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America’s form of government is unique among nations, in that we are a federal republic. Other nations may call themselves such, but they do not have our distinct history, in which 13 separate British colonies, having fought and won a war for independence from their homeland, then developed a new charter for their combined government as a federation of states. As a condition of ratifying that charter, the constitutional conventions of several states — most particularly Virginia — insisted that it must be amended to include guarantees of certain rights.
Most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights address what the Americans had inherited from the Whig tradition in England (e.g., religious freedom, trial by jury, etc.) or else seek to prevent the sort of abuses of power (e.g., unwarranted search and seizure) by which the colonists had felt oppressed under the British rule. But the most unique expressions of the rights our founders saw fit to prescribe were contained in the Second Amendment (the right to “keep and bear arms” which “shall not be infringed”) and the Tenth Amendment (reserving to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government). In both cases, these amendments express the concerns of the Anti-Federalists that the federal government might obtain too much power, becoming not the servant of the people, but rather their master. You cannot understand our Constitution and its Bill of Rights without studying the debates over ratification, a point made by M.E. Bradford in Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution. Every student of American history is (or rather should be) familiar with The Federalist Papers, in which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay made their arguments in favor of ratifying the new Constitution.
But those arguments cannot be fully understood without reference to the arguments of the Anti-Federalists, who opposed ratification. The Constitution could not have been adopted as the supreme law of the land if its proponents had not succeeded in assuring delegates to the state ratification conventions that this new government would not become a centralized tyrannical power, as the Anti-Federalists claimed.
My friends, go read it all! Pass it around urge everyone to read this! Most of America’s issues, maybe all of them can be found in our lack of adherence to our Constitution. In fact, our Constitution is largely ignored by both parties and by the citizens. It has been referenced when convenient, and then forgotten by far too many in our government. It is not taught in school as it should be taught. America cannot survive if this continues. We cannot be America by erasing or ignoring what America is.
