Vol. 14 No.11 (November 2004), pp.849-851

RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: THE KENTUCKY AND VIRGINIA RESOLUTIONS AND THEIR LEGACY, by William J. Watkins, Jr.  New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. 264pp.  Hardback.  $39.95.  ISBN: 1403963037.

Reviewed by Mitchell McNaylor, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

The central argument of RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: THE KENTUCKY AND VIRGINIA RESOLUTIONS AND THEIR LEGACY is stark: “the warnings from the early national period about consolidation have come to pass. The promises made by the friends of the Constitution in 1787 concerning the limited nature of the national government have been undermined. The only question remaining is whether the beauty and purity of the federal system given to us so long ago can and should be recovered” (p.136). William J. Watkins, Jr., Greenville, South Carolina attorney and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, returns to the late eighteenth century for American renewal, by examining the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, the responses of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, respectively, to the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The book has six chapters. The first “Monocrats and Jacobins” sets out the differences between the Federalists and the Democrat-Republicans in the early National period. In the second chapter, “Legislation and Persecution” describes the Alien and Sedition Acts, that provoked the the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. In “The Principles of 1798” Watkins discusses the Resolutions themselves. Chapter 4, “Influence of the Resolutions,” assesses the impact of the Resolutions through the Nullification crisis. Chapter Five, “Consolidation,” departs from the chronological approach of the earlier chapters and takes a thematic approach to examine ways in which the national government has consolidated power at the expense of state sovereignty. In the final chapter, “Lessons for Today,” Watkins examines how the Principles of 1798 might help to revive a true spirit of Federalism in American government. That chapter also includes a draft amendment that Watkins devised calling for a Constitutional Commission to review the constitutionality of actions and laws of the United States Government. The texts of the Resolutions are included in appendices at the end of the book.

Watkins argues that Jefferson and Madison wrote their respective resolutions with the Compact Theory in mind, namely that the Union was a voluntary association of states. Even among Jefferson and Madison, Watkins notes differences—“under Jefferson’s compact theory each state contracted with every other state in forming the Constitution, whereas Madison viewed the compact as resulting from the collective action of the several states” (p.72). While Jefferson’s initial draft of the Kentucky Resolutions explicitly favored nullification, Madison remained vague, and apparently preferred [*850] collective action of the states. Jefferson viewed the rejection of the Federalists as vindication. Watkins writes, “In the Revolution of 1800, the people of the states fought for the right to govern themselves. They refused to accept a Federalist version of the Constitution that ignored the division of legislative sovereignty” (p.81).

Real fireworks are reserved for the “Consolidation” chapter. There Watkins turns his sights on the Supreme Court as a threat to American freedom: “The Court’s Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence marks the ascendancy of an unelected superlegislature, the coming of Plato’s elite Guardians to check the will of the people when the people’s choice is incongruous with the values held by the judges” (p.135).  Lest one too easily write off Watkins as a conservative railing against judicial activism, he blasts the Republican Party as well for supporting the USA PATRIOT Act and for supporting large scale education programs run by the federal government. Watkins is a strict constructionist right down the line.

Watkins’s book has one major handicap: only 28 pages of a total 163 pages of text actually focus on the resolutions themselves. He includes an excellent short discussion of how the Alien and Sedition Acts and the behavior of the Adams administration led to the backlash of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and includes a good description of the influence of the resolutions. But the book would not have suffered if Watkins had discussed the primary focus of his book in greater depth. Watkins is excellent in arguing forcefully for his position. He is a practicing attorney, and this is the work of a talented amateur, not an academic. The benefit of that is that he approaches his subject with a freshness and verve all too often lacking in the academy. On the other hand, readers might wish that the author of the rare work on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions had indulged in a little more Dryasdust pedantry and covered his topic in even more detail.

Watkins’s proposal for constitutional reform is unlikely to gain widespread support in either political party. The vast centralization of government under the Bush administration, in the Department of Homeland Security reorganization, and the coming reorganization and centralization of the intelligence services, are not the actions of an administration ready to return power to the states. Likewise, the Democratic Party favors further expansion of the national government and is wont to condemn any appeal to the rights of states as a desire to return to segregation and slavery. Watkins does anticipate the latter argument and lays out a brief case that, “Federalist principles, as explained in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, appear in the political theory of pro-slavery and abolitionist forces” (p.150).  Also, while Watkins did draft his own constitutional amendment to create a commission to give the states some oversight over the actions of the federal government, he spends little time defending his plan or discussing the implications of its adoption. His amendment is a creative attempt to reign in the power of the federal government, but it does need further analysis.

“While the modern world is much different from that of the late 1700s, the march of years has in no way rendered [*851] federalism obsolete. If anything, the diversity that is modern America highlights the need for local self-governance and decentralized decision-making. The more heterogeneous we become, the more we need a pure federalist system,” asserts Watkins (p.162).  RECLAIMING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION is an excellent attempt to re-examine the principles of 1798, both as an historical analysis and as a guide for the future. Watkins’s history of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and his plea for a return to federalism are both an excellent starting point for further research, into the drafting and thought of the Resolutions and for practical solutions to revive federalism.

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© Copyright 2004 by the author, Mitchell McNaylor