On September 17, 1787, America’s Founding Fathers signed the U.S. Constitution, creating a government that would fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, signed 11 years earlier.
The framers very consciously wrote a Constitution that, in many ways, reflects the words of the earlier document, says Jason Stevens, a political science professor at Ashland University in Ohio.
For instance, the Constitution highlights the Declaration’s principle that “all men are created equal” by prohibiting titles of nobility. The framers underscore the Declaration’s idea that a government derives its power from the people’s “consent” with the Constitution’s first three words: “We the people.”
The Declaration’s commitment to liberty is mirrored in the Constitution’s precept that the government “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
“In a whole variety of ways it points back to the principles of the Declaration of Independence,” Stevens tells The American Idea podcast.
The Constitution was formulated for that September 17 signing after some founders lobbied to amend the existing “Articles of Confederation,” which had guided the new nation since shortly after it declared independence from Britain in 1776.
The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia — presided over by George Washington, the Army’s commander during the Revolutionary War — included several men who had signed the Declaration of Independence , including Benjamin Franklin, who had edited the Declaration’s drafts.
At the September 1787 Convention, James Madison took notes and put forth a structure for the Constitution that would base a government on a separation of powers among three independent branches.
Some states declined to ratify the Constitution without a bill of rights that expressly guaranteed certain protections they had been denied by the British King George III. Again, the founders looked to the Declaration of Independence, which lists “unalienable rights” and outlines specific grievances against Britain that the new document would aim to prevent.
It took until 1789, but the founders proposed to amend the Constitution to include a Bill of Rights that guarantees freedom of religion, the right to trial by jury and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, among other protections.
The words of the Declaration and the Constitution have been repeated by U.S. leaders throughout history. On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln echoed them in his Gettysburg Address delivered on a Civil War battlefield, describing the then-divided country as “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, speaking on The Blessings of Liberty podcast, describes the U.S. Constitution as “a mission statement” for achieving the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. “As imperfect as the Constitution may be, it’s about the most perfect thing men and women could come up with in their time,” he says.
