Civic Literacy Curriculum

Background

The most direct and best-known influences on the U.S. Constitution were the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. In both laying out the political philosophy of the American people as well as describing various violations of rights, the Declaration outlined our collective dedication to liberty, political equality, limited government, and self-government. The Articles of Confederation, which governed the United States following independence, utilized a federalist division of power between states and the central government. While the Constitution differs from the Articles of Confederation in significant ways, the Constitution also established a federal system whereby political power is divided between the state governments and the federal government, with a federal government limited to those powers granted to it by the document itself. 

There were other significant and earlier influences on the Constitution that shared these ideas as well. 

The brief Mayflower Compact was signed by the Pilgrim voyagers aboard the Mayflower before their arrival at Plymouth, Massachusetts, which began the settlement of New England in 1620. The Mayflower Compact’s signers, “in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick,” — in other words, they created a political covenant in which they consented to self-government. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut in 1639 modeled a more extensive charter and governing structure, such as a (legislative) general assembly and governor and protocols for the towns to select their representatives. It was especially notable that this document did not cite the British monarch as a participant in their covenant — only the covenant participants themselves. 

All of the states had constitutions or charters that explained and structured their governments and modeled features later adopted in forming the American government. Arguably the most important of these was the Virginia Declaration of Rights, written by George Mason in 1776, and which soon influenced both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights of the Constitution. (Mason, a friend and mentor to many of the Virginians who later led the nation, served as a participant in the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where he unsuccessfully pushed for inclusion of a bill of rights. He was one of only three delegates at the Constitutional Convention who stayed until the end of the Convention but refused to sign the Constitution).

Some historians have argued that another influence was the Great Law of Peace of the Iroquois, which linked the five nations of the Mohawks, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca into a confederacy. The five retained most of their own sovereignty but made common decisions together—in other words, largely modeling the federalism later adopted in first the Articles of Confederation and then the U.S. Constitution itself. Benjamin Franklin cited this model in proposing a predecessor union in 1754, and representatives of the Iroquois later spoke to the Continental Congress in 1776, though whether the Iroquois model served as a direct influence is contested, since other federal models the Founders cited pre-existed their exposure to the Iroquois; either way, the Iroquois had a functioning federal and constitutional structure before the Constitution.  

Finally, although occurring after the Constitution was drafted, the debates between the Federalists, who supported the ratification of the Constitution, and critics of the Constitution, the so-called Anti-Federalists, helped clarify the meaning of the Constitution. The Federalist Papers was the most significant commentary on the Constitution to come out of these debates. These debates also helped shaped its subsequent developments and amendments; for example, just like George Mason, the Anti-Federalists argued that the lack of a bill of rights was a flaw in the Constitution, one which was soon fixed through the first ten amendments.