Who Was Originally Included in “We the People”?

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The opening words of the U.S. Constitution launched a revolutionary idea in 1787. “We the People of the United States” declared that government power came not from kings or nobles, but directly from citizens.

That said, the ideal was born into a society where “the People” had a narrow, contested definition built on widespread legal exclusion. The Constitution’s promise of liberty coexisted with slavery, the systematic exclusion of women from political life, and the treatment of Native Americans as foreign nations within American borders.

The story of American democracy since 1787 has been the struggle to expand who counts as “We the People.” Through civil war, constitutional amendments, and decades of activism, the United States has gradually widened the circle of citizenship and voting rights.

From “Firm League” to National Charter

The Constitution represented America’s second attempt at self-governance. The first governing document, the Articles of Confederation, created a “firm league of friendship” between states rather than a unified nation. Under the Articles, states retained most power, leaving the central government unable to collect taxes, regulate commerce, or conduct effective foreign policy.

The Articles reflected this state-centric approach by referring to states by name from north to south, emphasizing that the union was a compact between separate, sovereign entities. By 1787, problems with this system were so severe that delegates from twelve of the thirteen states convened in Philadelphia to revise the Articles.

The delegates quickly realized revision wouldn’t suffice—they needed an entirely new framework to “form a more perfect Union.” The result was the U.S. Constitution, designed to create a more powerful and balanced federal government.

The Preamble’s famous opening was crafted late in the convention by the Committee on Style, led by Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania. The shift from listing individual states to the unified “We the People of the United States” solved a practical problem: the Constitution would take effect once nine states ratified it, regardless of the remaining four.

Since the framers couldn’t know which states would join the new union or in what order, listing all thirteen states would have been inaccurate and potentially alienating. The elegant solution was to bypass states as individual political entities and ground the Constitution’s authority in a single, unified American populace.

This pragmatic choice had profound philosophical consequences. It established that the Constitution wasn’t an agreement among states, but an act of the sovereign people themselves. This conceptual leap transformed a collection of former colonies into a nation.

The Boundaries of Citizenship: Who Was Left Out

Despite its universal language, “We the People” didn’t include all people living within the new nation’s borders. The society that produced the Constitution was structured by deep hierarchies of race, gender, and class, and these hierarchies were embedded within the document itself.

The boundaries of citizenship and political participation weren’t accidental omissions—they were deliberately drawn, legally enforced, and central to the compromises that made the Union possible. For a vast majority of the population, the “Blessings of Liberty” remained a distant promise.

Enslaved Persons: Counted for Power, Excluded from Personhood

The most profound contradiction at the heart of the American founding was the coexistence of the pursuit of liberty with chattel slavery. Many men who drafted and signed the Constitution were themselves slaveholders—about 25 of the 55 delegates owned enslaved people.

This hypocrisy led Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice, to declare that the Constitution was “defective from the start,” noting that the framers had “left out a majority of Americans when they wrote the phrase, ‘We the People.'”

The Constitution’s protection of slavery wasn’t passive—it was explicitly woven into the new government’s structure through several key clauses. The framers consciously avoided using the word “slave,” recognizing that it would “sully the document.” Instead, they employed euphemisms to codify the institution.

This careful omission, paired with active creation of clauses protecting slavery, reveals that the framers weren’t ignorant of the moral contradiction but chose to embed it in veiled language to secure the political and economic compromises necessary to form the Union.

Three provisions were particularly important:

The Three-Fifths Compromise: Article I, Section 2 declared that representation in the House of Representatives and apportionment of direct taxes would be based on counting the “whole Number of free Persons” and “three fifths of all other Persons”—enslaved African Americans.

This compromise boosted the power of slaveholding states. By allowing them to count 60% of their enslaved population for representation, it gave the South extra seats in Congress and additional Electoral College votes, significantly enhancing its political influence. Thomas Jefferson would have lost the presidential election of 1800 without the electoral votes gained through this clause.

The Atlantic Slave Trade Clause: Article I, Section 9 prevented Congress from banning the “Migration or Importation of such Persons” until 1808—a 20-year protection for the international slave trade. This was a direct concession to delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, who insisted their states wouldn’t join the Union if the slave trade were restricted.

The Fugitive Slave Clause: Article IV, Section 2 required that any “Person held to Service or Labour” who escaped to another state “shall be delivered up on Claim” to the person to whom such service was due. This clause nationalized the capture of runaway enslaved people, requiring all states—including those where slavery was illegal—to aid in their return.

