The Constitution: A Moral Challenge

Script:

“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.”

These, of course, are stirring words from America’s Declaration of Independence. They are the foundation of America’s commitment to civil liberty. We accept them as a given now, but only because we know America’s history.

At the time, they presented a serious challenge to the founders of the nation:

Could they create a governing structure that would match the high moral standards they had set for themselves?

Their first attempt did not go well.

The Articles of Confederation, the document that governed the country through the Revolutionary War and for a few years after, was such a miserable failure that many in England (and America) thought the new nation would soon collapse and return, hat in hand, to the mother country.

The Americans’ wariness of central power was understandable. Americans had fought and died to win freedom from an oppressive government. They weren’t about to give away that hard-won freedom to a new government of their own making.

The Articles allowed for no central authority to speak of. There was no chief executive; no effective way to impose or collect taxes; no provision for the national defense. All the power belonged to the individual states. And since the states disagreed on so many issues, almost nothing got done.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 brilliantly solved this problem. It installed a system of checks and balances within the federal government and divided power between the