Sunday is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the day that the United States became the United States. But what is it we're actually celebrating? A Georgetown University history professor explains the arguments and the compromises that resolved them.
WASHINGTON — Sunday is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the day that the United States became the United States. But what is it we’re actually celebrating?
On Sept. 17, 1787, the document that acts as the supreme law of the United States was adopted and signed after a contentious series of negotiations that created the framework of not only the United States government, but the way we argue about it 230 years later.
Adam Rothman, a professor of American history at Georgetown University, said that on Sunday we essentially celebrate two things: “A framework of government that was established by this extraordinary group of founders in 1787 and 1788” and “the living endurance of that Constitution over time. It’s adaptable but it’s also durable.”
Learn what he has to say about the arguments that were resolved in Philadelphia all those years ago.
The haggling at the Constitutional Convention that started in May sometimes got contentious, Rothman said, but the delegates agreed on more than they clashed over. Since the end of the American Revolution, the U.S. had been operating under the Articles of Confederation, but the delegates knew that wasn’t cutting it.
The Articles functioned as “more like a treaty between states than the construction of a real nation,” Rothman said. “It provided for a very weak national government.”
He describes the situation as a form of chaos — the new country “was in a dangerous world, with foreign powers (including Britain and Spain) at its borders.” In the Peace of Paris — the 1783 treaty that formally ended the Revolution — Britain promised to abandon their forts in the Western United States. But they didn’t, and the U.S. couldn’t force them to do it.
(National Archives via AP)
National Archives via AP
George Washington was famously quoted as calling the Articles-era federal government “a half-starved limping government that appears to be always moving upon crutches, tottering at every step,” Rothman said. Clearly, something had to change.
(Photo by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)
Photo by William Thomas Cain/Getty Images
The question of how big the federal government should be has led to hot arguments in the past few decades, but Rothman said it has gone back as far as the country does. And while it’s true that the Constitution sets limits on federal power — it’s essentially a set of limits.
“It absolutely established a more powerful federal government than had existed under the Articles of Confederation. In a way the whole point of the Constitution was to strengthen the national government.”
(Howard Chandler Christy — The Indian Reporter, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
(Howard Chandler Christy - The Indian Reporter, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Howard Chandler Christy - The Indian Reporter, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Two major areas of contention were about representation in Congress: the dispute between big and small states, and how to count slaves.
In the former case, the two schools of thought were James Madison’s Virginia plan, under which states would be represented according to their population, and the New Jersey plan, in which each state would get a vote. As we can see, the compromise was to do both, establishing the House and Senate we know today.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The other contention was over slavery. Unfortunately, as Rothman said, they delegates “punted” on the fundamental question of slavery.
“It’s not like the Constitution was going to abolish slavery, although there might have been a few who would have liked to see that.”
The question in the drafting process was whether slaves would be counted for purposes of representation.
The result was the three-fifths compromise, “which a lot of people misunderstand,” Rothman said. The popular conception holds that a slave was counted as only three-fifths of a human being. Numerically, that’s literally true. But Rothman said that slave states would in fact want slaves to be counted fully, because they’d get more representatives in Congress that way. Non-slave states didn’t want slaves counted at all.
“When you think about it that way, the three-fifths clause looks a little bit different.”
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Other slavery-related questions included the fate of the slave trade. A lot of delegates, especially from Northern and “upper South” states such as Virginia and Maryland, Rothman said, “weren’t opposed to slavery, but they were opposed to the importation of more slaves.” The states in the Deep South wanted to continue to import new slaves from Africa.
Eventually, they arrived at a compromise under which the Constitution prevented Congress from prohibiting the importation of slaves for 20 years. After that, importation wasn’t automatically stopped, but Congress was given the power to stop it, which they did.
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Rothman called James Madison “the towering figure of the founding of the Constitution.”
He said Madison was “probably the most perceptive theorist of American government. He had the most nuanced idea of what they’re actually trying to accomplish. But he’s also a very shrewd politician, and he becomes the broker of a number of the compromises that result in the Constitution’s drafting and ratification.”
(Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images
During the ratification debate, James Madison wrote the influential Federalist No. 10, and argued why a bigger United States was a better idea.
“The bigger the country, the more different kinds of interests and factions will exist within it, and it’ll be harder for one interest or faction to tyrannize the others,” Rothman said, characterizing Madison’s argument. “That’s a really innovative idea in the late 1780s, and it’s sort of the beginning of American political theory.”
Madison was also the scribe of the convention: “A lot of what we know about the Constitutional Convention comes from Madison. He kept a pretty detailed set of notes. … He’s the best source for what happened.”
That said, the recent book “Madison’s Hand,” by Mary Sarah Bilder, shows that he changed his notes over the years, and thus “shaped his own historical legacy.”
(Getty Images)
Getty Images
Americans are unusual in the degree to which average people argue abut what the Constitution says, and by extension what kind of country this is supposed to be, Rothman said.
“Americans argue an awful lot about what the Constitution means,” Rothman said. “And sooner or later, most of our big political debates become Constitutional debates. This was true from the very early days of the Republic.”
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Pinning down the Constitution as an unyielding set of instructions handed down by the Founders actually does a disservice to the history, Rothman argued.
“Even the founding generation argued about what the Constitution meant. … People who wrote the Constitution were debating it! What hope is there for us to figure out exactly what it meant at the time? I think that’s liberating — it gives us a little more freedom to interpret the Constitution for our own purposes, for our own moment.”
Of course, theorists known as strict constructionists think of the Constitution as a set of instructions handed down by the Founders, to be followed to the letter.
Rothman’s response as a historian? “Good luck with that.”
(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Rick Massimo came to WTOP, and to Washington, in 2013 after having lived in Providence, R.I., since he was a child. He's the author of "A Walking Tour of the Georgetown Set" and "I Got a Song: A History of the Newport Folk Festival."
