E. Christian Kopff writes a rejoinder to Kevin Gutzman's There is No Authentic American Right—and a Good Thing, Too --Is America Unconservative?

I was looking for some books covering the Anglo-American political tradition, and Professor Kopff is of some help:

Willmoore Kendall and George Carey in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970) traced the American political tradition back to the Mayflower Compact of 1620 and other important documents that pre-date John Locke and could not have been influenced by him, like the Fundamental Order of Connecticut (1638-39) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641). Kendall and Carey argue that the American political tradition was not “derailed” until Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863). Barry Shain’s The Myth of American Individualism (1994) shows the centrality of Protestant Christianity and its communal character, founded in congregationalism. The importance of pre- and non-Lockean religious elements in the American Founding and their continuing importance is developed by Samuel Huntington in Who Are We?(2004)

He adds:

The importance of pre-Lockean traditions, British, Christian and Classical, has been made over and over again for generations after Hartz by scholars including P. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Carl Richard and many others. The importance of the Classical Tradition for the Constitution has been documented just last year by David J. Bederman, The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution (2008). Catherine Winterer’s The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002) has shown that the classical tradition continued to be influential for generations after the founding. The living significance of non-Lockean Christian and British traditions is part of the daily experience of most Americans.

Professor Gutzman responds: Left-wing America.

Grant Havers, Liberals and Illiberals
Richard Spencer, Re: Is America Unconservative?

Tom Piatak, America First, Of Course

Who cannot be ignorant of the Founders harkening back to the Classical age -- but is their understanding of government classical? What was inherited specifically from the modern English political tradition, and what, if anything, from the medievals?

Doing some further searching, I find an answer from Dr. Larison to a query:

For the Founders’ understanding of the relevant legal and political issues, I would have to recommend the primary sources of their own writings first and foremost (Regnery has a good edition of the political writings of John Adams with which I am familiar, and Jefferson’s writings are widely available), together with a combined reading of Filmer’s Patriarcha and Sydney’s Discourse Concerning Government (which was the Whig rebuttal of Filmer). There are several collections of Antifederalist and Federalist writings surrounding the ratification debates that convey the rival conceptions of the legal and political traditions both sides in the debates on the Constitution shared. As for studies of the more general background, I recommend The Language of Liberty by J.C.D. Clark for understanding the rhetorical and political tradition in which the Founders were working (this study extends beyond the Revolutionary period into the early 19th century, and treats both “sides” of the Anglo-American world together).

For the immediate post-independence period I recommend The Jeffersonian Persuasion by Lance Banning, particularly the connections it makes between the tradition of Country dissent against the Court (as represented by Bolingbroke) that the Jeffersonians relied upon in making their critiques of cities, merchants the “monied interest.” For some of the historical background of the 17th century, Crisis of Parliaments by the late Lord Russell is fairly good for the basic narrative up to the Civil War (I cannot claim that Russell is without his biases, but he was a good enough historian to keep them from overwhelming his interpretation). I’m afraid that American history is my amateur interest, not my professional area of expertise, so I am undoubtedly neglecting many very good and probably more important volumes that will help you more than my scattershot recommendations. I hope these help.

How little reading and research on this topic I've done since July 2006. That's rather pathetic.

More links:
Clyde Wilson, Nullification: Its Time Has Come Again
Lee Edwards, Revisiting Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order