"The organic law of a great commonwealth": the framing of the South Dakota constitution

South Dakota Law Review, Summer, 2008 by Jon Lauck

The republicanism extant during the American Revolution evolved in certain ways throughout the nineteenth century to become the republicanism prominent during the settlement of Dakota Territory. Even if classical republican references were not as common in nineteenth century rhetoric as that examined by intellectual historians during the Revolutionary period, Jean Baker has noted, "there were other ways to preserve beliefs." She notes, in particular, that "republican behavior" was promoted through schools and political parties and that "[w]hite male Americans who never gave speeches, framed resolutions or wrote pamphlets daily practiced and through their public behavior, observed its tenets." Baker found that republicanism "survived not so much in the rhetoric of the citizenry as through various institutions and forces that conveyed the importance of an organic community larger that its discrete parts, along with the conviction that the moral basis of American politics rested in civic obligations, mutually undertaken." (20)

The political culture of republicanism, in other words, persisted long after the American Revolution. Rowland Berthoff observed that "[w]hatever the fate that intellectual historians have found republicanism suffered as an articulate ideology, the underlying popular mentality has clearly persisted." (21) Unlike the classical formulation of republicanism, which focused on land-ownership as essential to the preservation of republican institutions, in the nineteenth century republicanism came to include merchants and workers as worthy republicans. "Jefferson's classical doubts about the civic virtue of merchants were being forgotten," Berthoff notes, and market-oriented Americans also claimed the "old-fashioned, fixed virtues of civic attachment and personal independence." Although some observers were concerned about the absence of republican virtue among the growing number of industrial workers, the act of voting, which was increasingly venerated and celebrated, and education could ensure that workers became good republican citizens. (22) Physical labor alone could instill republican attitudes as the "manly virtues of the republican citizen were practically narrowed down to the hard work, saving, and reinvestment that were now touted as the best means for individual success and for the economic progress of the country." (23) Vice and idleness became the signs of "unrepublican behavior" and free enterprise, long after the Revolution, became the "heart of the republican ethic that dated from the Declaration of Independence." (24) To counter the machinations of machine bosses and politicians, reformers would periodically arise to "stamp out corruption" in traditional republican fashion. (25) The settlers of places such as Dakota Territory, according to Donald Pickens, "were republicans in cultural values long before being labeled so by historians." (26)

III. REPUBLICANISM IN DAKOTA TERRITORY AND ITS SOURCES

The influence of republican thought remained strong throughout the nineteenth century and even intensified during the Great Dakota Boom of the 1880s, when it seemed threatened by other developments in American life. (27) Many of the attributes of the American frontier that Frederick Jackson Turner identified in his famous speech in 1893 were basic elements of the republican tradition. (28) As political leaders in Dakota Territory pushed for statehood, they consistently invoked the republican tradition. Congregational minister Reverend Joseph Ward called for an end to federally controlled territories and for Congress to promote self-governing states which were "truly republican, and in entire harmony with the spirit that created the present Union." (29) When the pastor of First Congregational Church of Sioux Falls gave a prayer at the 1883 Constitutional Convention in Sioux Falls, he said that the convention's work would "redound to the glory of the commonwealth." (30) At the 1885 Constitutional Convention, Chief Justice Edgerton, who served as president of the convention, said he was honored to "be a member of a convention called to form the organic law of a great commonwealth" and to write a "republican" constitution and that he put his faith in the "patriotism" of national leaders to act on Dakota's statehood request. (31)