I have just finished reading Ratification: the people debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 by historian Pauline Maier. Although others may have written about this before, I feel that this book has a really significant story to tell in light of current debate and discussion of the meaning of, and implementation of the Constitution.
What is most interesting to me, is that the main objections to the Constitution in 1787 and 1788 all turned out to be chimeras. The argument, for example, that the Senate and the President would somehow be in collusion because the Senate was to ratify treaties and consent to appointments is, in today’s world, almost comical. Yet in 1787 and 1788 there was great fear that somehow those two issues would blur the separation of powers between the Executive and the legislative is actually the opposite; we have a legislative trying to micromanage the executive, by not advise and consent, but by demand and overrule.
In 1787 and 1788 there was fear that the states would cease to exist, because sovereignty was wrested in the people, not the states. Patrick Henry (he of “give me liberty or give me death” fame) objected to “We the People” in the preamble of the Constitution, arguing that it should be “We the States...” Whereas the States were considered, at the time, the defenders of the rights of the people, it has turned out that, in the case of civil liberties and civil rights, the States have been the ones that were the oppressors of the poor, the black, the voiceless. The Federal Government has been the defender of the “little people”. We now have a situation where the Federal Government has had to intervene in state after state to secure the rights of the people.
State after state argued and debated the Constitution. North Carolina was one of the final states to ratify, but its first attempt included amendments that they stated were necessary to make their ratification effective. This was rejected by Congress and North Carolina had to go through the process all over again.
Dozens of amendments were proposed, to the result that, had they been accepted, our government would be unrecognizable.
We have people who believe that our Constitution was divinely inspired. Yet the debate over religion was decisive; no religious test for office proclaimed that there was no tacit or explicit support of any religion. While the debate on this didn’t change things, there were many who were afraid that Jews, Catholics, or Moslems might be elected and the argument against those fears was always the same: if a person was moral, upright and qualified, it mattered not whether he was religious or what religion he might espouse.
This is just a rambling sample of some of the debates. I heartily recommend that anyone seeking to really appreciate the Constitution read this book