410: Assignment #2 (2025)

1. James Madison, who wrote a draft of a Constitution that became the bases of the frame government we have been living under for the past 200 years, in arguing for ratification said that the Constitution was designed in such a way as to control the effects of factions, which he saw as the greatest concern in devising a democratic system of government.  He defined a faction in this way in his hugely influential essay, Federalist #10:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Madison wrote this document after living through the period we just studied.  What lessons do you think he should have learned about factions after hearing about what happened in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New Hampshire?  How do events in those states shed light on Madison’s definition of factions and how they might be bad for democratic governance?

2. Examine the presidency or the Senate, as they are explained in the Constitution, as an example for insight into the wider question about the nature of the Constitution and its relevance to the promise of 1776.  

3. Consider the “right to abolish” clause of the Declaration of Independence.  Did the logic behind that phrase justify any of the three rebellions we read about, in Massachusetts and NH under the Articles of Confederation or the Whiskey Rebellion under the new Constitution?

4. Given the evidence of things going on in the 1780s and 1790s, were people’s liberties more likely to be better preserved by a system that left most power with the states, as under the Articles of Confederation, or with the Federal system of 1787?

5. Pick one important feature of the US Constitution and explain how it got there.  Consider the influence of state Constitutions, events and ideas associated with the Revolution, and events of the “critical period.”

6. Choose a persona of an Exeter resident listening to the reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Town House Common on July 12, 1776.  After living through the defeat of Great Britain, the drafting of the NH state constitution, the paper money riot, ratification of a new Constitution in 1787, how would they feel about the Declaration and it’s ideas now?

7. Examine an element of the Constitution that Americans take for granted but shouldn’t—the bicameral legislature, for example, or judicial review.  Why did Americans put this into the Constitution?  Did they reject other options?  Were those potentially better?  Did some people favor those other options? Why?  How did one thing win out over an other? Was it a matter of the best idea winning out, or did other factors determine the outcome?  (It would be helpful to know about Marbury v. Madison to answer these questions.)

8. The world in a grain of sand.  Pick one provision in the Constitution.  Trace it’s provenance with the aim of explaining its significance and by extension telling a larger truth about the origins of the USA. 

EG: 3/5 compromise, items related to the regulation of trade, references to paper money (e.g.  in section 10 of article 1), bicameral legislature, supremacy clause, elastic clause, bill of rights.  

Navigation Acts

Mercantilism

Enumerated commodities

Currency Acts of 1751 and 63

Sugar

Seven Years' War

Treaty of Paris 1763

Stamp Act Congress

Proclamation of 1763

Benign Neglect

Regulators

Backcountry settlers

Coercive Acts

Virtual representation

Continental Congress 

New men

Popular politics

Loyalists

Common Sense

Declaration of Independence

Abigail Adams

Republicanism

Civic virtue

Patronage

Standing armies

Dependency

Montesquieu

Republican equality

Liberalism

Confederation Congress

Self-made man

Egalitarianism

bicameral
unicameral
populist schemes
leveling spirit
“upper house/chamber”
balanced or mixed government
Essex Result
Joseph Hawley
Articles of Confederation
"democratic despotism"
usury
debt peons
clean slates
debt crisis
suffrage
right to instruct
natural aristocracy
legislative tyranny
localist spirit
debtor farmers
creditors
paper money
egalitarians (RI)
old regime (RI)
legal tender laws
fundamental v. ordinary law
the convention
judicial review
nationalists
deflation
specie
Daniel Shays
Shaysites
Paper Money Riot
Major General John Sullivan
Philidelphia convention
debtor relief legislation

Cincinnatus
Richard Henry Lee
Virginia Plan
James Madison
New Jersey Plan
Nationalists
Article 1, Section 8
Enumerated powers
Article 1, Section 10
Electors
Proportional representation
Connecticut Compromise
Ratification conventions
Doctrine of Sovereignty
"We the People"
Federalism
David Hume
Interest-group politics (William Findley, Wood 165)
Factions
Majority faction
Federalist 10
Brutus