Founding Days

Antebellum America commemorated constitutional creation annually. The story of the Federal Constitution colonized Independence Day celebrations after the 1820s and recurred in other civic gatherings. In 1826, for instance, when Mississippi lawyer Powhatan Ellis addressed a Vicksburg crowd fifty years post-Declaration, he rallied members to see themselves as dutiful constitutional heirs. Proclaiming the “sacred instrument [] a splendid monument of the wisdom, intelligence and patriotism of our fathers,” Ellis asked his community, rhetorically: “shall we, the descendants of those great and good men, lay the rude hand of the spoiler upon that venerable memorial of their revolutionary deeds, and make it sink under the consolidating powers of General Government?” Old battles could be remembered; but, more importantly, the Fathers’ Constitution must be defended. Ellis’s oratory showed separate historical events being drawn together in public recollection. Constitution-making, once distinct from the Revolution, became its culminating triumph over adversity. As Samuel Yorke Atlee concluded in his Fourth of July remarks to a Maryland Odd Fellows Lodge in 1854, the “severest trials” had arrived after war ended and were only resolved by a Constitution for which “experience daily inculcates the sacred duty of maintaining its obligations.” A peripatetic civil servant and civic organizer, Atlee shared grand plans for how to carry out that duty at a subsequent teachers’ association convention: state legislatures should require “the first page of every newspaper” to bear the Constitution; “societies [should] be formed for supplying every family with a copy”; and more systematic laws should ensure that schools “impress the Constitution of the United States upon the minds of the children of the Republic.” While AtLee sought official measures, this consciousness-forming work had been carried out for decades at commemorative and associational gatherings where discrete publics rehearsed a possessive sense of the Founding.Footnote ¹⁰

More than an occasion for reciting hoary rhetoric, Independence Day celebrations offered thousands of wooden platforms for Americans to connect their troubled present to authority from 1787-1789—and to deploy that past as warning or weapon against other Americans. Across regional, partisan, and ethnic divides, speakers stood at ritualized proceedings in rural towns and growing cities to talk about the constitutional Founding. Representative rhetoric, reflecting Hildreth’s “glare of patriotic eulogium,” attests to this ideological convergence. In the modest New York village of Liverpool, John Martin Vincent, newly admitted to the bar, enjoined his audience in 1849 to make “the union, and the constitution your idols.” In politics, they must: “See to it, that their keeping be entrusted to men who venerate them, rather than confide their preservation to those who hold them secondary to any earthly consideration.” Orators defined a category of public enemies when promising the Constitution would, as youthful lawyer Daniel Dougherty uttered in 1856, guarantee liberty “until the earth shall crumble” only if “preserved unaltered and untouched.” Dougherty painted this relationship in plainspeak when he warned Philadelphians at the Old Statehouse that although the “Hall stands untouched by time, there are Americans—degenerate sons—cursed with ingratitude” who would “wither the hopes of the future” by violating the Constitution made there. Patriotic ceremonies routinely constructed this internal foe—“degenerate sons”—who dared transgress the Founding.Footnote ¹¹

Partisan politicking during the 1830s and 1840s, tending to submerge sectional conflict under other cultural and constitutional differences, saw Democrats and Whigs sometimes spar within a Founding framework. In 1834, for example, aspiring anti-Jackson Pennsylvania politician James Gowen made his Independence Day address to “Friends of the Constitution” about its faultless authorship. At the Federal Convention, national fathers “capable of penetrating into the future” had scrutinized their text’s “susceptibility of being interpreted or construed at any future time contrary to its spirit” and produced a work of such clarity that Andrew Jackson’s maneuvers against the Second Bank of the United States could only be a deliberate violation of original designs. The same approach informed anti-Bank discourse. Massachusetts Democrat Benjamin Hallett devoted multiple Independence Day speeches to arguing that constitutional history must end the Bank debate. In 1838, his oration deployed the Convention journal and anti-Federalist delegate Luther Martin’s report to prove that “contemporaneous exposition of the intention of the framers of the Constitution, settles this question.” Following the shock of Whig victories, Hallett returned with new materials in 1841. The “Convention expressly refused to give Congress the power to make a bank or erect any other kind of corporation,” he rejoiced, as the just-published “Madison papers confirm.”Footnote ¹²

Far more than party disputes, however, slavery’s irrepressible politics brought an original Constitution to the center of commemorative activity. When sectional conflict intensified, Founding ideology grew more pronounced. On the Fourth after the shaky “Compromise of 1850,” for instance, Centre College professor William Scott guided his Danville, Kentucky audience to behold a Fathers’ Constitution that had produced sixty years of “Liberty, prosperity, security, boundless growth, glorious prospects.” Then he warned that “enemies” jeopardized this “priceless heritage… and we must not gamble upon orphans’ trust funds, nor rattle the dice upon our fathers’ gravestones, nor allow it to be done.” Moved by explosive political conflicts and haunting moral tensions, voices rang out advocating constitutional veneration, obedience, and preservation. Communities made sense of strife through a ruling Founding. The Fourth of July oration that farmer David Heaton delivered in Middletown, Ohio in 1855 illustrated these enveloping dynamics. A novice politician who entered the state legislature that year, Heaton dwelt on the Constitution and fate of republics. Martial events merited scant attention. In mourning the passing of those “who composed that celebrated Convention,” Heaton and his constituency recognized themselves as continuously blessed and bound by original wisdom. Yet this was no happy pean. It was an impassioned call against “permit[ting] the great work committed to our hands to go to ruin and decay.” Americans, he explained, were lulled into dangerous complacency. These fortunate sons learned their national fathers “bequeath[ed] to us the most perfect government on earth, and that all we have to do is simply to live in the great Temple provided for us.” But the duty of preservation demanded greater vigilance against the threat “within our own border.” Then this free white farmer described the place of slavery in the constitutional Founding. His framers had:

This story did not display Heaton’s creativity. He extended a common sense of a Founding that had condemned the territorial extension of slavery. In the same breath, however, Heaton signified a Founding that excluded abolitionist action. Citizens must “hope” and “trust” that in another half century the tyranny of slavery would “dissipate.” This conclusion was no less crucial than the antislavery story. General and particular elements composed a structure that encouraged political organization while limiting its aims.Footnote ¹³