Native Americans: “Foreign Nations” Within

Native Americans were conspicuously absent from the new republic’s body of citizens. Rather than being considered part of “We the People,” they were treated as members of separate political communities.

The Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8) grants Congress power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” By placing Indian tribes in the same legal category as foreign countries, the framers established a government-to-government relationship, not a relationship between a nation and its citizens.

This power over tribal affairs was later interpreted by courts as “plenary power,” meaning Congress’s authority could extend to eliminating tribal powers or status entirely.

When determining state populations for congressional representation, Article I, Section 2 explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed.” This phrase reinforced their status as non-participants in the American political system—individuals geographically within the nation’s borders but legally outside its civic community.

Women: The Unseen Citizens Under Coverture

For women of the founding era, exclusion from “We the People” was primarily a matter of legal and social tradition, solidified by the English common law doctrine of coverture. Under coverture, a married woman’s legal existence was subsumed by that of her husband.

She was a feme covert, or “covered woman,” with no independent legal identity. She couldn’t own property in her own name, enter contracts, or sue or be sued in court. Her property, wages, and even her children legally belonged to her husband.

This legal dependency was the basis for political exclusion. The ideal voter in the 18th-century republican mindset was the independent male head of household, typically a property owner, who was believed to have the necessary autonomy and stake in society to vote responsibly.

Women, confined to the domestic sphere and legally dependent on their husbands, were seen as having “no will of their own” in a political sense. It was presumed that a husband would vote on behalf of his entire household, rendering a wife’s separate vote unnecessary and improper.

While the New Jersey state constitution of 1776 briefly allowed some unmarried, property-owning women to vote, this was an exception, and married women remained excluded due to coverture. This right was rescinded in 1807.

The Barriers of Property and Piety

The Constitution itself is largely silent on who could vote. Article I, Section 2 specifies that electors for the House of Representatives “shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” This provision effectively delegated voting requirements to individual states.

In the late 18th century, most states adopted qualifications based on the English model, which restricted suffrage to those with a tangible stake in the community.

Property Ownership: Most states limited voting to “freeholders”—men who owned land worth a certain amount. The belief was that only property owners paid the bulk of taxes and had a permanent interest in government stability. While land was more plentiful and cheaper in America than in England, allowing up to 75% of adult white males to qualify in some areas, this still excluded significant numbers of laborers, tenant farmers, and urban dwellers.

Religious Tests: Many colonies and early states imposed religious qualifications. In some, Catholics and Jews were explicitly barred from voting. Several state constitutions required officeholders to swear oaths affirming belief in Protestant Christian faith or the divine inspiration of the Bible.

The cumulative effect of these exclusions meant that active, voting members of “We the People” constituted a tiny fraction of the total population. After eliminating all women, all enslaved people, most free African Americans, Native Americans, men who didn’t own property, and certain religious minorities, the colonial electorate likely consisted of only 10% to 20% of people living in the new United States.

Codifying Exclusion: The Naturalization Act of 1790

The new federal government quickly used its constitutional powers to legally define and limit who could become an American. The Constitution grants Congress authority “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization” (Article I, Section 8). The First Congress exercised this power by passing the Naturalization Act of 1790.

This landmark legislation explicitly defined the path to citizenship in racial terms. The act stipulated that any “free white person” who had resided in the country for two years could apply for citizenship, provided they were of “good moral character” and took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution.

The decision to limit naturalization to “free white persons” was a deliberate policy choice. It demonstrates that the racial prejudices of the era weren’t merely passive social attitudes but were actively translated into the foundational laws of the new republic.

This act created a legal wall around American identity, establishing whiteness as a prerequisite for belonging for anyone not born in the country. It set a precedent for racially exclusionary immigration and citizenship laws that would remain in effect for more than 150 years, showing how the new government’s machinery was immediately used to construct the narrow boundaries of “We the People.”

The Long Road to Inclusion

The history of the United States since 1787 can be understood as a long, often violent struggle to expand the meaning of “We the People.” Through civic movements, political battles, civil war, and transformative constitutional amendments, the narrow definition of the founding era was gradually dismantled.

Each step toward inclusion was hard-won, representing a reinterpretation of the nation’s founding ideals to bring them closer to the promise of universal liberty and equality.

A New Birth of Freedom: The Reconstruction Amendments

The Civil War (1861–1865) and Reconstruction that followed represented a “second founding” for the United States. This era produced three constitutional amendments that fundamentally altered the nation’s legal and social fabric, aiming to remake the country on a principle of genuine equality.

