Americas

From Colony to Territory: Changing Concepts of Statehood in Revolutionary America Author(s): Peter S. Onuf Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 97, No. 3 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 447-459 Published by: The Academy of Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2149994 Accessed: 29/07/2010 09:06
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FromColony to Territory: ChangingConcepts of Statehood in RevolutionaryAmerica

PETER S. ONUF The founding fathersare justly famed for their developmentof a new "scienceof politics." The federalconstitutionwas the practicalculmination of a long traditionof republicantheorizing.It is misleading,however,to conceiveof the development constitutional of refinethoughtas the progressive mentoftheoreticalprinciples politicalaxiomswhose basicconfiguration or was apparentfrom the beginningof the imperialcrisis. Americansdid not immediately perceive,much less address,every theoreticalissue raised by the split with the empire.At first, even the fundamental problemof federalismwas ignored. Despitea burstof constitutional activityand debatein the states,littleattention was paid to defining the states'relationto Congressor to each other. Yet if pragmatic Americans avoidedgratuitousarguments about the locationof sovereignty,they could not avoid dealingwith claimsdisputesamongthe states. These conflicts revealedthat Americansheld different, potentiallycontradictory conceptsof whata statewas. If the union wereto survive,the conflictshad to be resolvedand these conceptshad to be reconciled.'
IDouglass G. Adair, " ' That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science': David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist," Huntington Library Quarterly 20 (1957): 343-60; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (NewYork: Knopf, 1979). This theme is also developed in Peter S. Onuf, "State-Making in Revolutionary America: Independent Vermont as a Case Study," Journal of American History 67 (1981): 797-815.

PETER S. ONUF is assistant professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This article is part of a broader, ongoing study of the origins of American federalism.
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| POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY

Early American concepts of statehood were drawn from several sources. Statesas territorial entitieswereinheritedfrom the colonialperiod;statesas inwerecreatedby the revolutionaries; dependent,self-governing communities and stateswithina communityof statesexistedby virtueof the recognitionof other states. Becausethe...