A company keeps faith with the people on its platform by bridging a change it could have forced on them. A country keeps faith with something harder to hold: an idea of what a society is, written down so that it can be kept or broken. This piece is about that faith, and it does not tidy it. The founders broke it in the same document that made it. Lincoln kept it unevenly, then asked the country to rebuild itself around it. The country fell, got up, fell again and got up again. That arc, falling and recovery, is what keeping faith looks like for a nation.
The Declaration of Independence, adopted July 4, 1776, says: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." [1] The Constitution's Preamble says it was ordained to "establish Justice" and "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." [2] Article VI says that every legislator and every executive and judicial officer "shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution." [2]
Three things sit in those texts. There is an idea, equality and liberty. There is a promise to people who are not yet born, our Posterity. And there is an oath to a document, not to a person or a party, which outlasts any officeholder. That is what makes a country's faith different from a company's. It is owed to an idea, it runs forward in time, and it is meant to hold when no one in the room wants it to.
The same Constitution counted some human beings as less than whole. Representatives and taxes were to be apportioned by adding the free population to "three fifths of all other Persons." [2] Another clause said that no person "held to Service or Labour" who escaped into another state could be discharged from it, but "shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." [2]
In my reading, this matters because it rules out a comforting story. The failure was not a later betrayal of a pure beginning. The beginning included the wound, in writing, in the same document that promised justice and liberty. Any honest account of the country's faith has to start there.
On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass spoke to an anti-slavery society in Rochester, New York. "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?" he asked, and answered: "a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." [3]
The same speech says that "the Constitution is a glorious liberty document," and that he drew encouragement from "the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains." [3] That is what faith looks like when it is kept at its hardest. He did not excuse the country, and he did not walk away from it. He held it to its own words. In my reading, a person who does that is more faithful to the country than one who defends every failure.
The man the country remembers as the keeper of this faith did not begin as its clean champion. On August 22, 1862, Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it." He added that he intended no change to "my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free." [4]
His official duty and his personal wish came apart on the page, and that belongs in the account. Less than a year and a half later, on November 19, 1863, he stood at Gettysburg and described the nation as "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and spoke of "the great task remaining before us." [5] In my reading, he changed what the country was asked to be faithful to. He set aside the compromises in the Constitution's text and put the 1776 sentence at the center.
On March 4, 1865, in his Second Inaugural Address, he named what had broken the faith: "All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war." He allowed that the war might continue "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword," and he spoke of "the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil." Then he closed on repair, not revenge: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds." [6]
The repair was put into the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, ended slavery, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." The Fourteenth, ratified July 9, 1868, made all persons born or naturalized in the United States citizens, forbade any state to "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," and forbade any state to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Fifteenth, ratified February 3, 1870, said the right to vote could not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." [7]
In my reading, this is the faith moving from speeches into the text. The Fourteenth's "life, liberty, or property" echoes the Declaration's "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," now written as a limit on what states may do to any person. It also carries a wart of its own: the Thirteenth Amendment's exception for punishment for crime. A repair is written by people who are still inside the thing they are repairing.
Notice what the earlier text did not contain. The word "equal" does not appear in the first ten amendments, ratified December 15, 1791. [15] The Fifth Amendment barred the federal government from depriving anyone of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," but in 1833, in Barron v. Baltimore, the Supreme Court held unanimously, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall, that the Bill of Rights restrained only the federal government and not the states. [16] So until 1868 the Constitution contained no equal-protection guarantee, and nothing in the Bill of Rights stopped a state from depriving a person of liberty. The Fourteenth Amendment wrote both in, and it was ratified in part to overturn the result in Barron. [16] In my reading, the idea that opens the Declaration did not enter the Constitution's text until 92 years after 1776, and when it did, it came as an amendment, not as part of the original design or even the Bill of Rights.
The repair did not hold. In 1877 the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South, which effectively ended Reconstruction. [8] On May 18, 1896, twenty-eight years after the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld a Louisiana law requiring "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races." The majority reasoned that any stamp of inferiority existed only because African Americans chose to read it that way. [9]
A promise written into the Constitution in 1868 was used, in 1896, by the nation's highest court to hold the line against it. That is the second failure, and it was legal, not accidental.
On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Court held unanimously that "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and overturned the doctrine of Plessy. [10] On August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act "outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting." [11]
Brown came 58 years after Plessy. The Voting Rights Act came 95 years after the Fifteenth Amendment promised the vote, and its enforcement has since been narrowed by the Supreme Court, which I trace in a companion piece. [21] The faith was kept, but slowly, and at a cost paid by people who had been promised more.
