Right of Revolution - Preconditions To The Right of Revolution

Preconditions To The Right of Revolution

Some theories of the right of revolution imposed significant preconditions on its exercise, limiting its invocation to the most dire circumstances. In the American Revolutionary context, one finds expressions of the right of revolution both as subject to precondition and as unrestrained by conditions.

On the eve of the American Revolution, for example, Americans considered their plight to justify exercise of the right of revolution. Alexander Hamilton justified American resistance as an expression of “the law of nature” redressing violations of “the first principles of civil society” and invasions of “the rights of a whole people.” For Thomas Jefferson the Declaration was the last-ditch effort of an oppressed people—the position many Americans saw themselves in 1776. Jefferson’s litany of colonial grievances was an effort to establish that Americans met their burden to exercise the natural law right of revolution.

Certain scholars, such as Christian Fritz, have written that with the end of the Revolution, Americans did not renounce the right of revolution. In fact they codified it in their new constitutions. For instance, constitutions considered to be "conservative," such as those of post-revolutionary Massachusetts in 1780, preserved the people's right "to reform, alter, or totally change" government not only for their protection or safety but also whenever their "prosperity and happiness reduire it." This expression was not unusual in the early American constitutions. Connecticut's 1818 constitution articulated the people's right "at all times" to alter government "in such a manner as they may think expedient."

Legal historian Christian Fritz in American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War, describes a duality in American views on preconditions to the right of revolution: "Some of the first state constitutions included 'alter or abolish' provisions that mirrored the traditional right of revolution" in that they required dire preconditions to its exercise. Maryland's 1776 constitution and New Hampshire's 1784 constitutions required the perversion of the ends of government and the endangering of public liberty and that all other means of redress were to no avail. But in contrast, other states dispensed with the onerous preconditions on the exercise of the right. In the 1776 Virginia constitution the right would arise simply if government was "inadequate" and Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution required only that the people considered a change to be "most conducive" to the public welfare.