The Constitution of the United States, first drafted in 1787, is the oldest written constitution in the world and is still in operation as the fundamental basis of the United States government today. The enduring power of this eighteenth century document is undoubtedly based upon its thoroughness as well as flexibility, but perhaps more so upon the ideas both explicitly and implicitly incorporated in it. The origin and nature of the 1787 Constitution derive from some of the Enlightenment ideas in political philosophy and theories of government popular in the eighteenth century, particularly ideas of John Locke, James Harrington, and Montesquieu, among others. It also embodied the colonial experience since the early seventeenth century in the art of self-government and the sense of nationalism that had developed during the American Revolution. Equally important, it was the product of an extraordinary group of men.
The earliest English American settlements in New England (as represented by the Massachusetts colony) and those in the mid-Atlantic regions such as the Virginia Colony were of very different characters. The first permanent English settlement in North America, the Jamestown colony in Virginia, was established in 1607 and was founded by the private Virginia Company of London with specific economic goals to establish a profitable enterprise in order to repay the investors back in England (1). The government of Jamestown colony was controlled by the London company with a company appointed military Governor. By the year of 1619 when the survival of the colony was ensured and the tobacco cultivation began to provide a profitable return, the first representative assembly was established,following instructions from colony’s sponsor Company in London to introduce “just Laws for the happy guiding” of the people. The first assembly was made up of the Governor, his four councilors and 22 burgesses chosen by the free, white inhabitants throughout the colony (1). This emerging political institution in British America mirrored that in England with an emphasis on the rule of law and participation through representatives of the governed.
In contrast to the Virginia colony, the social and political lives of the Puritan colonies in New England were dominated by Puritan doctrines. As a more extreme sector of the Protestant movement of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many of the Puritan ideas and attitudes were shared in various degrees by all English Protestants (2). The Protestants believed that the Roman Catholic Church had been corrupted, and they must break away from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. They believed that each individual could have a relationship,or priesthood, with God directly. For Puritans, self-rule was how they practiced religion. Each group of Puritans was a covenant community, and each congregation elected its own minister and established its own regulations and policies. Such doctrine of Puritanism separated Puritans from the Anglican Church of England,which still had the hierarchy of bishops closely resembling the organization of the mother Catholic Church. The self-rule practice in religion was extended to social and government matters for Puritan colonies in New England. In his Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the American Puritanism was both a religious and a political doctrine (3).
The first New England Puritans, calling themselves Pilgrims, came to the New World because their way of life centered on their religious beliefs was no longer tolerated in England, then under the rule of James I. Some of Puritans first went to Holland where they found a safe haven to practice religion freely. However, these Puritans identified strongly with their home country England and cherished their English heritage.This is one of the reasons that they left Netherlands for the more perilous New World but which also offered new hopes. The Puritans themselves were English and wanted their children and grandchildren to be English and speak English language as well. About more than one hundred passengers on board the ship Mayflower heading for America included family, women and children. They were mostly of middle class people and many of them were well educated. The Mayflower arrived in America near the shore of what is today’s Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620. However, before the passengers left the ship, they wrote and signed the Mayflower Compact which is essentially a social contract in which the settlers consented to bind themselves together to form a polity and to follow the rules and regulations of the community for the sake of order and survival in spite of any differences. They were willing to give up some of the individual liberty and rights for the good of the community (4).
Thus, the early New England Puritans formed a society of their own accord and exercised the right of sovereignty of the people. They were self-governing as if their allegiance was only to God. These early Puritan colonies “showed a remarkable acquaintance with the science of government and the advanced theory of legislation” (3). They tried to find a way to work together for the good of the community by recognizing collective and individual rights, and principles of freedom and responsibilities as they understood them at the time.
However,the New England Puritan colonies were not democratic, nor did they practice religious tolerance. The religious practice and government were closely intertwined in these colonies through most part of the seventeenth century. The incorporated Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629 was declared a place where the Puritans would live under “godly rule.” They believed that the government was obliged to protect society from heresy and to enforce moral standards of the society (4). The colonial laws imposed corporal punishment, banishment and even execution against public dissent from the religious establishment, in this case, the New England Puritanism. There were many incidents of excommunications and banishments of religious dissenters; among them were Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. As late as 1692, the Salem witch trials accused more than 200 people of witchcraft and sentenced 14 women and 5 men to death by hanging (4).
Compared to the continent of Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, there was, nevertheless, a greater separation of church and state in Puritan New England.The Puritan principles of being independent from religious hierarchy and authority over individual resulted in an emerging sense of individualism and a distrust of any large “earthly” institution that would wield authority over spiritual or material matters of individuals, be that the Catholic or Anglican or any other churches, a monarchy, or a “big” government. It is thus not surprising that the Americans initially were very reluctant to give power and allegiance to a central government after they declared independence. Only a decade later when the survival of the Union was under threat did the leading politicians from each state come together and try to create a type of government that would ensure the stability of the Union, promote prosperity of its citizens, and at the same time protect both the individual and collective rights.
