The Original Constitution

This article is taken from the National Constitution Center's About the Constitution: FAQs page. You can find these questions here.

##What is the U.S. Constitution?

The U.S. Constitution is the fundamental framework of America’s federal system of government.

##What are the three branches of the federal government?

The Constitution separates the powers of the federal government into three branches:

The legislative branch (outlined in Article I), or Congress, which makes the laws;

The executive branch (outlined in Article II), or the Presidency, which executes the laws; and

The judicial branch (outlined in Article III), or the federal judiciary (headed by the Supreme Court), which interprets the laws.

##What is the difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?

The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 (during the Revolutionary War) by Thomas Jefferson, edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin (among others), and adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, as it voted to declare independence from Great Britain. It included a list of grievances against King George III that justified separation from British rule, and it expressed the core principles upon which the United States was founded.

The Constitution was written and signed by a group of delegates in 1787 (years after the Revolutionary War was over) and ratified in 1788. (Thomas Jefferson was not present at the Constitutional Convention.) It remains the “supreme law” of the land today.

Both documents were signed in Independence Hall in Philadelphia (then known as the Pennsylvania State House), steps away from where the National Constitution Center now stands. Read more about the relationship between Declaration of Independence and the Constitution here.

##What was the Articles of Confederation, and how did it lead to the Constitutional Convention?

Adopted by the Second Continental Congress on November 15, 1777, and ratified by the states in 1781, the Articles of Confederation was America’s first framework of national government. Crafted during the American Revolution, it initially formed a war-time confederation of states.

Overall, the Articles of Confederation created a weak central government—a “league of friendship” between the states—that largely preserved state power and independence. While the document made official some of the procedures used by the Continental Congress to conduct business, many Americans came to recognize the Articles of Confederation’s many flaws. It created a national government centered on the legislative branch, which was composed of a single house. There was no separate executive branch or judicial branch. The delegates in Congress voted by state—with each state receiving one vote, regardless of its size. The national government did not have the power to tax or to regulate commerce between the states. And any proposed amendment to the Articles required unanimous approval from all 13 states. As a result, no amendment was ever ratified. The delegates to the Constitution Convention eventually framed a new Constitution designed, in part, to address many of the Articles of Confederation’s flaws.

Alarmed by the need for greater economic cooperation, delegates from five states met in Annapolis, Maryland, in September 1786 to discuss revising the Articles of Confederation. These delegates included John Dickinson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. They recommended a later meeting that might include all 13 states. On February 21, 1787, the Confederation Congress agreed to call for a convention of state delegates to meet in Philadelphia for the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles.” Instead of amending the Articles of Confederation, the convention delegates crafted an entirely new framework of government: the U.S. Constitution.

##When and where was the Constitution drafted?

The Constitution was drafted and signed in Philadelphia in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall.

The Constitution was created during the Philadelphia Convention—now known as the Constitutional Convention—which convened from May 25 to September 17, 1787. It was signed on September 17, 1787, and ratified on June 21, 1788.

##Who was at the Constitutional Convention?

Delegates from all of the original states except Rhode Island participated in the Constitutional Convention. Many had fought in the Revolutionary War and had served in Congress.

The delegates named George Washington presiding officer. Of the 55 original delegates, only 41 were present on September 17, 1787, to sign the final draft of the proposed Constitution, and 39 of the delegates signed. Three of those present (George Mason and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts) refused to sign the Constitution. One delegate, John Dickinson of Delaware, was too sick to attend the final session but had fellow delegate George Read sign his name. The delegates from each state were:

Connecticut: Oliver Ellsworth; William Samuel Johnson; Roger Sherman

Delaware: Richard Bassett; Gunning Bedford Jr.; Jacob Broom; John Dickinson; George Read

Georgia: Abraham Baldwin; William Few; William Houstoun; William Leigh Pierce

Maryland: Daniel Carroll; Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer; Luther Martin; James McHenry; John Francis Mercer

Massachusetts: Elbridge Gerry; Nathaniel Gorham; Rufus King; Caleb Strong

New Hampshire: Nicholas Gilman; John Langdon

New Jersey: David Brearley; Jonathan Dayton; William Churchill Houston; William Livingston; William Paterson

New York: Alexander Hamilton; John Lansing Jr.; Robert Yates

North Carolina: William Blount; William Richardson Davie; Alexander Martin; Richard Dobbs Spaight Sr.; Hugh Williamson

