essay on benefits of constitution

Chapter 1 – Why Was the Constitution Necessary?

I doubt . . . whether any Convention we can obtain, maybe able to make a better constitution; for, when you assemble a number of men, to have the ad­vantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected? It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does.

Do you have a right to hold opinions that differ from others around you? Can you write and publish what you think? Can you worship as you believe? Can you protest to your government if you disapprove of its policies? Can the government search and seize your property? Can you be arrested and held without trial? Can the government treat you differently than it treats other people? As a citizen, you must know your constitutional rights in order to assert them.

Every society sets rules to live by. Our Constitution established the United States government and determined its relationship with the people and the individual states. As constitutions go, it is remarkably short and durable. Most state constitutions are hefty documents, and the proposed constitution of the European Union runs to 60,000 words. The original text of the U.S. Constitution, by comparison, came to only 4,200 words, and all its amendments, made over the course of two hundred years, added just another 3,000 words. Despite its brevity, the Constitution has continued to satisfy the needs of a nation that has grown enormously in territory and population, and has seen a vast expansion in both its international and domestic responsibilities.

In existence for more than two centuries, the Constitution has been amended infrequently. In order to win the campaign to ratify the Constitution, the supporters of the new government promised to add a bill of rights, guaranteeing certain basic protections to the people. Congress proposed the first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, almost as soon as the new government began. Although thousands of amendments have been proposed since then, only seventeen other amendments have been ratified. This means that the basic structure, functions, and powers of the federal government remain essentially the same as when the framers drafted them, giving the United States a bedrock of continuity and stability.

Because we live under these rules, it is essential that we know what they are, why they were established, how they have been implemented, and how they directly affect us. The Constitution not only designed a government but also placed limits on it to prevent arbitrary rule. Particularly through its amendments, the Constitution guarantees every American fundamental rights and protection of life, liberty, and property.

Our Constitution created an effective national government, one that balances expansive powers with specific limits. By contrast to its sturdy endurance, the first American government established under the Articles of Confederation in March 1781 showed signs of weakness and disorder within a few years after it was organized. That first national government depended upon the states for revenue but could not compel their cooperation. Surrounded by lands controlled by Great Britain, France, and Spain, Congress under the Articles of Confederation had trouble funding its own army. Its weaknesses troubled many of the leaders of the young republic. In 1787, they gathered in Philadelphia to form a more perfect union.

The road to the Philadelphia convention started two years earlier at Mount Vernon, the Virginia estate of General George Washington. The hero of the American Revolution brought together representatives from Virginia and Mary­land to settle navigation rights on the Potomac River, which ran between them. Following that gathering, the Virginia Assembly called for a larger conference to deal with trade among all thirteen states. Only five states bothered to send delegates to the meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, the following year. Although disappointed by the turnout, the delegates who had gathered were persuaded by a New Yorker, Alexander Hamilton, to call for a full constitutional convention to tackle the serious weaknesses in their union. They requested that the Confederation Congress issue formal invitations to the states to appoint delegates to meet in Philadelphia.

This Constitutional Convention drew fifty-five delegates from all but one of the states. Rhode Island, fearing national interference in its own state economic initiatives, stayed away. Those who decided to come to Philadelphia gained prestige when General Washington agreed not only to serve as a delegate but also as the convention’s presiding officer.

In May 1787, the delegates convened in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence had been adopted in 1776. The Confederation Congress had also met there until 1783, when American soldiers marched on Philadelphia to demand their unpaid salaries. Unable to raise sufficient funds either to provide for the military, or to protect itself, Congress hastily departed. The Confederation Congress met in several locations before it settled in New York City.

The inability of Congress to handle the soldiers’ protest demonstrated the powerlessness of America’s first national government. Real power rested with the individual states. The Articles of Confederation established a single legislature but no executive or judiciary branch. In that Congress, all the states had an equal vote, regardless of size. Delegates from seven states had to be present in order to conduct business. To amend the Articles required the unanimous agreement of all the states. These requirements made it difficult to get much done.

What the Articles of Confederation created was less a nation than a “league of friendship” among the thirteen states. The national government could make treaties and declare war, but it could not raise taxes or require the states to provide the funds that it requested. Nor could it stop the states from imposing taxes on each other’s exports. The weak national government was in no position to prevent the American economy from sinking into depression.

In Massachusetts, during the winter of 1786, deeply indebted farmers whose land was being foreclosed refused to pay their state taxes, shut down the local courts, and seized a government arsenal. Troops from Massachusetts put down the farmers’ revolt—known as Shays’ Rebellion after its leader, Daniel Shays—while the Confederation Congress stood helpless in the crisis. “From the high ground we stood upon,” General Washington despaired in a May 18, 1786, letter to John Jay, “to be so fallen! So lost! It is really mortifying.” To national leaders, including Washington, the need for a stronger central government grew increasingly evident. Yet Americans had only recently rebelled against a tyrannical government, and remained suspicious of a concentration of government power.

This was the dilemma facing the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia. Fortunately, they were well educated and experienced in law and government. Eight of them had signed the Declaration of Independence. A third had served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Most had been members of the Continental Congress or the Congress under the Articles of Confederation. They ranged from young men, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who were still in their thirties, to the eighty-year-old Benjamin Franklin. They were merchants, planters, and professionals who had a personal interest in creating and preserving a stable society. Some of them had read widely in history and philosophy and had studied other forms of government, from republics to monarchies.

The delegates did not intend to produce the type of “pure democracy” that existed in the ancient Greek city states, where citizens voted on everything. Instead, during their debates several of the delegates warned against the “ex­cesses of democracy,” with its “turbulence and follies,” and “dangerous leveling spirit.” They were more impressed with the ancient Roman republic, where representatives of both the aristocracy and the people had a say in passing laws.

As British subjects by birth, all the delegates shared in the British legal tradition dating back to the writing of the Magna Carta (the Great Charter) in 1215, which stated that all people have rights that even a king has to respect. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention were also influenced by the ideas of philosophers from the European Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century intellectual movement that emphasized rational thought. These philosophers had defined ideal governments as ones in which power was separated between executive, legislative, and judicial branches that could check and balance each other.

As North Americans, the delegates had the additional example of the Iroquois Confederation, in which five Native American tribes in New York State governed themselves independently but also sent their chiefs to a Great Council to make decisions on larger issues of war and peace affecting the five tribes.

In writing a constitution the delegates departed from the practice in Great Britain, where the government was established not by a single document but rather by the entire body of British common law, the rulings of judges and parliamentary legislation. The delegates were instead continuing a colonial tradition that dated back to the Mayflower Compact of 1620, and other colonial charters. These systems had accustomed Americans to the idea of a single document serving as a contract between the people and their government.

For Ratification of the Constitution

Often called the Father of the Constitution, James Madison was born in 1751 and raised on a plantation in Orange County, Virginia. He graduated from the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) during the American Revolution, but his fragile health kept him from military service. Madison instead involved himself in public affairs by helping to write Virginia’s first constitution. He served in both the Continental Congress and the Confederation Congress, and was a delegate to the Annapolis Convention. Having lost faith in the government formed under the Articles of Confederation, he actively promoted the Constitutional Convention and took the lead in drafting the Virginia Plan, which offered the basic structure of the new government. After winning Virginia’s ratification of the Constitution, Madison was elected to the House of Representatives during the First Congress. There he led the Federalists and sponsored the Bill of Rights.

Madison grew troubled over the policies of Presidents George Washington and John Adams. He joined with Thomas Jefferson in founding the Democratic-Republican Party in opposition to the Federalists. When Jefferson became President in 1801 he named Madison as his secretary of state. Later Madison succeeded Jefferson, serving as President from 1809 to 1817. During his administration, the United States declared war on Great Britain. In August 1814, British troops invaded Washington, D.C., and burned the Capitol and White House, forcing Madison to flee to safety. America’s pride was salvaged by victory of its troops at New Orleans. Madison devoted his last years as President to rebuilding the capital and the national economy. At the time of his death in 1836, James Madison was the last surviving delegate to the Constitutional Convention.

When the delegates convened, Virginia’s Governor Edmund Randolph offered a bold proposal that they not simply revise the Articles of Confederation but create an entirely new form of national government. Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan, which outlined a Congress with two bodies: a House of Representatives and a Senate. The new government would also have a separate executive branch, headed by a president, who would be both chief executive and commander in chief of the armed forces. The plan also called for an independent judiciary.

Although Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan, its actual author was James Madison, a young Virginian who served in the Confederation Congress and knew its weaknesses firsthand. Much of what we know today about the Constitutional Convention we owe to Madison, who kept detailed notes of the secret sessions. In an effort to avoid public pressures that might hinder their ability to reach a consensus, the delegates had barred the doors and windows and conducted all their business away from public view. The official minutes of the convention recorded little of the debate between the delegates. But Madison took a seat in front of the chamber, where he could hear the presiding officer and members on both sides, and he diligently kept a daily journal that summarized the members’ arguments. His notes reveal the shared sentiments and disagreements among the delegates, the alternative proposals they considered, and the compromises they reached. Not published until after his death, Madison’s notes have become an essential source for jurists who ponder the founders’ intent for each provision of the Constitution.

The Virginia Plan envisioned a republic based on popular consent. Elected officials would represent the people, although the people could vote directly only for members of the House of Representatives. State legislatures would elect senators. Members of an Electoral College, chosen by the people, would elect the President. The Virginia Plan provided that each state would have representation in the House and Senate that reflected the size of their populations. This was the desire of the larger states, which blamed the Articles of Confederation’s weakness on the equal representation of the states. Because every state had one vote under the old system, the smaller states, representing a minority of the population, could block the will of the majority.

