the public good," that "property rights, while important, were clearly not sacrosanct," and that juries and local militias were the appropriate institutions to "administer justice" (109–14). In this way, Cornell offers an important reminder that published texts and formal legal treaties are not the only ways to recover constitutional ideals—especially from ordinary citizens who seldom expressed their political beliefs in such forms.	7
Cornell also heightens our understanding of Anti-Federalism by placing it in social and intellectual context. In particular, he exposes the dynamic relationships between elite, middling, and plebian Anti-Federalism, arguing that different strains of Anti-Federalist thought shaped one another, just as Anti-Federalism developed in dialog with Federalism. When crowd action and other forms of plebian constitutionalism threatened elite and middling Anti-Federalists, for example, they tempered their opposition to the Constitution and found common ground in a political identity as a "loyal opposition" within the new government. As Cornell shows, this move helped to narrow the intellectual gap between Anti-Federalist leaders and their Federalist counterparts, as elites from both camps attempted to fend off challenges from below.	8
By breaking down Anti-Federalism into its different strands and linking competing beliefs to class divisions, Cornell helps explain why the movement against the Constitution fell short. In his account, Anti-Federalists stumbled because their purported leaders advocated constitutional ideals that did not appeal to the rank and file, not because their message was chaotic and unfocused. His findings also suggest that debates over the original intent and ratification have been too narrowly defined because the arguments that most scholars have accepted as the definitive Anti-Federalist position were those of an elite minority. Unfortunately, Cornell does not explore the point further. Nor does he use his observations about the gap between what Americans wanted constitutional government to be and what it became to consider the relationship between power, democracy, and American constitutional traditions.	9
Indeed, despite Cornell's moments of innovation, his work fits squarely within older traditions of intellectual history in many ways. He is less interested in redefining how we think about the scope of political discourse during the nation's founding decades than he is with showing how Anti-Federalist ideals remained relevant to the thinking of congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices. In the second half of the book, he works backward: taking issues that were relevant to elite political leaders during the early national decades, Finding their connection to Anti-Federalism during the debate over the Constitution, and then exploring how certain ideas evolved over the period. He makes a strong case that Anti-Federalist constitutionalism influenced the thinking of James Madison and shaped early arguments over freedom of the press. He also complicates our understanding of the Nullification Crisis by shattering the direct links between Anti-Federalism and states rights. Nevertheless, the "Other Founders" we see in this part of the book are those at the top of society. Public discourse reverts to a conversation among elites.	10
Cornell's methodology contributes to this elite bias. For as much as he tries to break away from the focus on elite Anti-Federalists, his fixation with elevating Anti-Federalism as an alternative "canon of dissenting texts" leads him to privilege those ideas published in pamphlets or select newspapers (13). He generally eschews archival sources such as personal papers, petition files, and court records that other historians have used so profitably to recover the voices of ordinary Americans. He does not draw on material from the work of scholars who have used such sources to develop compelling portraits of popular dissenting thought. Nor, during his examination of the early nineteenth century, does he reference the many popular pamphlets and dissenting newspapers that gave voice to more "plebian" ideals. Instead, his plebian Anti-Federalists emerge from a narrow set of sources: the writings of a few individuals in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and the "social texts" of two moments of protest in Pennsylvania. Midway through the book, he essentially drops plebian Anti-Federalism as a category of analysis.	11
The elite bias leads Cornell to downplay the significance of so-called plebian Anti-Federalist ideals and to mask the extent of their appeal. Cornell portrays plebians as a minority population, concentrated in the backcountry, and composed of the poorest members of society: "cottagers, tenant farmers, and less affluent mechanics" (84). Yet the evidence he presents suggests that those who espoused "plebian" beliefs were far more numerous, widespread, and diverse. Take for example his treatment of the so-called "Whiskey Rebellion" in which an estimated 7,000 farmers and artisans from four western Pennsylvania counties formed militias to oppose the federal government. Cornell portrays this insurgency as a class-based uprising of plebians that was opposed by the middling sort—"the vast majority of citizens who constituted the substantial yeomanry" (205). Yet most of the insurgents were, in fact, land-owning yeomen—the very people who, according to Cornell, viewed the movement with disdain. This discontinuity (apparent as well in Cornell's handling of the Massachusetts Regulation of 1786, the Carlisle riots of 1787, and the popular calls for paper money during the 1780s) suggests that so-called "plebian" beliefs had a far greater appeal among middling people than Cornell allows.	12
