Constitution: History of Its Ratification

Constitution: History Of Its Ratification The Constitution is such a fixture in American political life and rhetoric it seems as if it has always existed, as if it sprung from the founding father's brains like Athena from the head of Zeus. However, this is not the case -- the concept of an individual's inalienable rights that could not be infringed upon by the government were not simply generated in the minds of Madison, Washington, and Jefferson after the American Revolution's extraction of the colonies from British rule.

The idea began with the ideals of an individual's right to life, liberty, and property that the sovereign ruler could not touch, as expressed in the words of the English philosopher John Locke. Locke proclaimed human liberty, or freedom of choice, to live as one desired could only be impinged upon if it were necessary to protect the liberty of another. The French philosopher Rousseau proclaimed human freedom in a state of nature -- only if one desired governance need one enters into a social contract with a sovereign state.

Later, the United States' Bill of Rights guaranteed a citizen's freedom of speech and the right not to have to house soldiers in one's home or property. It was thus revolutionary in its constitutional guarantee of liberties, the embodiment of older, radical philosophies of liberties and rights. But politically, the American Constitution came into being only with great struggle. It was spawned by the need for a more centralized government than the Articles of Confederation.

"With the states retaining considerable power, the central government, he believed, had insufficient power to regulate commerce. It could not tax and was generally impotent in setting commercial policy. It could not effectively support a war effort. It had little power to settle quarrels between states." (NARA, 2004) Another considerable obstacle was the regional divisions between the white slave owning Southern that feared a loss of white ethnic superiority over slaves.

Several plans were proposed to stem regional strife, one featuring strong executive power, called the Virginia Plan, the third a purely federal and states-rights-based system called the New Jersey Plan, and Alexander Hamilton's imposition of a British-style American monarch upon the newly independent nation. (NARA, 2004) Also crowding into this complicated and divisive discussion over representation was the North-South division over the method by which slaves were to be counted for purposes of taxation and representation.

On July 12 Oliver Ellsworth proposed that representation for the lower house be based on the number of free persons and three-fifths of all other persons, a euphemism for slaves." (NARA, 2004) Not until the fourteenth amendment and the 20th century were civil rights, the positive rights of protection of the government, given to American Blacks and many have argued that the first version of the Constitution was thus biased in favor of the Southern states despite the fact it did not delineate a fully federal system.

It still tolerated slavery and gave Blacks no constitutional guarantees of freedom and equality under the law. Of course, the first version of the Constitution was hardly purely democratic, even in its allocation of rights to white men. Male voters had to own property. Thus voting was still the province of land-holding elites rather than all the people under the rule of constitutional, national, and state law.

The fact that Senators were appointed by the state legislature not only allocated more rights to the states as desired by Southerners, but also further filtered the popular voice, as expressed in the House of Representatives. The Electoral College system also filtered access to power via the voting box when it came to voting for the executive authority.

"The large states got proportional strength in the number of delegates, the state legislatures got the right of selecting delegates, and the House the right to choose the president in the event no candidate received a majority of electoral votes." (NARA, 2004) The Electoral College system again underlines the republican, or filtered rather than pure democratic system of governance, as a chief executive could lose the popular vote but still win the Electoral College.

Theoretically, one of the elected 'electors' could change his mind after judicious consideration and refuse to vote for the chief executive 'he' was expected to elect. The theoretical principle of equality of all human beings upheld in the Declaration of Independence thus did not mean as a point of fact, in the Constitution, that all had equal access to power, as a way of tempering the will of the people and individual rights for the common good.

The framing of the Constitution thus is and was a compromise of individual and collective rights, and of Southern desire for state's rule and Northern desires for federal dominance that could more effectively negotiate with other nations. Indeed, it looked like the constitution would not pass at first. The compromise did not end with the signing of the Constitution, as only after a bill of rights was included did it seem that ratification by all.