After the English Civil War (1642-1651) started, the immigration of Puritans to America decreased. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century saw the power and influence of Puritanism decline in North American. Several factors contributed to these changes. First, the North American colonists changed greatly. The population had grown significantly from estimated 50,000 in 1641,to 250,000 in 1700, and to 2.5 million by 1776 (5). Among the newcomers there were German Lutherans, Scottish and Irish Protestants, and some French Huguenots. Changes in population size and cultural makeup brought about changes in attitudes. By 1700 the New England colonies were forced to tolerate Quakers,Scottish-Irish Presbyterians, and Anglicans. Second, the older Puritan worldview was challenged by the secular logic in Newtonian physics and other scientific discoveries, and by the Enlightenment ideas developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The large part of the eighteenth century belongs to the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. Building on the scientific breakthroughs made by Copernicus(1473-1543), Kepler (1571-1630), and Galilei (1564-1642) of the previous century,Isaac Newton (1642-1727) discovered the laws of gravity and motion that explained the movements of the heavenly bodies and, as it appeared, of everything else in the known world as well. The ancient beliefs and superstitions were swept away by these discoveries. People began to view the natural world as an objective entity governed by laws of nature, knowable through reason, the main faculty of human intelligence. Although man had not uncovered all the secrets of the natural world, there was no doubt about the possibility of attaining knowledge of it. God was hardly needed anymore. The eighteenth century Enlightenment ideas were centered on reason as the primary source of knowledge. Scientific advancement contributed to the erosion of religion and traditional authority in favor of free thought and speech. The ideas of liberty, progress, toleration, separation of church and state, and political theory of constitutional government were greatly advanced during Enlightenment.
The secular teachings of Enlightenment emphasized civil society and government based on natural laws and not religion. The attention had shifted from concentration on salvation and next world to concentration on the social, political, economic and religious experiences of people in this world. In politic theory, Enlightenment thinkers looked back to the two greatest European societies of the ancient world, Athens and Rome, as well as the more recent past, and examined various different political systems. By the time of mid-seventeen century nearly all political systems in history, from democracy in ancient Athens, republicanism in Rome, to various forms of feudal aristocracy and monarchy, had all been full of strife and instability. Most had inevitably fallen into decay or tyranny.
Having lived through the bloody conflicts of the English civil war, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) believed that an absolute monarchy with absolute political power was needed to maintain peace and order of the society. Hobbes was pessimistic about the nature of common men. He imagined that in the state of nature, men would be driven by self-interests and fear to a "war of all against all" in which life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (6). Despite his arguments for political absolutism, Hobbes’ vigorous and rationalistic approach had led to the development of some of the fundamentals of European liberal thoughts, among them the right of the individual, the natural equality of all men, the view that all legitimate political power must be representative and based on the consent of the people, and a liberal interpretation of law.
In some sense Hobbes was proved wrong by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which ushered in a period of peace and progress in England. Perhaps more than anyone else John Locke (1632-1704) influenced the Founding Fathers of the United States. Some of the passages in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, which was published in 1689, were used almost verbatim in the Declaration of Independence drafted by Thomas Jefferson nearly a hundred years later. Locke combined his insights about human nature and human society with rigorous reasoning, and arrived at the conclusions that absolute monarchy’s claims to be ordained by divine right or by paternal dominion were self-contradictory and inconsistent with the natural rights of man. In Locke’s hypothetical state of nature, men “are all equal and independent, no-one ought to harm anyone else in his life, liberty, or possessions.” Locke broadly defined that as a man’s “property”; it included “his life, liberty and possessions.” Natural men would associate voluntarily to form society and a body polity in order to better protect their property. The only legitimate governments were those that had the consent of the people. The chief purpose of the government was the preservation of men’s property, as Locke broadly defined it. For this purpose, men would give up some of their natural power to such authority. “Where there is no law there is no freedom. Liberty is freedom from restraint and violence by others; and this can’t be had where there is no law.” Locke provided some of the best arguments on the relationship between liberty and security in a society.
French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) articulated the theory of the separation of powers in The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. He argued that there were three sorts of power in a government: executive, legislature and judiciary. Each power should only exercise its own function;otherwise there would be an end of liberty. The influence of Montesquieu’s ideas can be clearly seen in the 1787 Constitution of the United States.
The Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) had applied the ideas of free choice and consent to the economic realm, arguing that commerce and market, when not regulated by the state, have a natural order as well. Individual freedom, or the freedom of choice, is compatible with a free market capitalist economic system. The implication of these ideas was to justify a limited government because hierarchy and compulsion were not required to assure peace and order in religion, political and economic life. Peace and order are compatible with freedom and choice (7).
