Join us on Sept. 17 for a Constitution Day address by Jason Opal, dean and director of Ohio State Mansfield and professor of history, followed by a panel discussion.
"To live in the United States," writes the historian Jonathan Giennap, "is to feel the relevance of the Constitution's origins."
No wonder we Americans spend so much time arguing over those origins and over the motives of the elite statesmen who wrote the document in 1787. And yet, the Framers were clear about their intentions and united in their motivations: They wanted a "more perfect Union" that would command loyalty within U.S. borders and respect beyond them.
They largely succeeded, so much so that the idea of the Union took on a life of its own, separate from the words and rules of the Constitution. "Union" became the moral framework within which Americans chose to restrain their ambitions — and, in a sense, their freedoms. The one issue on which the Framers were not clear, slavery, could not survive within that framework, and so the old Union died along with more than 600,000 people in the Civil War. But the idea that Americans make up a Union, not just a population of self-interested individuals, remains a source of hope and connection, even in our own, bitterly divided times.