Most white political communities spent Independence Day observing a constitutional Founding that defined a Union with slavery. This was the case even among those disaffected with the existing order. “Our 4th of July was celebrated with considerable spirit at several places in the District, which shows there is some patriotic feeling & pride still extant,” reported one South Carolina slaveholder to another in 1844. He recounted that “addresses were mostly of a political kind: bitter & denunciatory of our General Government as being administered by a reckless & dominant majority, without any regard to its constitutional restrictions.” On the margins, meanwhile, abolitionists sought alternatives. Some intellectual leaders like Frederick Douglass labored to refashion the Constitution as an emancipatory text unencumbered by an authoritative originary moment. Others, like William Lloyd Garrison, concluded that the Constitution was unredeemable. Both abolitionists used Independence Day—Garrison to incinerate a tyrannical Constitution and Douglass to urge people to “do with the past only as we make it useful to the present and to the future.” These opposing positions responded to the power of Founding ideology in preserving a Union with slavery. It was precisely this anchoring effect that so many civic events cultivated. The Fourth was for constitutional discipline, not revolutionary aspiration.Footnote ¹⁴

Proceedings at New Haven, Connecticut in 1851 exemplified this Founding work. Civic leaders had requested esteemed attorney Hiram Ketchum to make “a salutary and enduring impression in regard to our great duties to the Union, the Constitution, and the Laws.” He answered the call. Declaring independence and waging war were beside the point. They were “but the beginning of the contest,” Ketchum explained, as “the great question arose how shall we preserve the liberty which has been acquired.” He led listeners back to the Convention where Washington, “the ablest man of any age,” along with “a host of other worthies,” had created the best possible Constitution. The crowd traveled between the 1780s and 1850s, as Ketchum recalled how nobody in 1789 had “dispute[d] the right of their masters” to seize absconding slaves. The lesson was to follow the Founding in values and law, tolerating slavery and obeying its commitments. The Constitution, Ketchum instructed, was a “whole bargain… of the most binding character” and “has done more to advance the happiness of man than any other that was ever made.” Peals of laughter rewarded the sarcastic portrayal of antislavery citizens—“so much wiser than Washington, and Franklin, and Hamilton, and Madison, and Roger Sherman, and Oliver Ellsworth”—whom Ketchum mocked as Constitution-destroying fools. Asked if Americans could “do anything better than to sustain” the Fathers’ Constitution, the audience erupted in a roar of noes. Shouting constitutional deference to a Founding that settled slavery was how many patriotic citizens celebrated the Fourth. In their cheers, references, and assumptions, they grasped and reproduced Founding ideology.Footnote ¹⁵

With holidays such as these, it is little wonder that Americans did not establish a Constitution Day. Beyond the Fourth and other patriotic commemorations, the Founding infiltrated everyday civic life. For instance, local lyceums and debating societies staged events where residents rehearsed constitutional memory between holidays. As one avid participant explained, these civic institutions performed invaluable service because “there is a possibility of the humblest citizens aspiring someday to a seat in the councils of the nation.” When groups like the Barboursville, Kentucky Debating Society or the Good-Will Debating Society in Montgomery, New York convened, they debated the same questions of constitutional politics—such as Congress receiving antislavery petitions or the annexation of Texas. In Troy, Ohio, Zelona Eaton “read & thought” about slavery’s constitutional status for many days in 1843 before entering a three-day argument at his town’s lyceum urging abolition in the District of Columbia. James Coon reflected in his diary on his experience arguing the affirmative “for the United States to take speedy measures for the abolition of Slavery in the Southern States” in 1841. The Salem, New York lawyer noted that in two years, he had argued it “five several times and always have gained it when on the Neg and lost it when vice versa” because “no presiding officer can be found who will do justice to the disputants of this question.” These civil society engagements nurtured inhabitants’ shared recognition of a governing Founding. In Tunbridge, Vermont, a rural association debated which founder had the greatest influence and whether “the people of the United States [ought] to make slavery a Political question.” They agreed: Washington and Nay. At the nearby Montpelier Lyceum in 1830, one member volunteered to deliver a lecture on “The History and Principles of the American Constitution,” and another prepared a “Lecture on the Duties of an American Citizen.” Learning, affirming, and thinking with the Founding was part of the social fabric of active citizenship.Footnote ¹⁶

Yet one well-to-do Delaware man campaigned persistently during the 1850s to establish a yearly “National Jubilee” honoring the Constitution. If it was “important to celebrate, annually, our National Independence,” John Connell argued, “how much more so, ought it to be, to commemorate our National Union?” That the Fourth had been rededicated to constitutional memory did not satisfy his conscience. “We are trustees for posterity,” he believed, imagining divine retribution for breaching that trust. Beset by ideological anxieties that required dissatisfaction with the sufficiency of commemorative practices, this civic campaign reflected the Founding’s inner reach.Footnote ¹⁷

Governing Lessons

How did antebellum Americans learn the Founding? Sources were plural, abundant, and diffuse. The civic gatherings where communities practiced their idioms and imperatives took place within a thick field of constitutional memory. From political rallies and legislative speeches to circulating newspapers and patriotic biographies, words spoken and printed cemented the Founding in language and thought. Yet the question of assimilation can also be examined directly, albeit partially, by observing reproduction through education—a domain where society transmits core intergenerational ideological commitments. Among the host of sources from which people learned the Founding was an antebellum curriculum that incorporated its structure into educational life across levels and regions. Boys and girls were taught precepts of veneration and obedience, though the normative pupil was a figurative son of national fathers. Students in academies and colleges practiced speaking and writing within the framework. Meanwhile, booksellers and associational libraries provided an ever-growing supply of didactic texts directed to the citizen-student outside formal education. For free white Americans, educational access varied widely by geography, class, and gender; but in innumerable schools and homes, the Founding was learned—an accessible, uncontested form of constitutional understanding distinct from precise textual and doctrinal knowledge. As the first words of a leading constitutional handbook announced: “The Constitution, as the fireside companion of the American citizen, preserves in full freshness and vigor the recollection of the patriotic virtues and persevering courage of those gallant spirits of the Revolution who achieved the national independence, and the intelligence and fidelity of those fathers of the republic who secured, by this noble charter the fruits and the blessings of independence.” In discursively representative samples of popular constitutional education, rising generations can be seen learning to be governed by the Founding.Footnote ¹⁸

