Constitution, U.S.

Although William Gladstone (1809–98), who served as British prime minister four times in the late nineteenth century, called the U.S. Constitution “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man,” the framers had a vast reservoir of history and personal experience to draw on during their labors of drafting a constitution for the new nation. On the whole they were well educated in political history, and Great Britain’s in particular. Under the banner “No taxation without representation,” revolutionaries in Britain’s thirteen American colonies had separated themselves from the mother country with their Declaration of Independence (1776) and the long Revolutionary War (1775–83). Britain’s government was (and is) a monarchy, albeit limited to some degree by the country’s constitution, led by a Parliament in which the colonists had no representation when it came to unwelcome taxes or other matters.

Democratic experiments—in ancient Greece, the Roman Republic, the confederacy of Switzerland, and particularly European models of political organization—informed the delegates in Philadelphia in 1787 (see Democracy). The Federalist Papers (1787–88) indexes references to Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. The works of the English philosophers John Locke (1632–1704) and David Hume (1711–76) and the French philosophical historian and jurist Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Bréde et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), among many others, also provided guidance in their deliberations. The delegates knew about Isaac Newton’s success in formulating the laws of gravity and motion, making sense of the orbits of the planets around the sun. The many lawyers at the convention were undoubtedly aware of William Blackstone’s (1723–80) monumental work Commentaries on the Laws of England[Page 116] (1765–70), which reduced the vast body of English law into an organized and comprehensible entity. If such complexities as the solar system and a nation’s hundreds of years of judicial opinions and statutes could be reduced to basic concepts and organized into a meaningful whole, why then, they thought, could not a nation’s political organization be amenable to rational description and understanding?

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