Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (review)

Combining models of political science and historical narrative, Hendrickson reinterprets the creation of the U.S. Constitution as a document inspired by "internationalist" precedents. The author depicts the Constitution both as a treaty of peace, marking the end of revolution, and an alliance between the states—"the most self-conscious 'security community' in world history until the eighteenth century" (xi). The "lost world" that he portrays is an intellectual milieu rich in examples of concert between states but absent a modern sense of nationalism. Viewing the Constitution as an effort more of diplomacy than of nation building, Hendrickson asserts that the founders' achievement offers lessons for international cooperation today. This is an ambitious, well- researched, and bold book. Its parts prove more compelling than its larger argument.

Peace Pact works when focused on historical narrative and method. Part Two, "The Lessons of History," identifies the wellsprings of the founders' political thought in the context of the American Enlightenment. Part Three investigates the colonists' efforts to define their constitutional standing in the British Empire between 1754 and 1776. Parts Four and Five evaluate the Confederation period. In these sections, the influence of classics by Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood are much in evidence, but Hendrickson's noteworthy use of primary sources and deft treatment contribute to an original, worthwhile, analysis.¹ For instance, Hendrickson notes the opinions of both leading revolutionaries and important secondary figures—such as South Carolinian William Henry Drayton—on the critical subject of protecting minority states' interests in the Confederation Congress (136). Thus does he capture sectional nuance and do justice to complex themes.

Despite such merits, Peace Pact's overall claim is unconvincing. The problem stems from imposing political-science models of international order on the framing of the Constitution. In comparing Philadelphia's proceedings in 1787 to Vienna's in 1815, Paris' in 1919, and San Francisco's in 1945 (xi), he sees the delegates' goal as a middle ground "society of states," likened to a European "grand alliance," that would mediate between extremes of "international anarchy" and "universal empire" (274). The argument overreaches and leads Hendrickson to strain metaphors. The Constitution's provision protecting the slave trade for twenty years becomes "a compromise between the antipodes: the Deep South and New England, as different as Russia and Turkey" (237). Sharing a language, English common-law legal heritage, Protestant religious outlook, colonial experience, class interests, and ethnicity, even Charles Pinckney and Roger Sherman had much in common. Their similarities make it doubtful that the Constitution offers a model for international cooperation post-September 11, despite Hendrickson's hopeful assertion that it does (260).

Framing the Philadelphia Convention in "internationalist" theory also jars against the delegates' own self-image as nation builders creating something without precedent. Whatever "lost worlds" they plumbed, James Madison came to write that the Constitution was "sui generis . . . so unexampled in its origin, so complex in its structure, and so peculiar in some of its features, that . . . the political vocabulary does not furnish terms sufficiently distinctive and appropriate" to explain it (16). The sense of unique American national identity suggested here makes one wish that Hendrickson had given more play to exploring the founding moment on its own terms by jettisoning theoretical baggage.