If you’re interested in the characters and rhetorical conflicts that generated the U.S. Constitution, you’ll probably enjoy David O. Stewart’s The Summer of 1787 (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
Among the interesting observations is the following description of Gouverneur Morris’ work to compile the final version of our “supreme law of the land”:
Morris also wrote a new preamble. Paeans have been written to his transformation of the opening from “We the People of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts” and so on, to “We the People of the United States….” By not referring to each state, Morris proclaimed a new government based on the consent of the people. Here, theorists declaim, popular sovereignty stands foursquare.
A practical reason helps explain the change. Listing the states would have been presumptuous, even foolish, since ratification by every state was no foregone conclusion. Indeed, Rhode Island and New York were still absent.
Greater consensus surrounds the balance of Morris’s preamble, which distills the purposes of government: “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, [Kokai’s note: I’m not sure why Stewart omits here “promote the general Welfare”] and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Many constitutions have been written since. France has had more than ten, while almost two hundred are now in place around the globe, not to mention supernational statements like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the draft Constitution for the European Union. Yet none surpasses ? and few rival ? Morris’ preamble. Madison approved of “the talents and taste stamped by the author on” the Constitution: “A better choice [than Morris] could not have been made, as the performance of the task proved.”
