ABSTRACT
The majority of Americans who participated in the founding discourse emphasized discontinuity from European origins and past. This new "project of American modernity" was of crucial importance because it shaped the specific institutional features that developed in the United States. The concept of a written constitution was already embedded in American colonial history: each colony possessed a "frame of government" as part of its charter, and in most cases the settlers complemented these documents with a declaration of rights. The American "project of modernity," therefore, resulted from struggles and compromises between different ideas, concepts, and visions advanced by various factions, interest groups, and parties. The general thesis is that a distinct pattern of modernity, rooted in the colonial past and influenced by European Enlightenment thought, emerged during the American Revolution and the early national period. Retrospectively, the Civil War revealed the fragility of American nation-building in the early Republic.
