1. Francis Lieber, Legal and Political Hermeneutics: Principles of Interpretation and Construction in Law and Politics, 3d. ed. (St. Louis: F. H. Thomas, 1880), iii; this edition hereafter cited in text as LPH. The passages I cite were relatively unaltered between the first (1837) and the third (1880) editions. The third edition added a new chapter on precedents and expanded the one on authorities, neither of which is discussed here. [BACK]

2. Thomas Sargeant Perry, ed., The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber (Boston: Osgood, 1882), 75. [BACK]

3. Perry, Life and Letters, 116. [BACK]

4. Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1986), 90. See also Robert A. Ferguson, Law and letters in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). [BACK]

5. Kammen, Machine, 87-88, 88. [BACK]

6. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist (New York:Heritage Press, 1945), no. 37. [BACK]

7. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Antifederalist, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vol. 2, no. 7.3. [BACK]

8. Richmond L. Hawkins, August Comte and the United States, 1816-1853 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936). [BACK]

9. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1969), 12. [BACK]

10. Senate Documents, 314, 24th Congress, 1st Session, 1836, Serial set 282, p. 1. [BACK]

11. Daniel P. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 188. [BACK]

12. Francis Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics, 2 vols., 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1911); this edition hereafter cited in text as PE. [BACK]

13. Frederick D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1977). On Schleiermacher, see Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), chap. 7; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1989),173-97. [BACK]

14. See Hans Frei, The Decline of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 251-52. [BACK]

15. These various works are collected in Miscellaneous Writings, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1881). This work hereafter cited in text as MW. [BACK]

16. John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). See Lieber's speech-act analysis of "fetch some soupmeat" in LPH, 18-19. [BACK]

17. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions in Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chap. 9. [BACK]

18. It is likely that lieber's personal experiences informed his judgment in this regard. As a student activist in Prussia, Lieber was briefly imprisoned after the assassination of August von Kotzebue by Lieber's friend Karl Sand. The Prussian police perused his diary, seizing on an entry that read, "all day murder lazy." According to Lieber's biographer, this phrase was student slang that the police completely misunderstood in their literal-mindedness, instead "torturing all possible meaning out of it." See Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1947), 25-26. [BACK]

19. Perry, Life and Letters, 116. [BACK]

21. Quoted in Freidel, Francis Lieber, 178. [BACK]

22. The fifth principle creates the exception to this, but only when the "superior" directs it. Although generally uninterested in questions of methodological rules, Gadamer (in Truth and Method, 154) gives an example from theological hermeneutics: "The allegorical method ... is legitimate only where the allegorical intention is given in scripture itself," as for example with parables. [BACK]

23. Bernard E. Brown, American Conservatives: The Political Thought of Francis Lieber and John W. Burgess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); and Rodgers, Contested Truths. [BACK]

24. Quoted in Freidel, Francis Lieber, 175. [BACK]