The "Grand Principles" of our founding fathers are rooted in the dedication to supreme fundamental rights for individual citizens with limited government to interfere with the citizenry's exercise of their rights.
Our constitution was setup with the individual citizen having supremacy over government and all other entities and that the country belonged to The People as individual persons and not as the collective society. The founders established a republican form of government which is one of The People by The People and for The People as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently stated. The supremacy of the individual citizen is entrenched in all that our founding fathers architected for We The People.
The founders heavily referenced the theories of "natural law" in enumerating the fundamental rights endowed to mankind by our creator's natural law. They knew that all of importance was, by necessity, to be formally memorized by written constitution which along with the Declaration of Independence was to be the supreme law of the land.
The US Constitution and Declaration of Independence are in fact We The People's contract for those we choose to govern. It tells government how it can and cannot govern.