The smaller states refused to accept any plan that sacrificed their equality. They countered with a plan, introduced by William Patterson of New Jersey, that would have preserved the government structure under the Articles of Confederation. The convention voted to reject the New Jersey Plan in favor of the Virginia Plan, granting the larger states the most members in both houses of the new Congress. But the smaller states would not tolerate inequality, and they continued to fight for their rights. The convention reached an impasse, just as it planned to take a few days off to celebrate the Fourth of July. It appointed a special committee to try to work out the disagreement during the recess. Chaired by Roger Sherman of Connecticut, the committee split the difference between the two factions. It proposed that the larger House of Representatives reflect the size of each state’s population, while the states would have equal representation in the Senate. This became known as the Connecticut Compromise, or the Great Compromise. The delegates accepted the compromise and, as an additional assurance to the smaller states, wrote into the Constitution that no state would lose its equality in the Senate without its consent (which, of course, no state would give). Through this compromise, the Constitution went on to create a single nation from a confederation of states. Yet, the states remained as permanent and integral parts of the new federal system.

The absence of anyone representing Rhode Island served as a reminder to the other delegates that it would be folly for them to require unanimity in any new form of government. They provided that the Constitution could be ratified by the vote of nine of the thirteen states. Nor would unanimity be needed for future amendments. Instead, the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states would be required to ratify an amendment.

From May until September 1787, the delegates deliberated over all aspects of the new government. They worked out its structure and listed the specific powers of each branch. However, they left considerable flexibility in implementing those powers, by giving Congress the power to make all laws “necessary and proper” for carrying out its explicit powers. The great difficulty in framing a government, as James Madison pointed out in The Federalist , the papers written to support ratification of the Constitution, was first to “enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” Assuming that human nature would always be the same, and that powerful leaders would inevitably try to amass greater power, the Constitution divided power among the branches of government and created a system of checks and balances. Madison reasoned that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

On September 17, 1787, most of the delegates signed the new Constitution. A few of them, notably Virginia’s George Mason, declined to add their signatures on the grounds that the Constitution lacked a bill of rights that would identify and protect the rights of citizens. The weary delegates had voted down a bill of rights on the grounds that the state constitutions already protected the people’s liberties. Otherwise, the signers had good reason to feel satisfied with their accomplishment. The elderly Benjamin Franklin pointed out at the end of their deliberations that the back of the chair where General Washington sat while presiding had a half-sun carved upon it. Often during the debates he had “looked at that behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting,” he said. “But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

Afterward, some of the delegates traveled directly to New York City to serve in the Confederation Congress. They presented the Constitution to the Congress, which transmitted it to the states for ratification. Proponents of the Constitution identified themselves as Federalists. Its skeptics became known as Anti-Federalists. The opponents feared the Constitution would create a powerful central government that would overwhelm the states and would run contrary to the democratic spirit of the American Revolution. They were particularly agitated over the Constitution’s lack of a bill of rights.

Unlike the idealistic Declaration of Independence, which had declared that “all men are created equal . . . [and] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” the Constitution made little reference to religion, except to prohibit any religious test as a qualification for candidates for federal office. It did, however, date its completion “in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven,” as was customary at the time. The Constitution was a pragmatic document that sought to balance the varied interests of the large and small states, the mass of people and the wealthier elite, and those who supported and those who opposed human slavery.

Against Ratification of the Constitution

George Mason had never left his native Virginia until he traveled to Philadelphia as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention.He preferred to remain at his comfortable home, Gun­ston Hall, but went to the convention because he favored a stronger national government. Born on a Virginia plantation in 1725, Mason was a planter and also treasurer of the Ohio Company, which sold land to settlers moving westward. To assist his work with the Ohio Company, he read each of the colonial charters. This experience proved handy in 1776, when he joined with Virginia patriots in writing the state’s Declaration of Rights and its first constitution.

Mason served as a delegate to the conference held at Mount Vernon in 1785, and became one of Virginia’s delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. At first he worked closely with his fellow Virginia delegate, James Madison, but soon their thinking diverged and Mason grew disillusioned. Mason feared the Constitution gave too much authority to the President over Congress, and too much power to the national government over the states. When Mason lost a motion to add a bill of rights he told the delegates that he would rather “chop off his right hand than put it to the constitution as it now stands.” Back in Virginia, he fought against ratification. Not even Congress’s enactment of the Bill of Rights appeased Mason. He died in 1792, suspicious of the Constitution to the end.

Slavery seemed to many Americans contradictory to their Revolution’s principles of freedom and equality. The northern states had already begun to abolish slavery at the time of the Constitutional Convention, but the southern states were growing more dependent on slave labor. At the convention, southern delegates insisted that the Constitution not interfere with slavery. Northerners agreed, both because they considered slavery a state matter, and because they felt that the southern states would never enter the Union without such a guarantee.

The framers did not use the word “slave” in the Constitution, but referred instead to “other persons” when addressing issues related to slavery and the slave population. The Constitution prohibited Congress from ending the importation of slaves before 1808. It also provided that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person to determine taxation and representation in Congress. (At the time, slaves accounted for about 20 percent of the U.S. population, mostly concentrated in the South.)

During the ratification of the Constitution, the most inflammatory issue was not its toleration of slavery but its lack of a bill of rights. Thomas Jefferson, who had drafted the Declaration of Independence, was away serving as the American minister to France. Jefferson admired the delegates’ work, but he wrote to his friend James Madison that “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth . . . and what no just government should refuse.” Many other Americans shared Jefferson’s concern about the protection of their rights.

In order to win ratification, the authors of the Constitution needed to explain and defend their handiwork to the people. Under the joint pen name of Publius (Latin for “the public” or “the people”), James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote a brilliant series of essays published in newspapers throughout the states in 1788. These essays have been reprinted in book form in many editions since then, and are known today as The Federalist . They explained how the new government would work, and sought to calm people’s apprehensions about it. In one of his essays, Madison discussed the failure of past republics when one faction grew so strong that it dominated and suppressed all others. Madison predicted that the American republic would survive because of its size and its continued growth. In a large republic, no single faction would predominate, he reasoned. This would prevent a powerful majority from suppressing the rights of the minority. As Americans moved westward into new territories, they would form new states that would join the Union and add even more groups into the equation. The arguments put forth by the authors of The Federalist carried great weight, and they still inform us about the thinking of the framers of the Constitution.

On December 7, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution, and other states quickly followed. The fiercest battles took place in the larger states. In Virginia, Revolutionary War patriots such as Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee opposed the Constitution, while Washington and Madison argued in its favor. To gain support, Madison pledged that the new government would move speedily to adopt a bill of rights. On June 25, 1788, after four months of debate, the Virginia convention voted 89 to 79 for ratification. On July 26, New York concluded an equally divisive debate and approved the Constitution by the narrow margin of 30 to 27. North Carolina’s convention voted against ratification, however, and Rhode Island never called a convention. Still, eleven of the thirteen states had ratified the Constitution, which was two more than required. North Carolina eventually joined the Union in 1789, and Rhode Island in 1790.

Among its last acts, the outgoing Confederation Congress set the first Wednesday in January of 1789 as the date for the first Presidential election. The Electoral College would cast its ballots on the first Wednesday in February, and the new government would begin on the first Wednesday in March. But on March 4, 1789, neither the House nor the Senate could establish a quorum. Both had to wait until April, when enough members arrived to conduct the business of implementing the new Constitution. Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were elected as members of the First Congress, including James Madison, who served in the House of Representatives.

Representative Madison, true to his word, introduced a bill of rights. Congress crafted his proposals into twelve amendments. The states ratified ten of them, which became known as the Bill of Rights. Two hundred years later, in 1992, the states ratified the eleventh of these original amendments, which dealt with congressional pay increases. (The unratified twelfth amendment would have set the number of people to be represented in each congressional district at fifty thousand, a number so low that the House of Representatives would by now have grown to many thousands of members.)

Over the following centuries, Congress continued to enact all laws “necessary and proper” to carry out the powers enumerated in the Constitution. Presidents vastly expanded their power in competition with Congress. The Supreme Court became the final arbiter of whether acts of Congress or Presidential actions were constitutional. Beginning with the case of Marbury v. Madison (1804), the Supreme Court asserted its right to declare laws unconstitutional—a power that is implied but not specified in the Constitution. In the case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Chief Justice John Marshall observed that the Constitution provided only the “great outlines” of government. The brevity of the document suggested that its authors expected judges to interpret its meaning, and anticipated flexibility in its implementation.

Growing from thirteen to fifty states, the United States spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, with a larger population, a more complex economy, and a mightier military than the authors of the Constitution could possibly have imagined. Yet the Constitution remains essentially the same document they drafted during the summer of 1787. The Constitution’s succinctness helped it to survive largely intact, forcing Presidents, Congress, and the courts to find new applications periodically to meet changing circumstances and cope with new problems. Understanding the Constitution requires careful reading of the original document and its amendments, taking into consideration what we know about its framers’ intent, and the ways in which generations of judges have construed its language to make it work.

The Federalist No. 10: Growth will strengthen the republic

At the time that the Constitution was written, people worried that past republics had worked best in small governments such as city-states. James Madison saw different possibilities and argued in The Federalist that the American republic would grow stronger as it expanded because it would be harder for any one group to dominate it.

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.

Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic—is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it.

Table of Contents

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Why is the constitution important, the overall importance of the constitution.

The U.S. Constitution is important because it established a central government with power distributed across three federal branches and the states. The Constitution is also important because it protects individual rights and liberties while allowing the United States to function under a democratic system.

