Made In America - Bill Bryson [38]
We, the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
After this simple statement of intent, there follow seven Articles, six of which set out – sometimes sketchily, sometimes with fastidious detail – the mechanisms of government, with a seventh announcing that the document would take effect once it had been ratified by nine states. (A number not chosen lightly; the delegates thought it doubtful that more than nine states would ratify.)
At just twenty-five pages, the Constitution is a model of concision. (The state constitution of Oklahoma, by contrast, is 158 pages long.22 On some matters it was explicit and forthright – on the age and citizenship requirements for senators, representatives and the President, and most especially on the matter of impeachment. The framers seemed cautious almost to the point of paranoia about providing instructions for how to depose those found to be disloyal or corrupt. However, on other matters it was curiously vague. There was no mention of a cabinet, for instance. It mandated the setting up of a Supreme Court, independent from the other branches, but then rather airily decreed that the rest of the judiciary should consist of ‘such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish’. Sometimes this vagueness was a consequence of oversight and sometimes of an inability to arrive at a more specific compromise. Where it was specific, it almost always left room for later change. After decreeing that Congress should assemble at least once a year, beginning on the first Monday in December, it thoughtfully added ‘unless they shall by law appoint a different day’. The upshot is that the Constitution is an extraordinarily adaptable set of ground rules.
In terms of its composition, surprisingly few oddities of spelling and syntax stand out. Three words are spelled in the British style, behaviour, labour and defence, but not tranquillity, which even in 1787 was being given a single l in America. Only once is there an inconsistency of spelling – empeachments in one paragraph and impeachment in the next – and only two other words are spelled in an archaic way: chuse and encreased. The opening sentence contains a double superlative (’more perfect’), which might not survive the editing process today, though it was unexceptionable enough at the time. The occasional appearance of a discordant article and noun combination (’an uniform’), a rather more fastidious use of the subjunctive (’before it become a law’, ‘if he approve he shall sign it’), the occasional capitalization of nouns that would now be lower-cased (’our Posterity’), and the treating of ‘the United States’ as a plural (it would remain so treated until about the time of the Civil War),23 more or less exhaust the list of distinctions.
The Constitution is more notable for what it does not include. The words nation and national appear nowhere in the document, and not by accident or oversight. The delegates carefully replaced the words wherever they appeared. They feared that national smacked of a system in which power was dangerously centralized. They instead used the more neutral and less emotive federal, derived from the Latin fides, ’faith’, and in the eighteenth century still carrying the sense of a relationship resting on trust.24
The other part of the Constitution with which we are most familiar, the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, came later. They were not adopted until 1791 (and in the case of Massachusetts not until 150 years later, when it was discovered that their ratification had been accidentally overlooked). These guarantees of basic freedoms were as radical and novel as anything