William Vollmann in Harper’s Magazine:
What dimensions has our America? I propose to offer you this antique measuring stick, with a few of my own prejudices rudely gashed in.
Just because the Founders said it hardly makes it so. Moreover, just because I have read some of them here and there hardly proves that I understand them. Fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Supreme Court’s longest-serving chief justice expressed sour expectations of my abilities: “Those who follow us,” wrote John Marshall, “will know very little of the real transactions of our day, and will have very untrue impressions respecting men and things. Such is the lot of humanity.” Indeed it is. Picking through his relics, I uncover one such disarticulated “real transaction,” dated 1788: “He told us that the principal danger arose from a government which, if adopted, would give away the Mississippi.” Tucking that item back into its coffin of irrelevance, I rake through kindred ephemera, hoping for something to serve our day—for although Marshall could hardly foresee my real transactions, maybe it will suffice that he loved the Constitution, hoped it would endure while fearing it wouldn’t, and did his best to operate its checks and balances with impartial fairness and benevolence: “a government of laws, and not of men.”
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