Jim Choate wrote:
The reality is that ALL law in this country was 'reset' (to use modern parlance) with the Declaration of Independence.
Really? So murder, theft, assault & battery were all unpunished by the local governments in the new States from Independence until they got around to passing new laws? Debts went unpaid without resort to the courts, contracts were unfilled subject to no sanction other than the opprobrium of neighbours? That the new United States were functional anarchies until new legislatures imposed new rules? I don't think so. What I suspect happened was that the administration of local government and the local courts carried on exactly as before, that office holders continued in office (even with the same title - which is how you come to have "governors" and which is hardly a republican term), judges continued to judge, juries to do whatever juries did back then, administering exactly the same laws on the 5th of July as they had on the 3rd. Which of course is why, in a sense, it really was more of a "war of independence" (as it is usually called over here on the downwind side of the North Atlantic) than a "revolution". In a revolution everything is up for grabs, things change and change fast. Revolutions get mixed up with people like Jacobins, Bolsheviks, Hezbollah (or for that matter Diggers, Levellers and Ranters) who want to change everything from the bottom up. In the USA that happened to some extent, but it was a process that took decades, and nowhere near as root-and-branch as, say the French Revolution. America the day after Independence was still in many ways the same America that had been the day before. Ken