When was America’s birthday?
When was America’s birthday?
Traditionally it’s July 4, 1776. There is a case for June 21, 1788.
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 all nations seeking hope 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.”
(Quick note – in this newsletter 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 – an assertion some truths are 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 to deny there is objective truth.
If there were a canvass to ascertain the most influential short phrase, 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, has stood for liberty, fought for justice, spread prosperity and seeks equality.
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 the whims or personalities of men or women. 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 personalities 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).
Several more are needed. The Supreme Court should be term-limited to end its status as an unaccountable aristocracy; the only sure solution to gerrymandering is to make members of the House at-large like members of the Senate; 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. Just a few days ago 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.
And it did not outlaw slavery, an offense before God as well as before society. Another 77 years had to pass before that happened.
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 158 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. Abolitionists, anti-slavery judges, editorialists from 1788 to 1865 drummed on the fact that the United States Constitution says Persons.
Whether antislavery forces should, as they did, 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 was, before deciding to join. 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.
Bonus: Timely Books.
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 British colonies to agree to join hands rather than seek individual sovereignty: and initial steps toward a Constitution that ultimately would be ratified unanimously, and stand the test of time.
About All Predictions Wrong
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When the NFL season begins, there will a lot about football, sometimes in the format of Tuesday Morning Quarterback. But other subjects too; I realize many people don’t like the NFL, with good reasons.
1. One of the more amazing things to me is the Constitutional Convention’s decision to scrap the Articles of Confederation and to essentially start over. Anyone who has served on a big committee knows how uncommon it is to start anew rather than revise and update existing frameworks, however flawed. Getting a committee to agree to more work - that might be the biggest miracle to me.