Pop Sov John S.) Inventing

Pop Sov

John S.)

Inventing the People Comparison

In Inventing the People by Edmund S. Morgan, popular sovereignty is a myth. The power of the few is re-enforced; there is no representative democracy. He maintains that the founding fathers set up a system with an elaborate electoral process that disguises that the powerful keep power and only pretend that they get the power from the constituents who vote.

This evaluation on the evolution of American power from England to American hands and the mythical passing of power to the people is reflected by Morgan. For example, Morgan writes that "in elections the fiction of popular sovereignty makes its strongest approach to reality, as actual people ostensibly go about selecting from among themselves the few to whose government they consent," which reflects his views that people perceive the United States to be a nation of popular sovereignty, but really it is not (Morgan 174). This notion was passed down from the notion of divine right and acts passed by lawmakers were said to be passed because of the will of the people in support of it, or the popular sovereignty for an act.

This carried over to the issue of slavery in territories. This was a major issue that greatly divided America across the North and South as the number of slave states would influence Congress. Compromises were intended to be made. Notable in this issue of popular sovereignty is that Utah and New Mexico were allowed to decide directly through popular sovereignty. These states would vote on whether they would want slavery; however it was not completely up to the people of the states. This was because the time of the decision on slavery was up for debate at anytime between settlement and application for statehood and was put into law by the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This appears that the people were allowed to make the decision and that popular sovereignty was in fact a reality. The were Southerners who believed that this allowed for anti-slavery forces to prevail, but this appears to be a biased perspective and in reality popular sovereignty was passed on to the people in deciding slavery in the new territories.

Morgan's argument is largely based upon the legislature and people in power holding American power. When it comes to popular sovereignty, the people were given the absolute right to decide, and although these decisions were no doubt influenced by the legislative, they were the people's decisions. Furthermore the notion of popular sovereignty according to Morgan includes the "independent authority of the state governments" and thus the way the states or future states were given the opportunity to decide for themselves if they want slavery or not was in fact the practice of popular sovereignty (Morgan 280). The conclusion to draw from this is that if in fact Morgan's belief that popular sovereignty was a myth is to be accepted, it was a myth in its earliest days, and perhaps later it became more of a reality, particularly on the issue of slavery in new territories.