Like most relationships, the constitutional union between Great Britain and the American colonies was never a static relationship. Rather, as described in Chapter 2, over the course of the eighteenth century various economic, demographic, institutional, and ideological developments continuously redefined their relationship. Previous historical accounts typically agree that, despite these dynamic conditions, the constitutional union between Great Britain and the American colonies was generally stable and mutually beneficial as late as the early 1770s. Three questions therefore challenge every account of the American Revolution. First, why did British interests by 1774 commit to a reconfiguration of the terms of this union? Second, why were American interests generally unwilling to accept a reconfiguration? And third, why did this long-standing and valued relationship ultimately end in the civil war commonly known as the American Revolution?

The structural foundations of this constitutional union were not wholly immaterial to the sequence of decisions by which Great Britain and the American colonies committed themselves to civil war. For in addition to forming the context within which these historic decisions were made, this structure projected a future paradoxically constituted by relative American and absolute British gains. These crosscutting dynamics thus supported different (and often conflicting) perceptions of and expectations for the relationship between Great Britain and the American colonies. As a result, explanation of the subsequent constitutional crisis must extend beyond the structural context to the political actors and the decisional sequences that directly effected the final rupture of the British-colonial order.

Chapter 9 completes the account of the third constitutional change in the national rule of apportionment. Whereas Chapter 8 described the development of various environmental (or macrolevel) conditions between 1790 and 1860, this chapter analyzes the microlevel (or actorcentered) conditions that effected the abandonment and replacement of the original Constitution's rule of apportionment. This chapter focuses on the sequence of decisions that preceded the wholesale breakdown in the political bonds between the northern and southern states. It also provides a brief account of the formalization of a new national rule of apportionment in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

The structural developments described in Chapter 8 offer no immediately obvious long- or short-term sectional differences that necessitated a constitutional crisis between northern and southern states in 1861. Since 1790, every state had reaped significant benefits under the constitutional Union established in 1787. In addition to sharing generally peaceful domestic and external constitutions, high rates of demographic growth, and sustained (although uneven) economic development, the principal interests within both sections had fashioned similar state governmental institutions and conceptualizations of representation, and they both had success in using the national government to promote or protect their particular interests.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, relative differences among the sections grew more prominent in several areas, although these differences were often mitigated by shared national experiences or by other more deeply embedded political commitments and capacities.

The preceding chapters offer detailed descriptions, explicit causal explanations, and a unifying theory that accounts for the creation and recreation of the American political order from 1700 to 1870. A comparative historical analysis of the conditions and decisions comprising three constitutional changes in the national rule of apportionment was the means employed for confronting and understanding the violent and consensual origins of this order in 1776, its peaceful transformation in 1787, and its ultimate breakdown and reconstruction after 1861. The first apportionment rule change studied began in the wake of the Declaration of Independence and culminated in 1781 with the formalization of the equal state apportionment rule in the Articles of Confederation.

The double rule of apportionment fashioned at the 1787 Constitutional Convention served as the formal basis for the division of political representation within the U.S. Congress and the Electoral College for the next seventy-four years. The rule divided national representation among the states in three distinct ways: proportionally according to population in the U.S. House of Representatives, equally in the U.S. Senate, and the combined effect of these two methods in the Electoral College. The unique and combined distributional logics of these terms of apportionment sustained and oriented much of the constitutional development of the American political order until its collapse into civil war in 1861.

Given the deep sectional divisions that animated the 1787 Convention's debate over representation, the new rule of apportionment initially inspired different expectations and anxieties concerning each section's future political strength within the national government. Southern statesmen recognized that the new rule's demographic calculus likely guaranteed northern state majorities in the House and the Electoral College until at least the 1800 Census. Many were convinced however that the new apportionment rule was particularly well designed for the South's rapidly growing population. The seemingly effortless development of the southwestern territory (and future states) of Kentucky and Tennessee throughout the 1780s provided reassuring evidence of the section's future strength in the Senate as well.

Northern statesmen were decidedly less confident about the longerterm consequences of the new rule of apportionment.

Amidst the welter of discrete approaches and dispositions that happily constitute the social sciences, studies of past and present politics remain unified by a common interest in the conditions, causes, and consequences of collective authority. Across the disciplines of political science and history, many of these studies provide descriptions or measurements of various forms of collective authority. Other studies provide explanations of the causes or consequences of this authority; still others provide theories that account for its creation, transformation, or breakdown. This study speaks directly to these two disciplines and their common interest by describing, by explaining, and by proposing and testing a theory accounting for the development of the American political order between 1700 and 1870.

