Americans often engage in the conceit that we have the oldest written constitution in the world. But that’s a false story, and a dangerous lie to boot.
Yes, a Constitution was written in 1789. And it fell apart in 1861 under the weight of its uncertainty on whether the United States was a collection of sovereign states or one nation—and even more so based on its moral bankruptcy on the issue of slavery.
And so, beginning in 1865, a new Constitution was forged, both in the halls of Congress and, as importantly, on the battlefields of Antietam, Bull Run and Gettysburg. The new movie Lincoln does the inestimable service of telling that tale of the Civil War, not as a tragedy, but as the founding of our country as one truly “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
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