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  • The U.S. Constitution: A Reader

     |  Front Matter

    The U.S. Constitution: A Reader The U.S. Constitution A Reader Edited by the Hillsdale College Politics Faculty ...

  • Copyright Information

     |  Front Matter

    Copyright Information Hillsdale College Press The U.S. Constitution: A Reader Copyright © 2012 by Hillsdale College Press Hillsdale, Michigan 49242 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior written permission of the copyright owners or holders. Every effort has been made to locate and obtain permissions from the copyright owners or holders of the copyrighted material in this book. Cover design Hesseltine & DeMason, Ann Arbor, Michigan Library of Congress Control Number: 2011938176 ISBN 978-0-916308-41-4 ...

  • Editorial Note

     |  Front Matter

    Editorial Note Editorial Note Spelling and punctuation in some of the documents in this book have been modernized. Ampersands have been converted. Footnotes have been omitted unless integral to the text. Misspelled names have been corrected and abbreviations eliminated in the lists of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. ...

  • Foreword

     |  Front Matter

    Foreword Foreword The U.S. Constitution: A Reader is made up of original source documents that bear upon the founding of the American republic, the making of its Constitution, and the struggle to preserve that document and govern under it to the current day. The Reader is used in the Hillsdale College core course on the Constitution required of every student. About one-half of Hillsdale's curriculum is to be found in its core, which is organized to present the basic and necessary elements of a liberal arts education—an education oriented to the ultimate purposes in human life, the goods at which all activity is properly aimed. The Hillsdale College Articles of Association state the reasons why the College takes this approach. The Articles promise a kind of ...

  • Section 1 Introduction

     |  The Apple of Gold/Frame of Silver

    Section 1 Introduction This first section of The U.S. Constitution: A Reader includes parts of two classic works of political philosophy by Aristotle, the first political scientist. They explain how politics arises from the nature of the human being, from the specific faculty that makes him able to reason, to talk, to choose according to moral criteria, and to live in connection with one another more profoundly than any other living beings on earth. We Americans, living in a liberal (in the old sense) regime, rightly believe that the purpose of government is to protect our private rights, our rights to our property, to our conscience, to our liberty to speak and worship as we please. We think the government must not exercise any authority over us except by our consent. This ...

  • Section 2 Introduction

     |  Natural Rights/American Revolution

    Section 2 Introduction The readings in this section illustrate four basic principles of the American Revolution. These principles, America's Founders held, are true always and everywhere. These principles guided the statesmen and citizens of the colonies as they protested and resisted the changes in policy enacted by the British government following the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, as they fought from Lexington and Concord in 1775 to victory at Yorktown in 1781, and as they concluded the Treaty of Paris in 1783, in which Britain recognized the independence of the United States of America. I. Every human being is equally a creature of God endowed with a natural right to life, liberty, and property. The Founders believed that every human being—regardless ...

  • Section 3 Introduction

     |  Religion, Morality, and Property

    Section 3 Introduction Almighty God hath created the mind free." Thus Thomas Jefferson begins the "Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom." The freedom of the human mind means that all individuals can choose between good and evil. The Founders believed that although human beings are capable of doing great good, they equally are capable of tremendous evil. In the words of Jefferson in the landmark Statute of 1786, all people, including rulers, are "but fallible and uninspired men." The theological conviction of early Americans was that all human beings are fallen; politically, this meant that all are fallible. The political, religious, and moral framework of the founding started with the affirmation of a common, enduring, and immutable human nature. Human beings are admixtures of roiling ...

  • Section 4 Introduction

     |  Articles of Confederation

    Section 4 Introduction Having fought and won a revolution against unchecked political power, the American Founders were determined not to install a government of their own that would degenerate into tyranny. As they quickly discovered, however, the real scourge of the young confederation was not centralization, but the confederate form of government itself. Historically, confederations had been effective in rallying disparate and small powers against larger common foes. The 1781 "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union" sought to unite the thirteen states against any external threat, especially Great Britain. Having seen the excesses of British rule, the colonists sought a form of government that would chasten rather than empower the central government. Designed ...

