Document Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

2-4-2010

SSRN Discipline

Legal Scholarship Network; Law School Research Papers - Legal Studies; Law School Research Papers - Public Law & Legal Theory

Abstract

Only one proposal for a more democratic alternative to the US Constitution was made in the 1780s and 1790s by a Pennsylvania farmer and preacher named Herman Husband His New Jerusalem proposal would have filled the Mississippi Valley with a multilayered government based upon tenmilesquare townships whose citizens would elect all the important officials This piece tells Husbands story from his Maryland gentry farmer days through a sojourn in central North Carolina whence he was driven because of his radical ideas to his demise after being acquitted of sedition against the new United States government in 1795

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