"But for Americans and Englishmen of the eighteenth century republicanism was also associated with the Commonwealth period of British history, when for a brief time England was ruled without King or lords; and indeed 'commonwealth' is the closest English equivalent to 'republic.' 'Republic,' then, had concrete institutional implications: it suggested a state in which all power flowed from the people, none from inherited title . . . The Americans' later conversion to republicanism represented, then, more than a reaffirmation of traditional conceptions of the corporate free state, in which all private interests must be sacrificed for the common good. It meant that the people alone would allocate power. It meant that the United States would have neither legally established nobility nor King."

Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776, pp. 287-288.

"Instead of locating sovereignty in either the national government or the state governments, the Federalists had located it in the people at large. By asserting that all sovereignty rested with the people, the Federalists were not simply saying, as theorists had for ages, that all governmental power was derived from the people. Instead they were saying that sovereignty, the final supreme indivisible lawmaking authority, remained always with the people and that government was only a temporary and limited agency of the people -- lent out to the various governmental officials, so to speak, on a short-term, always recallable loan. No longer could any parts of the state and federal governments, event the so-called popular houses of representatives, ever fully represent the people; instead all elected parts of the governments -- senators and governors and presidents -- were now regarded in one way or another as simply partial agents of the people."

From the essay "The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams" in Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Penguin Press 2006) at pp. 191-92.