By defining plebian narrowly and by insisting on a rigid match between ideas and social class, Cornell gives elite writers more credit as mouthpieces for public opinion than they undoubtedly enjoyed with the founding generation—an interpretive judgment that distorts how we understand the influence of Anti-Federalism. His abandonment of plebian Anti-Federalism seems puzzling because it contradicts the stated purpose of his study. To Cornell, Anti-Federalism deserves attention from scholars, lawyers, and judges because it remains deeply relevant to American life. He argues that its central tenets of "localism" and the "suspicion of centralized authority" have defined, and continue to define, "the spirit of American politics" (1). Cornell drops plebian Anti-Federalism because he claims that the so-called "Whiskey Rebellion" served "to sever the connection between plebian radicalism and Anti-Federalism." But this is true only if our understanding of political discourse is based on debates in Congress, state legislatures, judicial chambers, and a handful of mainstream newspapers (and by the private writings of the elites who dominated those institutions). Below the level of high politics, the kind of ideas that Cornell defines as plebian Anti-Federalism lived on, as a generation of work by social, labor, African American, and women's historians has demonstrated.	13
In fact, one could argue that it was precisely plebian constitutionalism (in all its complexity and diversity) that stands as Anti-Federalism's most enduring legacy. When considering the history of dissenting thought in America, the ideas that Cornell ascribes to plebians clearly stand near the center: from their fear of concentrated political and economic power (whether it be state and federal politicians, newspaper editors, or corporations), to their calls for a more active and democratic government that used its powers to benefit ordinary citizens instead of an affluent few, to their faith in the power of juries to administer justice, to their the preference for local control of issues. Understood in different ways, so-called plebian Anti-Federalism can also be linked to traditions of anti-statism and, although it must be heavily qualified and contextualized, a belief that force against government (even in the form of self-directed militias) is an acceptable last resort to defend one's rights. One need not share all or any of these beliefs to recognize their historical and contemporary resonance. Ironically, by purging such "plebian" constitutional traditions from an analysis of Anti-Federalism's legacy, Cornell may have discarded exactly those parts of Anti-Federalist thought that are most relevant for understanding modern American society.	14
By comparison, Brendan McConville's study of farmers in colonial New Jersey offers a more rigorous investigation of how many ordinary Americans of the founding generation defined good government. McConville's book is not about ratification, nor does it address the question of the Founders. But he does provide a stunning recreation of the beliefs that New Jersey farmers brought with them into the Revolution and, as a result, offers a standard against which the subsequent debates over the Constitution can be judged. Indeed, one of McConville's main goals is to document the longevity of popular notions of freedom, showing how many of the ideas and conflicts thought to have been unleashed by the Revolution had their origins in a near century-long contest over title to New Jersey lands. He argues that, for New Jersey yeomen, the crucible of Revolutionary ideology was a longstanding internal struggle between ordinary settlers (who claimed the land by purchase from land speculators, Indians, or by right of settlement) and the colony's genteel proprietors (who asserted ownership by right of royal grant). This land conflict, with roots that stretched to the colony's founding, eventually developed into a power struggle over fundamental issues of sovereignty and governance. The illumination of these ideals and the ways that New Jersey farmers organized to articulate them stand as McConville's most significant achievement.	15
There is much to praise in this ambitious and imaginative book. McConville begins by tracing the rise of the agrarian movement among New Jersey's diverse farming population. He reveals a rural society divided into religious and ethnic enclaves: New England Puritans and Dutch New Yorkers (both of whom purchased the lands they settled) and Scots-Irish Presbyterians (who generally claimed frontier lands by right of occupancy). Deftly using a wide range of evidence, McConville shows how these different ethnic groups managed to put aside their mutual mistrust to join in common struggle against the colony's Great Proprietors. The continuous legal battles over farmlands, forests, mines and the antimaterialist message of the Great Awakening narrowed the cultural gap and gave farmers both shared experiences and a common language of protest. In the process, McConville reveals subtle ironies within this movement. For example, he shows how the attempts of New England Puritans and Dutch New Yorkers to create their own isolated enclaves actually made it easier for them to work together by intensifying their shared hostility toward the great gentry. His depiction of the slow evolution of the farmers' organizing efforts is equally impressive, carefully tracing the progression from neighborhood pact-signing ceremonies, to the formation of regional associations, to the creation of a colonywide committee, to the attempts to recruit New York squatters into a multicolony, antiproprietor alliance.	16
