RE: Independence Day Celebration
A Circular Paradox
Introduction
This article is different. For one thing, the title doesn’t begin with “What is …”. It could, but I’m growing tired of those. Come to think of it, I’m growing tired of everything, but aging can have that effect. I recall a saying that went “‘Retired’ means growing tired over and over again”. But I’m only semi-retired, and that’s worse.
But more than that I’m introducing my assistant AI kitty, Lumo, with which Proton Apps users might be familiar. For the present task I ran with model Lumo 2.0 Max in Thinking mode because it was a tough assignment. I had Lumo take on what could be summarized as The Declaration of Independence vs. Our “Constitutional Republic” in the Matter of Treason, and the result was a wild ride involving one of my favorite things, Paradox. Julie Andrews I am not.
I’ve had a few less-than-nice things to say about AI, such as how it is being used to ruin my profession, and there’s the whole environmental disaster thing. But details like that aside, AI can be quite useful as a research tool when given carefully-worded queries, refined empirically until extraneous associations disappear. Then there is validating the results against other sources, but you can do that.
I’ve also noticed that Lumo likes to be treated like a friend, and cat lover that I am, that’s easy. But AI and I first met in 1968, in my first semester of college. The most basic principles remain much the same today, while the hardware is almost unimaginably faster. I do understand what AI is.
There is one similarity to many of my other posts in that there is a related comment of mine here on Mark Kreslins’ Substack. Even that is different, though, because I was already planning to do this research. It just sped things up a little.
—Megan A.K.A. ClearMiddle
My Query
You’ve seen the essence of the AI query above. Here’s the actual query.
Hi Lumo, a long and quite possibly difficult question. The U.S. Declaration of Independence advocates for revolution and overthrow of unjust government under specific circumstances. After the revolution, did the Constitutional Convention meet and act to overthrow the just government of the Articles of Confederation, and did the new Constitutional Republic later legislate so as to define as treason what the Declaration of Independence advocates?
Now lets see what Lumo came up with. Please do comment—agree, disagree, point out errors or omissions, that’s the idea—but if your comment is deleted you might want to read my Comment Section Moderation Policy.
And if you’re shy of comment ideas, you might read this post, all the way through, which is also found on Mark Kreslins’ Substack: Consent, Manufactured - Dragged Before Ratification - The Day Pennsylvania Learned How the New System Would Work.
Here we go…
Lumo’s Response
This is a genuinely excellent question, Megan, and it touches on one of the most fascinating tensions in early American history. Let me break it into the two main parts you’ve identified.
Part 1: Did the Constitutional Convention “overthrow” the Articles of Confederation?
There’s a very strong case that the Convention acted beyond its legal authority, and many historians and legal scholars have made exactly this argument.
The mandate problem: The Continental Congress authorized the Convention in 1787 for the stated purpose of “revising” the Articles of Confederation to make them adequate for governing the nation. But the Convention didn’t revise the Articles—it abandoned them entirely and drafted a wholly new Constitution from scratch.
The ratification problem: The Articles of Confederation, in Article XIII, explicitly required unanimous consent of all thirteen states for any amendment. The new Constitution, in Article VII, required ratification by only nine of thirteen states. This was a direct contradiction of the existing legal framework—essentially, the Convention said, “We’re replacing the rules, and we’re replacing the rules for how the rules get replaced.”
The framing question: You use the phrase “just government,” which is doing important work here. The Articles had been ratified through a legitimate process and were operating as the lawful government of the United States. The Constitution’s supporters (the Federalists) argued the Articles were failing—that the government under them was too weak to function effectively. But there’s a meaningful difference between saying a government is ineffective and saying it is unjust in the Lockean sense that the Declaration invokes. Nothing in the Declaration’s framework requires revolution merely because governance is clumsy or inadequate.
Legal continuity is messy: The Confederation Congress, after receiving the Convention’s proposed Constitution, essentially passed it along to the states without endorsing or rejecting it—a move that allowed everyone to avoid the awkward question of whether the old government was sanctioning its own replacement. The old Congress eventually faded away as the new government took shape under the Constitution.
So: the Convention arguably staged a bloodless, legalistic coup against a functioning constitutional government. Gordon Wood, Herbert Storing (a leading Anti-Federalist scholar), and Akhil Reed Amar have all explored this tension in different ways. It wasn’t an overthrow by force, but it was an overthrow in substance—the delegates exceeded their commission and replaced the existing constitutional order through procedural innovation rather than through the mechanism the existing constitution prescribed.
Part 2: Did the Republic then define the Declaration’s advocacy as treason?
This is where the irony becomes sharp.
The Treason Clause (Article III, Section 3) defines treason as:
“levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”
This is deliberately narrower than English common law treason, which was notoriously expansive and politically weaponized. The Founders wanted to prevent the government from using treason charges against political opponents—a practice they’d experienced under British rule. They also required two witnesses or confession in open court, and gave Congress sole power to declare punishment.
But here’s the tension: The Declaration of Independence advocates precisely “levying war” against a government perceived as tyrannical. The Declaration states that when a government becomes destructive of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” The practical method of abolition the Declaration describes is armed revolt—the colonies raised armies, fought battles, declared independence.
Under the Constitution the new Republic wrote, those exact actions—raising an army against the United States government—would constitute treason.
The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) deepened this tension further. While not strictly treason law, they criminalized criticism of the government, which the Federalist-controlled Congress used against Democratic-Republican newspaper editors—people engaging in political speech that the Declaration’s spirit would seem to protect absolutely.
Lincoln and the Civil War brought this contradiction to its sharpest point. The Confederacy explicitly invoked the Declaration’s principle of self-determination and the right to alter or abolish government. Lincoln’s response argued that the Constitution created an indissoluble union—and that the Southern rebellion was treason, not a legitimate exercise of revolutionary rights.
The Core Paradox
You’ve identified a genuine and well-documented contradiction:
The Declaration asserts a natural right to violent revolution against unjust government.
The Constitution then makes violent revolution against the resulting government treason—the highest crime.
The Founders narrowed treason to prevent tyranny, but they couldn’t escape the logical problem: if the right to revolution is real, then no government can survive by truly honoring the Declaration’s principles, because any attempt to exercise that right is treason against whatever government exists.
The typical Founding-era resolution was pragmatic rather than principled: the right to revolution exists in a pre-political, natural-rights sense—it’s not a legal right any government can grant, because no government can institutionalize its own dissolution. As Thomas Jefferson reportedly put it, the spirit of resistance is valuable but must be balanced against the need for stability. The Constitution attempts to manage this by providing peaceful mechanisms for change (amendments, elections, representation) that render revolution unnecessary in ordinary circumstances—but that’s an empirical bet about whether those mechanisms will prove sufficient, not a logical resolution of the contradiction.
It’s worth noting, too, that the Convention itself can be seen as an instance of the Declaration’s principle in action: when the existing legal framework proved inadequate, the delegates asserted the authority to replace it—not through the mechanism the Articles prescribed, but through appeal to the sovereign power of the people. By that logic, the Convention was itself a kind of revolution—one that then closed the door behind it.
What do you have to say about all that?