The Royalist Revolution
Monarchy and the American Founding
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Generations of students have been taught that the American Revolution was a revolt against royal tyranny. In this revisionist account, Eric Nelson argues that a great many of our “founding fathers” saw themselves as rebels against the British Parliament, not the Crown. The Royalist Revolution interprets the patriot campaign of the 1770s as an insurrection in favor of royal power—driven by the conviction that the Lords and Commons had usurped the just prerogatives of the monarch.
Leading patriots believed that the colonies were the king’s own to govern, and they urged George III to defy Parliament and rule directly. These theorists were proposing to turn back the clock on the English constitution, rejecting the Whig settlement that had secured the supremacy of Parliament after the Glorious Revolution. Instead, they embraced the political theory of those who had waged the last great campaign against Parliament’s “usurpations”: the reviled Stuart monarchs of the seventeenth century.
When it came time to design the state and federal constitutions, the very same figures who had defended this expansive conception of royal authority—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and their allies—returned to the fray as champions of a single executive vested with sweeping prerogatives. As a result of their labors, the Constitution of 1787 would assign its new president far more power than any British monarch had wielded for almost a hundred years. On one side of the Atlantic, Nelson concludes, there would be kings without monarchy; on the other, monarchy without kings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This deeply scholarly book from Nelson, professor of government at Harvard, continues in new dress an argument that's existed since the 1770s: whether the United States came into existence in opposition to Parliament and its ministers or in opposition to the King. If the former, then there was little worry about a strong executive in the revolutionary era, and by extension the argument would follow that there shouldn't be a worry today. Embroiling himself in an active debate among scholars, Nelson comes down squarely on the side of those who argue that the American Revolution was a "revolution against a legislature, not against a king." Because the Whigs of 1776 were opposing the British legislature, he argues, the Founders never turned their backs on the executive function. Instead, they argued over what powers to give it. Accordingly, the debates over the Constitution in 1787 and 1788 were about the American version of the royal prerogative what became the American presidency. The result was, and is, an executive branch whose powers are enshrined in the Constitution itself the "successful conclusion of a twenty-year campaign in favor of prerogative power." Sure to fire up an old debate, Nelson's book constitutes an important contribution to the literature on early American constitutionalism.