McConville then reveals how, in the process of struggling for their land, New Jersey farmers began to rethink their beliefs about government and society. Finding their interests persistently opposed by the colony's proprietors, farmers began equating a good society with a government that placed the interests of ordinary farmers ahead of a propertied aristocracy. At the center of the farmers' vision was a labor theory of value. Many New Jersey farmers argued that land belonged to those who settled it under the right of natural law rather than those who claimed it by royal grant. Yeomen also tended to believe that the economic and legal systems should work to benefit debtor farmers over the creditor gentry. Accordingly, they called for the government to establish a public bank to provide farmers with long-term low-interest land loans. When the proprietors rejected the entire slate of proposals, New Jersey farmers attempted to replace the existing colonial government with their own self-created system of governance. They administered justice through extralegal courts and even printed their own paper money. By calling into question the colony's basic social, political, and economic rules, New Jersey farmers created a moment when radical social change seemed a real possibility. Here was a world where leadership opportunities opened for farmers of the lower classes, where men in Dutch settlements followed a woman named Magdalena Valleau and where white settlers joined forces with Native Americans and free African Americans in collective crowd action. Although the arguments were clearly self-serving, white yeomen were even willing to assert that the king had violated Native Americans' natural rights by claiming their lands for the Crown. In short, from the 1740s to the 1760s, farmers across New Jersey developed a vision of a society far more egalitarian than any of the ideas considered at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 or the state ratifying conventions.	17
Although McConville does not carry his story to the debates over ratification, his work raises questions about popular constitutionalism as it emerged from the Revolution. Did this broad vision of social and economic egalitarianism survive into the postwar decades and, if so, what role did it play in the debates over the Constitution in New Jersey? In a brief speculative postscript McConville suggests that, during the postwar period, the ideals of yeomen farmers prevailed over those of the great gentry. The terms of this alleged victory, however, remain vague. Certainly many of the great gentry saw their interests undermined by the Revolution, particularly those who supported the Crown and had their estates confiscated. But, given the standards that New Jersey yeomen brought to the Revolution, the developments of the postwar years (and especially the ratification of the Federal Constitution) seem to repudiate their egalitarian ideals. After all, the new government and the legal system it created rejected the precepts of a labor theory of value. The laws of the new nation routinely favored land speculators over actual settlers; landholding patterns continued to concentrate; tenancy continued to rise. Neither the Constitution nor the new government placed the legal position of debtors ahead of creditors. Yeomen did not get paper money, a land bank, or the long-term low-interest credit that they thought were so central to maintaining their economic independence. In short, the ideals of New Jersey farmers—which approximate what Saul Cornell has labeled "plebian Anti-Federalism"—went down in a stunning defeat during the postwar decades. Had New Jersey farmers simply given up on beliefs that they had held for as long a century? Or was the will of the majority suppressed, perhaps with the complicity of elite and middling leaders?	18
Such reference to the postwar decades exposes the limits of McConville's work. Anyone probing New Jersey's colonial past for an understanding of the conflicts of 1780s and 1790s will find that his analytical categories cannot explain the kinds of divisions and conflicts that other scholars have identified during the postwar decades. The reason is clear: McConville defines social classes so broadly that he obscures power relationships within rural New Jersey. His colonial New Jersey is composed of but two social classes: "yeomen" and "the great gentry." For his purposes, this kind of grouping is justified. The story he tells is about how diverse peoples came to see themselves as a single class (yeomen), how they forged a common ideology, and how they worked together for a shared objective. Nevertheless, the all-inclusive term "yeomen" also masks an assortment of economic relationships that are critical to understanding both the colonial land riots and New Jersey's Revolutionary movement. Although McConville ably demonstrates that poor squatters, middling farmers, and wealthy landowners saw themselves as a unified group whose interests were distinct from the great gentry, it seems unlikely that they all shared the same economic values and objectives. McConville alludes to such distinctions by raising the concept of "ethnodeference"—how farmers deferred to elites within their religious and ethnic communities at the same time that they rejected the authority of those without. But he never really investigates the power relationships that caused most people to defer to local elites. As a result, we never understand a division within the category of "yeomen" that was obvious even to the Great Proprietors (who continually tried to exploit it): the gulf between the mass of the people and the prominent locals whom proprietors called "this new mob of gentry" (195).	19