Schoolbooks put students in their constitutional place. Across elementary histories, civic instructors, and introductory lawbooks, young Americans received a common lesson on their relationship to a Constitution made for them, not by them. Beginning in the late 1820s, this didactic literature, “inhabiting a space in between the elite and the average person” according to Margeret Nash, emerged at the conjuncture of growing sectional tensions, generational change, and concerns over democratic competence. It departed from regionalized early national history and civic materials in which the Constitution was neither central nor historical. The closing words of Arthur Stansbury’s Elementary Catechism on the Constitution of the United States summarized the ascending ideal relationship between pupils and their Fathers’ Constitution in 1828. Students took to heart that: “though the glory of giving to their country such a Constitution as this, is what none but [the framers] have been so blessed as to enjoy, yet you succeed to a task, but one degree removed from it, that of preserving what they have committed to your virtue, unsullied and unimpaired.” Republican virtue narrowed into constitutional preservation under this educational regime. As Stansbury was composing this lesson, educator Isaac Jones was also struck by the short life of republics and feared the “rising generation” would undermine their own. His short volume, Questions, Adapted to the Constitution of the United States, explained that important answers were “not found in the Constitution” as a text, and students would need guidance to achieve a “full and correct” understanding through history.Footnote ¹⁹

This counsel suggests how teachers mediated constitutional learning. The Founding gained life in the classroom and home. The language of fathers, norms of gratitude, and duty of deference drew strength through social reinforcement. Educational authorities pursued this effect. In the mid-1830s, for instance, a Pennsylvania committee planning a seminary to train public schoolteachers reported that learning the “civil history of the colonies and of the United States will be a natural introduction to the careful study and interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.” Teachers, many of whom would be women, must be able to inspire “a pure and unadulterated love of country and reverence for the laws and institutions of their native land.” Beyond endorsing general patriotic instruction, this undertaking placed a historically embedded Constitution at its center. That numerous women taught and that some authored educational texts buttressed this Fathers’ Constitution: it was a rhetorically gendered ideology joined across gender. For instance, when Emma Willard’s widely adopted History of the United States narrated framers compromising over slavery, students learned that the “convention was an example to future times of the triumph of strong patriotism, honest zeal for the public welfare over party feeling, and sectional prejudice.” This Founding-anchored view of dutiful constitutionalism was confirmed by an example from those future times. In depicting sectional conflict, Willard excerpted and lauded a northern senator’s speech denigrating abolitionists as “people who believed themselves charged with a mission, not only to amend the constitution framed by the wisdom of our fathers, but also to assist the Almighty in the correction of sundry mistakes which they had discovered in his works.”Footnote ²⁰

Inculcation of an authoritative Founding proceeded across educational levels. Proud constitutional deference laced through schoolbooks by the prolific Samuel Goodrich, often writing under the pseudonym Peter Parley. As his The Young American: Or Book of Government and Law expressed, “Why should not every boy and girl in our country be instructed in the nature and history of that government which our fathers founded, and which gives protection to the people, and looks to the people for support?” This paternal force of fathers who founded, a mainstay in textbooks, signified the bounded constitutional responsibility of youth “to perpetuate it; to obey its laws, to maintain its institutions and to carry it into effect, according to the wise and patriotic intention of its framers.” That final clause was crucial: nowhere were young Americans encouraged to revise or reconsider. Basic civics texts delivered this message and gestured toward practical implications. Joseph Burleigh’s American Manual, a prominent schoolbook in Border State classrooms, featured an extended “Commentary on the Constitution” explaining delicately that national fathers had faced “sectional jealousies” like those in the present and wisely resolved them with mutual “concessions.” Most important for students was to appreciate the unparalleled “success of the labors of the framers” and follow their design. As the Manual put it with dire veneration, “now, for the people to disregard the injunctions of the Constitution, and cast it aside, would denote political insanity.”Footnote ²¹

Specialized materials maintained this posture. Delaware attorney James Bayard Jr.’s well-received Brief Exposition of the Constitution of the United States, a textbook introducing constitutional law, explained that the very knowability of the Founding rendered it a revelatory historical rupture. Bayard, a future United States senator, instructed that while the “origin of most other governments is lost,” “it was reserved for our immediate ancestors to give to the world an example of a government, deliberately framed by the people,” and the Constitution’s “history, will be the best introduction to an examination of its principles.” This meaning-making history included slavery’s inviolability as a state institution, as “southern States would probably not have consented to the Union” without a constitutional promise of non-interference. The country’s most prominent jurist, Justice Joseph Story, joined this project of developing constitutional discipline. Story found time between judging and teaching to winnow his constitutional treatise into A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution for “Common Schools and Academies.” Studying the framers’ visions and values, he coaxed, would cause preexisting gratitude to “kindle into a holier reverence, and their memories will be cherished among those of the noblest benefactors of mankind.” The felt urgency for constitutional inculcation can also be seen in the striking fact that two of the first thirty-four embossed alphabet books manufactured for the Perkins Institution for the Blind concerned the Constitution. The first contained the text itself. The second was a common civics text, William Sullivan’s Political Class Book, which introduced the Constitution by teaching that the “framers of this system are entitled to the gratitude of their countrymen; and the people who adopted their work well deserve to be honored by their fortunate descendants.”Footnote ²²

