The US Constitution as Americans Once Understood It

The US Constitution as Americans Once Understood It

Thomas Allen

In The United States Unmasked: A Search into the Causes of the Rise and Progress of These States, and an Exposure Of Their Present Material and Moral Condition (London, Ontario: J. H. Vivian, 1878), pages 22–24, G. Manigault explains how Americans once understood the US Constitution. Rare is a politician who swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution knows what he is supposed to support and defend. Calvin Coolidge was the last president who even made an attempt to follow the Constitution. No Congress since the early 1930s has attempted to follow the Constitution. The following is Manigault’s explanation of how Americans once understood the Constitution.

The better to carry on the war begun in 1776 for the establishment of their independence of the mother country, the thirteen colonies had united themselves into a confederacy by a treaty called “The Articles of Confederation,” which by express agreement were to be perpetual. They continued united under this treaty through the greater part of the war, and seven years after. Becoming then dissatisfied with this treaty, the States, acting as States, set aside “The Articles of Confederation,” which were to have been perpetual, and made with each other another treaty called “The Constitution of the United States,” more precise in terms and more stringent in conditions, which created, under the form of a federal government, a common agent for each and all the States for certain specified purposes. The States endowed this common agent with certain specified powers and with no others; for the powers not granted were expressly reserved to the individual States. A year or two elapsed after this treaty went into operation between most of the states, before all acceded to it.

The purposes to be served by this agent of all the states, and which they named “The Government of the United States,” were essentially these: To secure the friendly union and intercourse between the states, and the people of the states; and to present them as one united hody, in peace and in war. to all foreign powers.

The States however did not cease to be each a sovereign body politic within its own limits, in all matters not expressly delegated to the common agent. The forming of the Union did not generate an allegiance to a government or to a country. Each citizen of each State owed allegiance to his own State. On the formation of the Union, at first under the “Articles of Confederation,” afterwards under the “Constitution of the United States,” he, as well as his State, assumed a new obligation: that of observing in good faith the terms of the treaty of Union. Not even the officials of the new government ever took any oath of allegiance to it, as a government, or to the country within its jurisdiction. The only oath taken was, to observe faithfully the terms of the treaty of union between the States. As to the perpetuity of the Union, nothing is expressly said of it in the “Constitution of the United States.” Doubtless it was meant to be as perpetual as the good faith in observing the conditions on which the States had entered into the Union, and no longer. To assume that the parties that made the compact of union on certain specified conditions, meant these conditions to be temporary, but the union leased upon them perpetual — that gross and persistent violation of the terms of the agreement, by some parties to it, would not release the others from their obligation — would be putting the most absurd and illogical construction on the contract.

Following Lincoln's War, people changed their primary allegiance from their State to the United States as a whole and often to the federal government. Allegiance to their State was a distant second. Most federal employees, especially federal judges, Congressmen, and high-ranking members of the federal executive branch, insist that the primary allegiance is to the federal government — especially when their party wields power.

Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Coley Allen.

More political articles.