Out of America’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, is the most eminently quotable; a 2003 poll also revealed it to be the American people’s favorite document. The Bill of Rights, meanwhile, maintains a cherished place in many an American heart with its enshrinement of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, the right to bear arms, protections against unfair courtroom proceedings and prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But the Constitution itself, from the Preamble to Article VII, seems to occupy a less familiar place in the American mind.
Save for an informative email from Larry Moneta last Thursday, it would have been easy for Constitution Day to come and go without any recognition. It’s easier still to forget, or misremember, what makes the Constitution so special.
Let’s start with the Preamble. Gouverneur Morris, a member of the New York delegation to the Constitutional Convention, insisted that the Constitution begin with the words “We the People,” not “We the States,” identifying individual citizens, not state governments, as the ultimate source of the national government’s legitimacy. Today, we seem to take “We the People” for granted, neglecting to recognize just how radical it was to write those words. During the Virginia ratifying convention, Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry scoffed at the language of the Preamble: “What right had they to say, We, the people?” The Framers, Henry argued, had exceeded their authority when they scrapped the Articles of Confederation in a convention intended merely to amend them.
We should be grateful that the Framers overstepped their bounds. The Constitution they crafted has not only benefited the United States but has also served as a model for the myriad republican governments that have taken root in the world since that pivotal summer of 1787 in Philadelphia.
Today, even the most repressive governments couch their legitimacy in the language of “We the People.” Myanmar’s constitution begins with the familiar phrase: “We, the National people…” Belarus, the last remaining dictatorship in Europe, opens its constitution with the words, “We, the People of the Republic of Belarus…” Syria’s constitution trumpets: “The completion of this Constitution crowns our people's struggle on the road of the principle of popular democracy…” For the citizenry of these countries, however, the promise of democracy, remains to be realized.
For millions of Americans, too, it took decades, if not centuries, of struggle for their country to fulfill the promise of the Constitution. The Constitution of 1787 included the Fugitive Slave Clause, which mandated that escaped slaves be delivered back to their owners. Women would not gain the right to vote until the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. It would take the Civil Rights Movement to break Jim Crow’s back and extend the rights and responsibilities of full citizenship to African Americans. The work of building a more inclusive democracy continues today.
The brilliance of the Constitution, then, is not that it was some kind of exhaustive law detailing the best policies on every issue for every era ad infinitum. The true genius of the Constitution is that it structures the politics of the country in such a way that successive generations of Americans, each seeking recognition of their rights, find in the Constitution words that speak to their aspirations and mechanisms that allow them to pursue their cause. When a destitute Florida convict was denied legal representation by the state, he looked to the Sixth Amendment and appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in the 9-0 Gideon v. Wainwright decision, upheld his right to counsel. When Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the March on Washington in August 1963, he spoke not only of a dream but also of a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” the Constitution’s promise of full American citizenship. As Justice Kennedy wrote this June in Obergefell v. Hodges, “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times.”
The Constitution doesn’t belong to Gouverneur Morris or James Madison or Roger Sherman alone. It doesn’t belong to Congress or the President or the Supreme Court. It belongs to you and me. It is ours to inherit, ours to question, ours to interpret, ours to amend, ours to pass on to our posterity.
The Constitution deserves our admiration but not our worship. It is a human document crafted by human hands, not divine scripture received from on high. We have Madison, not Moses, to thank for delivering it to us. In Federalist 14, Madison, writing as Publius, asked: “Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” We are wise to avoid “blind veneration” of the Constitution for a healthy acquaintance with the meaning of the Constitution breeds its own sort of informed veneration.
Matthew King is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Mondays.
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