The Constitution

The US Constitution was written and adopted by the 13 states that made up the US at the time in 1787-88, and George Washington, the first President of the US under the new provisions, took office in 1789 (read the document and official commentary at the US National Archives site here).

The Constitution, which of course has its roots in the events of the time, has come to be venerated as a kind of iconic symbol of "American" values and ideology, so much so that even as long ago as 1954, D.W.Brogan could write

...today, only a dissident and mainly academic minority doubt that this Constitution supplies the ideal solution of the American political problem whose basic rightness is not to be questioned — and a solution that would equally well serve the rest of the world had they the wisdom and virtue to adopt it. (Politics in America, 1954)

In some ways, the government created by the Constitution is of a very classical structure: the three major functions of any government described by political thinkers including Montesquieu, Locke, and many other are distributed in three branches, each described in one of the first three articles of the document.

The document is relatively short (less than 10,000 words including the amendments), and can thus give only a very general outline of the structures of the federal government and the relations between the states that make up the Union. This concision has, over time, arguably been both a strength and a weakness: by failing to specify various The federal government is made up of three branches, described in the first three articles. They have, of necessity, related and complementary powers; among their powers are those which collectively constitute what has become known as "checks and balances". The original document, before the Amendments were added, consisted of a Preamble and seven articles:

• Preamble
1. Article One: Legislative Branch (Congress)
   Congress defined: [House of Representatives & Senate], Modes of Election, Procedures, Compensation, Privileges, Restrictions, Modes of legislation, "Enumerated powers" of Congress, Prohibitions & limits (on federal gov't & states)
2. Article Two: Executive Branch
   (The President & Vice-President; Presidential elections & impeachment)
3. Article Three: Judicial Branch
   (The Supreme Court and lower courts, judicial review)
4. Article Four
   Relations Between the States & federalism
5. Article Five: Amendments
6. Article Six: Miscellany
7. Article Seven: Ratification

The objectives that the authors of the Constitution were trying to achieve included

reinforcing the Union, i.e., making the central, federal government stronger and strengthening the links between the federated states while at the same time

preserving the existence and identities of the states and

protecting the individual and personal rights and liberties that they considered to be the legacy of the War for Independence that had been fought and won only a few years before; part of this objective was achieved by the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Over the course of the 220 years since the Constitution went into effect, twenty-seven amendments have been added. Ten were added almost immediately, in 1791, as a compromise between opponents and supporters of the Constitution as it was originally proposed; they are collectively called the "Bill of Rights", and concern mainly the protection of individual rights and liberties against infringement by government, especially the federal government. It was, indeed, widely assumed that the state governments, smaller and closer to the people, would be more attentive to their rights than the large bureaucracy of the federal government, several hundred miles distant from the vast majority of Americans. More can be found about them at the Cornell University Law School's website (here).

Further information about and discussion of the US Constitution can be found at the Wikipedia site, here, and a very complete, but highly technical annotated Constitution is to be found at the Cornell University Law School's web-site here.