This chapter examines the major rebellions that occurred in Spanish America during the era of North American colonial protest and rebellion against British policies and government. It focuses on the revolt of the city of Quito in 1765, the Andean rebellions started by Tupac Amaru in 1780, and the 1781 Comunero rebellion in New Granada, set in the context of Spanish administrative and fiscal reforms under Charles III and Spanish geopolitical conflict with Britain between the Seven Years’ War and the American War of independence. The principal purpose here is to enquire into the origins of the rebellions, their organization and social composition, and the political attitudes and ideas of their participants. In addition to comparing the Spanish American rebellions in terms of their causes, political cultures and political impacts, it also reflects on their contemporaneous relationship to the American Revolution and their place in the wider challenge to European monarchies during the Age of Revolution.

The American federal union was created in 1781 by the Articles of Confederation. Designed to protect the independence and promote the interests of the member-states, it concentrated power over international matters and war in a central government. Although the Articles granted extensive powers to a congress of states, their implementation was left to the state governments. This arrangement proved dysfunctional and by early 1787, the future of the union was in doubt. The Constitution challenged neither the aims nor the purposes of the American union. Instead, it radically reformed its structure. It set up a central government with a legislative, executive and judicial branch and the right to legislate directly on the individual citizens of the American states. By allowing the federal government to operate independently of the states, the problem of the non-implementation of congressional decisions was overcome. Only with the adoption of the Constitution did the American union acquire national cohesion and a central government with the capacity to act with determination and energy against foreign powers and stateless peoples on the North American continent.

In 1851, Frederick Douglass publicly challenged the position of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society that the U.S. Constitution was a proslavery document. As an enslaved child, the self-taught Douglass had identified literacy as “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” The same insight prompted the mature author and editor to part ways with Garrisonian moral suasionists in order to join “legal suasionists” like antislavery constitutionalist lawyers Lysander Spooner and William Goodell. From the 1840s through the 1890s, Douglass promoted the legal literacy of everyday African Americans (free and enslaved) while developing his own legal-critical analysis of American racism. Committed to wielding the “forms of law and . . . rules of hermeneutics” on behalf of freedom and equality, Douglass tirelessly challenged the increasingly biopolitical orientation of post-Reconstruction legislation and jurisprudence. From slavery to mass incarceration, Douglass insisted, racism is incompatible with the rule of law.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass changed his opinion on the proslavery character of the U.S. Constitution. Most scholarship seeks to locate the core of Douglass’s politics in the critical patriotism of his post-change of opinion oratorical and literary output. However, if we keep the occasion for Douglass’s change of opinion firmly in view, that is, his critical engagement with the question of the pro- or antislavery character of the Constitution, there is a possibility not only of appreciating an experience of crucial significance to the development of his politics, but also of relocating the core of his politics in an ongoing ambivalence about the “moral power” of the United States. This chapter situates Douglass as a political thinker participating in a transatlantic paradigm shift in the rhetoric of sociopolitical change, a shift that gave rise to a new modern dilemma as to which form of change, reform or revolution, best suited one’s problem-solving needs.

This chapter engages in a critical review of the main thesis of Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager in Religious Freedom and the Constitution (Harvard, 2007), that religion is not “a … category of human experience that demands special benefits and/or necessitates special restrictions” or any “special immunity for religiously motivated conduct.” Against this position, this chapter argues that natural religion of the form manifested in the New York Regents’ prayer outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Engel v. Vitale (1962) is not to be put on the same constitutional level as (or below) other human passionate interests or even conscience. The paper considers the Indian and the European Convention provisions on religious liberty.