A Republic Madam if You Can Keep It
Past Richard R. Beeman, Ph.D.
While today we marvel at the extraordinary accomplishment of our Founding Fathers, their own reaction to the Usa Constitution when it was presented to them for their signatures was considerably less enthusiastic. Benjamin Franklin, ever the optimist fifty-fifty at the age of 81, gave what was for him a remarkably restrained assessment in his final speech communication before the Constitutional Convention: "…when yous gather a number of men to have the reward of their joint wisdom, you lot inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views." He thought it impossible to expect a "perfect production" from such a gathering, merely he believed that the Constitution they had just drafted, "with all its faults," was better than any alternative that was likely to emerge.
Near all of the delegates harbored objections, but persuaded by Franklin's logic, they put aside their misgivings and affixed their signatures to it. Their over-riding concern was the tendency in nearly all parts of the young country toward disorder and disintegration. Americans had used the doctrine of popular sovereignty--"democracy"--equally the rationale for their successful rebellion against English authorization in 1776. Simply they had not yet worked out fully the question that has plagued all nations aspiring to democratic government ever since: how to implement principles of popular majority dominion while at the same time preserving stable governments that protect the rights and liberties of all citizens.
Few believed that a new federal constitution lone would be sufficient to create a unified nation out of a collection of independent republics spread out over a vast concrete space, extraordinarily diverse in their economic interests, regional loyalties, and ethnic and religious attachments. And there would be new signs of disorder afterwards 1787 that would remind Americans what an incomplete and unstable national structure they had created: settlers in western Pennsylvania rebelled in 1794 because of taxes on their locally distilled whiskey; in western North Carolina there were abortive attempts to create an independent republic of "Franklin" which would ally itself with Espana to insure its independence from the U.s.; at that place was continued conflict with Indians across the whole western frontier and increased fear of slave unrest, particularly when news of the slave-led revolution in Haiti reached American shores.
But equally fragile as America's federal edifice was at the fourth dimension of the founding, there was much in the culture and surroundings that contributed to a national consensus and cohesion: a common linguistic communication; a solid belief in the principles of English language common law and constitutionalism; a widespread commitment (albeit in various forms) to the Protestant religion; a shared revolutionary experience; and, perhaps virtually important, an economic environment which promised most complimentary, white Americans if not bully wealth, at least an contained sufficiency.
The American statesmen who succeeded those of the founding generation served their land with a self-conscious sense that the challenges of maintaining a democratic union were every bit as great after 1787 as they were before. Some aspects of their nation-building plan--their standing toleration of slavery and genocidal policies toward American Indians--are fit objects of national shame, not honour. But statesmen of succeeding generations--Lincoln foremost among them--would continue the quest for a "more perfect union."
Such has been our success in building a powerful and cohesive democratic nation-state in mail service-Civil State of war America that most Americans today assume that principles of democracy and national harmony somehow naturally go hand-in-paw. But as we look around the rest of the world in the post-Soviet era, we find ample prove that autonomous revolutions do not inevitably lead to national harmony or universal justice. We see that the expression of the "pop will" tin can create a cacophony of discordant voices, leaving many baffled virtually the true meaning of majority rule. In far besides many places around the world today, the expression of the "popular will" is nix more than the unleashing of primordial forces of tribal and religious identity which further confound the goal of edifice stable and consensual governments.
Every bit we expect at the state of our federal union 211 years after the Founders completed their work, there is cause for satisfaction that nosotros have avoided many of the plagues afflicting so many other societies, but this is hardly crusade for complacency. To be sure, the US Constitution itself has not just survived the crises confronting it in the past, but in so doing, it has in itself become our nation's nearly powerful symbol of unity--a far preferable culling to a monarch or a national organized religion, the institutions on which most nations effectually the world have relied. Moreover, our Constitution is a stronger, ameliorate document than it was when it initially emerged from the Philadelphia Convention. Through the amendment process (in particular, through the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments), it has become the protector of the rights of all the people, not just some of the people.
On the other hand, the challenges to national unity under our Constitution are, if anything, far greater than those confronting the infant nation in 1787. Although the new nation was a pluralistic one by the standards of the 18th century, the face of America in 1998 looks very dissimilar from the original: we are no longer a people united by a mutual language, religion or culture; and while our overall level of material prosperity is staggering by the standards of any age, the widening gulf between rich and poor is perchance the most serious threat to a common definition of the "pursuit of happiness."
The conditions that threaten to undermine our sense of nationhood, bound up in the debate over slavery and manifested in intense sectional conflict during the pre-Civil War era, are today both more complex and diffuse. Some of today's weather are office of the tragic legacy of slavery--a racial climate marked besides oftentimes by mutual mistrust and misunderstanding and a condition of desperate poverty inside our inner cities that has left many immature people so alienated that any standard definition of citizenship becomes meaningless. More usually, but in the long run perhaps just as alarming, tens of millions of Americans have been turned-off by the corrupting effects of money on the political arrangement. Bombarded with negative advertising about their candidates, they express their feelings of alienation by staying home on election mean solar day.
If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a self-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attending and devotion of all citizens. In that location is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached past a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A democracy, if you lot can keep information technology." The brevity of that response should not cause us to under-value its essential meaning: autonomous republics are not just founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the agile and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.
Dr. Richard Beeman is professor of history and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. The Academy is NCC's bookish partner, and for the year 1997 – 98. Dr. Beeman serves as vice chair of our Distinguished Scholars Advisory Panel.
Grade: 12, 11, ten, 9, 8, 7, vi, five, 4, 3, ii, 1, Yard
Source: https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/historical-documents/perspectives-on-the-constitution-a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it
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