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A Review of “The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution”

Jack Greene is an eminent scholar of early America’s social, political, and intellectual history and an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins University. In The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution, Greene recapitulates decades of research and reflections on the evolution and understandings of the constitutional relationship between the American colonies and Britain during the eighteenth century. Greene’s thesis is that “the American Revolution had derived out of a disagreement over the nature of the constitution of the British Empire” (xii). He first forwarded the notion in the 1960s, but “few scholars . . . paid much attention to this particular argument” (x). Greene expanded his thinking on the significance of constitutional and legal dissonance between the colonies and London in Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (University of Georgia Press, 1986). In the face of continuing “neglect . . . by mainstream historians” (xxi), Greene elected to restate his thesis in this volume under the auspices of the Cambridge series “New Histories of American Law.” This volume is designed for history and law students and scholars, though it is readily accessible to an informed popular audience. Greene organizes this volume around four chapters preceded by a prologue and concluded by a brief epilogue. In the prologue, titled “Inheritance,” Greene asserts that English identity rested on ideas of the centrality of the rule of law as manifest in the institutions of juries and parliaments. Other key elements for American colonists included the guarantee of the rights of Englishmen and colonial autonomy in domestic affairs. However, following the Glorious Revolution, expanding metropolitan claims to authority increasingly conflicted with colonial assumptions. In the first chapter, “Empire Negotiated, 1689–1763,” Greene traces the evolving divide between metropolitan and colonial thinking about the proper relationship and distribution of power between the center and periphery of the emergent empire. In the first century of colonization, metropolitan authorities permitted colonies considerable local autonomy, in what Green calls the “localization of power” (48), but, during the eighteenth century, Parliament’s expansion of its powers in Britain undermined the established practice of localization. Alarmed colonists argued that Parliament’s jurisdiction was limited to England. Green mines a wide range of primary sources to explicate colonists’ reasoning that Parliament was entitled to exercise power only in external imperial matters and that legislative power over colonial affairs was inextricably embedded in their own local communities. In “Empire Confronted,” Greene tracks the well-known controversies over taxation, which became an acute issue in the wake of the Seven Years War. Debates over taxation reinvigorated public discussions over the rights of representation, the linkage of individual rights to corporate rights, the necessity of consent, and, ultimately, the locus of sovereignty. Colonists, according to Greene, subscribed to a federal model of coordinate legislatures for different parts of the empire, based on long-established custom, whereas metropolitans stridently insisted on the supreme unitary power and sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament. Thus, in the metropolitan view, a colonial challenge to taxation constituted “a challenge to British sovereignty” (99). In the third chapter, “Empire Reconsidered, 1767–1773,” Greene outlines how colonial insistence on localization represented a radical challenge to Parliament’s supremacy. For metropolitans, the concept of colonial autonomy raised the specter of imperium in imperio. Metropolitans insisted that colonial liberties were only what the kingin-Parliament permitted, in direct contradiction to colonial understandings of the fundamental rights of Englishmen. Thus, Parliament’s attempts to impose direct taxes such as the Stamp Act precipitated unprecedented colonial resistance. Green argues in the final chapter that the Tea Act of 1773 put the spotlight back on the still unanswered question of whether the king-in-Parliament was the unitary supreme sovereign or whether colonies were entitled by custom and constitution to the right of consent. In the face of colonial defiance of the Tea Act, British metropolitans determined to use a “firm hand” to maintain control over the colonies (154). Colonists responded with all of the constitutional arguments they had formulated over the prior decade to deny the legitimacy of Parliament’s authority over distant colonial populations. In the colonists’ view, the locus of state authority resided in their own legislature. Legitimacy rested on the law and the fundamental principle of consent. This logic led to the conclusion that each colony was in fact a separate entity, “independent of all others” (163). Greene points out that colonists believed fervently that all powers granted to governing bodies were limited and that the metropolitan claim of absolute power over the colonies was unconstitutional. Confronted with the hardline policies of Parliament and George III, the only recourse for colonists was independence. In his brief epilogue, Greene points out that the revolution succeeded in establishing “local control over local affairs” (190) but did not resolve the question of how to create a viable union of thirteen separate states. The final formula for the allocation of authority remained ambiguous, awaiting the miracle at Philadelphia. The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution contributes a valuable complement to the dominant historiographic view that ideological perceptions explain the divergence of Americans and Britons during the leadup to revolution. Greene’s careful readings of the writings of American political theorists and jurists reveal the coherence of the constitutional analyses that informed American colonists as they confronted a changing political landscape.