Constitutional Curious — Part 5 — “The Constitution and the Bill of Rights: The Unlimited Potential of Limited Government"

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Constitutional Convention c. 1787

The idea of America was born in the ferment of ideas of the 18th century. The reality of the United States was crafted on parchment, argued over and finally ratified, between 1787 and 1791. Those years spanned the war of ideas that followed the actual shooting war of the American Revolution. 

The crafters of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights —the first 10 Amendments were written and ratified almost simultaneously to act as a defining benchmark of the rights of individual citizens and the limited role of government— probably shared more, in an intellectual sense, than any representative group of American politicians would ever again. But they still had deep ideological differences. 

In an economic sense the men who battled over the exact wording of the Constitution and the scope of the Bill of Rights could be loosely divided between agrarians and mercantilists. They earned their livings either through farming or commerce and light industry. (One of the great ironies of the politics of the 18th and early 19th centuries is that many of the loudest proponents of the idea that America as a nation should first, foremost and forever, be a nation of “yeoman farmers” rather than “urban mercantilists” were not men who farmed themselves. Instead they were men who had enslaved men, women and children of African descent do their farming for them. The urban mercantilist “elites” of late 18th century America were often self made men and women who built small businesses from scratch or built on modest inheritances. Benjamin Franklin was an apprentice printer made good in the raw young city of Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson was the wealthy slaveholding plantation owner son of a wealthy slaveholding plantation owner.) 

The great political division that led to the compromise of a Constitution that was almost simultaneously amended, was the rift between “Federalists” and “anti-Federalists.” The roots of this argument are complex and the terms used —“Federalist” and “anti-Federalist”— deeply confusing, in part because those words would come to have different meanings as the United States evolved over the next two hundred years. In its simplest form the argument was the first chapter in our ongoing national argument to define the powers of the Federal government and the individual states versus the rights of the individual citizen. 

In general the Federalists of the late 18th century felt a strong federal government was a practical necessity. After a bloody war of independence they feared that a squabbling, disparate group of states without any strong federal government would make easy pickings for the imperialist governments of Europe. 

The anti-Federalists feared a strong federal government might chip away at the historical sovereignty of the different states (even as colonies Virginia and Massachusetts had been governed differently) and, worse, the individual rights of citizens who had endured a bloody revolt against a “tyrannical” monarchy simply to end up enduring a tyrannical centralized federal bureaucracy.

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were the product of the compromise between the mercantilists and the agrarians, the Federalists and the anti-Federalists. 

Government would expand, but there would be strict legal limitations into how far government could control, or infringe on, the rights of citizens. Along with rights, citizens would have duties. (A primary duty would be the protection of those rights. Some of the fiercest courtroom battles and bloodiest actual battles the United States would ever witness would involve the ongoing effort to define and protect rights and duties.) It would be a balancing act with endless opportunities both for success and failure.