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Popular sovereignty is a doctrine rooted in the belief that every human being is sovereign, and rather than a monarch or single individual, that they could unite and each delegate a small portion of their sovereign powers and duties to those who wished to temporarily serve as officers and employees of a state, who would then serve the rest of the people according to the will of the people expressed via a constitution and democratic process.
That the people fought for equality with the King of England was enshrined in their Declaration of Independence and was a matter of common knowledge in America after the Revolution. The first Chief Justice, John Jay, published this in his Opinion in the first major supreme Court case in order to briefly illustrate what was ordained and established and would eventually come to be known by the American usage of the term "popular sovereignty":
It will be sufficient to observe briefly that the sovereignties in Europe, and particularly in England, exist on feudal principles. That system considers the Prince as the sovereign, and the people as his subjects; it regards his person as the object of allegiance, and excludes the idea of his being on an equal footing with a subject, either in a court of justice or elsewhere... No such ideas obtain here; at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people, and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects, and have none to govern but themselves[.]
From the differences existing between feudal sovereignties and governments founded on compacts, it necessarily follows that their respective prerogatives must differ. Sovereignty is the right to govern; a nation or State sovereign is the person or persons in whom that resides. In Europe, the sovereignty is generally ascribed to the Prince; here, it rests with the people; there, the sovereign actually administers the government; here, never in a single instance; our Governors are the agents of the people, and, at most, stand in the same relation to their sovereign in which regents in Europe stand to their sovereigns.[1]
Further, while it is true that the people are each sovereigns, it is imperative to grasp that the individual people's sovereignty is dual-fold. That is to say, over their bodies, lives, private holdings and the like, they are akin to the Monarchs of Europe (with few exceptions, like the doctrine of Thomas Stanley Matthews expressed this in his Opinion in Yick Wo v. Hopkins:
When we consider the nature and the theory of our institutions of government, the principles upon which they are supposed to rest, and review the history of their development, we are constrained to conclude that they do not mean to leave room for the play and action of purely personal and arbitrary power. Sovereignty itself is, of course, not subject to law, for it is the author and source of law; but, in our system, while sovereign powers are delegated to the agencies of government, sovereignty itself remains with the people, by whom and for whom all government exists and acts. And the law is the definition and limitation of power. It is, indeed, quite true that there must always be lodged somewhere, and in some person or body, the authority of final decision, and in many cases of mere administration, the responsibility is purely political, no appeal lying except to the ultimate tribunal of the public judgment, exercised either in the pressure of opinion or by means of the suffrage. But the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, considered as individual possessions, are secured by those maxims of constitutional law which are the monuments showing the victorious progress of the race in securing to men the blessings of civilization under the reign of just and equal laws, so that, in the famous language of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, the government of the commonwealth "may be a government of laws, and not of men." For the very idea that one man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living, or any material right essential to the enjoyment of life at the mere will of another seems to be intolerable in any country where freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself.[4]
As noted by legal historian Christian G. Fritz in American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War, both before and after the Revolution, Americans believed "that the people in a republic, like a king in a monarchy, exercised plenary authority as the sovereign. This interpretation persisted from the revolutionary period up to the Civil War." [5] However, as widespread as this belief in the power of the people was, the early Americans infrequently used the term "popular sovereignty" to describe the idea.[6] Rather, in expressing this founding concept of rule by the people, they would described the ideal of how "the people" would exercise sovereignty in America and that the state officers and employees function as "public servants." The actual use of the term, "popular sovereignty," didn't begin to gain popularity until around the 1840s.
The idea that the people were sovereign (often linked with the notion of the consent of the governed) was not invented by the Americans. Rather, the consent of the governed and the idea of the people as a sovereign had clear 17th and 18th century intellectual roots in European history.[7] 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.[8]
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"). The American Revolution marked the establishment of the concept of popular sovereignty in large scale practice as it had been discussed and experimented with in the European historical contexts. With their Revolution, Americans substituted the sovereignty in the persons of the several European Monarchs, with a collective sovereign—composed of the people. Henceforth, early Americans (in truth, "European 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.[9]
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.[10]
In 18th-century European political thought, "the people" excluded most of the population, such as women, slaves (not just Africans, but all slaves), those lacking sufficient property, people of Tribal Nations (not just Native Americans), and children.[11] While it took many generations to evolve the minds of the majority of the population immigrating to America from the rest of the world to a point where the term "We, the People" included everyone, this ideal was formally achieved at the dawn of the 20th century with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. Granted, long before this time, many of the people of several States had already evolved.
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." [12]
In 1846, as the dispute over slavery in the United States developed in the wake of the Mexican-American War, the use of the term "popular sovereignty" began to gain currency as a method to resolve the status of slavery in the country. The war ended with the United States acquisition of lands once held by Mexico.[13] The effort to incorporate these lands into the United States uncovered long-simmering disputes about the extension of slavery – whether slavery would be permitted, protected, abolished, or perpetuated in these newly acquired areas.[14] Congressional attempts to resolve this issue led to gridlock. Several congressional leaders, in an effort to resolve the "deadlock" over slavery as a term or condition for admission or administration of the territories, searched for a "middle ground".[15]
Some moderates asserted that slavery in the territories was not a matter for Congress to resolve. Rather, they argued, the people in each territory, like the people in each American state, were the sovereigns thereof, and as that sovereign they could determine the status of slavery for themselves.[16] In this way, the term "popular sovereignty" became part of the rhetoric for leaving it up to residents of the American territories (and not Congress) to decide whether or not to accept or reject slavery. In essence, this also left it up to the people of the territories to resolve the controversy over expansion of slavery in the United States. This formed a "middle ground" between proponents of an outright limitation on slavery's spread to the territories and those opposing limitation. The idea tied into the widespread assumption of Americans that the people were the sovereign.[17]
As explained by historian Michael Morrison, the "idea of local self-determination, or, as it would become known, popular sovereignty" began to occupy the attention of members of Congress in 1846 and 1847.[18] In modern historiography, Illinois U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas is most closely associated with the idea of popular sovereignty as a solution to the issue of the extension of slavery in the territories.[19] Douglas's biographer, the historian Robert W. Johannsen, observed that Douglas was:
chairman of the Committee on Territories in both the House and Senate, and he discharged the responsibilities of his position with single-minded devotion…. During the debates over the organization of the Mexican Cession, Douglas evolved his doctrine of popular sovereignty, and from that time on it was irrevocably linked to his interest in the territories and in the West. His commitment to popular sovereignty was the deeper because he recognized in it a formula that would (he hoped) bridge the differences between the North and South on the slavery question, thus preserving the Union.[20]
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