Magna Carta’s Impact on American Founders | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: The author of this post is Dr. Troy Kickler, who is director of the North Carolina History Project for the Carolina Journal, John Hood Publisher.

    RALEIGH     The John Locke Foundation recently commemorated the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta (Latin for "Great Charter"). Magna Carta of 1215, I admit, is not an everyday conversation topic, yet its general principles generate many modern-day conversations in work break rooms, at dinner tables, on blogs, and in the media.

    Americans often express statements such as "The president is not above the law," or "It doesn't matter how much money one has, everyone is equal under the law." These sentiments can be traced back to Magna Carta.

    Several decades after King John and the barons signed Magna Carta, Henry de Bracton, known as "the Father of English Law," wrote in 1260: "The king himself ought not to be under man but under God, and under the law, because the law makes the king. Therefore let the king render back to the law what the law gives him, namely, dominion and power; for there is no king where will, and not law, wields dominion."

    Or, in more contemporary terms, no person is above the law, and all must obey it.

    What prompted Magna Carta, a watershed event in English history that eventually influenced U.S. history? There had been precedent: King Henry I's coronation Charter of Liberties (1100). Later, in 13th-century England, disagreements abounded.

    King John disapproved of the Vatican's appointment of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury; there was unrest among many English barons, protesting heavy taxation, mismanagement of funds, and dispossession of land; and the French posed an imminent threat to England.

    In all, circumstances compelled John to acquiesce to demands, abdicate some authority, and recognize liberties to barons, the Church, and the city of London. It must be remembered, however, that all involved parties agreed to abide by the stipulations of Magna Carta, and in so doing, admitted that their authority derived from somewhere else - the law.

    To be forthright, the document was "aristocratic" in scope; it was written for a feudal society of lords and vassals and barons and the crown. Even so, its principles soon spread across the English kingdom and influenced the development of an unwritten British constitution and English common law, and later an American resistance to the crown.

    Conservative scholar Russell Kirk has remarked in The Roots of American Orderthat Magna Carta was the "root of the Declaration of Independence."

    So how did Magna Carta influence the American founders and the drafting and ratifying of the U.S.

    Constitution? After the American colonies withdrew from Great Britain in 1776, many founders started penning and adopting respective state constitutions. They contained declarations of rights, and this practice set a precedent that influenced concerns in 1787-89 that the U.S. Constitution should contain a similar declaration of rights.

    In other words, many Americans wanted a list preventing government encroachment on certain guaranteed liberties.

    Alexander Hamilton, however, argued that what became known as the Bill of Rights was unnecessary. A declaration of rights applied only to kings and their subjects, and the United States did not have a king, was his thinking. In the end, advocates for a Bill of Rights and those skeptical of handing more power to the national government prevailed.

    Magna Carta's principles can be seen in the Bill of Rights. For two examples, passages 39 and 40 of Magna Carta sound similar to the Fifth and Sixth Amendment's guarantees of a right to a timely trial by a jury of one's peers, and passages 28-32 seem similar to the Fifth Amendment's stipulation that no "private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

    One has to read only various declarations of rights in state constitutions and the Bill of Rights (along with Magna Carta itself) to determine that America's founding documents embody a longstanding legal tradition.