The Origins of the Constitution

The Constitution originated out of a need for a stronger central government . Although the Articles of Confederation from the Revolutionary War established a union among the states, it left most powers to the states. The Articles only granted limited powers to a one-house Congress at the federal level, and there was no executive branch . 

The weaknesses of the articles and federal government included not having the power to tax or regulate commerce. As revealed by an uprising of indebted farmers called Shays’ Rebellion, the federal government also lacked the power to stop such rebellions.

Recognizing these and other problems, political leaders like Alexander Hamilton and founding father James Madison convened a convention in Philadelphia to create the Constitution.

The Constitutional Convention and Importance of Dividing Powers

In 1787, fifty-five delegates from the states decided to draft a new constitution to hold the nation together in a stronger way, but also in a way that would avoid tyranny. The first aim was to establish a national government that would divide powers and contains a system of checks and balances . Hence, the three branches–the legislative, executive, and judicial–were created with provisions that would prevent one branch from being too dominant.

The Constitution also divides power between the national and state governments. This important arrangement is called federalism, a shared basis of power between the central government and the states. Further, the Constitution protects individual liberties from being abused by the government. A significant accomplishment of the Constitution was finding a means to agree on this basis of power.

Likewise, it was important that the states’ ratification, or approval, of the Constitution, actually occurred. This meant overcoming the divide between those who supported ratifying the Constitution, called Federalists , and those who opposed it, the anti-Federalists . This was largely accomplished by the agreement to add the Bill of Rights to the Constitution during the first meeting of Congress.

The Significance of the Bill of Rights and its Protections

Although some protections of individual rights are provided in the articles of the Constitution, most protections derive from the Bill of Rights . These are the first ten amendments of the Constitution , including freedom of speech and religion. Such protections were initially aimed at the federal government, but additional amendments also secured protections against state governments.

The Significance of the 14th Amendment

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified and provided for the crucial protection of citizenship rights against state abuses. For example, it specified that states could not take away a person’s life, liberty, or property without due process of the law. This amendment also made it illegal for states to deny equal protection of the laws. 

Permanent Yet Changeable Constitution

The Constitution is also important because of how it is structured. It is meant to be a permanent social contract between the government and the people, but it can be altered. While it is possible to add an amendment , the process is arduous, including that a proposed amendment be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

How Else is the Constitution Valuable Today?

The Constitution remains valuable in the modern day in many ways beyond those discussed above. For instance, it guarantees that each state will have a republican form of government . It also allows individuals to gather and protest or vote in an election.

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Today, the American Constitution still serves as the main structure for keeping the nation together. The president, any person in Congress, or the Supreme Court is accountable to it, not above it. The states still reserve certain powers to themselves. Individuals are still protected from both federal and state governments.

Guiding Principles of the Constitution

What ultimately makes the United States Constitution important is the way that it guides the U.S. nation. It provides a set of principles to instill a flexible democratic form of government . In the end, it is the supreme law of the land . 

Alicia Reynolds

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Constitution

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 28, 2023 | Original: October 27, 2009

The Constitution of the United States established America’s national government and fundamental laws, and guaranteed certain basic rights for its citizens. 

It was signed on September 17, 1787, by delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Under America’s first governing document, the Articles of Confederation, the national government was weak and states operated like independent countries. At the 1787 convention, delegates devised a plan for a stronger federal government with three branches—executive, legislative and judicial—along with a system of checks and balances to ensure no single branch would have too much power. 

The Preamble to the U.S. Constitution

The Preamble outlines the Constitution's purpose and guiding principles. It reads:

The Bill of Rights were 10 amendments guaranteeing basic individual protections, such as freedom of speech and religion, that became part of the Constitution in 1791. To date, there are 27 constitutional amendments.

Articles of Confederation

America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation , was ratified in 1781, a time when the nation was a loose confederation of states, each operating like independent countries. The national government was comprised of a single legislature, the Congress of the Confederation; there was no president or judicial branch.

The Articles of Confederation gave Congress the power to govern foreign affairs, conduct war and regulate currency; however, in reality these powers were sharply limited because Congress had no authority to enforce its requests to the states for money or troops.

Did you know? George Washington was initially reluctant to attend the Constitutional Convention. Although he saw the need for a stronger national government, he was busy managing his estate at Mount Vernon, suffering from rheumatism and worried that the convention wouldn't be successful in achieving its goals.

Soon after America won its independence from Great Britain with its 1783 victory in the American Revolution , it became increasingly evident that the young republic needed a stronger central government in order to remain stable.

In 1786, Alexander Hamilton , a lawyer and politician from New York , called for a constitutional convention to discuss the matter. The Confederation Congress, which in February 1787 endorsed the idea, invited all 13 states to send delegates to a meeting in Philadelphia.

Forming a More Perfect Union

On May 25, 1787, the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence had been adopted 11 years earlier. There were 55 delegates in attendance, representing all 13 states except Rhode Island , which refused to send representatives because it did not want a powerful central government interfering in its economic business. George Washington , who’d become a national hero after leading the Continental Army to victory during the American Revolution, was selected as president of the convention by unanimous vote.

The delegates (who also became known as the “framers” of the Constitution) were a well-educated group that included merchants, farmers, bankers and lawyers. Many had served in the Continental Army, colonial legislatures or the Continental Congress (known as the Congress of the Confederation as of 1781). In terms of religious affiliation, most were Protestants. Eight delegates were signers of the Declaration of Independence, while six had signed the Articles of Confederation.

At age 81, Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) was the oldest delegate, while the majority of the delegates were in their 30s and 40s. Political leaders not in attendance at the convention included Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and John Adams (1735-1826), who were serving as U.S. ambassadors in Europe. John Jay (1745-1829), Samuel Adams (1722-1803) and John Hancock (1737-93) were also absent from the convention. Virginia’s Patrick Henry (1736-99) was chosen to be a delegate but refused to attend the convention because he didn’t want to give the central government more power, fearing it would endanger the rights of states and individuals.

Reporters and other visitors were barred from the convention sessions, which were held in secret to avoid outside pressures. However, Virginia’s James Madison (1751-1836) kept a detailed account of what transpired behind closed doors. (In 1837, Madison’s widow Dolley sold some of his papers, including his notes from the convention debates, to the federal government for $30,000.)

Debating the Constitution

The delegates had been tasked by Congress with amending the Articles of Confederation; however, they soon began deliberating proposals for an entirely new form of government. After intensive debate, which continued throughout the summer of 1787 and at times threatened to derail the proceedings, they developed a plan that established three branches of national government–executive, legislative and judicial. A system of checks and balances was put into place so that no single branch would have too much authority. The specific powers and responsibilities of each branch were also laid out.

Among the more contentious issues was the question of state representation in the national legislature. Delegates from larger states wanted population to determine how many representatives a state could send to Congress, while small states called for equal representation. The issue was resolved by the Connecticut Compromise, which proposed a bicameral legislature with proportional representation of the states in the lower house ( House of Representatives ) and equal representation in the upper house (Senate).

Another controversial topic was slavery. Although some northern states had already started to outlaw the practice, they went along with the southern states’ insistence that slavery was an issue for individual states to decide and should be kept out of the Constitution. Many northern delegates believed that without agreeing to this, the South wouldn’t join the Union. For the purposes of taxation and determining how many representatives a state could send to Congress, it was decided that enslaved people would be counted as three-fifths of a person. Additionally, it was agreed that Congress wouldn’t be allowed to prohibit the slave trade before 1808, and states were required to return fugitive enslaved people to their owners.

Ratifying the Constitution

By September 1787, the convention’s five-member Committee of Style (Hamilton, Madison, William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, Gouverneur Morris of New York, Rufus King of Massachusetts ) had drafted the final text of the Constitution, which consisted of some 4,200 words. On September 17, George Washington was the first to sign the document. Of the 55 delegates, a total of 39 signed; some had already left Philadelphia, and three–George Mason (1725-92) and Edmund Randolph (1753-1813) of Virginia , and Elbridge Gerry (1744-1813) of Massachusetts–refused to approve the document. In order for the Constitution to become law, it then had to be ratified by nine of the 13 states.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, with assistance from John Jay, wrote a series of essays to persuade people to ratify the Constitution. The 85 essays, known collectively as “The Federalist” (or “The Federalist Papers”), detailed how the new government would work, and were published under the pseudonym Publius (Latin for “public”) in newspapers across the states starting in the fall of 1787. (People who supported the Constitution became known as Federalists, while those opposed it because they thought it gave too much power to the national government were called Anti-Federalists.)

Beginning on December 7, 1787, five states– Delaware , Pennsylvania, New Jersey , Georgia and Connecticut–ratified the Constitution in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document, as it failed to reserve un-delegated powers to the states and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech, religion and the press. 

In February 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document with the assurance that amendments would be immediately proposed. The Constitution was thus narrowly ratified in Massachusetts, followed by Maryland and South Carolina . On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document, and it was subsequently agreed that government under the U.S. Constitution would begin on March 4, 1789. George Washington was inaugurated as America’s first president on April 30, 1789. In June of that same year, Virginia ratified the Constitution, and New York followed in July. On February 2, 1790, the U.S. Supreme Court held its first session, marking the date when the government was fully operative.

Rhode Island, the last holdout of the original 13 states, finally ratified the Constitution on May 29, 1790.

The Bill of Rights

In 1789, Madison, then a member of the newly established U.S. House of Representatives , introduced 19 amendments to the Constitution. On September 25, 1789, Congress adopted 12 of the amendments and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten of these amendments, known collectively as the Bill of Rights , were ratified and became part of the Constitution on December 10, 1791. The Bill of Rights guarantees individuals certain basic protections as citizens, including freedom of speech, religion and the press; the right to bear and keep arms; the right to peaceably assemble; protection from unreasonable search and seizure; and the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury. For his contributions to the drafting of the Constitution, as well as its ratification, Madison became known as “Father of the Constitution.”

