US Founding Documents a guided tour

1776–1791 · The founding texts of the American republic

Three documents written across fifteen years by overlapping casts of working politicians, drafted in the heat of revolution and ratification — then extended by amendment across two more centuries. Together they are the founding argument of American constitutional democracy.

The book in brief

The Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776), the Constitution (September 17, 1787), and the Bill of Rights (December 15, 1791) are not three separate works. They are one continuous argument, made across fifteen years by people who knew they were inventing the modern republican state. The Declaration announces the philosophical premises. The Constitution lays out the working machinery. The Bill of Rights names what the machinery may not do to the people who live under it.

Read together — with the later amendments that extended the settlement across two more centuries — the documents constitute the complete founding text of the United States. The Declaration is short enough to read in twenty minutes; the Constitution takes perhaps an hour; the Bill of Rights is ten amendments, none of them long. Reading all four in sequence, in an evening, is the closest modern readers can come to watching the American republic think itself into existence.

US Founding Documents, chapter by chapter

Click through the 4 chapters like a tour. Each card picks up where the last left off — a quick way to read US Founding Documents in five minutes. Open any book in depth, or jump straight into the reader.

Declaration of Independence1 of 4

Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence is short — about thirteen hundred words — and divides cleanly into three parts. The opening paragraph announces the occasion: one people dissolving the political bonds that tied them to another. The second paragraph is the philosophical core: the self-evident truths, the unalienable rights, the consent of the governed, the right of the people to alter or abolish a destructive government. It is one of the most carefully composed pieces of political philosophy ever written for a public audience, and it is closely modelled on John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Then comes the long list of grievances against George III — twenty-seven specific charges, each beginning with "He has" — which is the legal indictment, the case that the revolution is justified under the very principles just announced. The closing paragraph is the formal declaration of independence, signed by the representatives of the thirteen united States of America.

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Constitution

The Constitution

The Constitution is drafted eleven years after the Declaration, in a different mood. The Articles of Confederation have proved unworkable — no power of taxation, no executive, no judiciary, a unanimity rule for amendment that means nothing can be changed. The Convention of 1787 sits for four months in the same State House where the Declaration had been signed. The result is not a revision of the Articles but a wholly new framework. Read it in order: the Preamble (one sentence, the statement of purpose); Article I (Congress — the longest and most carefully constructed); Article II (the Presidency — shorter and looser, with consequences still being worked out); Article III (the courts — the briefest of the structural articles); Articles IV-VII handle relations among the states, amendment, supremacy, and ratification.

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Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights is the political settlement of the ratification fight. Several state conventions had voted to ratify the Constitution only on the express understanding that the first Congress would propose amendments protecting individual rights, and Madison, who had argued in Federalist 84 that no such bill was necessary, drafted a set of twelve amendments in the summer of 1789. Ten were ratified by the states by December 15, 1791. Read them in order: the First Amendment's five freedoms (religion, speech, press, assembly, petition); the Second through Fourth (arms, quartering, search and seizure); the Fifth through Eighth (criminal procedure: grand jury, double jeopardy, self-incrimination, due process, speedy trial, jury trial, cruel and unusual punishment); and the Ninth and Tenth, which are the structural principles — the enumeration of rights is not exhaustive, and unenumerated powers are reserved to the states or to the people.

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Later Amendments

The Later Amendments

The Constitution's amendment process (Article V) requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states — deliberately hard. The first ten amendments came as a batch in 1791; the next two (the Eleventh and Twelfth) followed in 1795 and 1804. Then a long silence. The Civil War amendments — the Thirteenth (1865, abolishing slavery), Fourteenth (1868, birthright citizenship and equal protection), and Fifteenth (1870, the right to vote regardless of race) — are the second founding, extending the Declaration's principles to the people the framers had excluded. The Progressive Era brought the Sixteenth (income tax), Seventeenth (direct election of senators), Eighteenth (Prohibition), and Nineteenth (women's suffrage) in close succession between 1913 and 1920. Prohibition was repealed by the Twenty-First Amendment in 1933 — the only amendment to repeal another.

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Key themes

5 threads that hold the book together. Full analysis →

The Lockean Argument of the Declaration

The second paragraph of the Declaration is one of the most carefully composed pieces of political philosophy ever produced for a public audience, and it is closely modelled on John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Jefferson is not concealing the source; he is paraphrasing it.

