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The Constitution’s Deep Roots
and political, that are reflected in their political behavior and in the constitutions they drafted for their countrymen. No generation of political
leaders has been better prepared or better educated for writing a constitution and assuming the reins of government than the Framers of the
American Constitution.
The French and American
Revolutions Compared
Representative government, a tradition of well-established civil and political liberties, and the heritage of the common law are only three of the
more important examples of English political and legal institutions that
passed into the civil social order of the United States. The Congress, the
Bill of Rights, and the American system of law and justice today are all
the products of British experience and political thought going back more
than seven centuries.
Although the Framers of the American Constitution declared that they
were creating a new political order for a new age, they never thought of
repudiating their American past, their British past, or their classical past.
On the floor of the Federal Convention, and in the State ratifying conventions, the leading men repeatedly appealed to examples from ancient
times and from English history, and a few even relied upon philosophers
of earlier centuries to support their views. They were seeking to preserve
their ancestral America.
The wisdom of the Framers and their attachment to the political and
moral heritage of Hebraic, classical, and British cultures, combined with
the American experience, prevented them from falling into the ruinous
political errors that, only two years after the Constitution was written,
French reformers would begin to commit. Initially, the French Revolution
that began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille (a prison in Par