Bulletin n. 2-3/2013
February 2014
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Opal J.M.
    General Jackson's Passports: Natural Rights and Sovereign Citizens in the Political Thought of Andrew Jackson, 1780s–1820s
    in Studies in American Political Development , Volume 27 - Issue 02 ,  2013 ,  69-85
    This essay examines the development of Andrew Jackson's ideas about nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty within the southern borderlands of the post-Revolutionary United States. It argues that he was in many respects a conventional borderlands leader—that is, someone with little sense of attachment to any particular polity, who speculated in Indian lands while pursuing commercial ventures through American, Spanish, and Native jurisdictions. But an especially devastating war between the settlers of Middle Tennessee and some Cherokee warriors during the 1790s forced Jackson and others to articulate their attachment to the United States in new ways. Bitterly rejecting a Federalist model of citizenship that assumed clear territorial limits, they invented a new “protection covenant,” whereby the people themselves, imagined within a brutal state of nature, retained full sovereignty to deploy violence. In addition to a fresh look at Jackson, the article demonstrates the importance of international as well as Constitutional law in the formation of early American nationalism.
    ©2001 - 2020 - Centro Studi sul Federalismo - P. IVA 94067130016