Edmund Randolph and Virginia Constitutionalism

Abstract

Scholars have long been under the impression that the doctrines enunciated in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799 and the Virginia Report of 1800 originated with the authors of those documents, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Yet this article demonstrates that it was not either of those two future presidents who concocted what Andrew Jackson would dub “the Virginia Doctrine.” That distinction belongs to Governor Edmund Randolph, a non-signer of the Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention who became a leading voice for ratification in the Virginia Ratification Convention of 1788. The trajectory of Randolph's thinking regarding federalism and the story of his doctrine's effect in 1788 are recounted here. Ironically, the reading of the Constitution that would underpin various outbreaks of sectionalism in the antebellum period and later originated with a Federalist of 1788, not with an opponent of ratification.