Most Americans believe that the ratification of the Constitution
in 1788 marked the settlement of post-Revolutionary disputes over
the meanings of rights, democracy, and sovereignty in the new
nation. In The Citizenship Revolution, Douglas Bradburn undercuts
this view by showing that the Union, not the Nation, was the most
important product of independence.
In 1774, everyone in British North America was a subject of King
George and Parliament. In 1776 a number of newly independent
"states," composed of "American citizens" began cobbling together a
Union to fight their former fellow countrymen. But who was an
American? What did it mean to be a "citizen" and not a "subject"?
And why did it matter?
Bradburn's stunning reinterpretation requires us to rethink the
traditional chronologies and stories of the American Revolutionary
experience. He places battles over the meaning of "citizenship" in
law and in politics at the center of the narrative. He shows that
the new political community ultimately discovered that it was not
really a "Nation," but a "Union of States"--and that it was the
states that set the boundaries of belonging and the very character
of rights, for citizens and everyone else. To those inclined to
believe that the ratification of the Constitution assured the
importance of national authority and law in the lives of American
people, the emphasis on the significance and power of the states as
the arbiter of American rights and the character of nationhood may
seem strange. But, as Bradburn argues, state control of the
ultimate meaning of American citizenship represented the first
stable outcome of the crisis of authority, allegiance, and identity
that had exploded in the American Revolution--a political
settlement delicately reached in the first years of the nineteenth
century. So ended the first great phase of the American citizenship
revolution: a continuing struggle to reconcile the promise of
revolutionary equality with the pressing and sometimes competing
demands of law, order, and the pursuit of happiness.
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