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The Constitution’s Deep Roots
was joined with England and with her own colonial past by a continuity
of culture that much exceeded the Americans’ link with old Rome, so distant and so remote in time.
It was the aspiration of the delegates at Philadelphia in 1787 to reconcile the need for a strong federal government with the demand for State
sovereignty, local autonomy, and personal liberty. They could not find
in the history of the ancient world any model constitution that might
achieve this purpose. In 1865, nine decades after the Great Convention at
Philadelphia, Orestes Brownson—one of the more interesting of America’s political thinkers—would write in his book The American Republic
that America’s mission under God was to realize the true idea of the political state or nation. America’s mission, Brownson believed, was to give
flesh to that concept of the commonwealth ‘‘which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual—the sovereignty
of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without
anarchy. . . . The Greek and Roman republics asserted the state to the detriment of individual freedom; modern republics either do the same, or
assert individual freedom to the detriment of the state. The Am