Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

BOOK REVIEWS 135
of the Puritans. Yet such lapses are very rare. This eminently readable book, like its
author, lives up to the title.
William J. Watkins, Jr., Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and
Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Pp. xx + 236. $39.95.
Reviewed by Carol Sue Humphrey, Oklahoma Baptist University
In Reclaiming the American Revolution, William Watkins states that Americans have lost
the true meaning of the American Revolution through a growing consolidation of
government power at the national level. Watkins hopes to remedy that situation by
introducing his readers to a piece of American history that he believes has been
neglected. He seeks to place the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in their proper
historical context in order to finally put them in a place of importance in the canon of
documents which have been important in the history of the United States. He begins by
relating the history of how the two documents came into existence. Watkins asserts that
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison feared that the Federalists, led by Alexander
Hamilton, sought to undermine what the American Revolution had been fought to
achieve. They wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions to express that concern and
to rally Americans to prevent that from happening. The development of the idea of a
loose construction of the Constitution helped lay the foundation for the increasing power
of the national government throughout the 1790s. The culmination of this effort came in
response to the French Revolution with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in
1798.
According to Watkins, the Sedition Act proved particularly offensive because it
placed power over political debate at the national level. For the Republicans, the issue
involved the very federal nature of the American system. They believed that control over
political debate should be at the local and state levels in order to provide room for local
and regional differences in ideas and procedures. A number of Republicans criticized the
legislation, but no critique proved more influential than the Kentucky and Virginia
Resolutions, secretly written by Jefferson and Madison, respectively. As Watkins points
out, “the involvement of a sitting vice president and the Father of the Constitution
indicates the severity of the situation” (55). Together, the two documents presented a
mechanism for the states to use to preserve the powers reserved to them by the
Constitution—what would later be called nullification and interposition by John C.
Calhoun of South Carolina.
Watkins continues his discussion by relating how the Kentucky and Virginia
Resolutions influenced later events. He points out how efforts by the national government