13th Amendment (1865): This amendment formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” It eradicated the institution that the original Constitution had protected, marking the first monumental expansion of freedom.

14th Amendment (1868): Perhaps the single most important structural change to the Constitution, the 14th Amendment addressed questions of citizenship and rights left unresolved by the war. Its most critical provision is the Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

This clause was a direct repudiation of the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had ruled that people of African descent could never be citizens.

The amendment accomplished a revolutionary shift in the balance of power between federal and state governments. Before the Civil War, the relationship between state and national citizenship was ambiguous, allowing states to be the primary arbiters of individual rights. The 14th Amendment established supreme national citizenship, clarifying that an individual’s citizenship comes from the nation first, and the state second.

This meant the federal government, not the states, was now the ultimate guarantor of fundamental rights of citizenship. By including the Privileges or Immunities, Due Process, and Equal Protection clauses, the amendment provided constitutional tools to protect citizens from discriminatory state laws, laying the groundwork for nearly every major civil rights victory of the 20th century.

15th Amendment (1870): The final Reconstruction amendment addressed the crucial issue of political power. It declared that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

This amendment granted suffrage to Black men, giving constitutional status to the principle of political equality for the newly freed population.

However, the promise of these amendments was betrayed almost as soon as it was made. With the end of federal Reconstruction in 1877, Southern states began systematically dismantling these new rights. Through violence, intimidation, and discriminatory laws—collectively known as Jim Crow—they effectively disenfranchised African American voters.

Practices like poll taxes, literacy tests, and “grandfather clauses” were used to circumvent the 15th Amendment, ensuring that its promise wouldn’t be realized for nearly another century.

“Votes for Women”: The Fight for the 19th Amendment

The struggle for women’s suffrage was a decades-long movement with roots in the abolitionist campaigns of the 1830s. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is often cited as its formal beginning, but the fight was long and complex.

The movement fractured after the Civil War over the 15th Amendment, which granted the vote to Black men but excluded all women. This led to the formation of rival suffrage organizations that pursued different strategies for decades.

After years of state-by-state campaigns, parades, militant protests, and imprisonment, the tide began to turn. In 1920, the nation ratified the 19th Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

While a landmark victory that enfranchised millions of American women, the 19th Amendment didn’t grant universal suffrage. For many women of color—including African Americans in the Jim Crow South, as well as Asian American and Native American women who were denied citizenship altogether—the right to vote remained out of reach.

They continued to face the same legal and extralegal barriers that disenfranchised men of color, demonstrating that the fight for true equality at the ballot box was far from over.

Citizens at Last: The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

Native Americans occupied a unique and precarious legal position. Even after the 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1884 case Elk v. Wilkins that a Native American born on a reservation owed allegiance to his tribe and was not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Therefore, he was not a citizen.

This legal limbo was finally resolved with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 (also known as the Snyder Act). This act declared that all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States were citizens.

However, granting citizenship didn’t automatically confer the right to vote. Because states still controlled voting qualifications, some continued to use various legal pretexts to bar Native Americans from the polls for several more decades, with the last state barriers not falling until 1957.

Making the Promise Real: The Voting Rights Act of 1965

For nearly a century after the 15th Amendment was ratified, its guarantee of voting rights regardless of race was largely unenforced in the American South. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s brought this injustice to national attention through voter registration drives, marches, and protests, often in the face of brutal violence.

In response to this national crisis, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. This landmark federal legislation finally gave teeth to the 15th Amendment, designed to “enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution” by outlawing discriminatory practices used to disenfranchise Black voters for generations.

Key provisions included:

• A nationwide ban on literacy tests and other discriminatory devices
• The establishment of federal oversight, including federal examiners and observers, in jurisdictions with a history of voter discrimination
• A powerful “preclearance” requirement, which mandated that certain states and localities with a history of discrimination obtain federal approval before making any changes to their voting laws or procedures

The Voting Rights Act was profoundly effective, leading to a dramatic increase in voter registration and participation among African Americans in the South and finally making the promise of the 15th Amendment a reality for millions.

Modern Debates and Ongoing Struggles

The expansion of “We the People” didn’t end in 1965. The definition of citizenship and the scope of voting rights remain subjects of intense legal and political debate in the 21st century. These modern struggles demonstrate the “living” nature of the Constitution, where the meaning of centuries-old text is continually contested to address contemporary issues.

Who is a Citizen? The Enduring Debate Over Birthright Citizenship

The central modern debate over the boundaries of “We the People” revolves around the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and the principle of birthright citizenship. The clause grants citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

For over a century, this has been understood to mean that nearly every person born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen, regardless of the immigration status of their parents.