Enthusiastic adoption of Burleigh’s American Manual by Virginia educators as “the best book for training the young mind” reflected the Founding’s cross-sectional resonance. While white southern communities had much less educational development than did northern states, the core ideological structure was the same. For instance, the rare southern-printed history textbook Catechism of United States History celebrated the “not every-day men that made this government” and were “[l]ike stars scattered across the darkness of Heaven.” Of vastly greater reach in the South, however, were northern-produced schoolbooks that, like Emma Willard’s History, communicated a binding Founding compatible with proslavery constitutional memory. As the publishing house Harper & Brothers wrote in an open letter to southern newspaper readers, “it must be pretty generally understood in your section, as well as elsewhere, that we uniformly decline publishing works calculated to interfere, in any way, with Southern Rights and Southern Institutions.” Later, Fletcher Harper reflected, “I grew up under the Union and the Constitution…. I don’t believe what the abolitionists print weekly in their organ, that the Union or the Constitution is a covenant with hell.” He believed and reproduced Founding ideology. Southern writers sometimes objected to specific nationalist interpretations of constitutional text and history, but they had no objection to Founding authority essential to delegitimating antislavery democratic capacity. It was this cross-sectional instruction that led Dr. James McCune Smith to conclude that “A School History, sound on the principles of liberty… would be entirely too Anti-slavery to command the market” and to hope that an abolitionist lawyer would author a counter-textbook on the “Constitution of the United States with questions and answers for the use of schools.”Footnote ²³

It is important to see that Founding apostles such as Burleigh, Story, Bayard, and Sullivan, along with American history writers who spread constitutional education, were reaching beyond classrooms to instruct the citizen-student. Books were addressed and marketed to a larger reading public outside of schools. Catalogues of mercantile libraries, young men’s associations, and public libraries reveal a canon of texts that developed quickly and expanded over time. In Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Boston, Lowell, Saint Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Brooklyn, Albany, Troy, Buffalo, Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, Hartford, Chicago, Richmond, and San Francisco, eligible readers perused constitutional commentaries and instructors, national histories and records from the Convention and ratification debates. At New Bedford, Massachusetts’ Free Public Library, for instance, visitors could borrow works by Story, Sullivan, and Bayard, choose from three additional instructors, consult two handbooks, read national histories, and study ratification records. At this hub of Black abolitionism, such resources may have illuminated oppressive structures rather than inculcating reverence. More broadly, however, they permitted white citizens to become informal students of the Founding.Footnote ²⁴

After learning basic ideological precepts, some pupils went further. Constitutional government formed a part of collegiate curricula, evident in dozens of catalogs from northern, western, and southern schools. Collegiate men obtained fluency with the Founding. At Trinity College, for instance, one student in a Constitution class jotted that “to understand the phrase ‘Consolidation of the Union’ we must go back & understand what the framers of the Constitution had in their minds, for in interpreting any such thing we must see what the phrases were to those who used them.” Doing so would establish the “cardinal principle of the Constitution that it is a union made by the people & not a league made by states.” At South Carolina College, John McMaster recorded that the Constitution was framed by a “convention of deputies from all the States,” and that the original states had “preserved” and “only suspended” their sovereignty in creating a limited national government. Harvard law student Charles McIntire took down his professor’s account that the Constitution “is an instrument to which the states as an entire people are parties, it was adopted by conventions. One should go back to the first settlement of the country & to the revolution in order to understand the constitution, it emanated from the Declaration of Independence.” Beneath these divergent origin stories, the students received the shared lesson of an authoritative Founding.Footnote ²⁵

Learning was not passive. Students might craft and read aloud a paper like the one Phillip Blanton of Hampton-Sydney College wrote in 1847. He proposed that the “two most prominent events in American history are undoubtedly the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the formation of the Constitution of 1787,” and “the latter, I think, must be acknowledged the greater of the two.” After defending this claim, Blanton’s conclusion translated fears of republican declension into duties of constitutional fidelity. He prayed that the “government our fathers have built for us, be a stranger to decay forever.” An instructor scrawled a note of satisfaction, stating that the essay contained “nothing which requires to be altered.” Blanton garnered this approval because it was what he declared of the Constitution.Footnote ²⁶

Students like Blanton practiced the art of historical veneration beyond the classroom. In a speechifying age when oratory commanded influence, stirring Founding reverence was a powerful competency. At the University of North Carolina, Frederick Toomer demonstrated this ability as a student commencement speaker in 1851. Soon to become a slaveholding planter, Toomer apprehended national politics through the Founding. He enshrined the Constitution as revolutionary fulfilment, extolling its “fram[ing] by heroes fresh from the field of the American Revolution, glowing with the love of liberty, aided by experienced statemen whose heads were filled with wisdom and whose hearts were burning with the fire of patriotism.” Public veneration for this Founding had just saved the country, Toomer contended, through the ostensible Compromise of 1850: politicians and people had “realized that the constitution was framed by sages and heroes, from every section,” and obeyed their fathers’ rules. Especially in the South, a highly oral political culture led by the slave-owning class positioned educated speakers as conduits of Founding ideology to communities and constituencies. Promising capability for this role was what John Randolph Tucker displayed when addressing his University of Virginia law class in 1844. “Never was so august an assemblage convened” than when the constitutional fathers secured liberty and independence, he announced, glorifying various framers, most of all “just, noble, great and patriotic Washington,” who had ensured state rights in settling the “permanence of our glorious union.” This Founding fluency saw use before and after the Civil War during Tucker’s long political, legal, and professorial career dedicated to denying the rights of Black citizens.Footnote ²⁷

Just as Independence Day speakers constructed constitutional enemies, collegians learned how to heap scorn on skeptics and apostates. This was the art of governing through the Founding. At the University of the City of New York, Representative Daniel Barnard modeled this approach in 1845. “There are those who think that this generation, and they themselves, are wiser, better instructed and grounded in political doctrine, and understand better the true relations between government and the governed than the generation and the men of 1776 and 1787,” Barnard scoffed. Lengthy mockery of antislavery constitutional impiety resolved into thundering denunciation: “I believe it is all a miserable delusion.” The framers’ work could not be surpassed, he taught, but modern hubris could destroy it. This scornful principle, a corollary to reverence and deference, produced a distinct form of condemnation. Speaking a month later at Ohio’s Miami University, attorney James Taylor demonstrated how this same form could be wielded against Barnard’s doughface constitutionalism. First, he recalled a Founding moment when there was “unanimous condemnation of slavery,” an understanding borne out by the Northwest Ordinance. Then Taylor scorned. “We have changed all this,” he lamented, allowing slavery to invade “the very temple of the Constitution.” The force of his censure derived from the authority of original visions that measured a failure to preserve.Footnote ²⁸

