From the start of the Revolution, ordinary Americans shared with their political leaders a belief in "the people" as the only legitimate basis of government. However, their shared belief in a sovereign people almost immediately fostered strong disagreement about what rights "the people" possessed and what rights they might utilize to create and modify constitutions.

There was an ambiguity inherent in this commitment to the sovereign people because there were distinctly different ways of viewing the relationship of "the people" to their governments. The nature of the people's sovereignty and its constitutional implications could be viewed more expansively or in a more constrained manner. A number of major, pre-Civil War controversies shed light on how Americans and their political leaders divided in their understanding of the people's sovereignty: Shay's Rebellion in 1786-87, the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1799-1800, the Hartford Convention in 1814, the Nullification Crisis in 1832, the Dorr Rebellion of 1842, and the controversy over Kansas's statehood, 1854-1861.

Scholars have correctly identified the relationship between the national and state governments under the Federal constitution as central to many of the crises in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. The preoccupation of constitutional historians on how events after the Revolution reflected an understanding of the nature of the Union and the relationship
between the two levels of government, however, has overlooked other questions. The competing views of "the people" and their role in legitimating government could have a bearing on understandings of federalism, but primarily they raised different considerations.

Reexamining the period with sensitivity to attitudes towards "the people" as the legitimizing authority of government provides a more comprehensive explanation that integrates constitutional positions into a broader account of how Americans sought to work out the implications of their Revolution. Events and reactions that have seemed aberrational can meaningfully be integrated into an interpretation of America's constitutional past. That interpretation retains the traditional emphasis on federalism issues and leaves the discrete histories of the pre-Civil War episodes intact, but reveals a broader constitutional history with greater complexity and conflicting views than we have recognized.