Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins E-Book
John Fiske
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins," John Fiske presents a comprehensive examination of the principles and structures of American governance. The book is characterized by Fiske's eloquent prose and analytical depth, effectively intertwining historical context with philosophical inquiry. Through a meticulous exploration of constitutional frameworks, Fiske elucidates the evolution of civil government in the United States, offering insights into its democratic underpinnings and the social contract theory, which shaped the nation's identity in the wake of revolution. John Fiske (1842-1901), a prominent American philosopher and historian, was deeply influenced by the intellectual currents of his time, particularly the notions of evolution and progress. His background in history and philosophy allowed him to dissect complex political ideas and present them in a manner accessible to a broad audience. Fiske's commitment to understanding American ideals, coupled with his belief in democracy, propelled him to articulate the importance of government as a living entity shaped by its citizens and history. This book is essential for anyone seeking to grasp the intricacies of American governance and its underpinnings. Fiske's work not only serves as a foundational text for students of political science but also engages general readers interested in the philosophical roots of contemporary civil society. His nuanced analysis remains relevant, prompting critical reflections on the nature of democracy and governance in today's political landscape. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins
Table of Contents
Introduction
Understanding how American government works begins with understanding where its institutions came from. In Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins, John Fiske approaches the nation’s public framework through that pairing of function and ancestry. He presents the machinery of local, state, and national authority while pausing to note the precedents that shaped them, building clarity through careful organization rather than polemic. The result is an introduction that treats civics not as isolated rules but as a living inheritance. Readers encounter an orderly guide that renders complex structures intelligible, linking present practice to earlier forms and inviting reflective attention over haste.
This is a work of nonfiction in civic education and institutional history, grounded in the United States and informed by the historical scholarship of its era. First published in the late nineteenth century, it reflects a period when authors sought to explain the nation’s constitutional and administrative arrangements to a broad audience. Fiske brings to the task the perspective of a historian attuned to development over time, situating contemporary structures within long arcs of change. The book’s focus is practical and explanatory, offering an accessible map of governmental forms alongside a measured account of how those forms took shape.
The premise is straightforward: to describe how American government is organized and to illuminate the older patterns that informed it. Readers are guided through the relationships among local jurisdictions, the states, and the federal system, with attention to the ways authority is distributed and coordinated. Along the way, Fiske points to historical antecedents—especially those arising from colonial experience and English legal traditions—to show how familiar offices and procedures gained their character. The experience is that of a coherent primer: calm in tone, attentive to sequence, and designed to help newcomers find their bearings without assuming prior expertise.
Fiske’s voice is lucid and pedagogical, favoring plain exposition over rhetorical flourish. He builds from simpler elements to more complex arrangements, demonstrating how civic structures fit together in practice. Historical references appear as clarifying lenses rather than detours, used to reveal the continuities and adjustments that mark institutional life. The mood is steady and analytic, and the style encourages patient reading. While historically minded, the narrative remains anchored to concrete features of governance, so that readers come away with both a sense of origin and a functional understanding of the present-day system the book sets out to explain.
Key themes include federalism as a balance between unity and local autonomy, the importance of local self-government, and the endurance of legal and administrative traditions within a written constitutional order. The book emphasizes that institutions are not abstractions but frameworks for public action, shaped by experience and refined over time. By tracing lines from earlier practices to current forms, Fiske underscores how continuity and adaptation coexist. Readers are encouraged to consider why specific arrangements took hold, how they distribute responsibility, and what those patterns reveal about the practical and historical character of American public life.
For contemporary readers, the book offers relevance as a steadying primer in an often complicated civic landscape. Its method—pairing structural description with historical context—helps disentangle recurring questions about the roles of local, state, and national bodies. By grounding present institutions in their origins, it fosters perspective: today’s issues can be read with an eye to enduring frameworks rather than only to immediate controversies. Students, educators, and general readers may find in its pages a durable foundation for civic literacy, one that clarifies terminology, outlines relationships, and cultivates a disciplined way of thinking about public power and responsibility.
Approached as a guide and companion, Civil Government in the United States invites a methodical reading that rewards attention to definitions, sequences, and connections. Its careful pacing equips readers to move from the familiar to the structural, and from the structural to the historical, without losing the thread. What emerges is a framework for interpreting public institutions with calm confidence: a sense of how they are arranged, where they came from, and why their design matters. In bringing origins into view, Fiske’s book offers a clear path toward understanding how the nation governs itself and how that governance has taken form.
Synopsis
John Fiske's Civil Government in the United States, Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins is a systematic outline of American public institutions set against their historical background. Written as a clear guide for students and general readers, it explains how local, state, and national structures developed, how they are organized, and what functions they perform. The book proceeds from early European antecedents to colonial practices and then to the federal system framed in the late eighteenth century. Throughout, Fiske emphasizes continuity, showing that American arrangements are not inventions of a moment but results of gradual growth, adapted to changing conditions in society and territory. The treatment is descriptive rather than polemical, aiming to inform rather than persuade.
