A Constitutional Idea

Sitting in panels at the 2022 Organization of American Historians (OAH) conference, it is clear historians are thinking about the upcoming semiquincentennial in expansive ways. In one panel, a participant joked that maybe we would extend the commemoration through 2033, the end of the Revolutionary War. Others responded that in some states, they are. My response, albeit to myself, was a strong 2037! 2039! The conversations we have about the legacy of 1776 are deeply entwined with the conversations about the legacy of 1787 and the United States Constitution.

The upcoming semiquincentennial raises questions about how Americans celebrate and remember the country’s founding. Ideas like liberty, democracy, and equality all bear close historical scrutiny. Central to this is the Declaration of Independence, which is a document filled with ideas. More complicated, but no less symbolic, is the United States Federal Constitution, which has the double burden of being both a symbol for Americans’ ideas about the United States and a functioning (some of the time) governing document. On one hand, people project the ideals of the Declaration like equality or liberty onto the Constitution, promises it rarely delivers. On the other hand, the Constitution is a much stronger symbol of sovereignty, republicanism and citizenship than the more abstract Declaration. When Americans in the Early Republic were crafting their identity, they celebrated the Fourth of July but they toasted the Federal Constitution.

There is a bounty of great scholarship on the Constitution. Legal scholars and political historians have devoted reams of paper to the ideas in the Constitution: the three-fifths clause, due process, the role of the president and many other sections. There has also been work starting to think about the Constitution as an idea in and of itself. Questions about what it means to have a written constitution and grappling with myths, like that the United States was the first country to have a written constitution at all.

Still unanswered is Michael Kammen’s 1986 call for a “good cultural history” of the Constitution, especially for the early part of the republic. This is where intellectual and cultural history overlap. Because to write a cultural history of the Constitution is to write about the Constitution as an idea in people’s minds. What did it mean to everyday Americans and how did they incorporate it into their understanding of what it meant to be an American? In examining the larger cultural uses of the Constitution, I grapple with the ideas people had about what the document was. Like today, these ideas were not always grounded in legal precedent but rather in social understanding.

This meaning-making can be seen in the Golden Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of the Constitution, paired with Washington’s inauguration in 1839. The event, staged by the New-York Historical Society, culminated in an oration by John Quincy Adams where he compared the Constitution to the “shield” of the nation. Other metaphors illuminate the range of perspectives of the document: “machine”, “fabrick”, “harbor”, etc. These images pepper the literature of the Early Republic, but we don’t yet know the extent to which they took root in popular imagination or were used by those outside of Adam’s political spheres. This is what I hope to discover over the next few years of research.

Today, the U.S. Constitution is held up by all manner of people across the ideological spectrum. As my high school government students (who I required to read it in its entirety) pointed out, those brandishing the little booklet rarely had an accurate idea of what was between the covers. What then, does it mean to us? How has the Constitution taken a symbolic place next to the Declaration, despite being a much more concrete document? Finding its roots in the early 19th century will give us a better sense heading into the next anniversary.