Within the span of two weeks each year, the nation marks two declarations of freedom: Juneteenth and the Fourth of July. This series brings them into conversation to examine what they reveal, together, about the American project.
Across three essays, the series traces a central tension at the heart of American democracy: its enduring promise to freedom alongside a persistent capacity for injustice. The first essay names this contradiction and challenges the narratives that keep it obscured. The second grounds that insight in history, showing how the design of the system itself has enabled inequality to coexist with democratic ideals. The third turns toward the future, using this moment of reflection to ask what it would take to build something more honest, more durable, and more just.
Taken together, these essays invite a deeper reckoning with the present and create space for imagining what comes next.
One of the unexpected joys of writing my forthcoming book, The Price of Union, was discovering historical figures who played profound roles in shaping the American story yet remain largely forgotten by history. Few captivated me more than Gouverneur Morris.
Morris was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, a Pennsylvania aristocrat, a peg-legged socialite, and by most accounts a man of enormous appetite and ego. Legend has it he lost his leg after leaping from a lover’s window to avoid being discovered, only to be run over by a carriage in the street below. Years later, while serving as an American diplomat in France during the French Revolution, he narrowly escaped mob violence alongside another lover. Morris was worldly, theatrical, and deeply imperfect.
He was also one of the fiercest opponents of slavery at the Constitutional Convention.
James Madison’s notes recount Morris repeatedly railing against the inclusion of slavery in the new union, denouncing it as a “nefarious institution” and warning that permitting it would undermine the moral legitimacy of the republic itself. Though many of the founders spoke cautiously around the issue, Morris confronted it directly. He argued openly that slavery was incompatible with the principles upon which the nation claimed it was being built.
He lost that fight.
The Constitution would incorporate slavery into the architecture of the republic, binding together democracy and racial caste in ways that would shape the nation for centuries to come.
But as part of the committee responsible for finalizing the Constitution’s language, Morris is widely credited with drafting the Preamble, including the phrase that has echoed across generations ever since: “to form a more perfect Union.”
I’ve thought about Gouverneur Morris a great deal over the last year. I’ve thought about his contradictions: he was an aristocrat yet anti-slavery, a cad yet morally courageous, flawed yet historically consequential. And I find myself returning to the possibility that history is often carried forward by people who are themselves imperfect, yet capable of glimpsing truths larger than the societies that formed them.
Charged with giving the Constitution its final voice, Morris embedded something extraordinary into the nation’s founding charter. In describing the new government as an effort to form “a more perfect Union,” he left behind an acknowledgment that the union was unfinished.
Sign up for our free newsletters
Subscribe to NPQ's newsletters to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.
By signing up, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of use, and to receive messages from NPQ and our partners.
But perhaps the deeper power of the phrase lies in the fact that it points beyond the Constitution itself. A more perfect union is not merely about preserving a political container or maintaining national continuity. It is an aspiration about how human beings choose to live together. About how we distribute care, belonging, dignity, responsibility, and freedom across the breadth of a society.
The union’s perfection is not realized through the endurance of institutions alone, but in our capacity to build the social bonds and democratic structures that allow people to flourish together.
That unfinished aspiration has carried us forward ever since.
There are moments in a nation’s life when gradual evolution is no longer enough, when the inherited order begins to lose its coherence and a generation is forced to confront the possibility that what comes next cannot simply be an extension of what came before. This is one of those moments.
The democratic order we inherited rested upon compromises it could postpone but never fully resolve: between equality and exclusion, freedom and domination, multiracial democracy and racial hierarchy. For generations, the nation managed those tensions through expansion, growth, avoidance, and compromise. Yet there are periods when old arrangements begin to fracture beneath the weight of realities they can no longer contain.
The founders themselves did not inherit a stable democracy. They inherited fracture, uncertainty, and competing visions of what the future might become. What distinguished them was not perfection or moral clarity, but their willingness to imagine beyond the limits of the world they had inherited and to risk building something new.
Our task is no different.
We are not merely the inheritors of American democracy. We are being summoned into the work of refounding it.
Perhaps that is what Morris unknowingly left behind in the Preamble: not simply a political phrase, but an orientation toward the future. He left us a recognition that the work of union is never static, never finished, never fully settled. It is a continual unfolding, a collective quest to build forms of democracy capable of carrying the realities, complexities, and possibilities of an ever-changing society.
Our charge is not to return to the democracy we once knew, but to imagine beyond it.
