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Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Thu Mar 22 06:56:56 PST 2001


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





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