When is America’s birthday?
Traditionally on July 4, 1776. There is a case for June 21, 1788.
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 and consider subscribing.
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 powerful 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.
The sentence is powerful 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 centuries later.
Truths that are self-evident, embedded in nature, have more gravity than any political claim. The word truths still resonates today, 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” (spoken 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 that role.
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.
Admirable nations are based on laws, not on force or personality cults. Even today many nations do not have constitutional standards, 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. The United States Constitution has lasted so long owing to richness of wisdom.
Our long-lived Constitution is a core reason the United States is foremost among 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 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).
More are needed. The Supreme Court should be term-limited to end its status as an unaccountable aristocracy; term limits for Congress would end the Senate’s gerontocracy; and seriously, why haven’t we gotten rid of the vestigial Electoral College?
But only 27 patches in 236 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: the less you have to say, the longer it takes to say it. That the United States Constitution is short shows this document 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 2022 the Supreme Court needed 65 pages to determine whether laws apply to state legislatures. (Spoiler alert: they do!) A single judicial opinion about a single phrase in the Constitution is twice the length of the Constitution.
Rich with insight and protections of speech, faith, economic freedom and individualism, the United States Constitution also is rich in faults.
The Constitution appears to respect indigenous nations, yet enabled their exploitation. Its ambiguities regarding the roles of courts and the power of the executive caused generations of disputes that might have been avoided, ongoing to this day.
The Constitution did not outlaw slavery, an offense before God as well as before society. Seventy-six years had to roll by between ratification and abolition.
The United States Constitution contains the odious three-fifths clause. This passage is a stain on the American national heritage. Though vitiated in 1865 by the 13th Amendment, the three-fifths clause hasn’t mattered in 160 years.
Commonly said is that the clause meant an enslaved black had only three-fifths the moral worth of a free white. Actually it was 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, rather, concerned the apportionment of the House and Electoral College. Free persons and the indentured counted as a whole number. The figure for “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. Abolitionists ensured 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 the enslaved are 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: the Constitution 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.
No one wants to give up Fourth of July vacations, fireworks, cookouts and patriotic 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 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
A subscription to All Predictions Wrong includes Tuesday Morning Quarterback during the NFL season, so it’s two-for-one.
Love the articles and don’t want to get to pedantic; but Gary Willis’s excellent book Lincoln at Gettysburg makes a strong counter argument. Whether the Declaration or the Constitution was the key founding document was an immensely important issue in the Civil War. The South’s theory being that since the states ratified the Constitution, they could legally revoke that ratification and leave the Union. If instead the Declaration was the beginning then, as you note, the founding of the country was based on natural law and no human or legislature could undo it. Lincoln successfully settled the debate in famous but oft overlooked words, “four score and seven years ago” referring to 1776 not 1789. Of course there are multiple ways to see it, and both documents are critical to the US’s incredible 249 year run. But it is worth noting that there may be quite a bit more at stake in this seemingly simple question than meets the eye. Thanks for all of the lively, thoughtful, and insightful articles and keep em coming!
From the outside looking in, it seems to me that the Constitution has been under attack from its own government officials. I'd never thought I would see this day. I don't think I could stand in front of Abe's memorial and not weep. I hope that some sanity will prevail eventually and that America can become the land that Lincoln envisioned once again. There is a greatness that is being buried by selfish and greedy people for their own gain and their own agendas. If the madness doesn't stop there will be a collapse like the world has not yet seen.
Happy 4th of July!