Abstract

Written in the aftermath of the Civil War, Orestes Brownson’s The American Republic is careful to address the arguments of the recently-defeated southerners. The running debates between southern constitutionalists and their nationalist opponents had produced a rich literature from the 1790s through secession. Brownson himself had known some of this literature and had greatly admired John C. Calhoun, the pre-eminent southern constitutionalist of the 1830s and 1840s. Brownson drew on the Old Republican constitutional tradition in The American Republic in order to counter the tendencies he saw in the northern movement for a national democratic politics. Through comparing Brownson’s ideas in The American Republic to those of Jeffersonian theorist John Taylor of Caroline, his reliance on Old Republican thinking becomes apparent.