In the Shadow of Our Founders: Part Two
officially concluded the American Revolution. The Preamble to the Constitution also identified the document's purpose as being to "form a more perfect Union" than the status quo under the Articles of Confederation.
Contrary to the implication of the Constitution's Preamble which refers to "We the People of the United States," the former president of the Confederacy declares in his memoirs that there is no such "political community as 'the people of the United States' in the aggregate." The fact that the Preamble refers to such an aggregate was, in fact, as Davis acknowledges, one of the leading complaints against the Constitution in 1787 when it was released to the states.
The omission of the names of the individual states, in light of all the other evidence available, cannot and should not be read as a decision by the Founders to diminish the importance of the individual states. However, it must be read as an indication of the Founders' commitment to the Union that the states made up at the time of the Constitutional Convention.
On this basic tenet of Davis's defense of secession as a legal right, it must be acknowledged that the Constitution was formed as a compact of the states. Yet we must also be aware that the nature of this compact required more from the states than the Articles had previously.
Part 3 will explore what exactly the Constitution required of the states, and will examine the final basic tenet of Davis's position, namely that states (as "sovereign communities" within a "voluntary compact") may reclaim their powers and withdraw from the Constitution.
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Sources for this article:
Encarta Encyclopedia (web site), "The Articles of Confederation," The Microsoft Corporation, 2001
Davis, Jefferson, The Rise And Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume I, Da Capo, 1990 edition
Fehrenbacher, Don E., ed., Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings 1859-1865, The Library of America, 1989
Hefner, Richard D., ed., A Documentary History of the United States, 5th edition, Penguin (Mentor), 1991
Jaffa, Harry, "The Imaginary Secessionist," The Claremont Institute web site, 2001
Kennedy, James Ronald & Kennedy, Walter Donald, Was Jefferson Davis Right? Pelican, 1998
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