To engage these parallel but divided audiences in these purposes, this study's format not only enables a comparative historical analysis of the events and eras surrounding the American Revolution, the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the American Civil War, it also facilitates the recognition and synthesis of the distinct scholarly contributions made by the disciplines of history and political science.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the context, the causes, and the immediate consequences of the first constitutional change in the rule of apportionment. This rule change begins with the constitutional breakdown of British-colonial relations in 1776 and ends with the formalization of a new American constitutional order in 1781. Whereas the former event signaled the abandonment of the unwritten but working rule of apportionment within the British Empire, the latter event established the written equal state rule of apportionment within the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on how and why the imperial rule of apportionment was abandoned. In brief, Chapter 2 provides a macrolevel description of the broader context within which this event occurred. It specifically recounts the development of economic, demographic, institutional, and ideological conditions in Great Britain and the American colonies over the course of the eighteenth century. Assessment of these conditions over time is necessary given this study's interest in explaining the causes of apportionment rule change because it aids the identification and measurement of long-term patterns in these contextual conditions prior to (and, therefore, apparently independent of) a subsequent rule change. Chapter 3 follows with a microlevel account of the political actors most immediately responsible for the breakdown in the constitutional union between Great Britain and the American colonies between 1774 and 1776.

Four research questions frame this inquiry into the elemental import of rules of apportionment, the process of constitutional change, and the development of the American political order between 1700 and 1870. The first two questions ask when and how do constitutional changes in the rule of apportionment occur. The final two questions ask why these changes occur and what are their immediate and longer-term consequences.

In the Preface, rules of apportionment were defined not only in terms of the allocation of collective decision-making authority, but of their particular informational and distributional qualities as well. The general relationship between these rules and the process of constitutional change thus seems clear. Constitutional changes are a type of political change that alters or establishes seemingly permanent organizational structures, institutional procedures, or customary practices that determine the practical limits of collective authority. These changes are easily recognized when they are coterminous with explicit formal changes like constitutional amendments or written legal decrees, but they also occur with the establishment or transformation of unwritten, customary political practices.

Because every type of constitutional order requires some form of apportionment rule, constitutional changes in the rule of apportionment are further signified by two distinguishing events: the abandonment of an existing rule and the establishment of a new rule of apportionment.

The economic, demographic, institutional, and ideological conditions described in Chapter 5 and the sequence of decisions analyzed in Chapter 6 constitute the remote and immediate causes of the abandonment of the Articles of Confederation. This chapter completes the story of this second constitutional and apportionment rule change by examining the deliberations and decisions of the 1787 Convention that produced a new national constitution and a new national rule of apportionment.

The new apportionment rule included within the U.S. Constitution established a dual form of state representation within the U.S. Congress: equal state representation in the U.S. Senate and a form of proportional state representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the former, each state was granted two senators regardless of its population and each senator voted individually. In the House, representation was divided among the states according to each state's respective “Numbers.” These numbers were to be determined for each state by adding the whole number of free and indentured persons to three-fifths of the total number of enslaved persons. “Indians” who did not pay taxes were not to be included in a state's total. This constitutional rule required an initial enumeration of the American population within three years of the first Congress, and a new census every ten years. It also established that the number of representatives in the House of Representatives cannot exceed one representative for every 30,000 persons, and every state was guaranteed at least one member.

The equal state rule of apportionment adopted by the First Continental Congress in 1774 and formalized within the Articles of Confederation in 1781 endured until the Articles were set aside in 1787. The new constitutional order fashioned in that year promised to establish a more powerful national government and a new national rule of apportionment. This new rule divided national decision-making capacities among the states according to state population in the new U.S. House and equally among the states in the new U.S. Senate. The next three chapters retell the seemingly familiar story by which the Articles and their equal state rule were abandoned and replaced with the U.S. Constitution and its new “double” rule of apportionment.

Chapter 5 begins this new story of constitutional change and the framing of the Constitution by examining the same macrolevel conditions examined in Chapter 2, tracking their development from 1776 to the calling of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. As in Chapter 2, this chapter focuses on the economic, demographic, institutional, and ideological conditions that shaped the context within which the change occurred. Description of these conditions between 1776 and 1786 serves several purposes. First, it provides an opportunity for an assessment of potential causal relationships between these conditions and the subsequent change that is not predicated on the detailed account completed in Chapter 6. Second, it establishes external reference points for analyzing the decisions and outcome of the 1787 Convention.

The structural conditions described in Chapter 2 and the sequence of decisions analyzed in Chapter 3 constitute the remote and immediate causes of the collapse of the British-colonial order in 1776. This chapter completes this new story of the American Revolution with an account of the subsequent series of political debates, deliberations, and decisions that produced a constitutional consensus for a new national rule of apportionment and the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation.

This chapter concentrates on the set of political actors who assumed the authority to define the governmental armature of the new American order, including its national rule of apportionment. The terms of this new rule were heavily contested. Many supported or contested other components of the proposed national order with reference to their expectations concerning the likely effect of different rules of apportionment. The latter phenomenon suggests a dynamic familiar to many constitutional transitions: constitution makers with positive expectations concerning the strength of their interests under a proposed rule of apportionment generally tend to support a more broadly empowered national government, whereas constitution makers with less positive expectations concerning the strength of their interests tend to support more limited forms of government. If, therefore, the set of constitution makers consists of individuals who do not share approximately similar interests and expectations, then the creation and maintenance of an order based on the consent of these individuals turns on the formulation of a rule of apportionment and a governmental structure capable of satisfying a multiplicity of interests and expectations.