THE CONSERVATISM OF THE REVOLUTION:

For early Americans, theirs was an ornery, moral republicanism. The American Revolution thus centered around a patrimony, the English constitutional tradition, that both belonged to this people and was that to which they belonged. It entailed preexisting, ancient norms to which colonials saw themselves as bound and was an inheritance they would not be denied. The American Constitution that followed thus reclaimed this heritage and, though a document of order and process, was designed to preserve a "peaceful, low-level conflict" for a government of rival interests and a society of plural moral commitments. The real work of this fundamental law was thus to facilitate the exercise of these commitments at lower levels of social life, close to the lives of the citizens.

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