FOURTH

THE MEN WHO produced the Constitution were preoccupied with the abuse of power. They talked in terms of restraint, division of powers, limits on government. They were ever mindful of the ways in which a majority could impose its will on a minority. They were attentive to the inhibitions a people ought to put on the government's tendencies toward war and conquest. And they debated all these questions and more in elegant
papers meant to lay the basis for a stable,
orderly republic that would prosper and
endure.
How, then, did it come about that 59 years after the Founders convened in Philadelphia, a rowdy gang of freebooting Americans was convening in faraway Sonoma, Calif., on July 4, not just to celebrate American independence but to proclaim the independence of California, which happened at the time to be part of Mexico? They fashioned their own crude flag, with a representation of a bear, disabled some Mexican cannons and generally took over the town. They acted as if they'd never read the Federalist Papers. Not too long afterward, California was part of the United States, thanks to the U.S. Army, a Navy and a president whom many accused of conducting an immoral and possibly illegal war of conquest.
Talk about original intent! In retrospect, and in the current vernacular, it might better be stated as "Who knew?" Who, in Philadelphia in 1787, could have foreseen the speed with which a newly independent people, concentrated on the Eastern Seaboard, would sweep across the continent, or the way they would do it: a sometimes glorious and sometimes appalling story that includes the acquisition of vast tracts by a president who believed in a strictly limited presidency; the forcible displacement of many thousands of peaceable native peoples; the spread of civilization to wild and unsettled regions; unspeakable greed, waste, mass religious movements, ambition and energy on an astonishing scale. And to top it all off, a long and bloody civil war over one of the most egregious abuses of power still existing in the western world (long after the Founders thought it would have disappeared): chattel slavery.
Of course much of this turmoil might have been foreseen, given the Constitution's emphasis on liberty and freedom of action. But did independence unleash the animal spirits that sometimes turned liberty into license? Might we, as many Americans argued during the Revolution, have maintained our essential freedoms and still advanced civilization in a more orderly fashion under the stately sway of a foreign empire? After all, Canada's not such a bad place, eh?
Of course the question is hardly worth raising today, and perhaps it never was. The people of the rebellious colonies along the Atlantic formed an identity of their own, mostly out of their rebellion, and they have never lost it, even through bitter conflict, incredible growth and the accretion of one generation after another that came here from elsewhere and became, in time, as American as the rebels of 1776. Which is to say that they still harbor much the same vision of opportunity Americans did some 250 years ago, and the same determination to realize it, however daunting the prospect or unpredictable the ways and means to their goal.