When is America’s birthday?
Traditionally it’s July 4, 1776. There is a case for June 21, 1788.
Note: this is a re-up of the All Predictions Wrong that ran on July Fourth, 2023. As such, is not paywalled. If you like it, please tap the {{HEART}} button.
Fourth of July fireworks are coming, and if you don’t like fireworks, Lord have mercy.
The Fourth is the traditional day to celebrate America’s birth. But is it the right day?
The Fourth of July commemorates the Declaration of Independence, significant not only in American annals but for every group seeking liberty and self-determination.
The Declaration contains one of the most important sentences ever written: “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.”
(In this essay I preserve the quirky capitalizations of the Framers’ moment.)
That sentence is among the most important ever — despite the duplicity of a slaveholding polity calling all men equal. At least the goal was the right one.
The clause we hold these truths to be self-evident – a natural-law premise at the core of a society -- still inspires all these years later.
Truths that are self-evident, embedded in nature, have more power than any political claim. Merely the word truths resonates these centuries later, when it is fashionable in academia and literature to deny there is truth.
If there were a canvass to ascertain the most influential short phrase in history, many votes would be drawn by, “Man is born free but everywhere in chains.”
Many would go to, “Yet it moves” (Galileo after being threatened with death if he did not say Earth is stationary).
Many would go to, “Workers of the world unite!”
Many to, “He is not here” (said by an angel at the empty tomb).
A fine choice is, We hold these truths to be self-evident.
Truth that is self-evident cannot be constrained. Which is why the United States, despite manifold faults, for two and a half centuries has stood for liberty, fought for justice, spread prosperity, come to the aid of the distressed.
Yet however powerful, the Declaration of Independence is not law. The Declaration did not create a nation. The United States Constitution played those roles.
Ratified on June 21, 1788, the United States Constitution became, and remains today, the most important document of human history.
For all its defects – we’ll lay them out in a moment – the United States Constitution formed the framework of our world’s most successful society.
Successful nations are based on laws, not on force or personality cults. Even today many nations do not have constitutional law, or have constitutions that are in endless flux or are incomprehensible. It’s easy to spot a nation based on men not laws. They are the failed states.
The United States Constitution is the oldest continuously used constitution in our world. Number two is the constitution of Norway, adopted 1814. That the United States Constitution has lasted so long shows its richness of wisdom.
Our long-lived Constitution is a core reason the United States is foremost among the nations; a core reason the United States, for all its errors and offenses, remains the bright hope of the human family.
That our Constitution protects rights while resisting wrongs is the greatest achievement in human lawmaking.
Even on January 6, 2021, when the institutions of American democracy were assaulted from the White House itself in an inside job, the Constitution proved stronger than its attackers.
In well more than two centuries the United States Constitution has known only 27 patches (amendments).
The Supreme Court should be term-limited to end its status as an unaccountable aristocracy; and seriously, why haven’t we gotten rid of the vestigial and obsolete Electoral College?
But only 27 patches in 235 years ain’t too shabby.
Another fine quality of the United States Constitution is brevity. At 8,000 words, anyone can read it in a single sitting, unlike the constitution of the European Union (70,000 words) or the numbing 145,000-word constitution of India.
A rule of rhetoric, whether text or speech, is: the less you have to say, the longer it takes to say it. That the United States Constitution is short shows it has a great deal to say.
Of course the wording could be better. Courts and law professors continue to argue about the exact meaning of constitutional phrasing. In 2023 the Supreme Court needed 65 pages to determine whether laws apply to state legislatures. (Spoiler alert: they do!) One judicial opinion about a single phrase in the Constitution is twice the length of the Constitution.
Rich with insight and with protections of speech, faith, economic growth and individualism, the United States Constitution also is rich in faults. It appears to respect indigenous peoples, yet enabled their exploitation. Its ambiguities regarding courts and the executive caused generations of disputes that might have been avoided, are ongoing to this day.
And it did not outlaw slavery, an offense before God as well as before society. Seventy-seven years had to pass between ratification and abolition.
The United States Constitution contains the odious three-fifths clause. This clause is a stain on the American national heritage. Though, vitiated in 1865 by the 13th Amendment. The three-fifths clause hasn’t mattered for 159 years.
It is common to hear the clause spoken of as saying an enslaved black had only three-fifths the moral worth of a free white. Actually it was quite a bit worse. The enslaved were regarded as having no moral worth – no rights, no liberty, no chance courts would protect them, their children born into suffering.
But the three-fifths clause did not refer to moral worth, it concerned the apportionment of the House and Electoral College. Free persons, the indentured and most Indians counted as a whole number. The number of “all other Persons,” the Constitution’s language, was multiplied by 0.6.
As the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz has shown, at the Constitutional Convention, abolitionists fought to keep the words “slave” and “slavery” out of the document (they succeeded) and to ensure the three-fifths clause described Persons rather than property, as Southern delegates wanted.
Having the Constitution call the enslaved Persons “proved enormously consequential,” Wilentz has written. From 1788 to 1865 abolitionists, anti-slavery judges and editorialists drummed on the fact that the United States Constitution says Persons.
Whether in 1788 antislavery forces should have taken the route of compromising for the sake of establishing a new nation, or should have refused and prevented the United States of America ever from forming, is a counterfactual that now cannot be resolved.
But we can know that not only did the United States Constitution protect rights and religions, embodying the Enlightenment insight that the individual is more important than the state: it brought about the strongest union ever achieved.
The initial Articles of Confederation, in force 1781-1788, were weak language creating something more like the Hanseatic League than a nation.
Had the Constitution not replaced the Articles, what are now the 50 states might each have become sovereign – as Vermont briefly was. They might have formed regional alliances, might have gone to war with each other individually or in European-style coalitions.
The Framers were deeply worried the New World would mire itself in endless coalition conflict as did the Old World – that, say, New Jersey and Pennsylvania would go to war with New York and Connecticut over the Hudson River, that Georgia would fight Alabama to control agricultural trade.
The wise, powerful United States Constitution prevented things like this from happening -- though Georgia does fight Alabama for bragging rights in football.
Needless to say, no one wants to give up Fourth of July vacations, fireworks, cookouts and reenactments.
We should, though, be aware the United States Constitution is more important than the Declaration of Independence – and that America’s birthday was June 21, 1788.
Unless you’d rather pick March 9, 1789, the day the United States Constitution went into effect.
Books Relevant to this Essay.
No Property in Man by Sean Wilentz, Harvard University Press, 2018. Presents encyclopedic historical detail of the Constitutional Convention as part of the author’s argument that the single word Persons set the United States on the road to emancipation.
Peace Pact by David Hendrickson, University of Kansas Press, 2003. Shows the negotiations, from 1785 to 1787, to get the newly freed colonies to agree to join hands rather than seek individual sovereignty. Shows the initial steps toward a Constitution that ultimately would be ratified unanimously, and stand the test of time.
About All Predictions Wrong
There will be an All Predictions Wrong, on an eclectic range of topics, every Friday all year. There are sometimes bonus editions depending on news events.
Tuesday Morning Quarterback returns every Tuesday when football resumes.
A subscription to All Predictions Wrong includes Tuesday Morning Quarterback, so it’s two-for-one.
Thanks!
Almost all of this finds me in deep, thankful agreement. The part that does not relates to the electoral college. It is massively unpopular, but I find myself in agreement with what Isabel Paterson argued a century ago in God of the Machine. Retaining the independent influence of all states, independent of population, was and is key to sustaining this federacy. Her argument that it was a mistake to go to direct election of senators also resonates with me.