  • Section 5 Introduction

     |  Rethinking Union and Government

    Section 5 Introduction The Constitution establishes a structure of government without offering a defense of the principles that undergird it. For that we must look first to the Declaration of Independence, and also to The Federalist. In the words of Publius—the pen name chosen by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to unify their argument and to invoke the memory of Publius Valerius Publicola, the savior of the early Roman republic—it would be up to the American people "to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." Put another way, if republican government could ...

  • Section 6 Introduction

     |  Three Branches of Government

    Section 6 Introduction Publius moves in The Federalist's second half to explain the separation of powers and the three branches of government: Congress, including the House (52 to 58) and the Senate (62 to 66), the presidency (67 to 77), and the judiciary (78-83). In response to the Anti-Federalist demand for a more responsive government, Publius teaches us a lesson about the true meaning of "responsibility." Good government is not defined by its responsiveness to popular demands, but is responsible to the true, long-term interests of the people. In other words, it protects their natural rights. In his attempt to heal the American body politic, Publius here offers a strong dose of political moderation. A government that is responsive to every popular whim suffers from the ...

  • Section 7 Introduction

     |  Roots of the Slavery Crisis

    Section 7 Introduction For the Founders, equality meant that every human being is born free from the arbitrary or non-consensual political rule of any other human being. All legitimate government is hence necessarily based on the consent of the governed. The continued existence of slavery, the most extreme form of denying consent, was thus the great original flaw in the American constitutional order. It is why Thomas Jefferson wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." In a similar vein, Abraham Lincoln would later describe slavery as the "cancer" in the American body politic. It is obvious from the official documents and private statements collected in this section that the Founders agreed that slavery was a moral evil because it violated the ...

  • Section 8 Introduction

     |  Crisis of Constitutionalism

    Section 8 Introduction The political contest between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas encompassed far more than a seat in the United States Senate or even the presidency itself. At stake in the 1850s was the very character of American self-government. In 1854, Congress enacted the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the brainchild of Douglas, then-chairman of the Senate's Committee on the Territories. The Act organized these vast territories, a necessary prelude to settlement (and railroad development, which was Douglas's original motivation), but did so in a way that placed the slavery issue in a state of permanent agitation that would persist until the Civil War. This land had been made forever free as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, but under Kansas-Nebraska the people ...

  • Section 9 Introduction

     |  Secession and Civil War

    Section 9 Introduction To secure their Creator-endowed natural rights, Americans constituted a form of government that addressed two distinct but related sets of questions: First, what regime will best secure those rights? That is: Who will rule in the United States? By what institutions will they rule? Finally, what way of life shall they pursue? Second, what kind of polity will best secure those rights? That is: How centralized will this system of government be? How extensive is its territory? How large is its population? The ancient Greek city-states had been centralized but small; the ancient empires and the feudal polities of Christian Europe had been large but decentralized. Modern states combined the size of some empires and many feudal realms with the ...

  • Section 10 Introduction

     |  Progressive Rejection of the Founding

    Section 10 Introduction It is impossible to understand the fate of the Founders' principles in American politics without perceiving how those principles have been replaced by those that animate today's administrative state. The administrative state in America emerged out of the dominant political ideas of the Progressive Era. As a practical matter, much of the infrastructure of today's system of property redistribution and centralized regulation was built during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. But the intellectual foundation for the New Deal came a generation earlier, in the Progressive Era—a fact acknowledged by no less an authority than Franklin Roosevelt himself, who in his 1932 Commonwealth Club Address credited the ideas of Theodore Roosevelt and especially ...

  • Section 11 Introduction

     |  New Deal and Great Society

    Section 11 Introduction Pick any three letters of the alphabet, economist Milton Friedman said, put them in any order, and in the acronym you will discover an unnecessary federal agency. The alphabet soup of federal regulatory and administrative agencies grew into what it is today largely during the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, two presidents whose names are well-known by their initials. Ronald Reagan, who majored in economics in college during the Great Depression, came much later to see LBJ's Great Society, especially, as inimical to freedom. It was his cause as president, Reagan wrote, to undo the damage it had inflicted upon the country, and to reduce government to a size more in keeping with the principles of the American founding. Franklin ...
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