To date, there have been thousands of proposed amendments to the Constitution. However, only 17 amendments have been ratified in addition to the Bill of Rights because the process isn’t easy–after a proposed amendment makes it through Congress, it must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. The most recent amendment to the Constitution, Article XXVII, which deals with congressional pay raises, was proposed in 1789 and ratified in 1992.

The Constitution Today

In the more than 200 years since the Constitution was created, America has stretched across an entire continent and its population and economy have expanded more than the document’s framers likely ever could have envisioned. Through all the changes, the Constitution has endured and adapted.

The framers knew it wasn’t a perfect document. However, as Benjamin Franklin said on the closing day of the convention in 1787: “I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such, because I think a central government is necessary for us… I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain may be able to make a better Constitution.” Today, the original Constitution is on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Constitution Day is observed on September 17, to commemorate the date the document was signed.

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Background Essay: “A Glorious Liberty Document:” The U.S. Constitution and Its Principles

Guiding Questions: How are republican principles of limited government, separation of powers, and checks and balances reflected in the U.S. Constitution?

• I can identify the ways the Founders tried to limit the power of the government.
• I can explain how the principles of government in the Constitution limit the power of the government.
• I can explain how the Constitution protects liberty.

Essential Vocabulary

Introduction.

In 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave a speech on the meaning of the Fourth of July. He addressed the inequalities and injustices for Black Americans that made them feel they did not belong and had no reason to celebrate the holiday. However, he also stated his belief that the Constitution was “a glorious liberty document.” Douglass believed that the document created a constitutional government with the central purpose of protecting liberty and a free society for all Americans.

The Founders of the Constitution wanted to build a new and enduring representative government based on the authority of the people. Important constitutional principles guided their work at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787. The balancing act of including these principles was difficult but necessary to protect the liberties of the people. Given their assumptions about human nature, and always keeping in mind the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the Founders created a Constitution rooted in sound principles of government.

Human Nature and Limited Government

The Founders’ understanding of human nature determined the kind of government they created. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison asked, “What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” The Founders believed that humans were flawed but capable of virtue. Therefore, humans must be allowed to govern themselves, but that government had to be limited and controlled by the people, or liberty would be lost.

The Constitution defines the powers of the national government. Some powers are enumerated powers , or specifically listed. Others are implied powers or not explicitly listed. These are powers that relate to other powers and are therefore implied. For example, the power to raise an army for defense implicitly includes the power to raise an air force. The Founders wanted to strengthen the national government over what existed under the Articles of Confederation, but they also wanted to limit the powers of that government.

Republican Government and Popular Sovereignty

Based upon the Enlightenment ideas of John Locke, the Declaration asserted that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and thus laid the basis for American self-government. This is the principle of popular sovereignty , which means the people hold ultimate authority. The authority of the people themselves is the greatest limit on the power of the government. In Federalist No. 39 , Madison defined a republic as a government that derives its powers from the people and is governed by representatives elected by the people to serve for a defined period.

The republican principle of self-government guided the Founders in creating the new constitutional government. The Preamble begins, “We the People,” and lists the guiding principles of government. The Constitution also provides for defined terms of office, including two years for the House of Representatives, four years for the president, and six years for the Senate. The most republican feature of the Constitution is the predominance of the legislative branch, which is closest to the people.

Separation of Powers

The Founders trusted the people and their representatives in the new government but created additional tools to prevent government from amassing too much power. Madison made it clear in Federalist No. 48 that the people cannot rely on mere “parchment barriers,” limits written on paper, to control government. Government is most effectively limited through well-founded institutions. The Founders chose to divide power as the best way to avoid tyranny and to ensure the rights of the people are protected. The Constitution contains many examples of the separation of powers . Each division of government exercises distinct powers to carry out its functions and to prevent the accumulation of power. The Congress is divided into two houses—a House of Representatives and a Senate—in a principle called bicameralism. The national government is divided into three branches with different powers and functions to prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful. A legislature makes the law, an executive enforces the law, and a judiciary interprets the law. Some specific constitutional examples are Congress’s power to declare war, the president’s power to make treaties, and the courts’ power to hear cases resulting from legal disputes. The government is also divided into different levels—national, state, and local—to separate power and limit government. This principle of different levels of government having their respective powers is called federalism .

Checks and Balances

Another central device limiting the power of the national government is the provision for the three branches to check and balance each other’s powers. The Constitution contains many such examples of checks and balances . Congress may pass a law, but the president has to sign or veto it. The president can make treaties, but the Senate has to ratify them. The Supreme Court can review a congressional law or an executive order. Another example is that the House can impeach a president and the Senate can remove a president from office if found guilty in a trial presided over by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. There are numerous other examples that would make a very long list.

The division of power among different levels of government is called federalism. As Madison described in Federalist No. 39 , the Constitution is a mixture of the national and the federal principles. In other words, sometimes the national government has exclusive power, and at other times, the national government shares power with the states. Some examples of federalism from the Constitution include the ratification process for the document itself. The people and their representatives had to decide whether to ratify, or approve, the Constitution in popular ratifying [approving] conventions in the states. The amendment process includes ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures or state conventions. Structuring these processes through the states ensures that approval of and changes to the national government are balanced among the states. Similarly, the Senate equally comprises two senators per state, who were originally elected by state legislatures. The Electoral College gives the states a voice in presidential elections through electors the states choose. These provisions also ensure that though the federal government is supreme, the states have a meaningful role in the system.

In the American federal system, both the national and state governments have sovereignty. In general, the national government is sovereign over national matters, such as national defense, foreign trade, and immigration, while states are sovereign over local matters, including basic rules of public order. As Madison noted in Federalist No. 45 , “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” In the federal system, the ultimate power to make decisions for the entire nation rests exclusively with the national government, which, when operating under its proper jurisdiction,is supreme in its enumerated powers. Article VI of the Constitution states that the Constitution, all constitutional laws, and all treaties are the supreme law of the land. More generally, the Constitution empowers the national government to govern for the entire nation. It makes the laws for the country. It makes decisions related to war and peace and conducts relations with foreign nations. It regulates trade between the states and settles disputes among them.

Constitutional Government

American constitutional government is rooted in the ideas of limited government, popular sovereignty, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. These ideas protect the liberties of the people and their right to govern themselves. The Constitution contains words and principles that have the flexibility to respond to centuries of social, economic, and technological change. While the text of the Constitution has words that should be adhered to closely, they are hardly etched in marble. Besides the amendment process that offers a constitutional means of change over time, the American people and their representatives breathe life into the meaning of their Founding documents. They have done so for more than two centuries, through civil dialogue, debate, and deliberation, to reason through the often contested meaning of the Constitution.

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“A Glorious Liberty Document”: The U.S. Constitution and Its Principles

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The first amendment, the declaration, the constitution, and the bill of rights.

by Jeffrey Rosen and David Rubenstein

At the National Constitution Center, you will find rare copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These are the three most important documents in American history. But why are they important, and what are their similarities and differences? And how did each document, in turn, influence the next in America’s ongoing quest for liberty and equality?

There are some clear similarities among the three documents. All have preambles. All were drafted by people of similar backgrounds, generally educated white men of property. The Declaration and Constitution were drafted by a congress and a convention that met in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia (now known as Independence Hall) in 1776 and 1787 respectively. The Bill of Rights was proposed by the Congress that met in Federal Hall in New York City in 1789. Thomas Jefferson was the principal drafter of the Declaration and James Madison of the Bill of Rights; Madison, along with Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson, was also one of the principal architects of the Constitution.

Most importantly, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are based on the idea that all people have certain fundamental rights that governments are created to protect. Those rights include common law rights, which come from British sources like the Magna Carta, or natural rights, which, the Founders believed, came from God. The Founders believed that natural rights are inherent in all people by virtue of their being human and that certain of these rights are unalienable, meaning they cannot be surrendered to government under any circumstances.

At the same time, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are different kinds of documents with different purposes. The Declaration was designed to justify breaking away from a government; the Constitution and Bill of Rights were designed to establish a government. The Declaration stands on its own—it has never been amended—while the Constitution has been amended 27 times. (The first ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights.) The Declaration and Bill of Rights set limitations on government; the Constitution was designed both to create an energetic government and also to constrain it. The Declaration and Bill of Rights reflect a fear of an overly centralized government imposing its will on the people of the states; the Constitution was designed to empower the central government to preserve the blessings of liberty for “We the People of the United States.” In this sense, the Declaration and Bill of Rights, on the one hand, and the Constitution, on the other, are mirror images of each other.

Despite these similarities and differences, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are, in many ways, fused together in the minds of Americans, because they represent what is best about America. They are symbols of the liberty that allows us to achieve success and of the equality that ensures that we are all equal in the eyes of the law. The Declaration of Independence made certain promises about which liberties were fundamental and inherent, but those liberties didn’t become legally enforceable until they were enumerated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In other words, the fundamental freedoms of the American people were alluded to in the Declaration of Independence, implicit in the Constitution, and enumerated in the Bill of Rights. But it took the Civil War, which President Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address called “a new birth of freedom,” to vindicate the Declaration’s famous promise that “all men are created equal.” And it took the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, to vindicate James Madison’s initial hope that not only the federal government but also the states would be constitutionally required to respect fundamental liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights—a process that continues today.

Why did Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence?

