Samuel Chase and the Principles of '76: A Study in American Republicanism and Jurisprudence, 1776-1803

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2004
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
At first glance, Samuel Chase has one of the strangest histories of any Supreme Court justice or revolutionary era founder. One of his acquaintances, Alexander Contee Hanson, once called him a "Strange inconsistent man!" Indeed, it seems his career is fraught with inconsistency. After his helping to write the Maryland Constitution in 1776, he became an Anti-Federalist opposing the Federal Constitution in 1787. After opposing the Federal Constitution, he was appointed in 1796 to the Supreme Court, the body tasked with defending the Constitution! Subsequently, he was the only justice ever to be impeached, though he was not removed from office. While on the bench, he decided one case (US v. Worrall (1798)) that rejected Federal power beyond the written constitution (i.e. "strict construction"). Only three months later, however, he decided another (Calder v. Bull (1798)) that referred to the "vital republican principles" that circumscribed legislative authority beyond the written Constitution, and presaged the development of "loose construction". Today, he is remembered either for those inconsistencies, or in terms of his vigorous prosecution of the Sedition Act, which led to his being remembered as an aggrandizing Federalist "hanging judge." The objective of this paper is to explain those inconsistencies by putting Chase into a discursive context. This context is Chase's belief in the "principles of '76," a set of norms that characterized republicanism during the heady 1770s. By understanding Chase through that discourse, this paper seeks to reevaluate Chase in his own terms. It finds, in the end, that Chase's inconsistencies lay in his varied applications of the different.
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