Beginning with English and earlier Teutonic roots, the narrative sketches the village community, the folk-moot, and the evolution of the township, hundred, and shire. It explains how habit and custom created self-governing practices long before formal theory, and how Norman and later royal influences introduced officers like the sheriff and strengthened royal justice. The rise of Parliament, representation, the jury system, and the common law supplied tools that the colonists carried to America. By tracing these features, the book connects American civil government to a tradition of local cooperation, customary law, and institutional balance that preceded the colonial experience and helped shape it.
In the colonies, these inherited forms took distinct shapes. Fiske describes three broad patterns of local government. In New England the town meeting became the central institution, with selectmen and committees administering roads, schools, and poor relief. In the South the county predominated, with justices of the peace and county courts managing public business across dispersed plantations. The Middle colonies presented mixed systems of township and county. Geography, settlement density, and religious organization influenced these arrangements. The account shows how daily participation in town, parish, and county affairs accustomed Americans to self-direction and prepared them for wider political cooperation and later constitutional development.
From colonial governments emerged the American states. The book outlines how, amid independence, colonies framed written constitutions, often with bills of rights, placing legislative, executive, and judicial powers in separate hands. State legislatures were commonly bicameral; governors were elected and limited; courts were organized on regular principles. Property qualifications for voting gradually relaxed. States assumed responsibilities for education, internal improvements, and policing. Charters and statutes defined counties, towns, and school districts. This state framework, varied in detail yet similar in outline, formed the principal arena of lawmaking and administration and served as a model for later institutional development and westward expansion.
The narrative then treats the first union under the Articles of Confederation, noting its inability to tax directly, regulate commerce effectively, or provide energetic administration. It recounts the movement for reform culminating in the Federal Convention of 1787 and the Constitution it produced. Compromises balanced large and small states and reconciled national authority with state autonomy. Enumerated powers, the supremacy of federal law, and a process of amendment were established, while ungranted powers were reserved to the states. Ratification debates led to the adoption of a federal Bill of Rights, securing civil and procedural protections against governmental overreach within the new constitutional order.
Fiske details the organization and powers of Congress. The House of Representatives, apportioned by population and elected for short terms, originates revenue measures and reflects immediate public opinion. The Senate, with equal state representation and longer terms, shares legislation and confirms appointments and treaties. Together they regulate commerce, levy taxes, coin money, raise armies, and declare war. The procedures of committees, debate, and conference are described, as are limits imposed by the Constitution on both Congress and the states. Impeachment provides a legislative check on officers, while appropriations and oversight connect lawmaking to the practical conduct of administration.
The executive power is presented through the office of the President. Elected indirectly by the electoral college for a fixed term, the President supervises federal administration through the heads of departments, issues messages, and executes the laws. Powers include the command of the armed forces, the veto of legislation, the negotiation of treaties (with senatorial consent), and the appointment of officers and judges. The book explains succession and the oath, notes the distinction between executive and legislative functions, and outlines checks such as impeachment and veto override. Civil service organization and the growth of departments illustrate practical administration and the conduct of national affairs.
Judicial power is vested in the Supreme Court and inferior federal courts, with jurisdiction over cases arising under the Constitution and laws, controversies between states, and disputes involving foreign parties. The account explains appellate review, the role of juries, and the doctrine that courts may set aside acts contrary to the fundamental law. Relations among states are defined through full faith and credit, privileges and immunities, and extradition. The Constitution guarantees each state a republican government. The book also describes territories, their governance, and the orderly admission of new states, showing how the Union expands while maintaining legal uniformity and structural coherence.
Finally, Fiske surveys municipal government and civic machinery. City charters, mayors, councils, and boards manage local services such as streets, policing, sanitation, and schools, financed chiefly by taxation. Elections, suffrage rules, and the mechanics of caucuses, primaries, and nominating conventions are explained, together with the functions of parties in organizing opinion. Juries, militias, and public education illustrate duties and benefits of citizenship. The presentation closes by emphasizing the central theme: American civil government is an outgrowth of earlier institutions, adapted through experience. Local self-government, written constitutions, and balanced powers combine to secure public order while preserving individual liberty.
Historical Context
Civil Government in the United States Considered with Some Reference to Its Origins appeared in Boston in 1890, at the crest of the Gilded Age, when the nation was urbanizing, industrial trusts were rising, and schools were standardizing civic instruction. John Fiske, a Cambridge-based historian, addresses the institutions as they existed in the late nineteenth century—federal departments in Washington, statehouses from Albany to Sacramento, and especially New England towns and county seats that embodied local self-rule. Post-Reconstruction politics, immigration surges, and municipal machines formed the backdrop. The book surveys contemporary offices, elections, courts, and fiscal powers, while constantly situating them in place—town halls, county courthouses, and Capitol chambers—and in time, after the Civil War’s national consolidation.
Fiske roots American arrangements in English constitutional growth. He emphasizes early Germanic and Anglo-Saxon institutions—the folk-moot, tithing, hundred, shire, and the sheriff—surviving the Norman Conquest of 1066 and adapting under common law. Magna Carta (Runnymede, 1215) limited royal prerogative; the Model Parliament (1295) institutionalized representation; and successive guarantees, including the Petition of Right (1628) and the Bill of Rights (1689) after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, circumscribed arbitrary rule. Parish vestries, justices of the peace, and juries sustained local governance. The book explicitly connects these milestones to American practices, presenting the New England town meeting and the county court as lineal descendants of medieval self-government, translated across the Atlantic.
