The Cause of America: Recovering Our Nation’s Revolutionary Promise

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
—Thomas Paine, 1776

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, many will celebrate the men who drafted and signed the document. Others will highlight what the revolutionary generation failed to accomplish, emphasizing less their ideals and more their desire to protect the existing social order, including the continuation of slavery.

The historical truth is more complicated than either of these narratives suggest. It is also more interesting. As historian Jane Kamensky put it, “To believe in America, rooted in the American Revolution, is to believe in possibility. Everybody, on every side, including people who were denied even the ownership of themselves, had the sense of possibility worth fighting for.”

The Cause of America, a daylong conference at NYU School of Law, brought historians and legal scholars together to enrich our understanding of the American Revolution and its aftermath by introducing audiences to a more colorful, compelling, and complete version of the U.S. origin story. The discussion gave due recognition to the many voices that contributed to the formation of our early democracy, recognizing that the aspirations of these revolutionaries — both those who have dominated traditional accounts and those whose voices have only recently been rediscovered — have the potential to inspire us today.

Produced in partnership with the Legal History Project at the NYU School of Law

As the revolutionary era unfolded, Americans from all walks of life — men and women, slave and free, settler and native — were drawn into a lively and contentious debate over the kind of nation the United States would be. This panel recovered those crucial perspectives and explored how they shaped the politics of the early republic — and how the unrealized aspirations of the many who were left out would fuel transformative social movements in the decades to come.

Speakers:
Alan Jenkins, Professor of Practice, Harvard Law School
Manisha Sinha, Draper Chair in American History, University of Connecticut
Karin Wulf, Professor of History, Brown University
Moderator: Theodore Johnson, Senior Adviser, New America

The revolutionaries of 1776 imagined a radically new concept of self-government which emphasized true popular sovereignty and republican virtue. This panel explored the democratic aspirations of the era, particularly as embodied in newly crafted state constitutions that piloted new forms of democracy. The panel also considered how these experiments helped shaped the future of American democracy, from the adoption of the U.S. Constitution through periodic waves of democratic reform and renewal.

Speakers:
Wilfred U. Codrington III, Walter Floersheimer Professor of Constitutional Law, Cardozo School of Law
Jesse Wegman, Senior Fellow, Brennan Center
Rosemarie Zagarri, Distinguished University Professor, George Mason University
Moderator: Joyce Vance, Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law, University of Alabama School of Law; Senior Fellow, Brennan Center

Though the Declaration of Independence was, by its terms, “the unanimous Declaration of thirteen United States of America,” there was little consensus on how these “free and independent states” would ever form one nation. How would democratic self-governance be best secured, through a loose confederation of small republics or in a consolidated “empire of liberty”? This panel examined the founding controversies over state’s rights and national power, explicating how they informed the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and many contentious debates that followed

Speakers:
Jane Manners, Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law
Saul Cornell, Guenther Chair in American History, Fordham University
Daniel Hulsebosch, Russell D. Niles Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Moderator: Elizabeth Wydra, President, Constitutional Accountability Center

Speaker:
Jay Swanson, Senior Fellow, Brennan Center