A Republic if You Can Keep It Meaning
By Richard R. Beeman, Ph.D.
While today we marvel at the extraordinary achievement of our Founding Fathers, their ain reaction to the United states Constitution when it was presented to them for their signatures was considerably less enthusiastic. Benjamin Franklin, ever the optimist even at the age of 81, gave what was for him a remarkably restrained assessment in his final speech communication before the Constitutional Convention: "…when you lot assemble a number of men to accept the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views." He idea it impossible to expect a "perfect production" from such a gathering, but he believed that the Constitution they had just drafted, "with all its faults," was meliorate than any culling that was likely to emerge.
Nearly all of the delegates harbored objections, simply persuaded by Franklin's logic, they put bated their misgivings and affixed their signatures to it. Their over-riding business organisation was the tendency in nearly all parts of the young country toward disorder and disintegration. Americans had used the doctrine of popular sovereignty--"democracy"--every bit the rationale for their successful rebellion against English authority in 1776. But they had non nevertheless worked out fully the question that has plagued all nations aspiring to democratic government e'er since: how to implement principles of popular majority rule while at the same time preserving stable governments that protect the rights and liberties of all citizens.
Few believed that a new federal constitution alone would be sufficient to create a unified nation out of a collection of independent republics spread out over a vast concrete space, extraordinarily diverse in their economic interests, regional loyalties, and ethnic and religious attachments. And in that location would be new signs of disorder after 1787 that would remind Americans what an incomplete and unstable national construction they had created: settlers in western Pennsylvania rebelled in 1794 because of taxes on their locally distilled whiskey; in western North Carolina at that place were bootless attempts to create an independent commonwealth of "Franklin" which would ally itself with Kingdom of spain to insure its independence from the United states of america; there was connected conflict with Indians across the whole western frontier and increased fright of slave unrest, especially when news of the slave-led revolution in Republic of haiti reached American shores.
Simply as fragile as America's federal edifice was at the time of the founding, in that location was much in the culture and environment that contributed to a national consensus and cohesion: a mutual language; a solid belief in the principles of English common police and constitutionalism; a widespread delivery (albeit in various forms) to the Protestant religion; a shared revolutionary experience; and, mayhap most of import, an economic surroundings which promised almost free, white Americans if not great wealth, at least an independent sufficiency.
The American statesmen who succeeded those of the founding generation served their country with a cocky-conscious sense that the challenges of maintaining a democratic union were equally as bully later on 1787 as they were earlier. Some aspects of their nation-building programme--their continuing toleration of slavery and genocidal policies toward American Indians--are fit objects of national shame, not honor. But statesmen of succeeding generations--Lincoln foremost among them--would keep the quest for a "more than perfect spousal relationship."
Such has been our success in edifice a powerful and cohesive democratic nation-country in mail service-Civil War America that most Americans today assume that principles of democracy and national harmony somehow naturally go hand-in-mitt. But every bit nosotros look around the rest of the earth in the post-Soviet era, we find ample evidence that democratic revolutions exercise non inevitably lead to national harmony or universal justice. Nosotros encounter that the expression of the "pop volition" tin create a cacophony of discordant voices, leaving many baffled about the true pregnant of majority rule. In far too many places around the earth today, the expression of the "popular will" is cipher more than the unleashing of primordial forces of tribal and religious identity which further confound the goal of building stable and consensual governments.
Equally we await at the land of our federal marriage 211 years subsequently the Founders completed their work, there is cause for satisfaction that we have avoided many of the plagues afflicting so many other societies, but this is hardly cause for complacency. To be sure, the US Constitution itself has not only survived the crises confronting information technology in the past, but in so doing, it has in itself get our nation's near powerful symbol of unity--a far preferable alternative to a monarch or a national organized religion, the institutions on which most nations around the world take relied. Moreover, our Constitution is a stronger, better document than information technology was when it initially emerged from the Philadelphia Convention. Through the amendment process (in particular, through the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments), it has become the protector of the rights of all the people, not just some of the people.
On the other hand, the challenges to national unity nether our Constitution are, if anything, far greater than those confronting the babe nation in 1787. Although the new nation was a pluralistic one by the standards of the 18th century, the face of America in 1998 looks very unlike from the original: we are no longer a people united by a common language, religion or civilization; and while our overall level of material prosperity is staggering by the standards of whatsoever age, the widening gulf between rich and poor is peradventure the virtually serious threat to a common definition of the "pursuit of happiness."
The conditions that threaten to undermine our sense of nationhood, leap up in the contend over slavery and manifested in intense sectional conflict during the pre-Civil State of war era, are today both more circuitous and diffuse. Some of today's conditions are part of the tragic legacy of slavery--a racial climate marked too often by mutual mistrust and misunderstanding and a condition of desperate poverty within our inner cities that has left many young people so alienated that any standard definition of citizenship becomes meaningless. More than usually, simply in the long run maybe just every bit alarming, tens of millions of Americans take been turned-off by the corrupting effects of coin on the political arrangement. Bombarded with negative advert near their candidates, they express their feelings of breach by staying home on election day.
If there is a lesson in all of this it is that our Constitution is neither a cocky-actuating nor a self-correcting document. It requires the constant attending and devotion of all citizens. At that place is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached past a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A democracy, if y'all can keep it." The brevity of that response should non crusade us to nether-value its essential significant: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the agile and informed involvement of the people for their connected good wellness.
Dr. Richard Beeman is professor of history and dean of the Higher of Arts and Sciences at the Academy of Pennsylvania. The University is NCC's bookish partner, and for the year 1997 – 98. Dr. Beeman serves equally vice chair of our Distinguished Scholars Advisory Panel.
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Source: https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/historical-documents/perspectives-on-the-constitution-a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it
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