Democratic Detours

Woody Holton pumps new life into the neo-Progressive interpretation of the American founding in Unruly Americans, a spirited account of fiscal and monetary controversies in the states in the 1780s and their repercussions for a reinvigorated constitutional reform movement that culminated in the ratification of the federal Constitution. As his title suggests, Holton’s sympathies are clearly with the reluctant, sometimes rebellious tax resisters who successfully challenged state governments and thus precipitated a “critical period” in American governance. These “democrats” unwittingly brought on a powerful reactionary movement as bondholders, creditors, and their allies sought “to put the democratic genie back in the bottle” (p. 5). With state governments failing to fulfill their obligations—or even to maintain order—reformers “decided to meld those thirteen [state] sovereignties together and launch an empire of their own” (p. 3). Holton’s democrats failed to rally against the Federalist juggernaut, “selling their birthright, as Esau had, for a mess of potage” (p. 242). If “the Constitution yielded tremendous economic benefits”—including the tax relief that Holton’s democrats originally had sought—these benefits “came at an enormous political cost” (pp. 270–1). Much less responsive to the people than the state governments it superseded, the new regime generated citizen apathy and indifference: “The sinister beauty of the Constitution— in particular, the immensity of congressional districts—is that when citizens find they cannot influence national legislation, their tendency is not to curse the system but to blame themselves” (p. 273).

Writers on the founding find the temptation to comment on our contemporary state of affairs nearly irresistible. Holton is clearly no exception, for his Constitution in all its “sinister beauty” casts its pall over American citizens today, leaving them impotent and awestruck in the Framers’ undying presence. The first step in recovering our democratic inheritance is to demythologize the Framers, toppling these icons from their pedestals by revealing “their antidemocratic intentions.” They are not the true authors of the “underdogs’ Constitution” we now revere, for the crucial rights-protecting amendments that most Americans confuse with the Constitution itself “directly contradict the Framers’ antidemocratic intent” (p. 277). Holton’s “unruly Americans” might, with a nod to Gary Nash, be called “the unknown framers,” for they initiated the centuries-long process of democratizing an undemocratic Constitution.¹ Not only did tax rebels initiate the Constitutional reform process—“with no rebellions, there would have been less tax and debt relief legislation, and without relief, there would have been much less need for a powerful new national government”—but they were virtually present in the anxious deliberations at Philadelphia and in the ratification campaign as Federalists sought to disguise their aristocratic intentions and placate wary voters (p. 277). “Numerous explicitly elitist proposals, each of which would have obtained majority support if the delegates had had free rein, had to be abandoned—or at least replaced with more subtle devices—because they jeopardized ratification” (p. 211).

Just as the Framers mystified their antidemocratic intentions, they mystified the “greatest compromise of all,” the concessions they were forced to make to “the American people” (p. 211). The Framers’ greatest success was in persuading Americans then and now that they had nothing to do with the nation’s founding, thus disguising the fact that the Constitution was from the beginning a latently democratic document, notwithstanding the Framers’ “original intentions.” Holton thus emphasizes historical process—the give-and-take dialectic of political conflict between distinct, self-conscious groups—at the expense of the textual fetishism that characterizes so much constitutional commentary. His deflationary account of the Framers’ reactionary and ultimately irrelevant intentions thus clears the way for recovering the progressive, forward-looking, immanently democratic intentions of the “unruly Americans” who originally challenged the state governments and so transformed American politics.

Unruly Americans is most effective as a conventional historical monograph on Confederation-era state politics, much less so as an historical commentary on the meaning of “democracy” in the founding era or over the long course...