Constitution Day, September 17, makes its annual return. It is a good occasion to reflect again on what it means for Americans to be a constitutional people. At the time of the framing of the Constitution, such a people was a great novelty in the history of the world. As James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, explained:

The important distinction so well understood in America between a Constitution established by the people and unalterable by the government, and a law established by the government and alterable by the government, seems to have been little understood and less observed by any other country.

In America, being a constitutional people is inseparable from being a free people, which is why Constitution Day is forever joined with Independence Day. The signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the Revolutionary War that followed, made possible and pointed the way toward the signing of the Constitution of the United States of America on the seventeenth of September, 1787.

In the American calendar ever since, Independence Day always looks forward, not just chronologically and historically but philosophically and politically, to its consummation on Constitution Day, just as Constitution Day always remains rooted in the principles famously proclaimed on Independence Day and vindicated by the Revolutionary War. The two days are inseparable in their political significance, as are the Declaration and the Constitution. It is a fine tradition to re-read each document in its entirety on its commemorative day.

On the principle that ideas and words get famous for a reason, and that time is precious, I take this occasion to reflect briefly on the most famous idea and phrase from each document—they are profoundly connected. I mean the Declaration’s great American proclamation that “all men are created equal” and the first three words of the Constitution: “We the People.” The relation between these two ideas—equality and consent—is at the heart of American political freedom.

That “all men are created equal” is what Alexander Hamilton would call one of those “primary truths, or first principles,” upon which all subsequent American political reasonings depend. An immediate inference from this primary truth, as the Declaration of Independence declares, is that the just powers of government are derived not from the divine right of kings but from the consent of the governed—from us, the people. And the legitimate purpose of government is not to win glory for the king but to secure the equal natural rights of the people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

Some scores of years down the American road, on the eve of the greatest crisis of the Union and the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln meditated on the relationship between the Union and the Constitution on one hand and the Declaration on the other. He had in mind a beautiful passage from Proverbs (25:11)—“A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.”—as he reflected on the blessings enjoyed by the United States.

“All this,” he wrote, “is not the result of accident.”

It has a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained the result; but even these, are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of “Liberty to all”—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all. The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy, and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity…. The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, “fitly spoken” which has proved an “apple of gold” to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it.

It is one of our greatest blessings as Americans that the American revolutionaries asserted and vindicated that principle that “all men are created equal.” It is one of our greatest blessings that, to secure the fruits of that principle, in the generation that framed and ratified the Constitution, “We the People” acted to establish a “more perfect Union.” In the period of the American Founding, from the Revolution to the establishment of the Constitution, Americans displayed statesmanship and citizenship unsurpassed in the history of human freedom. Any freedom and prosperity we enjoy today, as Lincoln understood so well, is a legacy of that founding—an inheritance of apples of gold in pictures of silver.

Happy Constitution Day.