Abstract
The ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 was greeted with more excitement and more unanimity among the American people than at any time since the Declaration of Independence a decade earlier. “ ’Tis done!” declared Benjamin Rush in July 1788. “We have become a nation.” This was an extravagant claim, to say the least. Yet Rush thought that the new United States had become a nation virtually overnight. Everywhere in America, he said, there was “such a tide of joy as has seldom been felt in any age or country. …Justice has descended from heaven to dwell in our land, and ample restitution has at last been made to human nature by our new Constitution of all the injuries she has sustained in the old world from arbitrary government, false religions, and unlawful commerce.” The new nation represented the “triumph of knowledge over ignorance, of virtue over vice, and of liberty over slavery.”1
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Notes
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© 2006 Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill
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Wood, G.S. (2006). The American Enlightenment. In: McDowell, G.L., O’Neill, J. (eds) America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601062_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601062_7
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