​A Compact or a Nation?

​In 2026, the United States turns 250. Across eight weeks we're reading the founders in their own words — the arguments they had with each other about liberty, power, and the system of government they were building.

​The question in our final week: what is the thing the Constitution made - a compact among sovereign states, or a nation? And did the experiment hold?

• ​Washington's Farewell Address (1796) — the first president declines a third term, which was the most consequential thing he ever did, and then warns against the two forces he thinks will break the Union: party spirit and sectional feeling.

• ​The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (1798–99) — twenty-six months later, his own Secretary of State and the man who drafted his first inaugural answer him. The Constitution is a compact, the states are the parties, and each may judge for itself when it has been broken. Kentucky supplies the word: nullification. Written in a good cause — the Alien and Sedition Acts were a disgrace — and it becomes the constitutional argument for secession.

• ​The Corner-Stone speech (1861) — three weeks before Fort Sumter, the Vice-President of the Confederacy explains what his government is founded on. He does not claim the founders. He says they believed slavery was wrong in principle, that they rested their government on the equality of men, and that in believing so they were mistaken.

• ​The Gettysburg Address (1863) — 272 words that date the nation to 1776 rather than 1787, and to the Declaration rather than the Constitution. Lincoln agrees with Stephens about what the founders believed and disagrees about whether they were right. Both men are claiming the same fathers.

• ​The Second Inaugural (1865) — the same man, six weeks from death, with the war effectively won, declining to claim the vindication that was by then in his hands.

​Download this week's reader here: masonmelead.com/foundingwk8.pdf