The Historic Unifying Potential of the U.S. Constitution

“Professor McConnell’s extensive study of the substance and scope of presidential power under the Constitution has convinced me that the unifying capacity of the Constitution could perhaps be revived.”

Disagreement and deep-seated difference are not alien realities to American political life. From the founding onwards, the United States of America has been replete with divisions running along fraught lines of race, region, religion, ethics, culture, and worldview. In the face of those differences, certain laws, ideas, understandings of our shared past, and even myths have helped to hold us together. Sometimes our bonds of unity have proven insufficient, and a particularly entrenched divide overpowers the normal constraints of public debate and morphs into violence, as was the case with the North-South dispute over slavery and the nature of the Union that culminated in the Civil War.

At any given point in our history, there have been various tools at our disposal to forge shared national unity. The tools vary in how morally upright, as well as how efficacious, they are. One especially powerful tool that helped to forge a sense of nationhood in the minds of Americans during the early years of the republic was the Constitution that the framers drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. It is important to remember that the fundamental fact of American political reality in the lead-up to the Constitution’s drafting was state-based, geographic division. Americans had a thin sense of their common nationhood, and their political attachments were almost entirely centered on their respective states. Americans’ overwhelming loyalty to their own states and lack thereof vis-à-vis the new nation had hampered the effectiveness of the national government under the Articles of Confederation and led founders such as George Washington and James Madison privately to worry about a national crackup prior to the Philadelphia Convention.

The Convention over which Washington presided and in which Madison was the principal intellectual force produced a national governance document, a “stunningly nationalist” Constitution, which brought the loosely-knit nation of states together into a veritable union. As the late Princeton historian John Murrin wrote:

“American national identity was…an unexpected, impromptu, artificial, and therefore extremely fragile creation of the Revolution…[T]he Constitution became a substitute for any deeper kind of national identity. American nationalism is distinct because, for nearly its first century, it was narrowly and peculiarly constitutional. People knew that without the Constitution there would be no America.”