It seems I’m still thinking about my recent columns.
One dealt with the current vs. historical meanings of “perfect” while the other discussed the second sentence of our Declaration of Independence that provided a basis for separating ourselves from the rule of the English monarch, George III.
I closed the column on the Declaration by suggesting that creating our Constitution was a formidable task, also deserving of our respect and admiration.
Well, as my brain works, one thing leads to another and that is what happened in this instance because the Constitution also has memorable language, such as the sentence that states the colonies’ intention to “create a more perfect union.”
There’s that word again, “perfect.” How can something be “more perfect.”
Are there degrees of perfection? Well sort of, depending on how the word is being used, either in the absolute sense, something is or is not perfect, or perhaps in the older etymological sense as I wrote about before of something that is completed.
Or perhaps a bit of both.
To push into that question, we need to look at what was going on at that time, how the colonies united to fight and win the Revolution under the inadequate Articles of Confederation, with its weak central government, which was established during the war, but was found for various reasons to be inadequate to govern the new nation.
To remedy that inadequacy the writers of what became our Constitution had to address the weakness of the Articles of Confederation and create a central government strong enough to govern the 13 original colonies, now states, which were different in many ways from geography to resources to the makeup of their population.
That last difference was the most difficult: how to establish a formula for representation for what would be our House of Representatives?
How would that number be calculated, particularly regarding a significant portion of population in the southern states: slaves?
Generally, the northern colonies were themselves moving toward abolishing slavery and were opposed to its continuation in the southern colonies.
The difference in attitude toward slavery between north and south was partly moral, to be sure, but also, perhaps primarily economic. Slaves in the north tended to be house servants, not drivers of the economy while in the plantations of the south, slaves were a necessary component of the region’s agricultural labor force. It would take the horror of the Civil War to settle that issue.
That process began with Lincoln’s wartime Emancipation Proclamation that was prompted in part by military as well as moral reasons.
But in the narrower focus of the creation of our Constitution, the northern and southern colonies had to find common ground because the slaveholding colonies wanted to count their slave population toward determining how many representatives they would have in the House. Many in the North were abolitionists for whom this idea was a non-starter.
But agreement had to be found. And it was. Each slave would be counted as a 3/5 person in determining the number of representatives for a slave-holding state. This compromise, as dehumanizing as it literally was, smoothed the way to the passage of our Constitution.
Making, therefore, in the old sense of “perfect” a completed task rather than a flawless one.
Accepting the terms of the draft constitution did not make the new union without imperfections, not when it’s counting of citizens reduced some to a fraction of a person, but as a difficult job accomplished through a morally obnoxious, compromise.
After the Civil War, three Constitutional amendments took us closer to a “perfect” union in the flawless sense of the word.