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in 1775, it was far from clear that the delegates would pass a resolution to separate from Great Britain. To persuade them, someone needed to articulate why the Americans were breaking away. Congress formed a committee to do just that; members included John Adams from Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston from New York, and Thomas Jefferson from Virginia, who at age 33 was one of the youngest delegates.

Although Jefferson disputed his account, John Adams later recalled that he had persuaded Jefferson to write the draft because Jefferson had the fewest enemies in Congress and was the best writer. (Jefferson would have gotten the job anyway—he was elected chair of the committee.) Jefferson had 17 days to produce the document and reportedly wrote a draft in a day or two. In a rented room not far from the State House, he wrote the Declaration with few books and pamphlets beside him, except for a copy of George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and the draft Virginia Constitution, which Jefferson had written himself.

The Declaration of Independence has three parts. It has a preamble, which later became the most famous part of the document but at the time was largely ignored. It has a second part that lists the sins of the King of Great Britain, and it has a third part that declares independence from Britain and that all political connections between the British Crown and the “Free and Independent States” of America should be totally dissolved.

The preamble to the Declaration of Independence contains the entire theory of American government in a single, inspiring passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

When Jefferson wrote the preamble, it was largely an afterthought. Why is it so important today? It captured perfectly the essence of the ideals that would eventually define the United States. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Jefferson began, in one of the most famous sentences in the English language. How could Jefferson write this at a time that he and other Founders who signed the Declaration owned slaves? The document was an expression of an ideal. In his personal conduct, Jefferson violated it. But the ideal—“that all men are created equal”—came to take on a life of its own and is now considered the most perfect embodiment of the American creed.

When Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address during the Civil War in November 1863, several months after the Union Army defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Gettysburg, he took Jefferson’s language and transformed it into constitutional poetry. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln declared. “Four score and seven years ago” refers to the year 1776, making clear that Lincoln was referring not to the Constitution but to Jefferson’s Declaration. Lincoln believed that the “principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” as he wrote shortly before the anniversary of Jefferson’s birthday in 1859. Three years later, on the anniversary of George Washington’s birthday in 1861, Lincoln said in a speech at what by that time was being called “Independence Hall,” “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender” the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

It took the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history, for Lincoln to begin to make Jefferson’s vision of equality a constitutional reality. After the war, the Declaration’s vision was embodied in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which formally ended slavery, guaranteed all persons the “equal protection of the laws,” and gave African-American men the right to vote. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, when supporters of gaining greater rights for women met, they, too, used the Declaration of Independence as a guide for drafting their Declaration of Sentiments. (Their efforts to achieve equal suffrage culminated in 1920 in the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.) And during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his famous address at the Lincoln Memorial, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In addition to its promise of equality, Jefferson’s preamble is also a promise of liberty. Like the other Founders, he was steeped in the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, in philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Francis Hutcheson, and Montesquieu. All of them believed that people have certain unalienable and inherent rights that come from God, not government, or come simply from being human. They also believed that when people form governments, they give those governments control over certain natural rights to ensure the safety and security of other rights. Jefferson, George Mason, and the other Founders frequently spoke of the same set of rights as being natural and unalienable. They included the right to worship God “according to the dictates of conscience,” the right of “enjoyment of life and liberty,” “the means of acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” and, most important of all, the right of a majority of the people to “alter and abolish” their government whenever it threatened to invade natural rights rather than protect them.

In other words, when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and began to articulate some of the rights that were ultimately enumerated in the Bill of Rights, he wasn’t inventing these rights out of thin air. On the contrary, 10 American colonies between 1606 and 1701 were granted charters that included representative assemblies and promised the colonists the basic rights of Englishmen, including a version of the promise in the Magna Carta that no freeman could be imprisoned or destroyed “except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” This legacy kindled the colonists’ hatred of arbitrary authority, which allowed the King to seize their bodies or property on his own say-so. In the revolutionary period, the galvanizing examples of government overreaching were the “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” that authorized the King’s agents to break into the homes of scores of innocent citizens in an indiscriminate search for the anonymous authors of pamphlets criticizing the King. Writs of assistance, for example, authorized customs officers “to break open doors, Chests, Trunks, and other Packages” in a search for stolen goods, without specifying either the goods to be seized or the houses to be searched. In a famous attack on the constitutionality of writs of assistance in 1761, prominent lawyer James Otis said, “It is a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.”

As members of the Continental Congress contemplated independence in May and June of 1776, many colonies were dissolving their charters with England. As the actual vote on independence approached, a few colonies were issuing their own declarations of independence and bills of rights. The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, written by George Mason, began by declaring that “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” 

When Jefferson wrote his famous preamble, he was restating, in more eloquent language, the philosophy of natural rights expressed in the Virginia Declaration that the Founders embraced. And when Jefferson said, in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, that “[w]hen in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” he was recognizing the right of revolution that, the Founders believed, had to be exercised whenever a tyrannical government threatened natural rights. That’s what Jefferson meant when he said Americans had to assume “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

The Declaration of Independence was a propaganda document rather than a legal one. It didn’t give any rights to anyone. It was an advertisement about why the colonists were breaking away from England. Although there was no legal reason to sign the Declaration, Jefferson and the other Founders signed it because they wanted to “mutually pledge” to each other that they were bound to support it with “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Their signatures were courageous because the signers realized they were committing treason: according to legend, after affixing his flamboyantly large signature John Hancock said that King George—or the British ministry—would be able to read his name without spectacles. But the courage of the signers shouldn’t be overstated: the names of the signers of the Declaration weren’t published until after General George Washington won crucial battles at Trenton and Princeton and it was clear that the war for independence was going well.

What is the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

In the years between 1776 and 1787, most of the 13 states drafted constitutions that contained a declaration of rights within the body of the document or as a separate provision at the beginning, many of them listing the same natural rights that Jefferson had embraced in the Declaration. When it came time to form a central government in 1776, the Continental Congress began to create a weak union governed by the Articles of Confederation. (The Articles of Confederation was sent to the states for ratification in 1777; it was formally adopted in 1781.) The goal was to avoid a powerful federal government with the ability to invade rights and to threaten private property, as the King’s agents had done with the hated general warrants and writs of assistance. But the Articles of Confederation proved too weak for bringing together a fledgling nation that needed both to wage war and to manage the economy. Supporters of a stronger central government, like James Madison, lamented the inability of the government under the Articles to curb the excesses of economic populism that were afflicting the states, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts, where farmers shut down the courts demanding debt relief. As a result, Madison and others gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 with the goal of creating a stronger, but still limited, federal government.

The Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania State House, in the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Jefferson, who was in France at the time, wasn’t among them. After four months of debate, the delegates produced a constitution.

During the final days of debate, delegates George Mason and Elbridge Gerry objected that the Constitution, too, should include a bill of rights to protect the fundamental liberties of the people against the newly empowered president and Congress. Their motion was swiftly—and unanimously—defeated; a debate over what rights to include could go on for weeks, and the delegates were tired and wanted to go home. The Constitution was approved by the Constitutional Convention and sent to the states for ratification without a bill of rights.

During the ratification process, which took around 10 months (the Constitution took effect when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify in late June 1788; the 13th state, Rhode Island, would not join the union until May 1790), many state ratifying conventions proposed amendments specifying the rights that Jefferson had recognized in the Declaration and that they protected in their own state constitutions. James Madison and other supporters of the Constitution initially resisted the need for a bill of rights as either unnecessary (because the federal government was granted no power to abridge individual liberty) or dangerous (since it implied that the federal government had the power to infringe liberty in the first place). In the face of a groundswell of popular demand for a bill of rights, Madison changed his mind and introduced a bill of rights in Congress on June 8, 1789.

Madison was least concerned by “abuse in the executive department,” which he predicted would be the weakest branch of government. He was more worried about abuse by Congress, because he viewed the legislative branch as “the most powerful, and most likely to be abused, because it is under the least control.” (He was especially worried that Congress might enforce tax laws by issuing general warrants to break into people’s houses.) But in his view “the great danger lies rather in the abuse of the community than in the legislative body”—in other words, local majorities who would take over state governments and threaten the fundamental rights of minorities, including creditors and property holders. For this reason, the proposed amendment that Madison considered “the most valuable amendment in the whole list” would have prohibited the state governments from abridging freedom of conscience, speech, and the press, as well as trial by jury in criminal cases. Madison’s favorite amendment was eliminated by the Senate and not resurrected until after the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment required state governments to respect basic civil and economic liberties.

In the end, by pulling from the amendments proposed by state ratifying conventions and Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, Madison proposed 19 amendments to the Constitution. Congress approved 12 amendments to be sent to the states for ratification. Only 10 of the amendments were ultimately ratified in 1791 and became the Bill of Rights. The first of the two amendments that failed was intended to guarantee small congressional districts to ensure that representatives remained close to the people. The other would have prohibited senators and representatives from giving themselves a pay raise unless it went into effect at the start of the next Congress. (This latter amendment was finally ratified in 1992 and became the 27th Amendment.)

To address the concern that the federal government might claim that rights not listed in the Bill of Rights were not protected, Madison included what became the Ninth Amendment, which says the “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” To ensure that Congress would be viewed as a government of limited rather than unlimited powers, he included the 10th Amendment, which says the “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Because of the first Congress’s focus on protecting people from the kinds of threats to liberty they had experienced at the hands of King George, the rights listed in the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights apply only to the federal government, not to the states or to private companies. (One of the amendments submitted by the North Carolina ratifying convention but not included by Madison in his proposal to Congress would have prohibited Congress from establishing monopolies or companies with “exclusive advantages of commerce.”)

