Reviewed by Benjamin H. Irvin | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3

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Reviewed by Benjamin H. Irvin | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

All Politics Is Local: Family, Friends, and Provincial Interests in the Creation of the Constitution. By Christopher Collier. (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2003. Pp. xiv, 224. $39.00.) Reviewed by Benjamin H. Irvin , McNeil Center for Early American Studies
The U.S. Constitution was very good for Connecticut. It protected that state's claim to the Western Reserve, a 3.3-million-acre stretch of land that attracted settlers and speculators alike. It fixed exclusive impost power in the national government, ensuring that Connecticut's import duties would benefit inhabitants of all the states, not just the middlemen of New York (p. 67). Finally, it offered security to Connecticut farmers and merchants, who, as the great provisioners of the Revolution, held more U.S. debt per capita than citizens of any other state (p. 37). "Why," asks Connecticut State Historian Christopher Collier in this brief new book, "would any rational person in Connecticut want to block ratification and prevent the implementation of such a beneficent national system?" (p.6). His answers are deeply intriguing.	1
Collier's title, thesis, and oft-chanted mantra is, "All politics is local"; his purpose is to demonstrate that a complete and accurate understanding of the Constitution can be achieved only through a careful examination of the "dual localism" that shaped its establishment (p.2). The first prong of this dual localism was the highly particular concerns each state's delegates brought to Philadelphia in the famously hot summer of 1787; the second was the altogether more parochial considerations voiced in the "ayes" and "nays" of the various state ratifying conventions.	2
In his first two chapters, Collier describes the singular geographical, political, social, and economic circumstances that bore upon Connecticut's federal agenda. He begins with the faintly Braudelian observation that "Connecticut had no major deep-sea harbor" (p. 30). Geography insulated the state's homogeneous population and promoted, in Benjamin Franklin's terms, "a general mediocrity of fortune" (p.13), further ordaining that no urban center would emerge to cleave Connecticut politics. (Collier graphically portrays this phenomenon in a neat appendix of New England turnpike maps: in Connecticut, all roads lead to nowhere in particular.) A second determinative aspect of Connecticut history was the Royal Charter of 1662, which so effectively established and preserved inhabitants' "darling liberty" that, after Independence, Connecticut leaders merely dusted it off rather than draft a new state constitution (p.11 .¹ Under the Royal Charter, highly democratic property qualifications enabled most male household heads to vote in state elections. Yet, largely owing to a relatively equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity, a culture of "voluntary deference" (p. 17), and a militia system that reinforced social and political status, this broadly enfranchised electorate consistently voted for a small circle of leaders from the state's oldest families. Connecticut's delegates to the Constitutional Convention—Roger Sherman, William Samuel Johnson, and Oliver Ellsworth—journeyed to Philadelphia intent on preserving this "oligarchical republic" (p.17).	3
In chapters 3 and 4, Collier discusses this delegation's objectively remarkable accomplishments. Economically, Connecticut's representatives attained their two foremost objectives: preservation of the Western Reserve and establishment of "a nationwide free-trade area," predicated upon federally regulated interstate commerce, a uniform impost, and the prohibition of export duties (p. 67). Yet the Connecticut delegation's greatest feat was not economic but political. No history—and certainly not this history—of the Constitutional Convention would be complete without discussion of the Connecticut Compromise, the legislative voting arrangement that broke the logjam between small states and large or growing states. This compromise, its advocates proclaimed, protected "the interests of state governments," such as the jealously autonomous Connecticut, and preserved "states' ability to protect the rights of individuals" (p.56).	. . .

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