Good morning, it's Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. Today is Constitution Day, an occasion for sober thinking in any year, but especially today. In that vein, C-SPAN host John McArdle interviewed constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen this morning, starting off the conversation with thoughtful observations on the danger political violence poses to a self-governing people.
Likewise, a White House proclamation notes that since 1952, Congress has designed this date as Constitution Day and Citizenship Day "to honor the timeless principles" enshrined in the nation's founding document. This being an election year, White House officials couldn't resist turning their missive into a partisan political pitch (which you can read for yourself here).
Whatever one's politics, honest discourse about this country's origins means confronting the Founders' faults as well as their virtues. I don't need to tell anyone who reads my newsletter that when the Constitution was ratified in 1788, women weren't allowed to vote and chattel slavery was not only legal on these shores – it was codified in the U.S. Constitution.
From time to time, modernists point to those offensive truths as a way of negating the entire enterprise. We are presently in one of those revisionist eras. Actually, it's hard to think of a time when the naysays and haters had more sway. They are wrong, of course. The genius of America's founding documents is eternal. The Declaration of Independence set the moral compass, while the Constitution provided the roadmap.
The New York Times' problematic 1619 Project is hardly the first effort to discredit America's founding. In 1854, William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery and influential Massachusetts abolitionist, commemorated the Fourth of July by burning a copy of the Constitution at a rally in Framingham. The document weaving slavery into the fabric of America's creation was a symbol of original sin, said Garrison, who termed it "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell."
Frederick Douglass, who'd been a protégé of Garrison, had a more sophisticated view of the founding and a much more charitable view of the patriots of 1776. These men were heroes in Douglass' telling – brave souls who had indeed risked their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to challenge the notion of the divine right of kings and the military might of the British empire.
The Constitution they forged was the best that could be achieved at time, Douglass said. But it was not the best that could ever be achieved, and three-quarters of a century later it was time to fix it, he added. He did not call the Constitution "a living document" as liberals do today – that was understood at the time – but Douglass did argue that the sons and grandsons of the Founders were cowards for not living up their forebears' potential.
And so, two years before Garrison punctuated his speech by torching the Constitution, Frederick Douglass gave an Independence Day speech of his own.
"Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this Republic," he said in an iconic 1852 speech. "The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age. … They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory."
His tone changing quickly, Douglass then turned on freedom's slothful heirs.
"You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence," he thundered. And he challenged them to look away from the Constitution to an earlier founding document, the Declaration of Independence. He described the remarkable language in the Preamble as "the ringbolt to the chain of your nation's destiny."
In his famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. fused the historic competition between the Declaration and the Constitution. Together, he said, the "magnificent words" of these two documents were "promissory notes" to future generations – the birthright of every American. But it was the Declaration that he quoted.
"This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," Dr. King said.
Or, as John Adams said on his deathbed, "Jefferson survives!"
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on X @CarlCannon.
