ABSTRACT
It has been a common teaching among modern historians of the guiding ideas in the foundation of the government that the Constitution of the United States embodied a reaction against the democratic principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence. The Federalist and the Founding Fathers generally have not been taken at their word. Predominantly, they are understood as being only quasi-or even anti-democrats. The Declaration of Independence formulates two criteria for judging whether any government is good, or indeed legitimate. Good government must rest, procedurally, upon the consent of the governed. The idea that the Constitution was a felling back from the fuller democracy of the Declaration thus rests in part upon a false reading of the Declaration as free from the concerns regarding democracy that the Framers of the Constitution felt. The Constitution left the suffrage question to the decision of the individual states.