McConville's failure to account for economic divisions among the yeomanry occasionally clouds his portrait of New Jersey farmers and their beliefs. For example, in chapter four he shows how the Great Awakening united many yeomen against the great gentry by giving them a shared worldview based on a religious message of antiauthoritarianism and antimaterialism. In the next chapter, however, McConville paints an almost antithetical portrait of the yeomen and their worldview. Gone are the antimaterialists who believed that wealthy men would be consigned to hell for their "Cut-Throat Covetousness" (88). In their place are "aggressive entrepreneurs" engaged in an "ambitious pursuit of wealth" who established timber and mining companies hoping to "transform" themselves "from simple yeomen to wealthy gentlemen"(90–104). Perhaps New Jersey farmers all shared this aggressive pursuit of wealth and managed to reconcile it with their religious beliefs. It seems likely, however, that the situation was more complicated: not everyone strove to become a wealthy gentleman; people undoubtedly disagreed over where to locate "the line that separated prudent labor from greed" (88). Indeed, McConville's evidence suggests that class divisions produced some variance in the beliefs and actions of New Jersey yeomen. For example, the people he identifies as the "entrepreneurial yeomen" who tried to establish their own mining and timber operations were the same prosperous families that proprietors called "this new mob of gentry." More rigorous analysis of the economic relationships at work among yeomen might reveal how far below the level of local gentry these more economically liberal notions extended. Did farmers from the middling and lower classes see such acquisitive individualism as consistent with their religious and ideological beliefs? Or did they object to the material strivings of the local gentry and their attempts to accumulate farmlands, forests, and mines? Similarly, exploring the extent to which tenants (as well as the colony's native population) were included or excluded from the yeomen's vision would help to clarify the possibilities and limitations of the farmers' movement, its objectives, and its ideological underpinnings. Ultimately, understanding the full dimensions of popular constitutional thought will require an appreciation of all the complex networks of power within and without New Jersey's yeomen population.	20
Where Brendan McConville adds the voices of yeomen to the opening chapters of America's founding drama, Woody Holton supplies an entire chorus: Indians, slaves, debtor farmers, and Scottish and English merchants. Holton argues that these disparate groups played an instrumental role in pushing the Virginia gentry to break from Britain, adding a new twist to recent scholarship that challenges the image of Virginia's Founders confidently leading their colony into a revolution. Like others, Holton portrays the Founders as reluctant revolutionaries who backed their way into the Patriot movement. Contrary to much recent scholarship, however, he argues that the Founders did not join the Revolution to defend constitutional principles. Rather, they did so to preserve their own freedom by quashing the calls for social and economic justice from those over whom they ruled.	21
Legal, political, and intellectual historians generally have situated the Founders within the framework of western legal, constitutional, and ideological traditions. The main strength of Holton's book is his effort to place the actions of the Virginia gentry within a more detailed local context and to see them as actors who were responding to the material concerns that governed their everyday lives. His is no crude economic determinism. Holton maintains that economics and ideology must be understood in tandem if we are to comprehend how and why the Founders thought and acted as they did. Each of the book's chapters reinforces this point by revealing the webs of economic relationships that the Virginia gentry spun around themselves and by showing how non-elites threatened the gentry by tugging on those webs. Balancing thematic chapters with chronology, Holton then explains how each new challenge imperiled the economic interests of the gentry in ways that heightened their animosity toward Britain. He demonstrates that Cherokee diplomats strained the relationship between gentry and Crown by threatening to organize a pan-Indian uprising unless Parliament upheld the legality of the Proclamation Line of 1763 and protected Indian lands from white incursion. Although such pressure did little to stem the tide of white settlers, Indian diplomacy induced Parliament to deny men like George Washington, Patrick Henry, and George Mason legal title to millions of acres of land, intensifying their contempt for British rule. Likewise, slaves influenced the gentry by running away and planning insurrections (or at least spreading rumors about impending uprisings). Through the enthusiasm they showed for Lord Dunmore's promise to free runaway slaves who fought for the British, black Virginians transformed the views of Virginia gentlemen, most of whom concluded that they could no longer serve a king who would arm black slaves against their white masters. For their part, ordinary debtor-farmers challenged the gentry by insisting that democratic standards be applied to the military chain of command, by organizing protests over war-related shortages of salt and other staples, and by refusing to pay the rents on the gentry- owned lands that they farmed. All these pressures convinced Virginia's elite Founders that retaining control of the colony could only be achieved by establishing a new government capable of suppressing what they saw as mass civilian and military disorder. Some of Holton's individual arguments about Indians, debtors, and slaves may seem familiar, but the way he assembles this material in one place and his efforts to show how challenges from below reinforced one another is both new and powerful. By revealing the various pressures at work on the gentry, Holton provides a rich context that opens up new avenues of inquiry for scholars probing the ideas and constitutional beliefs of Virginia's Founding elite.	22
