The study of legal change at local levels in this forum opens new windows onto the legal landscape, especially because they explore ground-level legal change that reveals far more innovative and incremental shifts in law and legal understanding than is visible at higher altitudes.

Revolutionary-era state constitutions reflected an unsettling tension in the history of American liberty. This article captures how revolutionary-era Americans accommodated moral liberty with religious establishment. Their notions of liberty were paradoxical, but it is possible to track their moral reasoning.

The American War for Independence scrambled the concept of political allegiance and belonging. In James H. Kettner’s apt phrase, “subjects became citizens.” Where British law denied the possibility that a subject could renounce the obedience owed to their sovereign, Americans asserted through force of arms “the right to choose their allegiance.”1 Influenced by a contractual notion of political compact and by the mayhem of a violent civil war, people shuffled and sometimes reshuffled into camps of revolutionaries, loyalists, and neutrals.2

The outbreak of the American Revolution thrust would-be revolutionaries into a paradoxical relationship with the law. As they overthrew colonial governments from New Hampshire to Georgia during the summer and fall of 1775, leaders of the resistance to Great Britain found themselves in the awkward position of having to justify rebellion against British authority while still professing to be law-abiding Britons. The revolutionaries’ mandate to govern rested on protecting rights to property and representation that many colonists believed had been violated by agents of the Empire, but the practicalities of war demanded extra-legal measures. The popular governments that replaced colonial administrations had to find a way to balance upholding many of the laws of the old regime while simultaneously organizing an armed insurrection against it. Much of this burden fell on revolutionary committees at the town and local level. As the Continental Congress and provincial elites vacillated between rebellion and reconciliation and struggled to assert control over the fast-growing revolutionary coalition, ad hoc governments comprised of ordinary citizens took on the tasks of governing their regions and organizing for armed struggle. For much of 1775 and early 1776, these popular regimes precariously balanced the need for extra-legal expediencies with the need to maintain at least a semblance of law to maintain their legitimacy.

This article continues a long-term investigation into the nature of legislation, regulation, and administration across United States history. In contrast to persistent myths about an original American legal and political inheritance dedicated primarily to private rights, limited government, and laissez-faire economics, this article explores the earliest roots of American public rights, popular lawmaking, and regulatory policymaking. In the very first activities of revolutionary Provincial Congresses and Committees of Safety, this article locates a surprisingly robust template for the future development of American state police power, public provisioning, general-welfare legislation, and socio-economic regulation.

This article reviews Martti Koskenniemi’s To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power, 1300–1780, Dannelle Gutarra Cordero’s She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World, and James Q. Whitman’s From Masters of Slaves to Lords of Lands: The Transformation of Ownership in the Western World. These authors raise fundamental questions about what was going on and what was or is at stake in the legal theorizing, argumentation, and adjudication that characterized the immediate prehistory of the nascent US constitutional order.