Kingless

Here you have the United States of America, home of liberty, theatre of manhood suffrage, kingless and lordless land of Protection, Republicanism, and the realized Radical Programme, where all the black chattel slaves were turned into wage-slaves (like my father's white fellows) at a cost of 800,000 lives and wealth incalculable.

How shall we sing a royal song in a kingless land?" Namale might have paraphrased the Psalmist.

In his survey of the forms of English republican discourse before and during the Civil War, Blair Worden provides a useful distinction between two key conceptions of republicanism, which he calls "constitutional republicanism," or "commitment to kingless government," and "civic republicanism," which denotes an ethos in which citizens actively pursue the public good rather than passively submitting to sovereign authority.