What Oaths Meant to the Framers’ Generation: A Preliminary Sketch

Oaths of office are required by the second and sixth articles of the United States Constitution. The oath for judges, however, has been a bit different from the very beginning. Recent discussion in this journal has again raised the perennial questions of the role of the oaths, and the degree to which the oaths signal some religious commitment by the Framers, or whether one can see in them any expectation for a religious leadership of the nation. My enterprise is to sketch a bit more of the context that might help shed light on the meaning of these oaths, or at least some of the meanings of these oaths as they would have been understood by a person of the Framer‘s generation. The enterprise here has two significant limits. First, to ascribe universal and specific meanings to something as complex as an oath would be unhelpful, as such meanings are, at best, matters of approximation and of averages among a variety of disparate views. Second, a full discussion of the history of oaths in each colony—as matters of office, of testimony, of personal covenants, etc., arising in each of the European states from which the colonists came—is beyond the scope of this article and, anyway, not the purpose of the editors of de novo. Rather, I here raise a few points of reference, illustrating some of them with a few examples from British, colonial, and early federal history.