Part II
The Threat
**
THE PEOPLE
§§§ Race and The People
The principles invoked by Jefferson are moral principles: All men are created equal, endowed with. . .; Do unto others as. . .; Love your neighbor as. . .. “We the People of the United States of America” is a political construct. The phrase disincludes anyone not of the United States of America.[11] The unanswered question was, Who are included? It is a fair presumption that many at least, at that time, supposed them to be the male, white, propertied, British-descended former colonials. The culture of the time, after all, was decidedly patriarchal. The population was predominantly of British lineage.[12] British heritage prepossessed them to class distinctions
And yet. . .And yet. . .. That class of men had charged King and Parliament, in the name of God, with enslaving that part of the human race colonizing North America, contrary to reverence for the Creator and to common sense. They had articulated the principles of the Declaration and asserted by armed force their right to claim those principles for themselves. They drafted a Constitution the better to cement that claim; and they expounded and defended that work in an 85-essay effort to persuade the people to ratify it.
Nowhere did they bar inclusion to any category except by the phrase “of the United States of America.” “People” is a collective noun signifying a group of persons. “All men,” depending on the context, as readily means all persons comprising “mankind” as all male persons. “Person” denotes an individual, bodily human being, distinguishable from its collective abstraction. At least some of these privileged, educated, reflective statesmen imagined their own personal desire for self-agency, their own personal antipathy to arbitrary domination by capricious power to be, not peculiar to themselves alone, not a special entitlement of their particular status or birth or accomplishments, their existential superiority; but rather to be universally shared by all human beings and to be rightfully claimed by all in “societies. . . capable. . . of establishing good government upon reflection and choice. . .”
This is the bright beacon shining from that hill. This is the promise of that Land beyond the River, that all men (all members of mankind) shall be free, here, under this government established by the people, consisting of the people, to secure benefits for the people. This is the aspiration that quickens the heart in every breast of the tired, the poor, the hungry, the oppressed.
At the same time that these reflective statesmen recognized that as for me so for every one of the people, their hard experience recognized that people rarely remember or acknowledge the point in the face of immediate private interest or passion. On those foundational axioms the Framers sought a system to extend the one impulse by constraining the other. Ambition, jealousy, revenge, envy, avarice, self-love, fear, loyalty. “The passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason or justice without constraint.” Government is essential in part to provide that constraint.
The Long Clasp 