This interpretation was cemented by the Supreme Court in the landmark 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were legally barred from becoming U.S. citizens under the discriminatory Chinese Exclusion Act. When he was denied re-entry to the U.S. after a trip abroad, he sued.

The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, holding that under the 14th Amendment, he was a citizen by virtue of his birth in the United States.

The legal and political battles over birthright citizenship today focus on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The historical understanding, affirmed in Wong Kim Ark, is that this phrase excludes only a very narrow class of individuals, such as the children of foreign diplomats or of an invading army, who are subject to the laws of another sovereign power while on U.S. soil.

However, modern opponents of birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors argue for a radical reinterpretation of this phrase. They contend that “jurisdiction” implies full legal consent to be in the country, and therefore, the children of parents who are not legal permanent residents are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. in the way the 14th Amendment intended.

This argument seeks to change a foundational aspect of American citizenship not by amending the Constitution, but by altering the accepted meaning of its 150-year-old text. This shows how the struggle over who is included in “We the People” is now being fought on the battlefield of constitutional interpretation.

The Continuing Fight for the Ballot Box

The legacy of constitutional exclusion persists in ongoing struggles over voting rights. While the overt, race-based disenfranchisement of the Jim Crow era is illegal, new, more subtle barriers to voting have emerged.

The central event in this modern conflict was the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder. In that case, the Court struck down the formula used to determine which jurisdictions were subject to the preclearance requirement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Court reasoned that the formula was based on outdated data from the 1960s and 1970s and was no longer necessary.

This decision effectively dismantled one of the most powerful tools for protecting minority voting rights. In the years since Shelby County, numerous states, now free from federal oversight, have passed a wave of new voting restrictions.

Modern voter suppression tactics include:

Strict Voter ID Laws: Requiring forms of photo identification that a disproportionate number of minority, low-income, and elderly citizens do not possess.

Voter Roll Purges: Aggressively removing registered voters from the rolls, often based on flawed data, which can result in eligible voters being disenfranchised when they show up to vote.

Cuts to Early Voting and Mail-in Voting: Reducing the number of days for early voting or making it more difficult to vote by mail, methods heavily used by working-class and minority communities.

Closing Polling Places: Reducing the number of polling places, particularly in minority neighborhoods, leading to long lines and greater difficulty in casting a ballot.

These measures, while often justified by claims of preventing voter fraud—a phenomenon that extensive research has shown to be exceedingly rare—continue the long history of restricting access to the ballot box.

In response, civil rights organizations and lawmakers continue to advocate for new federal legislation, such as the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore and update the protections of the original Voting Rights Act to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

The Unfinished Revolution

The story of “We the People” remains unfinished. From its narrow beginnings in 1787, when only a small percentage of the population could participate in democratic governance, America has gradually expanded the definition of citizenship and voting rights through constitutional amendments, legislation, and social movements.

Yet each expansion has met fierce resistance, and new forms of exclusion continue to emerge. The ongoing debates over birthright citizenship, voting access, and electoral participation show that the fundamental question raised by the Constitution’s opening words—who belongs to the American political community—remains contested.

The tension between the Constitution’s universal language and its original exclusions reflects a deeper contradiction in American democracy. The nation was founded on principles of equality and popular sovereignty while simultaneously denying those principles to most of its inhabitants. Resolving this contradiction has required Americans to choose repeatedly between the narrow vision of the founding generation and the broader promise of the founding documents.

This choice continues today as Americans debate immigration policy, voting rights, and the meaning of citizenship in an increasingly diverse society. The expansion of “We the People” has never been inevitable or automatic—it has required sustained political activism, legal challenges, and sometimes violence to achieve.

The Constitution’s genius may lie not in its original compromises, but in its capacity for growth and reinterpretation. The amendment process and the courts have provided mechanisms for expanding rights and redefining citizenship over time. Yet these mechanisms work only when citizens mobilize to use them.

Understanding this history reveals both the progress America has made toward fulfilling its founding ideals and the work that remains. The promise of “We the People” was radical for its time, but it has taken more than two centuries of struggle to begin making that promise a reality for all Americans.

The ongoing battles over citizenship and voting rights show that this struggle continues. Whether future generations will further expand the meaning of “We the People” or narrow it will depend on the choices Americans make about who belongs in their democracy and what rights come with belonging.

The Constitution’s opening words established a revolutionary principle: that governments derive their authority from the people they govern. Making that principle meaningful for all people within America’s borders remains the unfinished business of American democracy.

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