LDS Freedom Forum

As a result of the bicentennial of the United States Constitution, Americans have found themselves inundated with books, articles, television specials and assorted other productions on every aspect of that famous document. With rare exceptions, this outpouring repeats and embellishes the standard myth about the Constitution's adoption.

This myth celebrates the Constitution as a triumphant culmination of the American Revolution. After winning their independence from the British crown - this myth runs - the American people had slid into a critical period of economic depression, political turmoil and international peril. The promising American experiment in liberty was jeopardized right at its inception because the central government, under the Articles of Confederation, was dangerously weak. Fortunately, the country's most distinguished statesmen assembled at Philadelphia during the hot summer of 1787. Through a process of judicious compromise, they hammered out a new constitution for the country, one that carefully divided power between the state and national governments. Although opposed by many irresponsible state politicians, the American people enthusiastically embraced the new plan and the country was rescued from impending anarchy.

This account is mythical not only in the neutral sense of being the established American folklore, retold in every school in text. It is mythical also in the negative sense of being largely untrue and misleading. The alleged "critical period" was not one in which independent survival of the American experiment was jeopardised. Those who assembled at the Philadelphia convention were not not disinterested demigods, nor did they intend to establish a federal system of divided government powers. The Constitution did not have the support of most Americans. And finally, rather than representing the culmination of the previous Revolution, the Constitution represented a reactionary counter-revolution against its central principles.

The American Revolution, like all great social upheavals, was brought off by a disparate coalition of competing view-points and conflicting interests. At one end of the Revolutionary coalition stood the American radicals - men such as Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson. Although by no means in agreement on everything, the radicals objected to excessive government power in general and not simply to British rule in particular. They viewed American independence as a means of securing and broadening domestic liberty. Spearheading the Revolution's opening stages, the radicals were responsible for all the truly revolutionary alterations in the internal status quo: the abolition of slavery in the northern states, the separation of church and State in the southern states, the rooting out of remaining feudal privileges everywhere and the adoption of new, republican state constitutions containing written bills of rights that severely hemmed in government power.

At the other end of the Revolutionary coalition wore the American nationalists - men such as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Robert Morris, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Representing a powerful array of mercantile, creditor and landed interests, the nationalists went along with independence but opposed the Revolution's libertarian thrust. They sought a strong and effective American central government, which would reproduce the hierarchical features of the eighteenth century British State, only without the British...