Ultimately, students assumed the mantle of political, civic, and legal expounders of Founding ideology. A writer exemplified this mission in his 1851 Yale Literary Magazine article, “Reverence for Law,” reproving peers tempted to follow their own moral compass. The Constitution, “was received with all the veneration due to the greatness and genius of its authors,” he insisted, and “while we as a people revere its origin and prize its intrinsic worth, it proves itself adapted to our necessities and the stay of National honor and prosperity.” Historical description and contemporary prescription merged in the linkage of perpetual constitutional vitality to unflagging deference. Through this framework, making good on the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause enacted civic virtue. Another Yale student, Benjamin Martin, joined this campaign by assembling framer and ratifier quotations to present the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act as Founding-ordained. He argued that “strong assurances” had “reconciled the people of the South to the Constitution, and secured its ratification,” and “the same views of the subject were held by the statesmen of the North.” Then Martin judged that “[i]t has been reserved for the sophistry of our times to deny the existence of one of the plainest provisions of the Constitution.” Framer authority, historical foreclosure of choice, and present-facing derision operated together. From these premises, the novice expounder demanded Americans prove their constitutional devotion “by transmitting it unimpaired to posterity, and by defending it, if necessary, to the last drop of our blood.” Martin, soon passing from illness, would not see the bloodshed. “As a school-boy, he was remarkable for his knowledge of political and constitutional history,” memorialized a friend.Footnote ²⁹

These student exercises suggest how Founding ideas shaded toward action and, as powerfully, inaction. General rules of reverent deference supported specific injunctions to never interfere with slavery or aid freedom-seeking people. The Founding marked the course that citizens took. Authority-bearing narratives gave clarity amid crisis. In 1832, for instance, young North Carolina Unionist Junius King told peers that nullifiers committed “a daring insult to heaven” by jeopardizing the Constitution, and that it was absurd to think that lesser, living persons could match the genius of the “preeminently distinguished” framers. By the early 1850s, when college students formed Southern Rights Associations, they conceived of their militancy as constitutional preservation against a government “perverted from its original design.” And by the decade’s end, another North Carolina student, Elijah Withers, accepted disunion through the logic of a Founding betrayed. Schooled to believe that constitutional permanence required veneration and obedience, Withers concluded that both elements had ceased in the North. While the “founders of this Union pledged their sacred words and honor to observe these compromises,” Withers argued, their successors “have proven recreant to every filial duty.” The Republic was ending not because the Founding had failed but because it had been failed. While the fathers had introduced a golden period of constitutional virtue, antislavery rot had set in, rendering the United States “like all other governments” that had fallen. The 1860 election, he expected, would end “her short-lived existence.” When it seemed to do just that, this student joined a Confederate regiment. When it did not, he entered political office to help topple Reconstruction.Footnote ³⁰

Ideological Action and Inaction

Naming the constitutional Founding as an ideology urges recognition of the power that Americans vested in their ideas about constitutional history. It identifies relentless storytelling and claims-making as much more than background conventions. It emphasizes, instead, that people felt governed by a Constitution inseparable from an authoritative moment and made sense of grave conflicts through that relationship. As ideology, the Founding raised the stakes of constitutional difference, informed the valence of compromise, and configured conflicting positions over slavery and sovereignty. This account captures the social and subjective experience of constitutional life in which certain assumptions, methods, and principles could move people or hold them in place. If there is an elusiveness to this Founding’s force, it is because the work performed so often lay in producing quiescence.

As it narrowed moral and democratic imaginations and cast preservation as civic virtue in the antebellum era, the Founding governed people through their implicit consent to national fathers’ temporal sovereignty—that the Founding had settled the national future in ways that contemporary popular sovereignty could not challenge. This Founding performed work when people dismissed doubts, left contradictory ideas unsaid, and rejected unthinkable innovations. A Boston man exposed this disciplined self when he told an Iowa Territory relative of his dim hopes for slavery’s end: “Political action is so restricted by the Constitution itself” and people, himself included, would never support abolitionists who, “think[ing] the Constitution uphold it… rush madly on, trampling down everything sacred, to reach the evil.” All that was possible, he thought, was to “resist its further extension and to seek some way of producing the great staples of slave labor by free labor.” It was this constitutionalism’s restraining power that a colleague conveyed to Justice John McLean amid public digestion of Dred Scott. “I assure you, there will be real danger of disunion, when the conservative public opinion at the north shall become dissatisfied with the Constitution. I think we have not fully appreciated the strength & fidelity of northern devotion to that instrument,” he confided. It was this same power that struck a doleful observer of a Cincinnati anti-abolitionist meeting when he remarked how “many find a ready opiate for their conscience, by alleging, that the framers of the constitution were wise and good men.”Footnote ³¹ It was not chiefly ratified text but rather the structure of the Founding itself that sustained their anti-antislavery activity.

This Founding ideology was anchored by a sense of inspired, even providential, paternal settlements. Such original understandings derived from Hildreth’s “mythical and heroic times,” as exalted by patriotic orators and invoked by polemicists, judges, and lawmakers. In blunt form, it was held that “If God was ever visibly in history, it was surely when our Fathers fixed upon our present form of government,” as the Reverend Clement Butler explained in a Thanksgiving Day sermon. Compromises in the Convention came “not… altogether from the wisdom of our fathers” because “the Lord of Hosts was with us,” Butler announced. Mythical thinking can be a “register of ideology,” notes Terry Eagleton, one that “elevates certain meanings to a numinous state.” According to Richard Slotkin, myth is the “language of historical memory: a body of traditional stories that have, over time, been used to summarize the course of our collective history and to assign ideological meanings to that history.” But the Founding’s mythic times had no traditional existence. An original constitutional moment sounding in a mythic register was co-constructed with the ideology itself, summoned to provide “decontested meanings” about what the Constitution is and how a citizen must relate to it. Synthesizing emotive and rational political thought and bearing corollary imperatives of deference, preservation, and restoration, a sublime Founding established the thin-centered ideological framework that contained and channeled intense political conflict.Footnote ³²

