This doesn't answer your question directly, but you may be interested in this previous answer of mine to another Constitutional question which touches on this issue. No, U.S. law did not start fresh. Early U.S. law relied on British common law, and drew from Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (a compendium of English common law) to address issues that had not been addressed by U.S. law yet. By 1833, enough Supreme Court cases had been decided that SCOTUS justice Joseph Story put together Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States which is a common law book of the United States. So it kind of went: if a lawsuit presented a genuine issue under the U.S. Constitution, then the Supreme Court would decide the case one way or the other. If the case did not present an issue that a Constitutional issue might need to be decided, but there was no actual federal law in the U.S. law code to rely on, then Blackstone's Commentaries would be used. But by the 1830s, such cases were few and far between, and Story's Commentaries could be used instead.