The US Constitution is deliberately shrouded in mystery, portrayed as a holy, ever-lasting protector of individual rights. But the state is not a neutral body. It exists to protect the property and interests of the ruling class. As Marx put, “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

Constitutions represent the class balance of forces at a particular moment, enshrined into law. The US Constitution came about as a result of class struggle, when the rising American capitalist class realized they needed a stronger, more centralized state to rule over the masses.

Revolutionary land seizures 

During the Revolutionary War, the nascent bourgeoisie leaned upon the masses to wage a successful struggle for independence. This required temporarily identifying their own class interests with the interests of society as a whole. Thus, the revolution was presented as a struggle against tyranny and taxation in general—not merely a defense of the interests of the American landowners, merchants, and slaveholders.

One way this was accomplished was by the seizure of lands owned by pro-British Tories,  which often required the direct intervention of the masses. These properties were broken up and sold off for a fraction of their value, frequently to small farmers, in order to fund the war effort.

But wealthy Americans, including firm supporters of the revolution, viewed the masses with suspicion and fear. Still, as long as the rabble targeted the common enemy, they had to tolerate it.

Shays’s Rebellion

For the poor colonists, the point of the revolution was to establish a country free of injustice, where they could lead a decent life. But soon after victory they found themselves ruled by a different band of brigands. Small farmers rose up to defend the gains of the revolution—the rights and expropriated property they had acquired in the course of the struggle. The capitalist class’s worst nightmares were coming true.

In 1786, three years after the end of the Revolutionary War, deeply indebted small farmers in Massachusetts calling themselves Regulators forced the closure of the Northampton court to prevent the confiscation of their property. Within a few months, five courts would be shut down in this manner. By January, the farmers were in open revolt.

But the coastal elites got their way in the end, successfully suppressing Shays’s Rebellion, named for one of its leaders, Daniel Shays. America’s closest equivalents to the Jacobins were defeated and the revolution’s high-water mark had passed.

Constitutional convention

A few months after the Shaysites were crushed, 55 delegates met in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention. Of these, 30 were merchants and speculators, and 12 were plantation owners or managers; 35 delegates were lawyers of one kind or another. None of the delegates was propertyless, none were subsistence farmers, and none would have found themselves fighting alongside Daniel Shays.

Even before Massachusetts erupted in revolt, many in the ruling class believed that the Articles of Confederation, America’s first constitutional framework, had to go. The Articles did not provide the centralization of power needed for the emerging bourgeoisie to pursue its aims.

The central government’s purview was restricted and was impotent to enforce its decisions. The powers of taxation and trade were left to the states. This meant the federal government could not raise the money to pay the interest on the foreign debts it accrued in the war. States also enacted tariffs to try to defend and expand their own industries at the expense of neighboring states, which inhibited the formation of a national market, one of the most important gains a bourgeois revolution provides the capitalists.

Shays’s rebellion was a catalyst for many of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention. When Regulators shut down Worcester’s court, the state militia was called in. But the militiamen sympathized with the movement and refused to muster against their compatriots.

Samuel Adams accused the rebels of being foreign agents and suggested they should be executed. His reaction shows how frightened the newly minted elites were. They could not rely upon their local militias and did not have the authority to raise a federal force to rescue the Massachusetts gentry.

In the end, the more “loyal” state militias had to be supplemented by privately raised militias funded by wealthy merchants. Shays’s Rebellion made viscerally clear what was at stake if a strong central government could not be formed. Further, it provided the emerging American bourgeoisie with a powerful impetus to overcome their differences and unite against their common enemy: the toiling masses.

Anti-democratic measures

They did so in a consciously anti-democratic manner. There is no need to take our word for it. James Madison makes this argument explicitly, in the Federalist Paper No. 10:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States … A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.

The Constitution was created to place power firmly in the hands of the ruling class and suppress the revolutionary fervor of the toilers. It was also a constitution full of compromises. The three-fifths compromise was an attempt to bridge the gap between the interests of the young industrial capitalist class in the North and the slaveholders in the South. It took the Second American Revolution, and the efforts of millions of ordinary workers, farmers, freedmen, and runaway slaves to put an end to chattel slavery.

The American Revolution could not have succeeded without the heroism and sacrifice of the toiling classes which made Colonial society run. In mobilizing the masses, appeals were made to fraternity, equality, and liberty. But these ideals could not be realized in the constitutional republic which was nothing other than the kingdom of the bourgeoisie. Only when workers take the fate of society into our own hands, through the communist revolution, will “We the People” actually rule.