South Carolina: Pierce Butler; Charles Pinckney; Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; John Rutledge

Pennsylvania: George Clymer; Thomas Fitzsimons; Benjamin Franklin; Jared Ingersoll; Thomas Mifflin; Gouverneur Morris; Robert Morris; James Wilson

Virginia: John Blair; James Madison; George Mason; James McClurg; Edmund Randolph; George Washington; George Wythe

The National Constitution Center’s Signers’ Hall exhibit features life-size bronze statutes of 42 men: the 39 delegates who signed the Constitution on September 17, 1787, as well as the three who refused. To visit Signer’s Hall, click here

To learn more about the Constitutional Convention, click here:

##When did the Constitution go into effect?

The Constitution did not go into effect the moment it was signed by the delegates. It needed to be approved by the people through the state ratification process.

Article VII of the Constitution established the process for ratification, stating: “The Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.” On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify (after Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, and South Carolina); and the Confederation Congress established March 4, 1789, as the date to begin operating a new government under the Constitution. The first modern Congress convened in New York City at Federal Hall. It was about one month before George Washington was elected as the first president under the new Constitution.

##Who wrote the Constitution?

Because of James Madison’s crucial role in crafting much of the Constitution, he is often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution.” His notes of the proceedings, which were held in secret, also have provided valuable insights into the drafting process.

But the Constitution was the result of months of thoughtful deliberation, debate, and compromise among the delegates. Many others besides James Madison made important contributions, particularly those who served on the Committee of Detail, which included Oliver Ellsworth, Nathaniel Gorham, Edmund Randolph, John Rutledge, and James Wilson; and those on the Committee of Style, which included Alexander Hamilton, William Johnson, Rufus King, and Gouverneur Morris. Other notable delegates included John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and George Washington (who served as president of the convention).

##What is the Bill of Rights?

The Bill of Rights is the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. Congress proposed the first amendments to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789.

There were actually 12 proposed amendments, but two (the first concerning the number of constituents for each congressional Representative, and the second concerning compensation of Congress members) were not ratified at that time. Only 10 were ratified, becoming the Bill of Rights and officially added to the Constitution on December 15, 1791.

But the second unadopted amendment concerning compensation of Congress was eventually ratified on May 7, 1992, as the 27th Amendment.

As ratified, the Bill of Rights only applied to abuses by the national government—not the states. However, following the ratification of the 14th Amendment and later decisions by the Supreme Court, the Bill of Rights became a charter of national freedom—applying key Bill of Rights protections (like free speech and religious liberty) to abuses by all levels of government: national, state, and local. This process is known as “incorporation.” Today, virtually all of the key protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights apply with equal vigor against all levels of government.

##How have the American people used the amendment process to transform the Constitution?

With the U.S. Constitution, the Founding generation created the greatest charter of freedom in the history of the world. However, the Founding generation did not believe that it had a monopoly on constitutional wisdom. Therefore, the founders set out a formal amendment process that allowed later generations to revise our nation’s charter and “form a more perfect Union.” They wrote this process into Article V of the Constitution. Over time, the American people have used this amendment process to transform the Constitution by adding a Bill of Rights, abolishing slavery, promoting freedom and equality, and extending voting rights to groups like African Americans and women.

##How many amendments does the Constitution have?

The Constitution has a total of 27 amendments.

##Did any amendments fail to get added to the Constitution?

As of 2018, more than 11,000 amendments have been proposed in Congress. Just 37 proposed amendments were approved by Congress for submission to the states; 27 were approved including the Bill of Rights; one amendment in the original Bill of Rights was rejected; and six others congressionally approved amendments weren’t ratified by the states.

##Where is the Constitution? Is it at the National Constitution Center?

The original signed, handwritten Constitution is at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

However, the National Constitution Center owns a rare, original copy of the first public printing of the Constitution. This printing was published in a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, on September 19, 1787—two days after the Constitution was signed. Because the Convention was conducted under an oath of secrecy, this printing represents the first time that Americans—“We the People”—saw the Constitution.

The Constitution Center also contains rare first drafts of the Constitution in its American Treasures exhibit.

##How can I learn more about the Constitution?

Visit the National Constitution Center and explore the Interactive Constitution! Start here!

This is an excerpt from Richard R. Beeman's essay, "The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Revolution in Government."

