Thinking about Nationalism and Internationalism

Americans who have thought and cared about the law, from the era of unruly colonial crowds to the mid-twentieth-century days of backroom bargaining, have sought to make American nationhood meaningful to themselves, frequently with surprising twists of fate, and no less often with ironic, even tragic results. Such is one of the lessons to take away from John Fabian Witt’s ambitious and original Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law. Through four distinctive histories—or “yoked essays”—Witt unfolds a story about the important if often obscured relationships between international currents and ideals, the law, and the structures of the nation-state as they have come together in the lives of lesser-known individuals from the American past (p. 6). Taken together, Witt’s essays raise questions of growing interest to historians of the United States—questions about how Americans have juggled between nationalist and internationalist convictions as well as how scholars might assess the causes and consequences of such countervailing sensibilities.

Witt begins his quartet of essays with the tale of a leading lawyer of revolutionary America, James Wilson. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Wilson nevertheless has been overshadowed in the history of the period by other, more revered Founding Fathers. For Witt, recovering the personal and professional travails of Wilson offers a revealing lens into the matrix of political and legal theories at work during the formative years of the American nation-state. Raised and educated in Scotland, a twenty-three-year-old Wilson carried Enlightenment philosophies with him to America—notions above all about the positive connection between private interest and public virtue. Settling in Pennsylvania, Wilson found those lands an especially fertile ground to put such convictions into practice: “the virtuous cycles of Scottish political economy,” Witt writes, “would be realized at last on the American frontier” (p. 78).

Wilson might have been most inspired in the New World by the growing need for trained lawyers like himself and the rising stature of the profession. An erudite and thoughtful man, he emerged as one of the most active delegates to the federal Constitutional Convention, and, in 1789, became an associate justice on the first United States Supreme Court. Wilson, however, proved incapable of grasping the unique opportunities for legal experts in the new American system. Instead, he appeared far more interested in acquiring extensive land holdings and other markers of personal wealth. Like T. H. Breen’s revolutionary Virginians, Wilson became a man animated most by his private acquisitions, a man living grossly beyond his means.¹ Rather than seeing the pursuit of his personal interests as inconsistent with ascendant democratic principles, Wilson believed them to be in perfect concert with the public goals of the new nation.

As Witt paints him, Wilson is fascinating. He appears larger than life, like a character in a Warren Beatty film—a gifted but improbable dreamer who envisioned extending his own empire across the Pennsylvania frontier, culminating with the development of “Wilsonville,” a patchwork of properties across the northeast part of the state. “An almost fanatical idealist,” as Witt characterizes him, Wilson’s grandiose plans did not match up with his own financial resources, nor did they survive the property market collapse of 1796 and 1797 (p. 20). The chief justice appointment he so coveted would not come; hounded by creditors, Wilson spent his final years in hiding, in debtor’s prison, and in distress. For Witt, the lawyer’s ill-fated vision “makes clear that the founding period was a moment of many competing conceptions for what the United States might be” (p. 20).

In his second chapter, Witt moves forward to the era of Reconstruction, another key,nation-building moment. Here, he structures his essay around the life of Reverend Elias Hill, who led a group of 167 freedpeople from the South Carolina Piedmont across the Atlantic to Liberia in 1871. Hill and other black South Carolinians faced the difficult task...