Abstract
This article argues that teaching America’s foundational constitutional texts—beginning with colonial proto-constitutions such as the Mayflower Compact, Pilgrim Law Code, and Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and extending through the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution—offers a powerful means of cultivating the virtues essential to self-government. Drawing on Donald Lutz’s analysis of covenants, compacts, and charters, this article shows how these documents enacted popular sovereignty, federalism, and written higher law while presupposing and displaying seven key virtues: practical wisdom, temperance, sociability, humility, integrity, piety, and gratitude. Classroom engagement with the texts’ historical development and deliberative processes allows students to move beyond mere textual technique toward the practical knowledge of living under and sustaining a textual tradition of popular sovereignty. The same virtues reappear in the American practice of voluntary association, which Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the “master science” of democracy. While not sufficient by itself, this approach to teaching the texts makes explicit the character required for constitutional self-government and fosters gratitude for a tradition that remains contingent and hard-won.