On June 12, 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the Court ruled 9-0 that Virginia's ban on interracial marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection and due process clauses, and called marriage "one of the basic civil rights of man." [30][31] Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and an African American woman, had married in Washington, D.C. in 1958. Virginia convicted them and suspended a one-year sentence on condition that they leave the state for twenty-five years, and sixteen states still had such laws when the Court ruled. [30] In my own account, a marriage like my mother's, between an African American woman and a white man, would have been a crime in Virginia until that day. Two years later, in 1969, Virginia adopted the tourism slogan "Virginia is for Lovers." [32]
The clearest thread is who was allowed to vote. At the start, each state set its own rules, and property requirements were common. By the 1820s and 1830s most states had dropped them for white men, and by 1850 nearly all property and tax requirements for white men were gone. [12] The widening for white men went hand in hand with a narrowing for African American men. New York's 1821 constitution removed property requirements for white men and raised them for African American voters, which disfranchised most of them in the state. [13]
Then, in the text, came the Fifteenth Amendment. In practice, states built literacy tests and other barriers, and it took the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to outlaw them. [11] The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified August 18, 1920, said the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged" on account of sex, half a century after the Fifteenth. [7]
In theory the Fourteenth should have made the Nineteenth unnecessary. It made women citizens and promised every person equal protection, and women said so. Virginia Minor, a Missouri citizen, tried to register to vote in 1872 and sued when she was refused. In Minor v. Happersett, decided March 29, 1875, the Supreme Court agreed unanimously, in an opinion by Chief Justice Waite, that she was a citizen, and held that voting was not an inherent right of citizenship and that the Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee women the vote. [17] The Amendment's own Section 2 had already pointed that way: it penalized a state that denied the vote to "male inhabitants" over twenty-one, and that clause said nothing about women. [7] In my reading, the promise in the text and the reading the Court gave it were at odds seven years after ratification, and the Nineteenth came 45 years after Minor. Congress declared Native Americans born in the United States citizens in 1924. [14] The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified January 23, 1964, barred making a poll tax a condition of voting in federal elections, and the Twenty-sixth, ratified July 1, 1971, extended the vote to citizens eighteen or older. [7]
Read in order: first property-owning white men, then white men, then, on paper and conditionally in practice, African American men, then women, then Native Americans, then, by 1971, in principle, every citizen of eighteen or older. Each widening was a promise the earlier text could have made and did not. Each one then had to be defended against the people whose work was to keep it from functioning. In my reading, that is what failing to keep a promise looks like at national scale: the faith is not broken once but in installments, and the repair is also in installments. Whether the principle holds in practice is the question to ask of every promise on this list.
The Equal Rights Amendment was the attempt to write the missing promise into the Constitution. Congress passed it and sent it to the states on March 22, 1972. The ratification deadline was extended to 1982, and it fell three states short of the 38 required. [18] The absence had a plain cost. Before Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which President Ford signed on October 28, 1974, women commonly could not get credit in their own names, and many lenders required a husband's signature. The Act "prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status with respect to any aspect of a credit transaction." [19] In my reading, that is the heavy lifting by statute when the amendment failed: a repair for one harm, not the general promise.
The promise is also not finished. Some commentators have proposed that the vote belong to the household instead of the individual. [20] In my reading, in practice that would hand it to the man of the house. Taking the vote from individual women would collide with the Nineteenth Amendment, and removing the Nineteenth would take the same Article V supermajority that made every repair in this piece so slow: two-thirds of both Houses and three-fourths of the states. [2] The bar that delayed the promise also protects it. What proof-of-citizenship rules do in practice, at the registration desk, I have written about separately. [21][22]
The pattern is promise, betrayal, someone who holds the country to its own words, repair written into the text, relapse, and repair again. No generation finishes it. In my reading, a country's faith is not a record of having kept it. It is the habit of being held to it and of agreeing, eventually, to be held. A company keeps faith by building a bridge. A country keeps faith by amending itself, and the amending has to be done again.
The test is the one a company faces, applied to people: whether the promise still holds for those already inside it.
I would argue that to understand this country even a little, you need three documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They are short, and each is free to read at the National Archives. [1][2][15] The Declaration states the idea. The Constitution builds the machinery, and in its original text it also breaks the idea. The Bill of Rights restrains the government that wrote it, though at first only the federal one. Read together, they show you everything this piece has traced: the promise, the failure, the critic who holds the country to its words, and the repair, which came mostly by amendment.
The Federalist Papers, eighty-five essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay published anonymously as "Publius" in 1787 and 1788, argue for the Constitution. [23] The Anti-Federalist essays, written under pseudonyms such as Brutus, Cato and the Federal Farmer, argue against it, and a lack of a bill of rights was among their objections. [24] A good volume holds both. A citizen is built from points and counterpoints, not from a verdict.
The people on both sides were as mixed as the argument. Hamilton, who co-wrote the Federalist essays and, as the first Secretary of the Treasury, laid the groundwork for the nation's financial system, [25][26] also published a pamphlet in 1797 admitting an affair. [27] His marriage endured, and it was hurt. [28] His wife Eliza outlived him by fifty years and, in 1806, helped found New York City's first private orphanage. [28][29]
Many people now know Hamilton through the stage musical, which Lin-Manuel Miranda adapted from Ron Chernow's 2004 biography, Alexander Hamilton. The biography is the place to read the fuller account. [33]
When someone says the United States was founded on an idea, ask four things. Where was the idea broken? Who held the country to its own words? What repaired it, and how long did that take? What is still unrepaired? A faith that can name its own failures is the one that can still be kept.
This is the author's reading of the record, not a neutral survey.