Dr. Fleming on Written "Constitutions"

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I think we should all try to understand that there is not such thing as a perfect and probably not even a good constitution. One of the big problems with patriotic attachment to the Constitution is that it displaces our attention from how people actually live and make decisions and transfers it to a theory or piece of paper. The men who drafted the Constitution (or the Articles) were not geniuses. They were practical and usually commonplace people who had lived through strife and war. For the most part they were ward-heelers, that is, public men who were looking out for the interests of themselves and their constituents. Sitting down in Philadelphia, they hammered out a series of compromises that protected the various interests that had sent them there–big states and small, slave-holding and free, agricultural and mercantile interests, coastal and back country. It would be very naive to assume that such an agreement could bind their successors very long, and the illusion that it could prevented some otherwise fine statesmen from facing reality. One of the best thinkers among the framers, John Adams, had a son who made up his mind to break the Union–and the Constitution–in order to subjugate the South. If the South had got out then, during the ridiculous debate over Missouri, she might have stood a chance. By 1860 it was simply too late.