What does “We the People” mean?

What does “We the People” mean in the Constitution?

It names who is acting. The Preamble is one sentence, and its subject and verb sit far apart: “We the People of the United States … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Everything in between is the list of reasons.

That makes the phrase a claim about authority. The people make the government, and the government answers to them. Law professors Erwin Chemerinsky and Michael Stokes Paulsen wrote the National Constitution Center’s shared explanation of the Preamble together, then wrote separate essays taking it in different directions. On this point they speak as one:

The Constitution is “owned” (so to speak) by the people, not by the government or any branch thereof.

Erwin Chemerinsky and Michael Stokes Paulsen, National Constitution Center, “The Preamble”

The phrase has a legal limit. The Preamble hands out no powers of its own. In Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), the Supreme Court said it “has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the government of the United States.”

Who wrote “We the People”?

Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania most likely wrote the final wording, though it went out under a committee’s name. On September 8, 1787, the Convention chose a committee by ballot “to revise the stile of and arrange the articles which had been agreed to by the House.” Its members were Johnson, Hamilton, Morris, Madison and King. It reported on September 12.

The evidence for Morris comes largely from James Madison, who sat on that committee. In 1831, 44 years later, Madison wrote: “The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris.” He added that the job was “probably” handed to Morris by the chairman, so even his memory hedges. The records show no debate about the new opening. As the legal scholar William Michael Treanor put it in 2021, “the Convention records do not report any discussion about the Committee of Style’s revised preamble.”

You can watch the change in the Convention’s own records:

Date	Source	How it opened
Aug. 6, 1787	Committee of Detail	“We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachussetts, Rhode-Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia…”
Sept. 12, 1787	Committee of Style	“We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…”
Sept. 17, 1787	Signed text	“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”

Why does the Constitution start with “We the People”?

Its backers said its authority rested on the people, acting through ratifying conventions, and not on the state governments. James Wilson, a delegate from Pennsylvania, made that argument to his state’s convention in December 1787. The new government, he said, “is founded upon the power of the people.” Article VII follows through: it asks for approval by “the Conventions of nine States,” not by state legislatures.

Why “We the People” and not “We the States”?

The usual explanation is practical, and some scholars think there was more to it. Under Article VII, nine of the 13 states could put the Constitution into effect, so nobody could know who would be in. Rhode Island had not even appointed delegates. North Carolina and Rhode Island did not ratify until after Washington’s inauguration. The scholar Clinton Rossiter, as quoted by Treanor, put it this way:

Since no one could tell for certain which states would ratify and which would stall or even refuse flatly to join, the sensible course was to leave out any mention at all of New Hampshire and her twelve sisters.

Clinton Rossiter, quoted in William Michael Treanor, Michigan Law Review, 2021

Treanor disagrees. He points out that the committee could have solved the same problem with “We the People of the States of the United States.” In his reading, Morris chose wording that fit his belief in one nation over a league of states. That is one scholar’s argument from the text and from Morris’s other statements. The Convention’s records don’t give the committee’s reasons, so you get to weigh it yourself.

Who objected to “We the People”?

Anti-Federalists objected, and the sharpest was Patrick Henry, who had been appointed to the Philadelphia convention and did not attend. On June 4, 1788, he asked Virginia’s ratifying convention:

What right had they to say, We, the people? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask, Who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the people, instead of, We, the states?

Patrick Henry, Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 4, 1788

The objection had force, because the delegates had been chosen by the states. Joseph Taylor told North Carolina’s convention the same thing: “We, the people, is surely an assumed power.” James Iredell answered that the words were “not to be applied to the members themselves, but was to be the style of the Constitution, when it should be ratified in their respective states.” Until the people’s conventions approved it, in other words, it was only a proposal.

The founding generation never fully settled which “people” it meant. Madison, in Federalist No. 39, said ratification would come from the people “not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong.” Chief Justice John Marshall, in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), stressed the other side: “The government proceeds directly from the people.” Both men were reading the same words.

Who was left out of “We the People” in 1787?

Most people living in the country were left out of the group that could vote or hold power. The Constitution itself shows part of this. Article I counted “three fifths of all other Persons,” meaning enslaved people, and excluded “Indians not taxed.”

The numbers are stark. A table of the 1790 census in Richard Keyser’s legal history textbook lists 694,280 enslaved people out of 3,893,635 counted, about 18 percent. Free white males aged 16 and over came to 807,094, about 21 percent.

Voting was left to the states. Alexander Keyssar’s tables, reproduced in the same textbook, show 10 of the 13 states with property requirements in 1790. They list explicit “white” limits in three states (Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia) and no race limit elsewhere. Women generally could not vote, with one exception: New Jersey let some women vote until 1807, when it restricted suffrage to adult white male taxpaying citizens.

Morris himself cuts both ways. On August 7, 1787, he moved to limit voters to freeholders, meaning landowners, and lost. The next day he called slavery “a nefarious institution.”

In 1857, the Supreme Court in Dred Scott gave the narrow reading its harshest form, saying Black Americans “are not included, and were not intended to be included” among citizens. Frederick Douglass answered with the text in an 1860 speech: “Its language is ‘we the people;’ not we the white people.” Barbara Jordan, a member of Congress from Texas, described the gap in 1974:

But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that “We, the people.”

Barbara Jordan, House Judiciary Committee statement, 1974

She went on: “through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been included.”

How did “We the People” get wider?

It got wider one fight at a time, mostly through amendments. The list below is not a straight line. The National Archives notes that after the 15th Amendment, literacy tests and “grandfather clauses” were written into the laws of former Confederate states to keep Black Americans from voting.

Year	Change	What it did
1865	13th Amendment	Abolished slavery
1868	14th Amendment	Citizenship for “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” overturning Dred Scott together with the 13th
1870	15th Amendment	Barred denying the vote because of race, color or prior servitude
1913	17th Amendment	Senators “elected by the people” of each state
1920	19th Amendment	Barred denying the vote because of sex
1924	Indian Citizenship Act	Citizenship for Native Americans, though state law denied some the ballot until 1948 in Arizona and New Mexico and 1957 on reservations in Utah, per the AP
1964	24th Amendment	Ended poll taxes in federal elections
1965	Voting Rights Act	Federal law against discriminatory voting practices; the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in 2013
1971	26th Amendment	Barred denying the vote to citizens 18 and older because of age

What does “We the People” mean today?

Legally it means what it did in 1905: it declares who enacted the Constitution and grants nothing on its own. Beyond that, people disagree in good faith. In their separate essays, Chemerinsky argues the Preamble states basic values that should guide how courts read the whole document, including the national government’s authority to act. Paulsen argues it gives only “a very gentle interpretive ‘push’” and that where the text sets no rule, decisions “must remain open to the people, acting through the institutions of representative democracy.” Both claim to be taking the words seriously. For what surveys find about agreement and disagreement now, see what Democrats and Republicans agree on.

This site’s own view

What follows is our opinion, not history. The framers wrote in the plural, and for a long time the plural was narrower than it sounded. We think the phrase asks something of one person at a time: a conviction you will say in the first person and test with someone who disagrees, in the spirit of civil discourse. I’m The People isn’t open yet. When it is, it would introduce you to one person who places themselves somewhere else, for a private conversation. A historian could fairly say that’s a stretch of what Morris meant, and we’d accept the criticism.