By Philip Shucet
Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
The most famous three words in American constitutional history were adopted in 1787 without a fight. “We the People” now reads like a statement of fact, as if the country always understood itself that way. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, those words were a gamble.
The Declaration of Independence brushed past the principle that the power of government rested with the “consent of the governed.” But what did that mean? Did consent come from the states or directly from the people? That ambiguity continues to stir political conflict today.
The convention delegates debated this source of power – sovereignty – for months.
By September 1787, the summer heat had not broken. Four months of threats, bargains, and uneasy compromises left the delegates exhausted.
An early draft of the preamble began with a roll call, “We the people of the States of New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode-Island…” and so on through the 13 states, matching the political reality of the delegates who were sent to Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation.
As the delegates sprinted toward adjournment, five delegates were appointed to a small editorial committee, the Committee of Style, tasked to “revise the style and arrange the articles” of the draft constitution. Four of the men held public office: Alexander Hamilton was a member of the New York State Assembly, William Johnson of Connecticut, Rufus King of Massachusetts and James Madison of Virginia were members of the Confederation Congress, and Gouverneur Morris represented Pennsylvania. Morris, an elegant writer and Federalist, was the principal scribe.
Just five days before the convention adjourned, the committee presented a new Preamble beginning with a phrase that would take on near-scriptural status: “We the People of the United States.”
In one short phrase, they engineered a permanent ambiguity about the source of federal power in American life.
No recorded debate followed. The convention adopted the new language and moved on.
“We the People” revealed a revolution in authority. The delegates sent the new Constitution to the states for debate.
Nine state conventions needed to approve the Constitution for ratification. A contradiction was embedded into the ratification process. The Preamble proclaimed popular sovereignty. Ratification depended on state machinery. The framers did not resolve the tension; they balanced it.
In Pennsylvania, James Wilson made the case for popular sovereignty. “In this Constitution, all authority is derived from the people,” Wilson told the delegates. “It receives its political existence from their authority; they ordain and establish.”
The Constitution, Wilson argued, stood above the state governments that the people had created. State legislatures could not revoke the U.S. Constitution at will. Its ratification was an exercise of popular sovereignty.
Pennsylvania ratified in December 1787. Wilson's persuasive argument captured advocates and votes.
The debate moved to Virginia, where the outcome was far less certain.
Virginia’s convention convened in Richmond on June 2, 1788, and soon settled in the New Academy building on Shockoe Hill to accommodate the 168 delegates.
On the second day of the Virginia ratification convention, Patrick Henry went straight for the Preamble’s throat: “What right had they to say, We, the People?” he demanded, asking why not “We, the States”? Henry was a former two-term Virginia governor who refused his appointment to the Constitutional Convention.
Henry raised an alarm. “The question turns, sir, on that poor little thing. The expression, We the People, instead of the States of America.” Henry saw something dangerous in the Preamble: the seed for permitting citizens to form a strong national government. “Here is a revolution as radical as that which separated us from Great Britain.”
The states, he said, were “the characteristics and the soul of a confederation.”
James Madison embraced the tension. The Constitution, he argued, was a new model. Authority came from the people, but from the people acting through separate political communities. Madison said that even the act of ratification reflected this hybrid design. “Who are the parties to it? The people, but not the people as composing one great body, but the people as composing thirteen sovereignties.”
He added, “But, sir, no state is bound by it, as it is, without its own consent.”
Madison pointed out that ratification gave the people the ability to “peaceably, freely, and satisfactorily to establish one general government, when there is such a diversity of opinions and interests.”
On June 25, Virginia became the 10th state to ratify the Constitution by a narrow 89-79 vote.
The Preamble sustained two rival claims. Americans could imagine themselves as a single political community while continuing to act through institutions that preserved local authority.
The Founders knew that successive generations would wrestle with the boundary between national authority and state power. But one thing was not left open. The people establish and authorize government. Every faction that has since marched under those three words — the sincere and the cynical alike — faced that premise, even when trying to subvert it.
Union soldiers and Confederate secessionists claimed the words. So did civil rights marchers and the sheriffs who met them with billy clubs. Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets of American cities, the Jan. 6 rioters who breached the Capitol, Anti-ICE demonstrators in Minneapolis – all leaned on the same three words.
The Preamble was never meant to settle the argument. It was meant to establish who gets to have the debate.
Reach Philip Shucet at philip.shucet@philipshucet.com
Philip Shucet spent decades running large public institutions — the Virginia Department of Transportation and Hampton Roads Transit — during periods when they were under strain. He understands how they are built, how they break down, and what it takes to rebuild them. He is a graduate of Virginia Tech and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has begun doctoral research in law and policy.