ARTHUR M. WOLFSON, PH.D., Editor
THE CONSTITUTION—ITS ANTECEDENTS, ITS FORMATION, AND ITS ADOPTION.
The study of the Constitution of the United States involves two more or less distinct processes. If the student is to comprehend it perfectly, he must consider it, first, as an historical document, studying its antecedents, the process of its creation, and the method of its adoption; second, he must consider it as it exists at present, the ground plan upon which our national institutions have been reared, and under which the Government of the United States is still being operated.
A generation ago the opinion was almost universally received that our present constitution was the result of the superhuman skill of the two or three score men who sat and deliberated in the State House in Philadelphia from May 25th to September 17th, 1787. Even Gladstone, whose knowledge of history and politics should have taught him better, seems to have lent himself to this theory, for in contrasting the English and the American Constitutions, he declares that, “As the British Constitution is the most subtle organism which has proceeded from progressive history, so the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.” To-day this theory has been entirely abandoned. For this reason, the student must be brought to consider the Constitution as an historical as well as a political document, seeking its origins in the institutions of England and the English colonies, acquainting himself with the personality and the theories of the men who sat in the Convention, following the debates and the newspaper discussions which in every State were the preliminary steps to its ratification.
For the boys and girls who have studied their English history and their Colonial history with care and intelligence, only a brief review of the antecedents of the Constitution will be necessary. Nevertheless, this review should not be neglected. Once more the teacher should insist upon the fact that the roots of American civil and political institutions are to be found in English soil. Transplanted to America in the seventeenth century, these institutions were affected and modified by local conditions, but in their origin they were essentially English. The study of the Constitution should therefore begin with a brief reconsideration of the English system of government, its origin and development, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Far more important than the system of government, however, was the system of law and the theory of the right of the individual to freedom from unjust impositions by the government which the colonists inherited from the mother country. Not until the student is able to state again, and accurately, the fundamental principles of Magna Carta, of the Petition of Rights and of the Bill of Rights should the teacher proceed to the consideration of other subjects, for the very language of these documents will appear again in the first nine amendments to our present Constitution.
Next, the teacher should review with his students the history of the establishment of the various groups of colonies, their forms of government, the various methods of colonial legislative, executive, and judicial procedure, the rights and duties of the governor, the method of election and the powers and functions of both houses of the colonial assemblies, the rights and duties of the judiciary: one and all, these served as models which were freely studied and adopted by the members of the Constitutional Convention.
Most important of all precedents, however, were the colonial forms of union. Beginning with the process of amalgamation which is to be observed in the history of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, proceeding through the history of the New England Confederation, “a consociation for mutual help and strength in all their future concernments,” through the history of the Albany Plan, the acts of the Stamp Act Congress, the Committees of Correspondence, the Continental Congress, and the Articles of Confederation, the student should be made to see that the Constitution of the United States is but the last step in a century and a half of political development. In the Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England (Article 8), for instance, is to be found the germ of the constitutional provision for mutual rights of citizenship and for the return of fugitive slaves and criminals. In the Albany Plan we find at least two provisions which in later days were to be incorporated in the Federal Constitution: (1) that a single officer should be charged with the general administration of the affairs of the union, and (2) that representation should be proportional, not equal, among the members of the union.
The study of the Articles of Confederation should, of course, be thorough and exhaustive. Too many teachers are content to leave their pupils with a hazy notion of the form of government submitted to the States in 1777 and finally adopted in 1781. Because so much is regularly said about the defects of the Articles, so much about the perfection of the Constitution, the teacher must be warned and warned again against the almost universal custom of belittling the importance of this instrument of government. With all its imperfections, it is nevertheless true, considering the troublous times during which it was in operation, and the spirit of separatism which existed among the States, that this earliest bond of union among the States served as a strong link without which the present Constitution would never have come into existence. Under these Articles, the States severally entered into “a firm league of friendship with each other for their common defense, the security of their liberties and their mutual and general welfare.” They guaranteed that “the free inhabitants of each of these States ... shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States”; “that full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States to the records, acts, etc., of every other State.” The provisions of the Articles concerning the three departments of government should also receive careful attention, especially the executive and judicial departments, because it is here that most high school students are left with exceedingly vague and inaccurate conceptions. A thorough analysis of the document will show that while there were abortive provisions for the creation of a separate executive and an attempt to establish a limited national judicial department, all real power was vested in the Congress. Congress gathered to itself all the active functions of government, and yet even it could take no definite action unless the delegates from at least nine of the States consented, and none of its acts could be enforced except through the good will and the active coöperation of the separate States. In these two circumstances and in one other, namely: that Congress had no power to regulate interstate commerce, lay the serious, the fatal weakness of the Articles of Confederation. Nor did there seem to be any way of remedying conditions, for no amendment could be made to the Articles unless every State consented. Three times the attempt was made, but each time it failed, and the experiment of a union among the States seemed doomed to failure.
Then, in 1786, upon the invitation of Virginia, delegates from five of the States met at Annapolis to consider the subject of interstate trade without consulting the members of Congress. Instead of taking any action, however, this convention issued an address to the States inviting them to send delegates to a convention to meet in Philadelphia May, 1787, “to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” Though many States still hesitated, as a result of this address, delegates from all the States except Rhode Island met at the appointed time in what came to be known as the Constitutional Convention.
Having led his pupils thus far in the study of the history of the Constitution, the teacher is now prepared to discuss with them the second stage of its story. First he will need to insist, and that unrelentingly, that they become acquainted with the names and the personality of at least the most prominent members of the Convention: Washington and Madison and Randolph, from Virginia; Franklin and Wilson and Gouverneur Morris, from Pennsylvania; Hamilton and Lansing, from New York; Gerry and King, from Massachusetts; Ellsworth and Sherman, from Connecticut; the two Pinckneys, from South Carolina; and Patterson, from New Jersey. The personality of these men, their plans and preparations, are all of profound importance; each contributed something, positive or negative, to the new instrument of government.