Seventeenth-century colonies incubated self-rule that the book treats as prototypes of American local government. The Virginia House of Burgesses convened at Jamestown in 1619; the Mayflower Compact bound Plymouth settlers in 1620; and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) created a written frame of government at Hartford. Corporate and proprietary charters—Massachusetts Bay (1629), Maryland (1632), and Pennsylvania (1681)—shaped divergent institutions, while “salutary neglect” fostered autonomy. The Zenger trial in New York (1735) defended press liberty. Fiske uses these precedents to explain his typology: the “town system” of New England, the “county system” of the South and Middle Colonies, and a mixed system in places like Pennsylvania, each leaving durable imprints on states.
Imperial crisis and revolution produced national frameworks whose strengths and defects the book parses. Parliament’s Stamp Act (1765) catalyzed resistance; the First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in 1774; war opened at Lexington and Concord in April 1775; and independence was declared on July 4, 1776. The Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 and ratified in 1781, preserved state sovereignty but starved Congress of revenue and executive power. Shays’ Rebellion (Massachusetts, 1786–1787) dramatized fiscal disorder, while Yorktown (1781) and the Treaty of Paris (1783) secured independence. Two ordinances—the Land Ordinance (1785) and the Northwest Ordinance (1787)—structured territorial survey, public schools, and statehood. Fiske links these facts to the book’s argument for stronger union and coherent administration grounded in historical experience.
Fiske devotes his most sustained attention to the Constitution of 1787 and the architecture of federalism. Meeting in Philadelphia from May to September 1787, delegates led by figures such as James Madison, George Washington, and Gouverneur Morris forged compromises between the Virginia Plan’s proportional representation and the New Jersey Plan’s state equality. The Connecticut or “Great” Compromise created a bicameral Congress with equal state votes in the Senate and population-based seats in the House; the Three-Fifths Compromise apportioned representation and direct taxes; and the Electoral College mediated executive selection. Enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and the Supremacy Clause defined national competence. The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)—essays by Alexander Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay—argued for ratification achieved in 1788–1789, with the first federal government assembling in New York and later Philadelphia. The first ten amendments, proposed in 1789 and ratified in 1791, secured individual liberties and clarified limits on federal power. The Judiciary Act of 1789 organized federal courts, enabling constitutional adjudication. Marbury v. Madison (1803) announced judicial review; McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) upheld implied powers and national supremacy by protecting the Bank of the United States; Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) strengthened the Contracts Clause; and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) broadened the Commerce Clause. Challenges to union—state interposition in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (1798–1799) and the Nullification Crisis (South Carolina, 1832–1833)—tested constitutional boundaries, while Daniel Webster’s reply to Robert Hayne (1830) defended an indissoluble nation. Fiske uses these debates and cases to explain how separated powers, checks and balances, and a layered sovereignty work in practice, tracing a through-line from the Convention to the classroom and the courthouse, and showing how historical conflicts taught the operational grammar of American government.
Federal supremacy and citizenship were recast by civil war and Reconstruction, developments Fiske treats as constitutional watershed. Eleven states seceded in 1860–1861; Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861; and President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 1863) reframed the conflict. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery; the Fourteenth (1868) defined national citizenship and mandated due process and equal protection; and the Fifteenth (1870) prohibited race-based voting denials. Reconstruction Acts (1867) placed the South in military districts pending new constitutions. Subsequent decisions—Slaughter-House Cases (1873) and United States v. Cruikshank (1876)—constrained federal reach. The book integrates these measures into its account of national authority, civil rights, and state-federal relations.
The practical civics of the Gilded Age—central to the book’s classroom mission—involved parties, patronage, and cities. Andrew Jackson’s “spoils system” (from 1829) matured into machine rule, exemplified by New York’s Tammany Hall and the Tweed Ring (1869–1871), whose graft was exposed by Thomas Nast and the New York Times. President James A. Garfield’s assassination (1881) hastened the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act (1883), instituting competitive examinations. Regulation advanced through the Interstate Commerce Act (1887), and ballot secrecy spread after Massachusetts adopted the Australian ballot in 1888, with many states following by 1892. Fiske ties such reforms to the health of local institutions—school boards, councils, and mayors—urging informed voters to check corruption.
As a social and political critique, the book insists that constitutional order must be animated by civic competence and ethical administration. It exposes systemic vulnerabilities—spoils-driven appointments, bossism, and the manipulation of immigrants and the poor—and argues for civil service merit, secret ballots, and home-rule charters to curb urban corruption. It condemns sectional nullification and celebrates the post-1865 settlement of national supremacy, while warning against centralized despotism by defending robust town and county life as schools of citizenship. By rehearsing concrete cases and amendments, Fiske indicts ignorance as a civic vice and elevates historical understanding to a remedy for inequity and maladministration.
