“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Preamble was placed in the Constitution more or less as an afterthought. It was not proposed or discussed on the floor of the Constitutional Convention.
Gouverneur Morris, a delegate from Pennsylvania who as a member of the Committee of Style actually drafted the near-final text of the Constitution, composed it at the last moment.
The Preamble does not have any substantive legal meaning.
Preambles are merely declaratory and are not to be read as granting or limiting power—a view sustained by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). It does, however, specifies the purposes for which the Constitution exists.
As Justice Joseph Story put it in his celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, “its true office is to expound the nature and extent and application of the powers actually conferred by the Constitution.”
The very opening words of the Constitution mark a radical departure: “We the People of the United States.” That language was at striking variance with the norm. In earlier documents, including the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, the Articles of Confederation, and the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognizing American independence, the word “People” was not used.
The Preamble’s first-mentioned purpose of the Constitution, “to form a more perfect Union,” was likewise subjected to misreading by Anti-Federalists. “More perfect” may strike modern readers as an ambiguous depiction, for “perfect” is now regarded as an absolute term. At the time of the Framing, however, it had no such connotation. For example, Sir William Blackstone, in his widely read Commentaries on the Laws of England, could assert that the constitution of England was perfect but steadily improving. Thus a more perfect union was simply a better and stronger one than had preexisted the Constitution.
In the second stated objective, to “establish Justice,” the key word is “establish,” clearly implying that justice, unlike union, was previously nonexistent. On the face of it, that implication seems hyperbolic, for the American states and local governments had functioning court systems with independent judges, and trial by jury was the norm.
But Gouverneur Morris chose the word carefully and meant what he wrote; he and many other Framers thought that the states had run amok and had trampled individual liberties in a variety of ways. The solution was twofold: the establishment of an independent Supreme Court and the provision for a federal judiciary superior to those of the states; and outright prohibition of egregious state practices. (How far our current government has come from the original intent of the preamble and, indeed, as we will see, the intent of the Constitution in the whole!)
The third avowed purpose, to “insure domestic Tranquility,” was in a general sense prompted by the long-standing habit of Americans to take up arms against unpopular government measures and was more immediately a response to Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (1786–1787) and lesser uprisings in New Hampshire and Delaware.
The fourth purpose, to “provide for the common defense,” is obvious—after all, it was the reason the United States came into being. Congress expected that other wars would occur and were determined to be prepared to fight them. The Framers did, however, take fears of standing armies into account, hence their commitment to civilian control of things military.
The fifth purpose, to “promote the general Welfare,” had a generally understood meaning at the time of the Constitution. The concept will be developed fully in the discussion of the Spending Clause of Article I, Section 8. The salient point is that its implications are negative, not positive—a limitation on power, not a grant of power. By definition “general” means applicable to the whole rather than to particular parts or special interests.
The sixth purpose of the Constitution is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In broad terms the securing of liberty is a function of the whole Constitution, for the Constitution makes possible the establishment of a government of laws, and liberty without law is meaningless.
Some historians have argued that the philosophy or ideology of the Constitution was at variance with that of the Declaration of Independence; indeed, several have described the adoption of the Constitution as a counter-Revolution.
But consider this. The Declaration refers to God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Preamble introduces a document whose stated purpose is to secure the rights of life and liberty.
And what of happiness? Once again the word “Welfare” is crucial: in the eighteenth century the definition of welfare included well-being, but it also and equally encompassed happiness.
The Preamble as a whole, then, declares that the Constitution is designed to secure precisely the rights proclaimed in the Declaration.
NEXT: Article I: Legislative
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