The American Experience in Government

It has been said that if the American Revolution was a revolution at all, it was a conservative revolution, unlike almost any other in history. It has also been said that it was merely a war for independence, fought so that that Americans, as citizens of the new nation, would have the rights they were supposed to have had as English citizens under the Bill of Rights passed by Parliament after the Glorious Revolution. Certainly the Continental Congress, the Confederation Congress, the Constitutional Congress, and the first government under the new Constitution were all dominated by solidest citizens in the country: state governors and legislators, the wealthiest men from each state, and the most respected academic were among these founding fathers.

These architects of the new nation were conservative because they wished to conserve the best aspects of English law and government, while eliminating those aspects of the British system that the colonists had experienced as being abusive. They knew that they were in the virtually unprece

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ave almost Constitutional authority, even though they are not spelled out in the Constitution. Working out these structures over the years has been a major way in which Americans have learned from the on-going experiment that is American democracy. People now, being unfortunately uninterested in history, do not notice some of the fundamental ways in which our society has been changed by our Permanent Revolution during the last two centuries. One trend has been to steadily expand suffrage and direct participation in government, as it became clear that the government actually functioned better if suffrage were not restricted to wealthy white males. Expansion of the franchise to the working classes around the time of Jackson, to freed slaves after the civil war (although, of course, after the end of Reconstruction, African-Americans could not in practice vote in the South until the 1960s), to women, and to eighteen-year-olds has in every case proved to strengthen American government and society. This trend has roughly paralleled the broadening of individual rights carried out through amendments and Supreme Court decisions. People do not now remember that at first only the House of Representatives was elected directly by the peopl
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Approximate Word count = 1954
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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