THE OATH OF OFFICE AND THE INSURRECTION
Posted byJoseph Chapa January 7, 2022
The officiant in such ceremonies often points out to the honoree and to those in attendance that the U.S. military oath of office stands apart from others around the world in that we swear an oath, not to a monarch, nor to a head of state, but to the Constitution.
I first swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution in 2006 at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. It was the “rude bridge that arched the flood,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, where “embattled farmers stood // and fired the shot heard round the world.” There was no Constitution then; only a tacit agreement between the thirteen colonies to throw off the bonds of tyranny. Thomas Jefferson would formalize the language of that agreement the following year. It was the thirteen sovereign states’ duty, he wrote, “to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The throwing off—the Revolutionary War—took place from 1775 to 1783, but the new guards would not be in place until the first nine of the thirteen states ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1787 and 1788. It is that document I swore to support and defend against all enemies foreign and domestic at the Old North Bridge in 2006 and now, fifteen years in, I bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/oath-of-office/
