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THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Using the word republic also tied in with the Founding Fathers' interest in the long history of republics and republican political philosophy and a number of republican ideas were integrated into the new constitution. For instance many see the system of Checks And Balances being based on the republican mistrust of a unitary executive and preference for what classical writers called Mixed Government . There is a heated debate among academics as to how important republicanism was to the Founding Fathers. The traditional view was that it was of little import when compared to Liberalism , a word which only saw print in English more than thirty years after the Revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s a revisionist school led by Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Willi Paul Adams and others began to argue that republicanism was just as or even more important than liberalism in the creation of the United States. This issue is still much disputed and scholars like Isaac Kramnick completely reject this view. THE CONSTITUTION 1800-1860 CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION PROGRESSIVE ERA NEW DEAL ERA LATE 20TH CENTURY TERMINOLOGY: USE OF WORD "REPUBLIC" In the . A fourth restriction, abandoned state by state from 1777 to 1865, was the prevalent practice of allowing only property owners to vote. The use of the word republic to mean representative democracy can largely be traced back to the Founding Fathers , to other early commentators and creators of the American republics, and to Noah Webster's use of Madison's Federalist 10 for the definition of republic in his Dictionary. At the time of the American Revolution democracy was still associated with the negative views the classical scholars had of it. It was a pejorative term used to refer to what would today be called Mob Rule . The view was rooted in the writings of Aristotle and others who saw pure majoritarian rule as a form of despotism and noted that states ruled by popular majorities had often, in fact, elected despots. At least one Enlightenment philosopher, Kant, believed that a true republic was only one that protected minorities. Thus most of the Founders, most prominently John Adams , described the new nation as a republic rather than a democracy. The Federalist Papers are pervaded by the idea that pure democracy is actually quite dangerous, because it allows a majority to infringe upon the rights of a minority (in Madison's Federalist 10, it is the minority who are wealthy), or to abdicate their sovereignty to a dictator. A republic was thus defined as a state in which the will of the people (or of a majority of them) was at some remove from actual governance or magistracy. However, some other Founding Fathers used the terms republic and democracy interchangeably. The term ''republic'' does not appear in the Declaration Of Independence , but does appear in Article IV of the Constitution which "guarantee {Link without Title} to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government." What exactly the writers of the constitution felt this should mean is uncertain. Former Solicitor-General of the United States Wade McCree was heard to say in 1987 that he had "no idea" what it meant. The Supreme Court in '' Luther V. Borden '' declared that the definition of ''republic'' was a "political question" in which it would not intervene. In two later cases it did establish a basic definition. In '' US V. Cruishank '' the court ruled that the "equal rights of citizens" were inherent to the idea of republic. In '' Re Duncan '' it ruled that the "right of the people to choose their government" is also part of the definition. It is also generally assumed that the clause prevents any state from being a monarchy — or a dictatorship. Over time the pejorative connotations of "democracy" faded. By the time of Andrew Jackson and the new Democratic Party democracy was seen as an unmitigated positive by all except Whigs who feared executive aggrandizement, and it has remained so to this day. In debates on Reconstruction, Senator Charles Sumner argued that the republican "guarantee clause" in Article IV supported the introduction by force of democratic suffrage in the defeated South. As the limitations on democracy were slowly removed, Senators were made directly electable by the people; property qualifications for state voters were eliminated; and initiative, Referendum , recall and other devices of direct democracy became widely accepted at the state and local level. Presidential electors, now no longer chosen by state legislatures, were also increasingly constrained by state laws and political party leadership to be the dependent agents of the democratic electorate who voted for them. Thus, at present most people refer to the United States and its system of government as a democracy, and President George W. Bush speaks about spreading democracy, and not republics, around the world. REFERENCES
°_______, “Commercial Farming and the ‘Agrarian Myth’ in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 68(1982), p833-849
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