The seven words that open the Constitution - "We the People of the United States" - were not agreed upon on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. They were written by one man, in the closing days, and accepted without debate. The original draft said something different. The difference is not a footnote. It is the difference between a confederation of states and a unified nation.
The Constitutional Convention began on May 25, 1787, and debated through the summer in secret session. By late July the delegates had agreed on enough provisions to send the working draft to a five-member Committee of Detail for organization and drafting. The committee - John Rutledge, Edmund Randolph, Oliver Ellsworth, James Wilson, and Nathaniel Gorham - returned a printed draft on August 6, 1787. This was the first printed text of what would become the Constitution.
The Committee of Detail draft opened with this Preamble:
The differences are substantial. Thirteen named sovereign states became "the United States" - a single entity. The six purposes of the Constitution (more perfect Union, Justice, domestic Tranquility, common defence, general Welfare, Blessings of Liberty) were added entirely by Morris - none of them appear in the Committee of Detail draft. "Ordain, declare and establish" became "ordain and establish." The document describing a compact among named states became a document constituting a unified nation.
On September 8, 1787, nine days before the Convention concluded, the delegates appointed a five-member Committee of Style to arrange and polish the Constitution's final language. The committee: William Samuel Johnson (chair), Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Rufus King, and Gouverneur Morris. Morris did most of the drafting work. The committee's mandate was to style and arrange - not to change substance.
The Preamble rewrite exceeds a purely stylistic change. Removing the state names and replacing them with "the United States" altered the fundamental character of the document - from a compact among sovereign states to an act of a unified people. The convention accepted the rewrite without a recorded floor debate. No delegate rose to object to the change in the surviving record. The Convention voted to adopt the final text on September 17, 1787.
The primary record for Morris's intent in rewriting the Preamble is a letter he wrote to Timothy Pickering on December 22, 1814 - twenty-seven years after the Convention. Pickering had asked Morris to explain his role in drafting the Constitution. Morris's response is one of the frankest accounts of the Convention's work left by any participant.
The Constitution was a work of accommodation... I not only drafted it as it stands but with the hope that it would outlive the men who formed it and prove the instrument of national greatness. The preamble was planned with that object in view.
Morris was explicit that the Preamble was not a neutral stylistic exercise. He wrote it with the intent that the Constitution would function as a national document - an instrument of national greatness, as he put it - not as a compact among sovereign states. The debate between those two interpretations of the Constitution ran from 1787 through the Civil War. The Preamble Morris wrote in September 1787 became the textual foundation for the nationalist argument.
The question of what the Preamble meant - whether "We the People of the United States" referred to a single national people or to the peoples of the several states acting collectively - became the central constitutional argument of the next eighty years. Federalists cited the Preamble's "United States" language to argue for national supremacy. States' rights advocates argued the Preamble was merely an introduction with no operative legal force.
The argument was conducted in courtrooms, legislatures, pamphlets, and ultimately on battlefields. Chief Justice John Marshall cited the Preamble's language in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) to support the broad implied powers of the federal government. John C. Calhoun and the nullification theorists cited the state-compact theory - the interpretation the original August 6 draft would have supported - to argue for the right of states to void federal laws. The Civil War settled the question by force. The 14th Amendment settled it by law.
All of that followed from a change made without a floor debate in the final week of the Constitutional Convention, by one man on a five-member committee whose mandate was style, not substance. Morris wrote the Preamble. He said he planned it as an instrument of national greatness. The convention accepted his draft. The record is silent on whether anyone noticed what he had done.
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