In other chapters, Holton shows how social and economic concerns guided the gentry's decision to participate in two key events that led to the break with Britain: the nonimportation and nonexportation movements. Holton argues that the gentry's support for nonimportation was guided less by a concern for constitutional freedoms than it was by the need of deeply indebted gentlemen to cut back on luxury spending without undermining their social standing or calling into question their creditworthiness. By banning the importation of slaves and luxury items that conferred gentry status, nonimportation also allowed elite Virginians to repel a challenge from ambitious small planters trying to climb the social ladder. Likewise, nonexportation gave tobacco farmers an honorable excuse for withholding tobacco from depressed markets and shielded the gentry from British lawsuits by closing courts under the pretext of patriotism. The gentry may have used the language of constitutional principle to justify their participation, but as Holton reveals, self-interested social and economic concerns drew them into the fray.	23
By insisting that we understand the actions of the Founders within their own historical context, Holton makes these men and their decisions seem more human. Too often the Founders are treated as legal and constitutional technicians, sealed in a laboratory of thought quarantined from everyday matters. Holton shows that material concerns regularly and powerfully intruded on these thought chambers. Since the attacks on Charles Beard in the 1940s, scholars have tended to downplay the role of economic factors in explaining the nation's founding moment. Holton's book suggests that the debate over the role of economic self-interest was closed before much of the pertinent evidence had even been considered. Holton has reopened that debate and has placed it on more solid ground.	24
Holton also raises questions about how the Virginians' struggle over material issues expanded into a confrontation of competing ideologies. In concentrating upon the economic relationships that pressured Virginia's elite Founders to make the break with Britain, however, his comparative inattention to ideology has left unexplored important dimensions of the gentry's thought and the challenge from below. The failing seems especially striking in his depiction of Virginia's debtor farmers. Holton does a superb job of uncovering the economic interests of the yeomen and showing how they were often in conflict with those of the gentry. But he does not consider the broader ideology that ordinary farmers used to make sense of their conflict with Virginia gentlemen and the Crown. It is unclear whether Virginia's debtor farmers were merely concerned about pocketbook issues or if their struggles over economic matters produced new understandings of concepts like "liberty" and "democracy." The similarities between the rhetoric, grievances, and actions of Virginia farmers and the New Jersey yeomen that Brendan McConville writes about suggest that Virginians probably devised a broader notion of a good society akin to the one developed by their neighbors to the north. Consequently, an exploration of this larger ideological vision would likely help to clarify the nature of the contest between the gentry and Virginia's debtor farmers. Such an effort undoubtedly would reinforce Holton's case about the influence that ordinary people exerted on the actions of the Founding elite. Indeed, a closer analysis of popular ideology might ultimately reveal that the Founders' own understanding of "liberty" and "democracy," like their decision to break with Great Britain, was shaped in response to challenges from below. Such a project has the potential to transform how we think about elite Founders and their thoughts about politics and the Constitution.	25
The common elements of these three books suggest that scholars need to pay renewed attention to matters of class and material concerns during the Revolutionary period. During the 1970s and 1980s, social historians issued a similar call in an effort to direct attention to the role that artisans and laborers in seaboard cities played in creating the Revolution. This scholarship changed our understanding of the Revolution's origins and its outcome by revealing how urban workers developed different ideological beliefs and expectations for the Revolution as well as how they exerted pressure on the Revolutionary elite. The books under review indicate a similar process at work in the countryside where the majority of the population lived. This work suggests many ordinary farmers expressed a relatively consistent pattern of ideological and constitutional thought that extended from the colonial period beyond the debates over ratification. Moreover, popular rural beliefs appear to have been distinct from and even counter to those of the ruling elite, whether colonial aristocrats or the genteel Founders of the new nation. Fully understanding such beliefs, the ways that farmers expressed them, and their significance to the struggles over the Revolution and the Constitution will require a great deal more work. Thankfully, those who intend to expand the concept of the Founders in this direction have these three books to guide the way.	26
Terry Bouton University of Maryland, Baltimore County

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