By Dr Bertrand Ramcharan
Previously Fellow of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government
The 250th birthday of American independence, observed on 4 July, 2026, is an occasion for celebration and for reflection. Happy Independence Day, America.
Abraham Lincoln’s description of democracy as ‘government of the people, for the people, and by the people’, is lodged in the Guyanese psyche. Guyana has benefitted greatly from the democratic quest of President Jimmy Carter and the Carter Center. I met President Carter on different occasions at the UN in New York and at the Carter Center in Atlanta. He had much good will for Guyana.
Study of the constitutional history of a country helps one to evaluate the journey it has taken and to reflect on how its future journey might be charted. This is precisely what Mark Peterson, Professor of History at Yale University has just done in a book published on the occasion of America’s 250th independence anniversary. It is a remarkable work of scholarship that has been reviewed with high praise in the New York Times and elsewhere.
Petersen titled his book ‘The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution. A Thousand Year History’. He explains: ‘England’s North American colonies … began as an extension of ideas about landholding that went back to the Domesday Book and before.’ America’s constitutional development built on the English model.
Peterson’s insight is that in the Anglo-American tradition in which the United States emerged, a constitution is a relationship among the fundamental elements of a governing compact: the body of society, the nature and condition of the land and people, the frame of government as defined by its institutions, principles, practices and customs, and the written instruments employed to define, describe and delimit the government’s powers.
He submits that in order to understand America’s constitutional development one needs to know how it emerged from England’s Domesday Book. The latter was a meticulous and historic compilation of the ownership of land and property in England done at the behest of William the Conqueror after he took the throne of England by force in 1066.
Petersen writes: ‘As a written document, the Domesday Book was a great novelty – nothing quite like it existed in Europe’s other kingdoms. Domesday offered a painstaking written description of the existing constitution of England. It spelled out everything that was known about its land and its people, its resources, and its hierarchical structure of authority – a pyramid of obligations and relationships with the new monarch at the summit.’
The English settlers who began in what is today’s America benefited from royal grants of land patterned after William’s grants of land to his supporters. They took with them to the new world, ideas of constitutionalism that had developed in England. The unwritten English constitution had been a combination of ancient customs and practices, formal institutions of government, and occasional written instruments that clarified or adjusted them. Among these were the Magna Carta of 1215 and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Magna Carta had famously proclaimed: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.’
The book is a master-class of research and historical writing. It tells how the fledgling individual states set about drafting state constitutions with guarantees of rights – but not for slaves and indigenous peoples – and how the peoples on the eastern seaboard eventually wound their way across to the Pacific, trampling on the rights of indigenous peoples along the way.
Massachusetts’ process for drafting its constitution is inspiring. It developed an innovative process for representing the people. The state legislature called for a convention of the people and numerous representatives from every part of the state came together for the purpose of drafting an instrument of government. The document they drafted eventually became the people’s grant of political power to a governing body of the state. Once drafted, the written constitution was then returned to the people assembled in their towns. Their town-by-town ratification represented a popular validation that the work of the special convention did in fact express the will of the people. Might such a process be emulated in Guyana?
Peterson discusses the processes of drafting the Articles of Confederation and the subsequent Constitution of the USA. He laments the fact that the Constitution had no place for the rights of slaves and indigenous peoples. He writes: ‘Of the thousands off books and articles that have been written on the origins of the U.S. Constitution, few tend to focus on the challenge of Western land claims or acknowledge that half the territory of the original United States belonged to Indigenous peoples who were formally excluded from citizenship in the new nations.’ Petersen writes with feeling about the plight of America’s large slave population.
Chapter 12 of the book may be of particular interest to Guyanese in view of the role of the Executive Presidency. Petersen titles it ‘The Long Crisis of the Constitution’ and discusses the Executive grab for power, particularly in the twentieth century: ‘The federal government would take on new powers and amass ever-larger resources, both financial and administrative, to influence the lives of its citizens…The United States government has grown into what is perhaps the largest enterprise the world has ever known. Today it spends more money on military matters than the next nine largest countries combined, more than 40 percent of the world’s total. The society it governs, while comprising less than 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s resources – and generates 30 percent of the world’s waste.’
Beginning with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Petersen explains, many of the new powers assumed by the President and Congress, and the institutions they generated, lack specific support in the written constitution and therefore, no matter how much they may have changed the basic character of the nation and government, are perpetually subject to the vicissitudes of politics in every branch of government – the legislature, the executive, and the courts: ‘The ever-widening gaps between the nation, the government, and the written instrument – and the lastingly bitter politics these gaps have engendered – have produced the long constitutional crisis of the past century that is now coming to a head.’
Petersen registers the point: ‘Since the Cold War ended at the close of the nation’s second century, the United States has been constitutional adrift.’
In an Epilogue to the book, Petersen looks towards 2090 and reflects on a possible rethinking of the purpose of the United States. The USA, he notes, had started out as a confederation ‘for their common defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare.’ Woodrow Wilson’s slogan as America entered the First World War had been to ‘make the world safe for democracy’. Dwight Eisenhower thought that the purpose of America was ‘to defend a way of life’. During the Cold War the project had been to defend the ‘American Way’.
What, then, Petersen asks, might become the purpose of the United States as it looks ahead toward the end of its third century? He answers: ‘The present generation has it in its powers, as a sovereign people, to realign the strongest and most enduring values of our constitutional history with new frameworks of government well designed to meet the challenges of our world, to promote the general welfare of ourselves and our posterity.’
One thinks about climate change, protection of the environment, AI, peace, development and human rights.
Discussion