Separation of Powers and the Working Constitution

The Constitution's most enduring structural achievement is the separation of powers among three coordinate branches — each given its own enumerated authority and each given the constitutional means to check the encroachments of the others.

Federalism and the Compromise of the Convention

The Constitution is, before it is anything else, a federal compromise. The central political problem of the Convention of 1787 was how to construct a national government that would actually work without dissolving the existing states or alienating any of them so badly they would refuse to ratify.

The Bill of Rights and the Anti-Federalist Victory

The Bill of Rights exists because the Anti-Federalists won an argument the Federalists had thought they could win without conceding. During the ratification fight of 1787–88, the most consistent Anti-Federalist objection was the absence of an explicit declaration of rights.

What the Documents Did Not Settle

Reading the founding documents two and a half centuries later requires a willingness to see clearly both what they accomplished and what they did not. The accomplishment is enormous. So is the omission.

Key figures

The 6 who matter most. More in the full character guide.

Thomas Jefferson

Drafter, Declaration of Independence

Born 1743 at Shadwell in Virginia, William and Mary educated, Virginia lawyer and planter, member of the Continental Congress. Thirty-three years old when assigned the drafting of the Declaration in June 1776; produced the document in about seventeen days in a rented room on Market Street in Philadelphia. The voice of the Declaration is his — Lockean in substance, Augustan in cadence. Later first Secretary of State, Vice President, and third President. Died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration's adoption.

James Madison

Primary architect, Constitution and Bill of Rights

Born 1751 in Virginia, Princeton-educated. The most influential single figure at the Constitutional Convention — drafter of the Virginia Plan, keeper of the famously detailed notes that are the historian's chief source for what was said behind closed doors, principal author of Federalist 10, 39, and 47–51. Drafted what became the Bill of Rights in the first session of Congress in 1789. Fourth President of the United States from 1809 to 1817.

Alexander Hamilton

Constitutional advocate and Federalist Papers co-author

Born around 1755 on Nevis in the West Indies. Aide-de-camp to Washington through most of the Revolutionary War; New York lawyer afterwards; delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Wrote fifty-one of the eighty-five Federalist Papers, including the most influential papers on the executive (No. 70) and the judiciary (No. 78). First Secretary of the Treasury, designer of the federal financial system. Killed by Aaron Burr in a duel in July 1804.

George Washington

Presiding officer, Constitutional Convention

Born 1732 in Virginia. Commander-in-chief of the Continental Army from 1775 to 1783, presiding officer of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Said almost nothing during the four months of the Convention but was the silent guarantor of the entire enterprise; the framers were able to give the proposed presidency the powers they did because they assumed Washington would be the first occupant. Elected unanimously by the Electoral College in 1788 and 1792; established the foundational precedents of the office. Died December 1799.

George Mason

Anti-Federalist conscience

Virginia planter, drafter of the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 — the model for the natural-rights paragraph in the Declaration of Independence and for many provisions of the federal Bill of Rights. Refused to sign the finished Constitution in September 1787, chiefly because of the absence of a bill of rights. His Objections to This Constitution of Government, circulated in autumn 1787, was the most widely read Anti-Federalist pamphlet of the period. Died at Gunston Hall in 1792, having lived to see the ratification of the rights he had refused to sign without.

The Anti-Federalists

Ratification opposition

The loose coalition of state politicians and country gentlemen who opposed ratification of the Constitution in 1787–88. Patrick Henry of Virginia, George Clinton of New York, Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Richard Henry Lee, Elbridge Gerry — the cast varies by state but the character is consistent. They feared the new federal government was too consolidated, too distant from the people, too aristocratic in tendency. They lost the ratification fight but won, through their pressure, the commitment to a bill of rights. The American constitutional tradition is, in one of its central dimensions, the ongoing dialogue between the Federalist and Anti-Federalist visions of what kind of republic the United States was meant to be.

Go deeper

In 5 minutes — or in depth

Chapter-by-chapter

All 4 chapters summarized. The full plot in detail, told fast or told slow.

Analysis

Themes & meaning

Natural rights, separation of powers, federalism, individual liberty, the limits of government.

Who's who

Philadelphia, 1776–1787

The delegates, drafters, and dissenters who wrote the American republic into existence.

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