8889. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000) p13
8810. Ibid, p16
8811. John Hostetler, Sir Edward Coke (Chichester, England: Barry Rose Law Publishers, 1997) p135
79
craft Jefferson’s self-conscious nationalism as perpetually attentive to existential threats to the new nation’s integrity and security. The United States was a nation defined by its enemies, at home and abroad. But it was also the apex of his imperial ideals: a republican people, fully conscious of itself, enlightened enough to sustain consensual union and strong enough to resist coercion by any enemy. Union was predicated on shared commitment to ‘federal and republican principles’ that in turn depended on reciprocal recognition and identification among citizens in an inclusive national community.9 Jefferson further believed that the existence and future prosperity of the new federal republic – a regime of consent, not coercion – lay in the character of the people, the source of all legitimate authority. In effect, the nation was conjured into existence in order to secure and sustain a new and improved republican empire.10 Jefferson’s republican ideals were not a spontaneous epiphany. They were instead influenced, and even parodied similar foundational texts in England, namely Magna Carta and Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes.
VVIn April 1628 Sir Edward Coke, a notable councilor in the English Parliament, drafted a petition to the King of Britain which confirmed the rights and liberties of English subjects as expressed in Magna Carta. This long list of grievances was the model upon which Jefferson penned his Declaration of Independence – a list of grievances taken by the citizenry against the abuses perpetrated against the subjects of the land. When the English upper house, The Lords, determined to reserve the power of the sovereign in the personage of the Crown, Coke responded, “…but ‘sovereign power’ is no Parliamentary word…it weakens Magna Carta and all the statutes; for they are absolute, without any saving of ‘Sovereign Power’…Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no ‘Sovereign’.”11 This Petition of Right garnered little attention until confirmation by the Long Parliament of 1641 when it was entrenched as one of three overriding documents of English liberty.[2] Coke’s Reports and his famous four volume Institutes travelled to North America aboard The Mayflower, where they informed the legal professions and Presidents alike well into the nineteenth century. Samuel E. Thorpe, Professor of Legal History at Harvard University maintained that certain of Coke’s doctrines and ideas took firmer root in the colonies than at home and that much of American law need be traced back no further than to his books.[3] Even Hobbes complained that Coke endeavoured throughout the Institutes to diminish the Crown’s authority.[4] Coke’s legacy of jurisprudence significantly instructs U.S. Constitutional Law, and most profoundly in Marbury v Madison which cemented judicial independence and the predominance for judicial interpretation of the constitution.[5]