The U.S. gave the vote to all male citizens regardless of skin color or former condition of servitude only with the Fifteenth Amendment, in 1870. Until that point, African Americans as well as some white men in states that made tax payment a prerequisite had been denied the right to vote. These changes required a bloody civil war, and even they were still partial. Pennsylvania and Rhode Island maintained tax-paying qualifications into the 20th century; women and Native Americans did not yet have suffrage. In both Britain and the United States, true universal suffrage was not adopted until well into the 20th century, and fights for voting rights persist.
In other words, the Constitution did not earn an earlier release from bondage or promote universal suffrage for men much faster than was accomplished under Britain’s constitutional monarchy. Nor much faster than was achieved in Canada, a country we can look to for an answer to the question of what might have happened had the North American colonies that came to form the United States failed in their bid for freedom.
What did accelerate the march of freedom for all was abolitionism, a social movement that crystallized in both the United States and the United Kingdom in the years immediately following the revolutionary break between the two. Moral leadership made this difference. Freedom flows from the tireless efforts of those who proclaim and pursue protection of the equal human dignity of all.
So why, then, do I love the Constitution? I love it for its practical leadership. I love it because it is the world’s greatest teaching document for one part of the story of freedom: the question of how free and equal citizens check and channel power both to protect themselves from domination by one another and to secure their mutual protection from external forces that might seek their domination.
Why do we have three distinct aspects of power—legislative, executive, and judicial—and why is it best to keep them separate and yet intermingled? A typical civics lesson skates over the deep philosophical basis for what we glibly call “separation of powers” and “checks and balances.” Those concepts rest on a profound reckoning with the nature of power.