The Founding, as ideology, mediated proceedings at central sites of constitutional action. Commitments voiced at celebrations and schoolhouses echoed at the ballot box, legislature, and courtroom. Didactic writers made this connection explicit. Vermont author Daniel Parker’s The Constitutional Instructor taught that voters must act “in accordance with the Constitution and genius of our government,” and the “true exposition of the Constitution must therefore always agree with [the framers’] understanding.” Parker boasted of providing authoritative meanings because “the Madison Papers… has been my constant guide.” Similarly, Pennsylvania doughface Ezra Chase’s Teaching of Patriots and Statesmen asserted that voters, bound to heed the course “marked out by their fathers,” craved knowledge of framers’ settlements about slavery. Chase likewise noted his reliance on Madison’s notes to give “a clear notion of the intentions of the Convention.” These invocations reflected the assumption that Founding visions governed electoral choices. As a Mississippian wrote in 1842, Madison’s newly published notes belonged in the “possession of every voter in the country.” Yet except for disillusioning some abolitionists, their appearance did not change many minds: Americans received such historical materials as proving their preexisting, conflicting constitutional memories that occupied a limited range of possibilities. Parker and Chase, for example, delivered starkly opposing original meanings about congressional power over slavery in western territory, while neither fathomed a federal power of emancipating or enslaving. In their convictions about voters’ deferential duties, however, these authors were kindred constitutional thinkers.Footnote ³³

The anxieties and obligations of Founding ideology infused electoral appeals. As an address to “free voters of Ohio” exhorted, “Will you dishonor the dead—will you despoil the living—will you deprive posterity of its inheritance” by pretending “the doctrines of Calhoun are the true doctrines of those who framed the Constitution?” For elected officials, narratives of original meaning authorized action. After Massachusetts Whig Samuel Eliot voted for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, he penned a letter explaining how the Founding had directed his course. In the language of a civics instructor, he limned a providential consensus about slavery that enabled the “fathers [to] bequeath us this glorious constitution.” With familiar scorn, Eliot depicted the internal enemy of latter-day “parties who have so far misunderstood, or forgotten, or disregarded the compact of their fathers.” Rather than a discretionary policy choice, Eliot’s vote became a defense of the Fathers’ Constitution. In Congress, he explained, “the struggle for the constitution was renewed,” until it was “settled… on precisely the same principles as those on which it was first enacted.” When an antislavery writer critiqued this “historical disquisition,” it was not for Eliot’s reliance on the framers but rather for misusing their records. Founding ideology impelled these citizens to deny or justify political discretion through original visions. Legitimate lawmaking depended on Founding authority. As a Detroit resident wondered in 1860, “I see not why the compromises and compacts of the Constitution, especially in all matters not interpretative by the principles of party policy, should not be regarded as sufficient & solid ground, on which all patriotic & good citizens might rally for the maintenance of the Union.” Political actors rallied on the ground that they believed the Founding provided a vantage from which opposing political stands appeared unconstitutional.Footnote ³⁴

Inside courtrooms, this ideology structured judicial and juror responsibilities in cases implicating slavery’s constitutional politics. When a Kentucky slaveholder sued Michigan residents for aiding a fugitive family, circuit-riding Justice McLean instructed an unsympathetic jury in 1848 that rendition was “deemed so important, that, as a matter of history, we know the Constitution could not have been adopted without it.” He pressed the body to demonstrate fealty to the Fathers’ Constitution as the especial virtue of American constitutionalism. “The chief excellence of our institutions consists, not so much in our written constitutions and laws, as in the moral power which they embody,” McLean stated. Despite an initial hung jury, the slaveholder was eventually awarded damages. Under different circumstances, so too did Pennsylvania judge John Pearson instruct jurors on Founding imperatives when Dauphin County prosecuted a slave-catching gang for violence committed during an attempted seizure. “Whatever may be our own individual opinions concerning the institution of slavery, the history of the times when the Constitution was adopted clearly shows that without [the Fugitive Slave Clause], the union of these states would never have taken place, and… without its faithful fulfillment on the part of the non-slaveholding states, it cannot be continued,” directed Pearson. Here, the Founding authorized slave-catchers’ force and delegitimized legal countermeasures.Footnote ³⁵

In jurists’ hands, the Founding produced supreme legal meaning and moral compulsion. Ohio Supreme Court judge William Peck warded off challenges to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act through popular constitutional memory. “A careful perusal of the ‘History of the Origin and Formation of the Constitution,’ etc. by Curtis, and the supplement to Elliott’s Debates,” opined Peck, established that rendition “was deemed by many of the members, and those they represented, of great if not of vital importance, and contributed largely to its adoption by some of the southern states.” He concluded that the framers never “designed or intended to commit such necessary legislation to the states.” Founding ideology elevated constitutional slavery cases beyond a conflict between ordinary law and ethical convictions; they became proving grounds for subjection to the Fathers’ Constitution. As District Judge Peleg Sprague lectured a Boston jury, citizens with “the strongest convictions of the immorality of the institution of slavery are not thereby authorized to conclude that the provision for delivering up fugitive slaves is morally wrong, or that our fathers in Massachusetts did not act wisely, justly, humanely, in acceding to the compacts of the Constitution.” This was because no reasonable person could “hope of establishing a better” Constitution. Yet jurists and publics, such as politicians and constituents, could assert divergent original meanings on some matters within the Founding framework. Attorney John Andrews castigated the “remarks of Judge Sprague,” arguing that antislavery Americans “venerate the constitution. And, because they do so, they will not be contented victims of unconstitutional attempts to rob them of the liberties & rights, of which the constitution is their guaranty.” Dred Scott’s dueling opinions, heavily reliant on historical narratives, elicited exactly this contestation within the Founding’s parameters. Such was the pointed reaction of one editor: “the case runs far outside of the exclusive domain of the lawyer, into a field where the student of history and of politics can walk by his side, and weigh his arguments, and, if necessary, judge over him.” But the possibility of disputes and plausibility of arguments rested on what people believed the Founding allowed. In antebellum America, most agreed it disallowed much, including federal action against slavery in states.Footnote ³⁶

