Thursday, May 6, 2010

Good document - deliberately vague

"Thirty-nine men signed the Constitution. Interestingly only six of them had signed the Declaration. These Framers of the Constitution were not of a younger generation but from the same generation. They were less diplomatic but educated never-the-less. They were divided on every issue. Many wanted to insure that individual states would hold ultimate power. There were more attending who represented powerful men of business and a strong central government and banking system. The entire document was not inspiration but compromise, small states threatened by large states, slave vs free, commercial vs agricultural.
Every issue had to be compromised to the point that no one was delighted with the results. Any other approach would have ended in failure to produce a document.
Today many believe that the Civil War resulted from it."

"The country did not divide because the Constitution was ambiguous, but the Constitution was ambiguous because the country was already divided"
Carl Russell Fish historian 1913

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