ABSTRACT
If white reformers in the Old South wished to reorder their plantation world so that the elite—or at least that portion of the elite who were willing to put aside their seigneurial society and adopt a free labor, capitalist model—might retain their political power, southern revolutionaries dreamed of no such thing. Revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson hoped to create a rural Utopia, a new American society that lacked traditional European class boundaries, or traditional legal restraints. Believing the human creature to be fundamentally rational, white theorists envisioned a world in which each man might rule himself without resort to inflexible, written constitutions. (At the very least, Jefferson hoped, Americans might draft a new constitution for each generation, as it saw fit.)
