The Relationship Between The Declaration Of Independence And The Constitution Term Paper Examples

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are commonly considered to be the two most important and defining documents of our nation’s history. The former, a formal declaration of independence from their status as colonies of Great Britain, established the essential concepts by which the nation wished to define itself. The latter was the second (and current) attempt to create a system of laws that would provide structure to the nation’s workings now that it was successfully and fully independent. While the Constitution is its own distinct document, the central conceits and ideas behind it can be found in spades in the Declaration of Independence; the Constitution sets forth a government of just powers, as dictated in the Declaration. The general principles of the Declaration of Independence, including the right to rebel, the freedom of all men, and the sublimation of the government to the will of the people, all carried through into the forming and maintenance of the Constitution, to varying degrees.
When the Declaration of Independence was drafted, it acted as both an airing of grievances regarding the injustices they perceived befell them at the hands of the British, as well as a basic set of principles that they wished their new independent country would adhere to. Chief among these is “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”. In this respect, the Declaration of Independence created the basic framework for how the American they would create through this independence should operate, at least according to the founders. By outlining the many crimes that King George committed against his colonies, the founders essentially created a list of objectives that the Constitution needed to fulfill in order to grant those rights to a people sorely needing them.
Some of these issues include the accusations of giving the people no rights in their own government, offering no representation, the Declaration mentioning the stifling of “Legislative Bodies” and “Representative Houses,” both of which are seen as necessary and required entities for a free and just system of government. These types of representative groups would later find their way into the Legislative branch of government as outlined in the Constitution – inspired by the Declaration, the Constitution chose to grant the people the powers of representation robbed of them by King George.
The Founding Fathers wished to create a country in which people could be free to do as they wished, whether economically or religiously. Jefferson, one of the writers of the Declaration, expanded on this desire for religious freedom in the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, which stated that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion”.In order to ultimately justify their rebellion against the British, the Founding Fathers needed to create a moral absolutist justification for rebelling, relating their causes to “the course of Human History” and truths that are “self-evident”. It was then the job of the Constitution to relate those moral imperatives into workable solutions and structures for government.
First, the Declaration of Independence primarily establishes the desire for a limited sense of constitutional union. Because of the ‘self-evident’ nature of the right for the American colonists to rebel, the Declaration established that the government should be beholden to the people. According to the Declaration, the government should be maintained and structured to help the people, who have ultimate authority over their leaders. The Declaration states that “to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”.
The Constitution follows the Declaration’s implication of full equality for man. The aforementioned ‘all men are created equal’ admission in the Declaration of Independence was followed through to a large extent in the Constitution, with the Bill of Rights being a significant part of that sense of sovereignty. By granting people the legal and official right to free speech, press, assembly and more, the complaints lodged against the British in the Declaration are corrected from the start in the new American government. The very things that caused the need to rebel – namely, the ability to rebel if need be – were encouraged by the new government. This is yet another way in which the Constitution was guided by the principles and ideas of the Declaration of Independence.
That being said, there were some compromises made when the Constitution was being created to allow for slavery to flourish and survive, which is an unfortunate instance of the Constitution straying from the basic principles set out by the Declaration. Despite the Declaration stating the basic equality of man, the founders at the time, including James Madison, found reasons to technically exclude slaves from that definition: “Slaves are considered as property, not as persons. They ought therefore to be comprehended in estimates of taxation which are founded on property, and to be excluded from representation which is regulated by a census of persons.” There were economic reasons for this compromise, of course, being a primary factor in keeping the Southern states on board for the ratification of a federal government – the South’s dependence on slavery for its economy necessitated a compromise to ensure that slaves were not considered people. During the actual writing of the Constitution, it became easy for the North to overlook the presence of slaves in the South, particularly as they felt they did not have a responsibility toward those slaves who suffered from it. To that end, there were circumstantial political decisions that led to this particular compromise of the Declaration of Independence’s idealized moral beliefs; however, this also establishes the Constitution’s role as a way of contextualizing these ideals for a more pragmatic view of the world.
This issue of slavery, of course, created some issues around the time of the American Civil War; with the threat of the abolition of slavery, the American South felt that the preexisting rule of slaves being property still applied. Meanwhile, the North (and President Lincoln) took an approach similar to Madison, who wrote in The Federalist Papers that “if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with the other inhabitants.” In this respect, the Declaration of Independence’s essential concept of all men being created equal had to be upheld, particularly as the definitions of what constituted a man were changing. In this respect, the Constitution lived up to its reputation as a living document, but achieved it through a return to the more central, abstract concepts of the Declaration.
In this respect, the Declaration of Independence asserted itself most strongly as an influence on the Constitution. In Lincoln’s assertion that the nation was nothing without the entirety of the Union behind it, he linked the Declaration of Independence inextricably with all of its intended territories during its signing and beyond. Lincoln thought that the entrance of the Southern States into the Union was something that could not be changed, even if the states wanted to. Furthermore, his idea of a “standard maxim of a free society” stems from the Declaration-era idea of all men being ‘created equal’. In this way, the Civil War was Lincoln’s way of correcting the Constitution’s original straying from the ideas of the Declaration due to economic interests; he fulfilled Madison’s aforementioned caveat that, if the definition of slaves as being people and not property were changed, they would fall under the Declaration’s promise of freedom and equality.
The Constitution sets forth a government of just powers, as per the requirements of the Declaration,. This is done through establishing a sense of limited union, a focus on the authority of the people, and more. While the Constitution made some missteps in its creation by allowing for slavery (thus compromising its ability to make sure that all men “are created equal”), its intent is distinctly guided by the idealized concepts provided by the Declaration of Independence. Even this unfortunate compromise from the outset of the Constitution’s ratification, done for the sake of economic interests and federal unity, was eventually corrected by Lincoln and the Civil War. As it stands, the Declaration and the Constitution act as symbiotic, fraternal documents, one being informed and supported by the other, to create a framework for the American government that stands strong to this day.