But the protections in the Bill of Rights—forbidding Congress from abridging free speech, for example, or conducting unreasonable searches and seizures—were largely ignored by the courts for the first 100 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Like the preamble to the Declaration, the Bill of Rights was largely a promissory note. It wasn’t until the 20th century, when the Supreme Court began vigorously to apply the Bill of Rights against the states, that the document became the centerpiece of contemporary struggles over liberty and equality. The Bill of Rights became a document that defends not only majorities of the people against an overreaching federal government but also minorities against overreaching state governments. Today, there are debates over whether the federal government has become too powerful in threatening fundamental liberties. There are also debates about how to protect the least powerful in society against the tyranny of local majorities.

What do we know about the documentary history of the rare copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights on display at the National Constitution Center?

Generally, when people think about the original Declaration, they are referring to the official engrossed —or final—copy now in the National Archives. That is the one that John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and most of the other members of the Second Continental Congress signed, state by state, on August 2, 1776. John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, published the official printing of the Declaration ordered by Congress, known as the Dunlap Broadside, on the night of July 4th and the morning of July 5th. About 200 copies are believed to have been printed. At least 27 are known to survive.

The document on display at the National Constitution Center is known as a Stone Engraving, after the engraver William J. Stone, whom then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned in 1820 to create a precise facsimile of the original engrossed version of the Declaration. That manuscript had become faded and worn after nearly 45 years of travel with Congress between Philadelphia, New York City, and eventually Washington, D.C., among other places, including Leesburg, Virginia, where it was rolled up and hidden during the British invasion of the capital in 1814.

To ensure that future generations would have a clear image of the original Declaration, William Stone made copies of the document before it faded away entirely. Historians dispute how Stone rendered the facsimiles. He kept the original Declaration in his shop for up to three years and may have used a process that involved taking a wet cloth, putting it on the original document, and creating a perfect copy by taking off half the ink. He would have then put the ink on a copper plate to do the etching (though he might have, instead, traced the entire document by hand without making a press copy). Stone used the copper plate to print 200 first edition engravings as well as one copy for himself in 1823, selling the plate and the engravings to the State Department. John Quincy Adams sent copies to each of the living signers of the Declaration (there were three at the time), public officials like President James Monroe, Congress, other executive departments, governors and state legislatures, and official repositories such as universities. The Stone engravings give us the clearest idea of what the original engrossed Declaration looked like on the day it was signed.

The Constitution, too, has an original engrossed, handwritten version as well as a printing of the final document. John Dunlap, who also served as the official printer of the Declaration, and his partner David C. Claypoole, who worked with him to publish the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser , America’s first successful daily newspaper founded by Dunlap in 1771, secretly printed copies of the convention’s committee reports for the delegates to review, debate, and make changes. At the end of the day on September 15, 1787, after all of the delegations present had approved the Constitution, the convention ordered it engrossed on parchment. Jacob Shallus, assistant clerk to the Pennsylvania legislature, spent the rest of the weekend preparing the engrossed copy (now in the National Archives), while Dunlap and Claypoole were ordered to print 500 copies of the final text for distribution to the delegates, Congress, and the states. The engrossed copy was signed on Monday, September 17th, which is now celebrated as Constitution Day.

The copy of the Constitution on display at the National Constitution Center was published in Dunlap and Claypoole’s Pennsylvania Packet newspaper on September 19, 1787. Because it was the first public printing of the document—the first time Americans saw the Constitution—scholars consider its constitutional significance to be especially profound. The publication of the Constitution in the Pennsylvania Packet was the first opportunity for “We the People of the United States” to read the Constitution that had been drafted and would later be ratified in their name.

The handwritten Constitution inspires awe, but the first public printing reminds us that it was only the ratification of the document by “We the People” that made the Constitution the supreme law of the land. As James Madison emphasized in The Federalist No. 40 in 1788, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had “proposed a Constitution which is to be of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed.” Only 25 copies of the Pennsylvania Packet Constitution are known to have survived.

Finally, there is the Bill of Rights. On October 2, 1789, Congress sent 12 proposed amendments to the Constitution to the states for ratification—including the 10 that would come to be known as the Bill of Rights. There were 14 original manuscript copies, including the one displayed at the National Constitution Center—one for the federal government and one for each of the 13 states.

Twelve of the 14 copies are known to have survived. Two copies —those of the federal government and Delaware — are in the National Archives. Eight states currently have their original documents; Georgia, Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania do not. There are two existing unidentified copies, one held by the Library of Congress and one held by The New York Public Library. The copy on display at the National Constitution Center is from the collections of The New York Public Library and will be on display for several years through an agreement between the Library and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; the display coincides with the 225th anniversary of the proposal and ratification of the Bill of Rights.

The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are the three most important documents in American history because they express the ideals that define “We the People of the United States” and inspire free people around the world.

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Why a Constitution Is Necessary. Philosophers on Constitutions: Aristotle and John Adams’ Defence

• First Online: 07 November 2023

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• Michael H. DeArmey 2  

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The necessity of a constitution for good government is explored by examining the thinking of Aristotle in the ancient world, and by examining John Adams’ A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Adam’s book surveys philosophical thinking about government from the ancients to the moderns and was used as a widely read handbook at the Constitutional Convention. It was meant to show that Americans were not mere amateurs on the one hand, nor simply copying England on the other.

If a constitution enshrines a way of life, then different constitutions will effect different ways of life. ( Nicomachean Ethics, 1165 b 22 1. See footnote on page 375 in The Politics of Aristotle , Edited and Translated With An Introduction and Appendixes by Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, A Galaxy Book, 1962). Hereafter all references to the Barker translation of the Politics will be abbreviated “ PA .”) Aristotle

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Ernest Barker says that “the legacy” of Aristotle’s Politics is his work on constitutions. The Barker translation of the Politics is 352 pages in length.

Recall the famous painting, Raphael’s “The School of Athens.” It has Plato pointing up to first principles and mathematics, and Aristotle standing beside him, with his hand pointing outward to the wonders of the natural world. Testimony from the ancient world indicates that Plato would ask whether a theory proceeds from down to up or up to down.

Aristotle is the founder of logic as a necessary propaedeutic to the sciences; he wrote the first book on physics, the first full length texts in ethics, poetics or study of the fine arts, rhetoric, and the first study of mind as part of the energized and organized organism.

Barker’s Politics contains edited and translated passages from the 70 chapters of The Constitution of Athens . For a fascinating account of the origin, discovery, and acquisition of The Constitution of Athens , see Brent Nongbri, “The Papyrus of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens: Provenance Questions,” Access at: https://brentnongbri.com/2019/01/01/the-papyrus-of-aristotles-constitution-of-the-athenians-provenance-questions/ January 1, 2019.

PA , 50 and 301.

Ibid., 299.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says that, even though politics is the master science, and, in that sense, ethics is subordinate, but that does not mean at all that political reasons can override ethics. Together they form the ethics of a political community living under a constitution that enshrines a way of life. This is a higher stage of human development than individual ethics. Nicomachean Ethics , 1094 b 8 and Barker’s comment (PA, 355) on same. Hereafter references to the Nicomachean Ethics will be abbreviated “ NE .”

What “happiness” means for Aristotle and the Founding Fathers is not the same, but quite similar. References to happiness as the aim of the federal government and its citizens are in the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist papers, and correspondence between the Founding Fathers. Benjamin Franklin at one point said, perhaps tongue in cheek, that, although the God of the Universe is unknowable, it is certain that He would want us to be happy.

PA , 110 and 156.

But Aristotle’s analysis contains no checks and balances as in Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers.

Ibid., 169.

Ibid., 230. In the new, updated Constitution inscribed in this book, 70% of citizens or more must favor by vote constitutional change in a national referendum.

Ibid., 230.

Ibid., 127.

Ibid., 146.

Ibid., 137 and note.

Nicomachean Ethics , XVIII, 10. 1160 a-b.

Ibid., 185.

Ibid., 179.

Ibid., 181.

Ibid., 182.

PA, 123ff. This contention will be taken up below. Our House of Representatives and Senate are stocked with attorneys, who do not know any more than other professionals and workers what is good for society. Some are quite sleazy; others informed and ethical. Their talent is writing laws. They can drop their law practice if elected, and if they are not re-elected, they can go right back to their law firm and practice. Many other talented people cannot just go back to their jobs and professions in this way.

Ibid, 123 and 142.

Ibid., 166, 174–176.

Ibid., 205.

Ibid., 227.

Ibid., 228. Today members of Congress freely engage in stock market transactions with knowledge of the market unavailable to ordinary citizens. The most egregious example of executive profiting is that of former President Trump.

Ibid., 296–297.

Barker notes that Athens had a program for the assistance of the poor.

PA, 307. The new, updated Constitution establishes government overseeing of the basic goods necessary for a decent life. Water is the first of these goods, and its availability and cleanliness are now threatened worldwide.

Ibid., 332 and 313.

Nicomachean Ethics , 29; Book II, 1.

In the new, updated Constitution, public education is free from pre-Kindergarten through community or junior college.

Ibid., 332, 333.

Aristotle does not have a doctrine of moral duties. Rather, there are the excellences like courage, temperance, and the other means between extremes, along with the good of property, that make good citizens.

Jonathan Barnes, Aristotle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 82.

New York: Da Capo Press, 1971. An unabridged reproduction of London 1st edition of 1787 (London: C. Dilly, in the Poultry). Hereafter referred to as A Defence.

Andrew J. Reck, “The Philosophical Background of the American Constitution(s),” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, Volume 19: American Philosophy, March 1985, 273–293.

