Cameron Brown: The Constitution was a miracle, indeed
There is little our Founders missed in crafting our nation's Constitution, notably its separation of powers and checks and balances. They were children of the Enlightenment and their studied view of monarchs and ruling classes infused their world view with a healthy mistrust of government.
“If men were angels," James Madison wrote, "no government would be necessary.” But government is necessary they affirmed to "secure" God-given rights — the predicate for their experiment in self government. The forerunning Declaration of Independence borrowed from the Old World — Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu — but the experiment itself would be planted in the New World.
Revisionists may decry the idea of American exceptionalism, but the validation of that superlative stares us in the face. From Sinai’s Decalogue to Runnymede’s Magna Carta to all the struggles of men and women to live free, our Constitution stands apart from other charters of government and is itself exceptional in the annals of world history. John Adams called the 1787 convention in Philadelphia that drafted our Constitution "the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen." Modern-day historians agree.
While America's past bears the ignoble stamp of slavery, it was the U.S. Constitution that President Lincoln ably employed to abolish the evils of slavery using the constitutional means of an Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment. It was the supreme law of the land that broke the shackles of American slavery.
In the 1960s, Catherine Drinker Bowen authored “Miracle at Philadelphia,” a compelling history of that five-month gestation that birthed our Constitution. “Reading Madison's long letters on politics," she writes, "with their cool forceful arguments, or Washington's with their stately rhythm, one senses beneath the elaborate paragraphs a very fury of concern for the country. And one takes comfort in this solemnity." Bowen's narrative is timely reading for America today.
Washington called it a miracle, and Madison too, and they would know. No other nation has eclipsed the brilliance of the miracle we take for granted — our U.S. Constitution. Because of it, we can speak our mind, pursue our life goals, and be protected by a jurisprudence based on due process. And that remains true not by virtue of having the Constitution, but to the extent we "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution." We are a republic, the “Sage of Philadelphia” would remind us, if we can keep it. May we ever keep it as a "fury of our concern" for the treasure and miracle it is, and for the sake of generations unborn.
— Cameron S. Brown is president of the Kalamazoo Abraham Lincoln Institute and a former Michigan state senator. Follow him at HistoryFrontiers.blog.
This article originally appeared on Sturgis Journal: Cameron Brown: The Constitution was a miracle, indeed