The United States Constitution has become the primary text of America’s civil religion. As a nation lacking a common religion, “We the People” have come to worship our Constitution as the scripture that holds us together. In virtually all of the public opinion polls conducted on the subject, Americans not only express their reverence for the Constitution, but also their strong opinions about its meaning. Indeed, many Americans—whether Tea Party members, left-wing critics of growing inequality in America, Democrats or Republicans in Congress, and (with particular impact) justices of the United States Supreme Court—feel so passionately about our founding documents that they claim that they and they alone are the true defenders of the ideas expressed in them; and that their opponents are not only mistaken and misguided, but in some cases, downright “un-American.” But in fact, whatever their passion or reverence for America’s Constitution, most Americans lack even a minimal historical understanding of it. (In one recent survey, for example, 71 percent of Americans believed that the phrase “all men are created equal” appeared in the Constitution, not in the Declaration of the Independence. Even more amazing, in another poll, a third of American expressed the belief that the Declaration of Independence was written after the Civil War!)

This brief, introductory essay on the “Interactive Constitution” will focus on the efforts of the fifty-five men who gathered in Philadelphia in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House (much later to be known as Independence Hall) in the summer of 1787 to draft the four parchment pages of the original Constitution. But it is impossible to begin even a brief essay on the Constitution and the Founding Fathers of 1787 without saying a few words about the document, drafted eleven years earlier, without which Americans could not be engaged in defining the character of their new nation: the Declaration of Independence.

##The Beginning of an “American Identity.”

America’s Declaration of Independence, drafted by the young but rapidly-rising revolutionary leader Thomas Jefferson, and adopted by the revolutionary Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, marks the first attempt by the “united States” of America not only to justify their decision to separate themselves from the Empire of Great Britain, but also to define some of the “unalienable rights” on which their revolutionary action was based. Included in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most important statement of American ideals ever articulated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Those ideas of the equality of mankind; that governments are based on the consent of the governed; that it is the fundamental obligation of a government to serve the needs of the people it governs; and, indeed, that it is the right of the people to abolish a government that does not serve those ends, has formed the basis of American government and society from that time forward.

As a part of their decision for independence, the “united States” moved forward to create the first written constitutions in the world’s history. Most of those state constitutions, in addition to crafting specific outlines of the way in which their new state governments should function, included “declarations of rights.” These declarations articulated in specific fashion the nature of the “unalienable rights” referred to in the Declaration of Independence—rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right of trial by jury, the right to bear arms in the context of a “citizens militia,” and many, many others. These state constitutions were bold revolutionary experiments, and in many cases, because they were the first time state political leaders sought to write down the way their governments should function, they were far from perfect. But they were an important step forward in the notion that the purpose of governments was to serve the public interest while at the same time protecting individual liberty.

Shortly thereafter, the thirteen soon-to-be independent states created an “Articles of Confederation.” Although some regard it as America’s first “federal” constitution, in fact, it gave so few powers to the central American government that it was more like a treaty among the thirteen independent states than a constitution for a new nation. It amounted to little more than a “league of friendship,” in which “each state retain[ed] its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” Although it gave to the central government substantial responsibilities—including the “common defence, the security of their liberties and their mutual and general welfare”—it denied to the government most of the powers necessary to carry out those responsibilities—including the power to tax and to regulate commerce among the independent states. Moreover, the Articles of Confederation failed to provide for a chief executive capable of giving energy and focus to the new central government.

By the fall of 1786, the combination of a financial crisis suffered by the newly-created confederation government and disorder threatened by dissatisfied farmers in western Massachusetts, led a group of “nationalist” politicians, meeting in Annapolis on September 22, 1786, to propose that the Continental Congress in New York call a “general convention” in Philadelphia. Congress delaying until February 21, 1787, reluctantly agreed to that convention, but limited any change to the mere “revising” of the existing Articles of Confederation. The fifty-five delegates who met in Philadelphia between May 25 and September 17, 1787, would not only reject the Articles of Confederation altogether, but they would produce the first written constitution for any nation in the history of the world.

Those gathered in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House during the summer of 1787 faced a formidable task. The thirteen “united States” seemed at that moment remarkably disunited. Yet somehow, in the space of slightly less than four months, they managed to pull off an extraordinary accomplishment. The Constitution they drafted has been successful for most of U.S. history in striking the difficult balance between the maintenance of public order and security, on the one hand, and the nurturing and protection of personal liberty, on the other. And it has brought remarkable stability to one of the most tumultuous forms of political activity: popular democracy. The challenge that all nations in the world have faced not only in drafting a constitution, but also creating a form of government that both provides stability to its nation and sufficient civic responsibility and liberty to its people, is enormous. Indeed, among the more than 150 constitutions presently operating in the world today, few have been as successful in creating that delicate balance between governmental power and personal liberty among the citizens ruled by their government.

