ECHOES OF EXCEPTIONALISM: George Mason, James Madison, and the 15-Year-Old Who Walked the Truth.

On September 25, 1789 – 237 years ago today – the sun appeared over New York City and shone down into Federal Hall on Wall Street in lower Manhattan. Gathering there were members of the First Congress under the new Constitution of the United States of America. Members of the House and Senate had barely been in their new roles for six months, but they were already about to dramatically alter the fledgling nation’s governing document – and change the world in the process.

George Mason, the Virginia planter who authored the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, was not present on that Friday morning. Mason, two years earlier, had refused to sign any document that did not contain a declaration of rights. James Madison noted that Mason “would sooner chop off his right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now stands” without a Bill of Rights.

The Constitution, absent the Bill of Rights, was officially adopted in June 1788. But Mason’s steadfast insistence gained allies, and the new federal Congress meeting in New York took up the challenge.

Hundreds of draft amendments were submitted. Madison drafted a master list of 19 to present to the House of Representatives. Congress eventually narrowed the list down to 12, and on September 25, 1789, it approved them and sent them to the states. Ten would ultimately be ratified and added to the Constitution.

Mason was back in Virginia on his plantation bordering the Potomac River, overseeing enslaved laborers engaged in tobacco and wheat production. For someone who argued so passionately about individual liberties and gave so much to the cause of American freedom, he could not reconcile the glaring contradiction in holding human beings in bondage. Although he condemned slavery, described it as a corrupting influence on American society, and argued against protecting the slave trade in the Constitution, he never emancipated his own slaves.

Even after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the conception of freedom articulated in the Virginia Declaration of Rights would take longer to be realized. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law. That progress would cost more than 600,000 American lives – and the life of the country’s 16th president.

168 years after Congress approved what would become the Bill of Rights, on September 25, 1957, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford of Little Rock, Arkansas, buttoned the blouse her mother had ironed the day before. She smoothed the skirt they had starched together and picked up her schoolbooks.

Elizabeth never met George Mason. She may or may not have known his name. She only knew she was walking toward a door in Little Rock which the powers that be had forbidden her to use – the front door to Little Rock Central High School.

She had already walked this street once before. Twenty-one days earlier, on September 4, she had stepped off the bus at 12th and Park alone. She was supposed to meet a group of other students, but the family had no telephone to coordinate her arrival. The escort to protect her never reached her.

Instead, she saw rifles and bayonets. The state guard had been called out to prevent her from going through that door. The rifles were not there to protect her, but to refuse her entry – she was turned back into the crowd to sit on a bench, alone.

She looked for a kind face and found only hostility. Protesters screamed inches from her cheek. They hurled slurs and threats.

On September 25, there were bayonets again – but this time they belonged to the 101st Airborne, and they were there to get her in. They held the street and created a fence between her and the mob. But Elizabeth carried the weight. She held her schoolbooks as a shield and her dignity like a secret.

One hundred and sixty-eight years after the ink shaped by Madison’s words dried, 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford of Little Rock, Arkansas, carried the truth of those words. She and eight others would successfully integrate the school.

Elizabeth was joining a long line of Americans called to risk their safety and their very lives to breathe life into those precious words housed in our National Archives. It seems one of the great mysteries of God that we often do not see the beauty of truth until we see the ugliness of lies. The ugliness on display in Little Rock brought home for so many Americans the importance of ensuring that the rights and liberties outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are extended to all.

So, as we remember the George Masons and the James Madisons of national history, let’s remember the Elizabeth Eckfords as well.

The strength of our republic has never rested on parchment alone. It rests on a vision of the human person that predates every constitution, every convention, every Congress. Mason saw it dimly, Madison more clearly, Lincoln with fire, and Elizabeth Eckford with a courage that could not be taught.

It is the conviction that dignity is not earned, negotiated, or granted by the majority. It is gifted by God, and therefore cannot be revoked by man.

The Bill of Rights is a fence dividing individual liberty from government, but the fence only matters if we remember what it protects. It protects human beings – even the ones who fail, even the ones who fall short, even the ones history exposes in uncomfortable light.

In the Bill of Rights, in Mason’s conviction, in Madison’s genius, in Elizabeth Eckford’s bravery, we see the exceptional character of America. Only in this nation can a young black girl overcome centuries of racism and hatred because of the radical ideas about inalienable rights and individual liberties put forth by slaveowners more than one hundred years before she was born.

We owe a debt of gratitude to all of these individuals – and it is our responsibility to carry forth their legacy today and preserve it for future generations.