Epilogue

The United States does not operate today under the Constitution ratified in 1788 or the Constitution as completed by the Bill of Rights in 1791 or even the one revised by the Reconstruction amendments. Nor is it the same nation. The United States, then a plural noun and now a collective one, has grown from thirteen states hugging the Atlantic seaboard to fifty states spread across a continent and beyond. It has experienced a civil war that ended one social and political regime and ultimately ushered in another far different from anything most people could have imagined in 1776 or even in 1865. From its beginnings as a second-rate country with a tiny navy and army, it has grown to become a global economic and military superpower. It is a democratic republic in which democracy weighs far more heavily in its constitutional and societal calculus than the framers would have endorsed. Its citizens vest government with the responsibility for safeguarding their prosperity, health, safety, and welfare in ways alien to the experiences of the founding generation....

3. Balance of powers

Two questions guided the framers when dividing power among the branches of government: What were the limits and purposes of national power? What were the roles and responsibilities of the various branches in exercising the government’s authority? ‘Balance of powers’ explains that no single event resolved these questions. Each branch has made large claims of power; each has experienced stinging rebuffs to those claims. The struggle involving the balance of power is described, including the Supreme Court and the President seizing opportunities to define their own constitutional powers as equal to Congress. Today’s hyper-partisanship has weakened Congress, although both division and inaction serves as an informal set of checks and balances.

4. Property

The Constitution of 1787 contains no broad guarantee of the right to property, but it established numerous protections for property. ‘Property’ explains that the right to property found explicit protection in the Constitution with the 1791 Fifth Amendment. It also describes how the courts reshaped the law of property as a capitalist instrument in ways that fit both constitutional republicanism and an emerging democratic order. Twice, Congress passed and states ratified amendments that redefined property rights: the 1913 Sixteenth Amendment and the 1919 Eighteenth Amendment. Private ownership has often been in tension with popular sovereignty, democracy, and the general welfare. How to strike an appropriate balance between these legitimate constitutional interests remains a challenge.

8. Security

Armed conflict poses an imminent threat to the nation’s existence, but so does suspension of the nation’s fundamental laws. The framers wrestled with how to grant government the power to defend the nation without providing it the means to threaten liberty. The question it raises—does war suspend the Constitution or does the Constitution control the conduct of the war—has rarely been absent from American history. ‘Security’ describes the impact of the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, as well as the recent ‘war on terror’ on the nation’s laws, the executive presidential power, and the roles of the Supreme Court and Congress.

2. Federalism

Federalism, the division of power between state and central governments, was the most novel doctrine to emerge from the Constitutional Convention. ‘Federalism’ explains how it embraced a contradiction, imperium in imperio, a sovereignty within a sovereignty. This logical inconsistency—classical theory assumed that governmental sovereignty was indivisible—could be explained only by another innovation, popular sovereignty, which vested ultimate power in the people. Federalism has proven to be a highly malleable scheme for accommodating the demands of a diverse society and a dynamic economy. What began in 1787 as a partnership of equal governments became a powerful national government two centuries later, with widespread authority to safeguard (or threaten) liberty for its citizens.

1. The revolutionary Constitution

The American Revolution was a radical event that redefined ideas of sovereignty, liberty, equality, representation, and power. It also recast how men and women related to each other within and outside of government. As its political expression, the Constitution was the revolutionary answer to an age-old antagonism in Western culture between power and liberty. ‘The revolutionary Constitution’ describes the processes involved in the drafting of the Constitution, its ratification, and the creation of the new national government structure, including the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. It outlines the key stages in the Constitution’s construction such as the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 and the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

7. Rights

Throughout American history, rights have been invented and repudiated, fought over and striven for, expanded and violated. From the nation’s beginnings, revolutionaries appealed to natural rights, but the question often became which rights and for whom? ‘Rights’ explains that what is most striking about the conflict over rights has been its democratic character. Rights are always a matter of public debate about the proper balance between order and liberty. It is a conversation that engaged the framers of the Constitution, and, as has been the case with each successive generation, Americans are continually working out the boundaries of what individual liberties are essential for a just and free society.

6. Equality

Equality was not an explicit core value of the Constitution, nor was it a basic condition of republican governments. The framers, living in a world based on class distinctions, rejected hereditary aristocracy, but casually accepted the idea of a natural aristocracy based on merit. Political equality was an animating force of the Revolution, although this condition applied primarily to white, property-owning men. ‘Equality’ outlines the three Amendments adopted between 1865 and 1870 that ended slavery, made state citizenship a consequence of national citizenship, and designated African-American men as political equals. It also describes the women’s movement of the 1920s, the aftermath of World War II, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

5. Representation

More than most constitutional issues, questions of representation and suffrage have exposed the fault lines of class, race, and gender in American society. Popular sovereignty was the touchstone of republican liberty, but only grudgingly did rulers admit the ruled into their circle. The world-view of the framers had no room for women, blacks, Indians, or the poor as citizens worthy of the ballot. It took a series of constitutional amendments, all spurred by war or mass movements, to expand the electorate and redefine “we the people” to include all adult citizens as rulers. ‘Representation’ describes the various Amendments to the Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that have reshaped what representation means.