##The Launching of a New American Constitution

The remarkable achievement of the fifty-five men gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 was by no means inevitable. Looking back on their work that summer, we can identify a few factors that enabled them to achieve their success. Certainly among the most important was the quality of leadership among those most committed to strengthening the American government. The ringleader was the thirty-seven-year-old James Madison. Standing only a few inches over five-feet tall, scrawny, suffering from a combination of poor physical health and hypochondria, and painfully awkward in any public forum, Madison nevertheless possessed a combination of intellect, energy, and political savvy that would mobilize the effort to create an entirely new form of continental union.

Madison was joined in his effort by a group of delegates from Virginia and Pennsylvania who, in a series of meetings before the Convention formally began its business on May 25, combined to concoct a plan not merely to “amend” the Articles of Confederation, but to set the proceedings of the Convention on a far more ambitious course. The first gathering of these reform-minded delegates took place on the evening of May 16, in the home of Benjamin Franklin (where dinner was served in his impressive new dining room along with a “cask of Porter,” which, Franklin reported, received “the most cordial and universal approbation” of all those assembled). The Pennsylvania and Virginia delegates then met frequently during the days leading up to May 25. The presence of Ben Franklin and General George Washington gave the group both dignity and prestige, but it was James Madison, James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania who provided much of the intellectual leadership and who shared a commitment to creating a truly “national” government based on the consent of the people, not the individual states. Together these men would forge a radical new plan, the Virginia Plan, which would shape the course of events during that summer of 1787.

By seizing the initiative, this small group of nationalist-minded politicians was able to set the terms of debate during the initial stages of the Convention—gearing the discussion toward not whether, but how—a vastly strengthened continental government would be constructed. On May 28, 1787, the state delegations unanimously agreed to a proposal that would prove invaluable in allowing men like Madison, Wilson, and Morris to move their plan forward. Importantly, to prevent the “licentious publication of their proceedings,” the delegates agreed to observe a strict rule of secrecy, with “nothing spoken in the house to be printed or otherwise published or communicated.” In our twenty-first century world, this manner of proceeding on a matter of such monumental importance would be instantly rejected as unacceptably pretentious and undemocratic. But the rule of secrecy gave to delegates the freedom to disagree, sometimes vehemently, on important issues, and to do so without the posturing and pandering to public opinion that so often marks political debate today. And it also gave delegates the freedom to change their minds; on many occasion, after an evening of convivial entertainment with one another, the delegates would return the following morning or even the following week or month, and find ways to reach agreement on issues that had previously divided them. The rule of secrecy helped make the Constitutional Convention a civil and deliberative body, rather than a partisan one. It helped make compromise an attribute of statesmanship rather than a sign of weakness.

As the details of the Virginia Plan came under discussion, it became clear that it was not a mere revision of the Articles of Confederation, but rather a bold plan for an entirely new kind of government—a government with a vastly more powerful “national” legislature and, unlike the Articles of Confederation, with a powerful chief executive. It also became immediately clear that, however bold and innovative the plan may have been, there were many delegates in the room who had grave misgivings about some aspects of it. For nearly four months, the delegates attempted to work through, and resolve, their disagreements. The most divisive of those issues—those involving the apportionment of representation in the national legislature, the powers and mode of election of the chief executive, and the place of the institution of slavery in the new continental body politic—would change in fundamental ways the shape of the document that would eventually emerge on September 17, 1787.