Many of the main political and intellectual figures behind the American Revolution associated themselves closely with the Enlightenment and were more than familiar with those philosophical and political thoughts popular at the time. Even before the American colonists struck for independence in July 1776, they were already thinking about what kind of government would be in place as they severed ties with Great Britain. Some saw themselves as if in a “state of nature.” Indeed when Locke described his hypothetical state of nature, he certainly had America in mind (8).Many Americans had had the actual experience of acquiring their own property by applying labor to wild land to make it productive. Some had participated in social compacts, setting up governments in places where none had existed before.However, there had been no precedents of implementing those enlightenment ideas and political theories in an actual working constitution for a nation.
The result of the first attempt by the founders of the United States to establish such a government is the Articles of Confederation, drafted in 1777 and ratified by all the states in 1781. The Articles empowered the Continental Congress to act as the governing body of the new United States. However, “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power,jurisdiction, and right,“ which was not expressly delegated to the Congress(The Articles of Confederation, Article II). The Congress was not authorized to levy tax and had only very limited power. As time passed, the new nation,independent only for a decade, was beginning to show the classic signs of instability that had characterized popular government since ancient times. Many leaders of the new nation realized the inadequacy and danger of lack of a more power central government and decided to call for a Constitutional Convention with the explicitly specified purpose to device a federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the union. In other words they decided to try again at the task of solving the problem of how to build a lasting democratic constitutional government for a whole nation.
Most of the 55 delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Conventions had seen extensive public service since before the Revolution time and knew first-hand the problem that faced the new nation. They all shared a broad consensus on the most fundamental principles – a limited government, a republic which combines democratic principles and a strong executive, separation of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism (a balance of the central and local government powers) – but they had to worked out how, in practice, these principles would fit together to produce justice, strength, and stability over time. It is to the credit of the delegates that through their principled creativity and political savvy that they were able to accomplish such a task after nearly four months of debates. The resulting Constitution of 1787 would provide a basis for a representative republic government not for a city-state but for a country as vast as United States with more than three million citizens at that time.
The influences of the Enlightenment thoughts and the unique American experience, in particular the early Puritan experience, on the Constitution are evident. Here it is worth noting that the preamble of the constitution begins with “We the people of the United States,” emphasizing that the constitution is an act of the sovereign people of the United States and thus derives its authority directly from the people. In contrast, the previous Articles of Confederation had been an agreement among the states. The ratification process further stressed this point: it was to be ratified by a specially convened ratification convention of people in each state and not by the state legislature. Thus the Constitution made the central government representative before giving it powers to tax.
The important compromises and ingenious solutions to a number of tough practical issues in the Constitution need not to be listed here. One innovative aspect of the Constitution is that in addition to dividing the powers and responsibilities of the new federal government among three branches, the framers of the constitution also built a complex system of checks and balances designed to prevent the problems associated with a pure separation of powers and to guard against tyranny by ensuring that no branch would become too powerful (9).
On September 17, 1787, thirty nine of the fifty five delegates of the Constitutional Convention signed the document of the original constitution. In July 26, 1788, with the ratification by the two powerful and populous states of Virginia and New York, eleven of the thirteen states had ratified the Constitution, and the organization of the new government went underway. The federal government of the United States began operations under the new Constitution in March 1789. The first session of the first Congress, including both the United States House of the Representatives and the United States Senate, convened on March 4, 1789. George Washington was sworn in as the nation’s first president on April 30.
At the time that the new federal government began to operate, people who made the Constitution did not know how successful they would be. Now 230 years later, their endeavor was by all standards an astounding success. The government of the United States – an extensively representative federal republic – has continued to operate to this day based on largely the same constitution, which has been amended only 27 times in the last 230 years. As a nation the United States has proved to be remarkably stable and enduring. It survived through the Civil War, the Great Depression, and many crises and changes. The meanings of the ideas of liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have continued to evolve and to challenge every generations of American people. In Edmund Morgan’s word, “As long as any man remains less free than another, it cannot honorably cease.”
References
1. Jamestown Rediscovery. Historic Jamestowne, 2019. Web. <https://historicjamestowne.org/history/history-of-jamestown/>
2. Morgan, Edmund S. Roger Williams: The Church and the State. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. p11-18.
3. de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Volume I, Chapter II. New York, NY: Bantam Dell, 2004. p28-50.
4. Bremer, Francis J. Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009
5. U.S. Bureau of the Census. A Century of Population Growth. From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790-1900. 1909. p9.
6. Hobbes,Thomas. “Leviathan” in The Modern World (Classics of Western Thought, Volume III), Fourth Edition. Knoebel, Edgar E. ed. San Diego,CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. p31-42.
7. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Abridged with Commentary and Notes, by Laurence Dickey. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1993.
8. Morgan, Edmund S.The Birth of the Republic,1763-89, Fourth Edition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press,2013.
9. Jillson, Cal. American Government: Political Development and Institutional Change. Sixth Edition. New York, NY:Routledge. 2011. p2-54.
