Popular Sovereignty in The United States

Popular Sovereignty In The United States

The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been discussed and employed in the European historical context. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the person of the English king, George III, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Henceforth, American revolutionaries by and large agreed and were committed to the principle that governments were legitimate only if they rested on popular sovereignty – that is, the sovereignty of the people. In 18th century American political thought, "the people" excluded most of the population, such as women, African Americans, those lacking sufficient property, Native Americans, and children.

This idea that the people were sovereign (often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed) was not invented by the American revolutionaries. Rather, the consent of the governed and the idea of the people as a sovereign had clear 17th and 18th century intellectual roots in English history. The American contribution lay in what Americans did with the idea that the people were the sovereign—how they struggled with and put that idea into practice. Before the American Revolution, few examples existed of a people deliberately creating their own governments. Most people in the world experienced governments as an inheritance—whether monarchies or expressions of raw power. What underscored the excitement surrounding the creation of constitutions establishing governments in America after Independence was the fact that Americans deliberately and self-consciously created governments at one single moment explicitly relying on the authority of the sovereignty of the people (or "popular sovereignty"). Having relied upon the people as the collective sovereign to establish their first state constitutions (and later the Federal constitution), numerous questions remained for Americans to answer. What did a collective sovereign mean? How did one recognize the voice or expression of that collective sovereign and in what ways could that collective sovereign act? Americans struggled and contested over the answers to these questions from the time they declared Independence to the eve of the Civil War. During this period the idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Historian Ronald Formisano notes that "assertions of the peoples' sovereignty over time contained an unintended dynamic of raising popular expectations for a greater degree of popular participation and that the peoples' will be satisfied."