Page Smith, John Adams , Volume 2 (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1962), 700. Thomas Jefferson said that it contained “learning and good sense…an institute for our politicians.” Quoted by Page Smith, Vol. 2, 699.

Cited by Cappon, 167. Rush to Richard Price, June 2, 1787.

A Defence …, “Preface,” xxv. Adams’ discussions of Geneva, Poland, Venice, Athens, Rome and other states and cities will not be examined here, only constitutional thinkers.

Gilbert Chinard, “Polybius and the American Constitution,” Journal of the History of Ideas , Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1940), pp. 46–47. Chinard cites Benjamin Franklin’s complaint that days of the Convention had become a discussion of the classical world. 48–49.

A Defence …, XXI. See the interesting article by Paul Joseph Cornish, “John Adams, Cicero and the Traditions of Republicanism,” Michigan Academician (2012) 41 (1): 22–37.

Cicero , De Re Publica, De Legibus . Translated by C. W. Keyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 65.

A Defence …, 210.

Ibid., 195.

Ibid., 198.

John Adams, Works, IV , 252.

Ibid., 271.

Ibid., 301.

John Adams, Works , 323.

A Defence , 181.

Ibid., 170. Benjamin Franklin used this ship/wagon analogy at the 1776 Convention: “in 1776, in the convention of Pennsylvania when speaking on ‘a motion to add’ another assembly, under the name of a senate or council,” the Doctor has said that: “two assemblies appeared to him like the practice he had somewhere seen, of certain wagoners, who, when about to descend a steep hill with a heavy load, if they had four cattle, took off one pair from before, and chaining them to the hinder part of the wagon drove them down hill; while the pair before and the weight of the load, overbalancing the strength of those behind, drew them slowly and moderately down the hill.” Quoted by Gilbert Chinard, from Works of John Adams , IV, 257.

Ibid., 171.

John Adams, Works, IV , 255.

J. G.A. Pocock, The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 15.

A Defence , 126.

A Defence , 158.

A Defence , 159.

A Defence , 161.

A Defence , 168–169.

A Defence , 148.

“The Philosophical Background of the American Constitution(s),” 284.

A Defence, 365.

A Defence , 153. Today, the toxic mixture of poverty, drugs, and guns create fear and harm “domestic tranquility.”

A Defence , 157.

A Defence , 369.

A Defence , 122.

A Defence , 123.

A Defence , 129.

A Defence , 130.

A Defence , 95.

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DeArmey, M.H. (2023). Why a Constitution Is Necessary. Philosophers on Constitutions: Aristotle and John Adams’ Defence . In: The Constitution of the United States Revised and Updated. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40426-9_4

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The Genius of the Constitution

The founders’ design.

The Constitution’s genius begins with recognizing both the virtues and limitations of human nature. It establishes a system of government that channels human nature toward the good of all. 

The first plan the Framers tried after declaring independence was called the Articles of Confederation. The government that the Articles created failed because it was too weak to coordinate national policy among states with different priorities. Before the government could do almost anything, the Articles required a unanimous vote by all of the states, which often put the states in the position of voting against their own individual interests. The Framers saw that it was not realistic to expect the states to do that. George Washington wrote, “We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.” 10 So the Framers tried again, creating a system of government that did not deny the pursuit of self-interest, but instead helped to direct it toward compromise and consensus. 

The Framers knew that human nature made this a difficult task. James Madison, for example, wrote that “[i]f men were angels, no government would be necessary” and that “[i]f angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” 11 The challenge they faced was that “[y]ou must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.” 12 

The Constitution accomplishes this by preventing too much power from ending up in too few hands. The Constitution divides and disperses government power, making it difficult for any person or group to obtain power without first seeking to compromise and reach consensus with others. The Constitution divides power to create “checks and balances” 13 among the three branches of the federal government and between the states and the federal government while also recognizing the priority of certain individual rights and requiring widespread agreement to change the “supreme law of the land.”

The Constitution divides government power in different ways. Federalism divides it vertically between the state and federal governments. State government is closer to the people and therefore should be principally responsible for looking after the people’s “domestic and personal interests.” 14 Especially as the country and its population spread, the federal government would be increasingly unable to address these ongoing needs.

>>>  The Federalists and the Anti-Federalists

On the other hand, giving states too much power would hamper efforts to address the country’s collective interests. For example, if Maine were invaded, Florida might consider that the cost of helping with resources and lives outweighed the benefits of preserving the Union. Or if each state had its own currency, trade and commerce would be almost impossible. The question was how to strike the right balance between the individual interests of the states and the collective interests of the nation as a whole.

Always mindful of the need to set limits, the Framers designed the Constitution so that the states would give specific powers to the federal government, not vice versa. The Tenth Amendment therefore says that any powers not directly given to the federal government “are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words, the states are assumed to have powers that are not given away, and the federal government has only the powers it receives and that are enumerated, or listed, in the Constitution. 

Separation of Powers

In addition to limiting the powers given to the federal government, the Framers also divided those federal powers into three branches. The legislative branch (which itself is divided into the House of Representatives and the Senate) makes laws, the executive branch enforces them, and the judicial branch interprets them when settling legal disputes. 

Once again, the Framers wanted to prevent too much power from ending up in too few hands because that would endanger the freedoms that government exists to secure. Madison, for example, wrote that putting legislative, executive, and judicial powers “in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” 16 Quoting Montesquieu, he continued that “there can be no liberty…if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.” After all, if one body possessed the power to make and enforce laws, nothing would stop it from enacting unjust laws. Likewise, if the same body exercised both the power to write laws and the power to decide legal disputes, nothing would stop it from arbitrarily changing the law to suit the government’s needs. Critically, the government could change the law without considering the will of the people.

>>>  Separation of Powers: Three Branches of Government

Separating the powers of government to protect against tyranny makes sense, but why does the Constitution separate them as it does? It all comes down to timing. A large body of people like Congress acts slowly and deliberately. When it comes to passing laws that will govern all the people of the country, deliberation and debate help to promote compromise and consensus. But speed is necessary if the nation is attacked and a defense must be mounted. In that case, one President can act much faster than an assembly can. Likewise, when the nation needs to speak to foreign countries, one person can present a unified message that Congress cannot.

The Constitution gives to the judicial branch the power to interpret and apply the Constitution or statutes to decide individual legal disputes. Alexander Hamilton explained that this requires the “judgment” of a court rather than the “will” of the legislative branch or the “force” of the executive branch. 17 Unlike legislators or the President, federal judges do not have specific terms, so they are free to render judgment impartially and without fear of political retaliation.

The Bill of Rights

Dividing government power vertically through federalism and horizontally through the separation of powers is an example of the necessary “internal” control of government that Madison described. The Bill of Rights, which recognizes certain fundamental individual rights, is an example of an “external” control.

Each of us has certain fundamental rights that no government may ever take away. The Declaration of Independence refers to these as “unalienable” rights. These include the freedom to practice any religion you choose, to speak your mind, to petition the government to change the law, to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, to bear arms, to have a fair trial, and to be free from cruel and unusual punishments. The Bill of Rights guarantees those rights for each and every individual, even if the government or a majority of the people might wish to deny those rights to someone.

Justice Antonin Scalia once observed that  “[e]very banana republic in the world has a bill of rights.” Most are just “words on paper” because those countries’ constitutions do not “prevent the centralization of power in one person or in one party.” 18 It is the structure of government established by our Constitution that makes our system distinctive. Federalism and the separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, and a judiciary that is independent of the two political branches combine to form a design for government that makes the Bill of Rights real and meaningful.

Amending the Constitution

The U.S. Constitution is the oldest written charter in continuous use anywhere in the world. In the famous case of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court in 1803 explained that the Framers wrote the Constitution down for a very practical reason: so that its rules for government “may not be mistaken, or forgotten.” 19 When he left office, President George Washington said that because the Constitution expresses the people’s will, it is “sacredly obligatory upon all” until it is changed by “an explicit and authentic act of the whole People.” 20 That act is the process for amending the Constitution.

>>>  How Does the Constitutional Amendment Process Work?

By permitting amendments, the Constitution allows the people of today both to continue operating with the rules that have been established and to change those rules if they see fit to do so. By design, amending our “great charter of liberty” is difficult and requires extensive deliberation to ensure that amendments reflect the settled opinion and will of the people. As James Madison explained in The Federalist, the amendment procedure allows subsequent generations to correct errors and make whatever “useful alterations will be suggested by experience.” 21 At the same time, the difficulty of the amendment process prevents the Constitution from being weakened or deprived “of that veneration, which time bestows on everything, and without which the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability.” 22 

Amendments have been suggested thousands of times since the Constitution was ratified in 1789, but the states have approved only 27 of the 33 amendments Congress has actually proposed. These included adding the Bill of Rights, changing the way the President and Vice President are elected, abolishing slavery, preventing state governments from discriminating against any person, guaranteeing the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race or sex, giving the federal government the power to collect an income tax, providing for the direct election of Senators, and both outlawing (in 1919) and then legalizing (in 1933) the production and distribution of alcohol. 

The great genius of the Constitution is this: it permits the people to govern themselves by putting the power of government in their hands, by protecting them from those who would take power or liberty from them, and by giving each successive generation the ability to improve upon the government bequeathed to them by those who came before. 

10. George Washington, letter to John Jay, August 15, 1786, National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%20Author%3A%22Washington%2C%20George%22%20Recipient%3A%22Jay%2C%20John%22%20Dates-From%3A1786-08-01&s=1111311111&r=1 (accessed May 20, 2021). 

11. Federalist No. 51.

14.James Madison, Federalist No. 46, January 29, 1788, National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0261 (accessed May 20, 2021).