The enormity of the Founding’s popular and juridical power in sustaining a slaveholding Union is precisely why some abolitionists committed themselves to tearing it down. By the 1840s, one abolitionist faction agreed with the view of the Constitution expressed by Bostonian Francis Jackson when he resigned as a justice of the peace: “Henceforth it is dead to me, and I to it.” This Constitution appeared irredeemable because, as Wendell Phillips wrote, “history, unbroken practice, and the courts prove that our fathers intended to make it, and what too, their descendants, this nation say they did make it” a proslavery compact. Black abolitionist Charles Remond rejected special pleading on behalf of the framers: “What if the word ‘slave’ is not in it? It does not matter to me nor mine. Slavery was in the understanding that framed it—Slavery is in the will that administers it.” In view of the same enormity, other abolitionists aspired to loosen the Constitution-as-text from its Founding anchor. Seeking escape from original understandings, they vaunted abstract text into which Americans might read freedom. At an Ohio Colored Citizens’ Convention, William Day, future editor of the Aliened American, spurned the anti-constitutional approach: “I would plant myself upon the Constitution, and using the weapons they have given me, I would appeal to the American people for the rights thus guaranteed.” Day and many free Black citizens calculated that it was better to wield the weapon of constitutionalism than to unilaterally disarm. As Frederick Douglass came to argue, anti-Constitution abolitionists’ “chief energies are expended in confirming the opinion that the United States Constitution is and was intended to be a slave holding instrument; thus piling up between the slave and his freedom the huge work of the abolition of the Government.” But some contemplated escape from a Constitution that seemed durably anchored to the Founding. In 1854, a National Emigration Convention observed that “Democrat, Whig, or Free Democracy—all have thrown themselves upon the declaration: To sustain the Constitution as our forefathers understood it, and the Union as they formed it,” which meant continued “slavery and degradation.” From outside the mainstream of constitutional culture, these various approaches responded to the Founding’s force by confronting it head-on, trying to extract an ahistorical Constitution, or considering emigration to Canada under the British Constitution. But it would be none of these approaches that would breach the Fathers’ Constitution.Footnote ³⁷

The thin-centered Founding itself facilitated national rupture and nationalist war. For all its constraining influence, the ideology galvanized dramatic actions and uncompromising inactions when conflicting publics believed themselves to be defending original commitments. Where this occurred, precepts of reverence, obedience, preservation, and restoration merged with incompatible narratives to explosive effect. The defining jurisdictional struggles over federal territory and the constitutional place of slavery—culminating in Republican Party coalescence, Democratic Party fracture, and southern state secession—bore this influence. As officials and constituents grappled over a continental empire, they saw themselves as enforcing original understandings and settlements. Within the Founding framework, divergent narrative streams cascaded forward, one encouraging slavery’s restriction and one prohibiting it. The result was dissonant voices proclaiming deference while pursuing agendas that struck opponents as betraying the Founding.Footnote ³⁸

This disjunctive experience is what led future Confederate constitutional framer Howell Cobb, a Georgia congressman in 1847, to exclaim, “When gentlemen from the North inform us that they are prepared to stand by the compromises of the Constitution, what say they are those compromises?” Likewise, two days later, it induced upstate New York congressman Samuel Gordon to wonder “in what school these gentlemen studied the Constitution” and then conclude, “not in the school of the founders of this Government and the framers of the Constitution,” all of whom “concurred in the power of this Government to exclude slavery from, or abolish it in, the Territories that belonged to the Union.” Northern Democrats like Gordon thought they were dutifully leaving slavery where the framers had left it. Concurrently, white southerners like Cobb became convinced that slavery must spread unrestricted by right of original understanding. Speaking to his Mississippi constituency, Representative Albert Gallatin Brown asked and answered: “Would Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison, have entered into such a union with Adams, and Hancock, and Jay? … Every thinking, reasoning man knows, that in the war on slavery, the Constitution and the Union have been diverted from their original purposes.”Footnote ³⁹

By the late 1850s, Founding ideology—with its complex of veneration, obedience, scorn and defense—structured how sectional publics proceeded. This complex sanctioned the inaction of refusing to compromise original meanings and valorized militancy. The Republican Party arose on a platform of administering the Constitution “as it was understood by the great men who framed and adopted it,” which in their telling meant admitting no more slave states. For wide-awake Republicans, Founding ideology pushed toward confrontation. Similar dynamics moved white southerners. At an early 1860 meeting in Prince George’s County, Virginia, a slaveholding community showed how Founding ideology made secession thinkable. With a single dissenting vote, it resolved:

These Virginians believed they had revered and obeyed their fathers’ slavery-securing Constitution. But doing so would become an impossibility if the United States elected an antislavery government: that Union would not be the one their fathers had made.Footnote ⁴⁰

Of course, a so-called “Black Republican” prevailed. Lincoln had run on constitutional redemption, vowing to follow the first principles and practices of the Founding—the theme of his Cooper Union speech. All parties had flown the banner of constitutional fealty, including the new Constitutional Union party. An “Abolitionist” did not take office in 1861, but the occupant was gradually remade into one. Amid wartime exigency, Black national service, and white treason, the Union would indeed cease to be the one that national fathers had constituted, regardless of which Founding story it was measured against.Footnote ⁴¹

The Founding Over Time

The destruction of the Union with slavery did not consign the Founding to a bygone era. Yet neither its popular hold nor the purposes it served could remain static as the country and Constitution transformed. Ideologies are not fixed. Their resonance may fade as the world they mediate shifts; or they may be adapted to fit, explain, and construct an emerging world. Having arisen in a slaveholding republic amid the attenuation of revolutionary ideology, the Founding’s sense-making power waned during a protracted struggle that many hoped would amount to a second founding. But it could rise again. What became of this constitutional ideology once Black Americans seized freedom and an empowered demos reclaimed temporal sovereignty to amend the Constitution over massive resistance is a history beyond the scope of this article. But it is material to specify here that it was not a linear one of continuity, decline, or restoration between then and now. Power and purposes have fluctuated, changed, and endured. Approaching the Founding as ideology not only offers resources for studying this evolution and persistence in the interconnected realm of constitutional politics, culture, and jurisprudence but also for understanding the histories that bear its imprint. By considering the Founding’s relative authority and shifting applications in that confluent realm as variables in constitutionalism across eras—from Jim Crow reasoning and New Deal narratives to civil rights movement litigation and conservative legal organizing—explanatory accounts sensitive to its integrated legal, political, and civic power and purposes can avoid foreshortening accounts of particular moments and reducing constitutional culture to static background context.Footnote ⁴²

