[Daily Caller] The American people, memorialized forever by our Constitution as the greatest "We" ever to speak univocally to posterity, are the benefactors of the greatest constitutional republic ever to exist. I believe that. I believe in American exceptionalism. It is in my blood. In truth, however, although it is seldom understood and even more seldom discussed, we have had three Republics, each corresponding to our three Constitutions. In my view, it is time for a Fourth.
The first Constitution and Republic were the products of the first constitutional convention, or as some historians call it, the Philadelphia Convention. Representing North Carolina during that long, hot Philadelphia summer of 1787 was an ancestral cousin of mine ‐ a relation by a series of crooked turns in a dead-end branch of the family tree, the sort of which only Southern grandmothers can keep track. Alexander Martin was a federalist, favoring a strong federal government, in a state that was overwhelmingly anti-federalist. This may explain why, as family lore has it, he was the only Founding Father not elected to his own state’s convention. He was, however, twice governor, so I don’t suppose things turned out so badly for him. |