15. Thomas Ginsburg, Zachary Elkins, and James Melton, “The Lifespan of Written Constitutions,” University of Chicago Law School, October 15, 2009, https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitutions (accessed May 20, 2021). .

16. James Madison, Federalist No. 47, January 30, 1788, National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0266 (accessed May 20, 2021).

17. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78, May 28, 1788, National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0241 (accessed May 20, 2021).

18. Antonin Scalia, statement in hearing, Considering the Role of Judges Under the Constitution of the United States, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 112th Cong., 1st Sess., October 5, 2011, pp. 6–7, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-112shrg70991/pdf/CHRG-112shrg70991.pdf (accessed May 21, 2021).

19. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 176 (1803). 

20. George Washington, “Farewell Address,” September 19, 1796, National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-0440-0002 (accessed May 21, 2021).

21. James Madison, Federalist No. 43, January 23, 1788, National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0248 (accessed May 20, 2021).

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Debunking Myths About the Constitution

Why Should the Constitution Matter to You?

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What’s So Great About a Written Constitution?

Having one document that sets up a government does not result in better democratic outcomes than having a mix of statutes, norms, and precedents.

After England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the monarchy was reinstated but under the watchful eye of Parliament, the country decided against drafting a new written constitution. Previous written constitutions under Oliver Cromwell’s rule had proved challenging, and by some accounts, disastrous—problems included the inadequate balancing and division of powers, and interpretative confusion and contradictory decisions in the courts. Almost a century later, America’s own revolution decided on a different course, drafting the U.S. Constitution, which has remained in place since 1789. This document almost immediately became a deeply revered symbol within America, and many of its features have been widely emulated around the globe.

But not every country possesses a single, written constitution, and some countries possess them in quirky forms. The United Kingdom famously does not have such a document. New Zealand possesses only a decorative one: an ordinary statute that’s been labeled a constitution, and that can be amended the same as any other law. And Australia’s 1901 constitution lacks what many consider the crown jewel of such documents: a bill of rights. Nonetheless, these countries remain some of the most free and democratic in the world.

Danielle Allen: The flawed genius of the Constitution

What, if anything, does this reveal about the value of written constitutions? The point is not that written constitutions are inherently bad, but that unwritten constitutions can result in systems that are equally enduring. Over the past five years I’ve been analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of written versus unwritten constitutions, with a special focus on the United States and the United Kingdom, for my recently published book, Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy . Without a written constitution in place, statutes are the U.K.’s highest form of law, and its unwritten constitution is a combination of legislation, conventions, parliamentary procedure, and common law. To some this setup may be odd or confusing, but my book’s conclusion is that unwritten constitutions can perform just as well as written ones, and that Britain’s unwritten constitution may be just as good as America’s esteemed document. Indeed, for all their grandeur, written constitutions do not produce better democratic outcomes and can sometimes entrench significant mistakes, rather than help facilitate resolutions to complex problems.

Of course, unwritten constitutions also contain difficulties: They may produce an overreliance on convention; often, they have no agreed-upon standard for constitutional change; and they frequently require trust in politics and the political process to resolve conflicts. No doubt the chaotic process of Brexit has exposed these issues many times over. But Brexit may have also accentuated the U.K. constitution’s bend-but-don’t-break quality. For all the economic, societal, and technological change that has taken place since 1688, Britain’s unwritten constitution remains intact.

One commonly cited benefit to states possessing written constitutions is that such devices perform an educative function, because citizens can easily consult and reference the documents. Indeed, the American Constitution is widely available on countless apps and websites, and its physical form consistently lands on best-seller lists. And yet, single, written constitutions do not inform citizens on political structures or constitutional operations any better than unwritten or partially written ones. A number of large comparative studies have found that those living in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia are just as knowledgeable, if not more, about politics, political structures, and constitutional operation as citizens in countries governed by easily accessed written constitutions.

In fact, a large portion of citizens in countries with written constitutions do not even know these documents exist. In 2015, in celebration of the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, Ipsos MORI and the Magna Carta Trust sampled a number of jurisdictions around the world on how familiar they were with various constitutional documents. The poll found that at least a third of citizens in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, India, and South Korea had never even heard of the constitution governing their country. In Romania, only 38 percent of citizens were familiar with their present constitution. These results call into question the significance and effectiveness of drafting written constitutions.

The U.S. Constitution’s “We the People” framing has long been its driving force, used domestically as a powerful rhetorical device and widely adopted internationally as a constitutional gold standard. But as scholars such as George Thomas of Claremont McKenna College have shown , James Madison often boasted about the fact that the U.S. Constitution did not allow “the People”—in their collective capacity—to possess any share of government, and Madison considered this exclusion as one of the document’s “great virtues.” Madison also recognized, however, that the best way to capture the public’s collective voice would be through representatives in Congress, the institution that was supposed to be the “ great engine of government .” Thus, in some ways the U.S. Constitution started out quite close to the U.K.’s model, which centers on Parliament as the highest legal authority and the closest possible realization of popular sovereignty.

And these ideas around popular sovereignty were present in England and Scotland well before the U.S. Constitution was conceived. The Scottish Declaration of Arbroath, in 1320, contained similar language, and in two 17th-century events in England—the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution—numerous accounts of such language have been documented. Although the idea that citizens possess ultimate constitutional authority may have been a central focus of these events, the U.K. never felt the need to write this commitment down.

Read: Britain’s political chaos shows everything is okay

It's not clear that the presence of “We the People” in a constitutional text actually matters. Advocates maintain that the phrase ultimately grounds the Constitution in “the People," producing better outcomes for ordinary citizens. But as a practical matter, the rhetorical invocation of “the People” does not confer any enhanced powers or special treatment on the citizenry. Nevertheless, the U.K.’s governmental system is regularly mocked—even by its own citizens—for not possessing a constitution that identifies the people as the underlying authority.

Yet if the United Kingdom decided to draft a constitution incorporating the words We the People , members of Parliament—especially those in the House of Commons—would likely lose power. As Jutta Limbach, a former president of the German Federal Constitutional Court, identifies , constitutional supremacy “means the lower ranking of statute,” and also a “ lower ranking of the legislator.” This presents clear problems for the U.K.’s unwritten constitution, which relies on parliamentary sovereignty and highly values both statutes and legislators. Without such a written document in place in the U.K., no intentional lower ranking of statute and legislator takes place. This means that the governmental institution most accountable and responsive to the people, the legislature, retains the most power within the U.K. system. Judges remain unable to strike down legislation, and if laws need to be amended or repealed, the legislature must take action.

Finally, single, written constitutions often stifle much-needed constitutional maintenance. The lack of formal constitutional change in the U.S. over the past few decades has produced a strong form of constitutional disillusionment, both with the written Constitution and with the Supreme Court . The main problem is that formal amendment procedures are so exceedingly difficult, but a 5–4 Supreme Court decision can produce significant constitutional change. Further, a focus on elusive constitutional moments—in which there must be intense and widespread constitutional discussion and debate among the citizenry—as opposed to constitutional maintenance, has obscured the need for regular constitutional change to take place.

In the U.K.’s unwritten system, however, virtually nothing is too sacred to be amended: The prescribed length of time between general elections has fluctuated; reform of the U.K.’s top court has taken place; historical government positions have been altered or eliminated; the role of the monarchy has changed significantly; and even major constitutional principles, such as parliamentary sovereignty, have shifted throughout the years as political and economic developments arose. Most of these have been responses to societal change, and did not require tidal-wave constitutional moments.

Yoni Appelbaum: America’s fragile Constitution

Although the longevity of America’s written Constitution remains impressive, many of its structures and operations have always been highly questionable . But recent events seem to have only exposed and exacerbated its flaws: A popularly elected leader should not be able to receive 3 million votes fewer than the challenger but still win the electoral contest; a system of checks and balances should ensure effective and responsible government, not sow political dysfunction; and generations of Americans should not have to live their life without a practical and reasonable opportunity to amend their Constitution. None of those outcomes advances “We the People.”

The U.K.’s unwritten constitution remains far from perfect; mistakes happen, much-needed reforms often stall, and reliance on politics can prove extremely frustrating. But when it comes to educating the citizenry, facilitating a focus on popular sovereignty, and providing a means of regularly updating the constitution, unwritten constitutions can go head to head with written documents any day.

This story is part of the project “ The Battle for the Constitution ,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center .

The Costs and Benefits of Clan Culture: Elite Control versus Cooperation in China

Kinship ties are a common institution that may facilitate in-group coordination and cooperation. Yet their benefits – or lack thereof – depend crucially on the broader institutional environment. We study how the prevalence of clan ties affect how communities confronted two well-studied historical episodes from the early years of the People's Republic of China, utilizing four distinct proxies for county clan strength: the presence of recognized ancestral halls; genealogical records; rice suitability; and geographic latitude. We show that the loss of livestock associated with 1955-56 collectivization (which mandated that farmers surrender livestock for little compensation) documented by Chen and Lan (2017) was much less pronounced in strong-clan areas. By contrast, we show that the 1959-61 Great Famine was associated with higher mortality in areas with stronger clan ties. We argue that reconciling these two conflicting patterns requires that we take a broader view of how kinship groups interact with other governance institutions, in particular the role of kinship as a means of elite control.

Chen would like to acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71933002; 72121002), Zhuoyue Talent Project, Theoretical Economics Peak Program and Legendary Project on Humanities and Social Sciences (XM04221238) at Fudan University. Wang would like to thank National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 72172090) for financial support. Qing Ye would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 72172060, 72132004) and the Major Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research Funds for Jiangsu University (grant No. 2020SJZDA068) for financial support. We thank Rui Rong for excellent RA work, all remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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