Consider in the broadest strokes how the Founding’s long-run force and analytical significance may be observed across the punctuated ages of United States constitutional history. Just as it took innumerable rites and rituals to inculcate the ideology in antebellum America, it took analogous work to rejuvenate it from a postbellum nadir when original authority receded. In this light, the Founding’s future became pivotal in the survival and substance of Reconstruction. Political campaigns, civic commemorations, judicial opinions, didactic literature, and paramilitary violence, together summoning a mythic, still-governing first Founding, sought to control the relationship between citizens and the Constitution. These efforts reestablished reverent deference to the Fathers’ Constitution as a potent constitutional ideology. In doing so, they initiated an enduring struggle within American constitutionalism over delimiting and hierarchizing the scope of latter-day change. The close connection between the Founding and politics of slavery faded after the Thirteenth Amendment. But the ideology’s premises concerning authority and its disciplinary qualities against democratic capacity held enormous potential to mediate constitutionalized conflicts in modern America. The Founding, for instance, could assist in forging white reunion and narrowing enforceable civil rights; it could authorize Jim Crow and challenge the New Deal; it could rally coalitions against legal liberalism and justify novel gun rights narratives. Here, as in antebellum America, the recurrent nesting of constitutional memory can be observed: specific narratives of meaning, resting on plausibility cultivated in different broad communities, fill the Founding’s thin-centered ideology while operating through its imperatives, constraints, and mythic anchor.

To the extent that the Founding reoccupied pride of place in constitutional culture and jurisprudence, it could steer, as it did for antebellum Americans, how people articulated plausible, “on the wall” arguments. This ideological force could induce popular and juridical constitutional actors to thread liberal, egalitarian, and social justice aspirations through the eye of an original moment or cast later amendments as fulfilling Founding ideals rather than toppling an ancien régime. Whether because of earnest belief in the Founding or because it commanded the belief of others, such constitutional reasoning developed pathways to translate the Founding or explain constructive development in light of ascribed original commitments. Yet the Founding as ideology faced significant opposition from various communities, and its relative influence waxed and waned. Branches of mainstream constitutionalism rejected or stretched the premises of faith in the Fathers’ Constitution, preferring to honor a “living document” that reflected, per Justice Thurgood Marshall, the “suffering, struggle, and sacrifice” to fix “what was wrong with the original.” More radical voices decried a Constitution fatally anti-democratic by design yet insulated by patriotic constitutionalism. Just as antebellum abolitionist attacks exposed the borders of the Founding as ideology, these critiques showed the Founding as powerful but contestable “political thinking” about how Americans must live under the Constitution.Footnote ⁴³

This forceful presence is why explaining the Founding is meaningful across eras and inquiries in the constitutional life of the United States. The politics that it has enabled and precluded, tensions it has contained, and opposition it has engendered make the modern history of the Founding a vital consideration for understanding American constitutionalism. Recognizing how the ideology shaped antebellum politics gives insight into this longer view of constitutionalism by identifying the Founding as a prescriptive relationship cultivated through a thick field of words, deeds, and events—neither a “given” feature of the Constitution nor simply window-dressing rhetoric. This view provides a framework to interpret power and purposes across the diffuse sights, sounds, and materials of constitutional culture—to recognize, for example, how the reception of Richard Hildreth’s History illuminates certain boundaries of dominant constitutional discourse. Studying the Founding as ideology concentrates attention on the dynamic connections among civic life, political culture, and formal constitutional interpretation. It can make sense of how nested memory claims have enabled action and inaction over time by attending to the interplay between diffuse expression that reproduces a “mythical and heroic” Founding and judicial narratives of specific meanings—what, for instance, the Taney or Roberts Court has said constitutional history requires or forecloses.Footnote ⁴⁴

Just as approaching the Founding as ideology clarifies antebellum constitutionalism, it can do so for modern America’s conflicted constitutional traditions. In particular, it can locate “originalism” in historical perspective as a program of constitutional politics before and beyond the legal community that identifies with the term. The ideology of an authoritative original moment, as built and rebuilt to mediate struggles over democracy, rights, and government authority, should be understood as providing resources that underwrite originalist discourses, scholarly, legal, and popular. Originalism involves the articulation of a strong form of the ideology as the only legitimate way to understand the Constitution—claiming not merely that constitutional history matters but that a meaning-fixing Founding governs. As such, efforts to rationalize and elaborate imperatives of recovery and obedience in legal literature, judicial opinions, and other constitutional law talk are bound up in reproducing the authority of a mythic original moment to settle the present. Indeed, as the federal judiciary has become central to shaping popular constitutional understandings, the approach makes “originalist” judges and academics legible as constitutional politicians iterating Founding ideology and scorning ideas that contradict both nested constitutional memories and premises of Founding authority.Footnote ⁴⁵

In a wide, long view of United States constitutionalism, these recent constitutional politics can be recognized as operating through concepts and convictions cultivated in antebellum America and reformulated for subsequent struggles. This view of the Founding’s presence does not appear in originalists’ internal histories, of course. Nor does it ground critical external histories that begin with Warren Court backlash and the Reagan Justice Department. But both intellectual and political stories depend on idioms, ideas, and imperatives outside and prior to originalist theory as such. The ideological Founding presents a framework that scrutinizes how and why appeals to an authoritative constitutional past arise, galvanize, and falter over time, including how invocations in law depend on popular notions about authority and history. The United States has long been home to a constitutional cacophony of claiming, believing, ruling, and dissenting. Approaching the Founding as ideology is a way to listen across eras and forums to understand the relationship between an ever-changing people and a Constitution that may or may not be conceived of as capable of changing with them.