##The Founding Fathers and Federalism

The delegates haggled over how to apportion representation in the legislature off and on for more than six weeks between May 30 and July 16. Those from large, populous states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania—supporters of the Virginia Plan—argued that representation in both houses of the proposed new congress should be based on population, while those from smaller states such as New Jersey and Delaware—supporters of the New Jersey Plan—argued for equal representation for each state. The compromise that eventually emerged, one championed most energetically by the delegates from Connecticut, was obvious: representation in the House of Representatives would be apportioned according to population, with each state receiving equal representation in the Senate. In the final vote on the so-called Connecticut Compromise on July 16, five states supported the proposal; four opposed, including Virginia and Pennsylvania; and one state—Massachusetts—was divided. James Madison and many of his nationalist colleagues were disconsolate, convinced that the compromise would destroy the very character of the national government they hoped to create. But in the end, recognizing the folly of allowing their desire for their “perfect” plan to become the enemy of the good, they acceded to the Connecticut Compromise. And, interestingly, during the subsequent popular vote on ratification of the Constitution in the thirteen states, Madison would use his “defeat” in the controversy over representation to fashion an entirely new definition of federalism. In The Federalist No. 39 he defended the proposed new Constitution against its critics by praising the different modes of representation in the House and Senate—with the House representing the people of the nation at large and the Senate representing the residual sovereignty of the states—as one of the features that made the new government “part national” and “part federal.” No one at that time knew how that new definition of federalism would work in practice, and it would remain a source of contention for the rest of the nation’s history, including today. In this, as in so many areas, the so-called original meaning of the Constitution was not at all self-evident— even to the Framers of the Constitution themselves.

##Creating an American President

The debate among the delegates over the nature of the American presidency was more high- toned and more protracted than that over representation in the Congress. At one extreme, nationalists like James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris argued forcefully for a strong, independent executive capable of giving “energy, dispatch, and responsibility” to the government. They urged their fellow delegates to give the president an absolute veto over congressional legislation. At the other end of the spectrum, Roger Sherman, a plainly dressed, plainspoken delegate from Connecticut who would prove to be one of the most influential members of the Convention, spoke for many delegates when he declared that the “Executive magistracy” was “nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the Legislature into effect.” This led Sherman to the conclusion that the president should be removable from office “at pleasure” any time a majority in the legislature disagreed with him on an important issue. In the end, it was compromise that once again won the day—the delegates agreed to give the President a limited veto power, but one which could be over-ridden by a vote of two-thirds of both houses of Congress.

Most of the delegates initially thought that the executive should be elected by the national legislature; still others thought the executive should be elected by the state legislatures or even by the governors of the states. James Wilson was virtually the only delegate who proposed direct election of the president by the people. He believed that it was only through some form of popular election that the executive branch could be given both energy and independence. But realizing that his idea of popular election of the president was gaining no favor, Wilson proposed a compromise by which the President would be elected by a group of “electors” chosen either by the state legislatures or by the people of their individual states. The delegates didn’t like that proposal any more than they liked his proposal for direct popular election, voting it down overwhelmingly at that point. They voted against some version of the proposal on numerous occasions between early June and early September of 1787, only agreeing to the version contained in our modern Constitution (modified slightly by the Twelfth Amendment) grudgingly and out of a sense of desperation, as the least problematic of the alternatives before them.

It has often been observed that the Framers’ difficulty in deciding how to elect the president was the result of their misgivings about democracy—their fear that the people of the nation could not be trusted to make a wise choice for their chief executive. In fact, it was not so much that America’s Founding Fathers distrusted the inherent intelligence of the people but, rather, that they had a realistic concern about the provincialism of the people of the thirteen “independent” states. America’s vast landscape, the poor state of its communications, and the diversity of its cultural character and economic interests would make it extremely difficult for any single candidate for chief executive to gain a majority of the popular vote. There was one obvious exception to this—General George Washington, sitting in the front of the Assembly Room as President of the Convention—but aside from America’s hero, how could a voter in Georgia know the merits of a candidate in New York, or vice versa? The other obvious solution—election by members of a national Congress whose perspective was likely to be continental rather than provincial—was ultimately rejected because of the problems it created with respect to the doctrine of separation of powers: the president, it was feared, would be overly beholden to, and therefore dependent upon, the Congress for his election. The creation of an electoral college was a middle ground, and while many delegates feared that locally-selected presidential electors would be subject to the same sort of provincial thinking as ordinary citizens, they reluctantly came to the conclusion that it was the best they could do while still preserving an adequate separation of power between the executive and legislative branches. It was a highly imperfect solution to a real problem, but, in the context of the times—perhaps until today—there may well have been no better alternative.

##The Founding Fathers and Slavery

The delegates’ commitment to principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of Independence was, even in the case of free white adult males, a limited one. For example, most of the delegates supported the imposition of property qualifications for voters in their individual states. But nowhere are those limitations more obvious than during the debates relating to the subject of slavery. In 1787, slavery in America was in a state of decline, but it remained a significant part of the social and economic fabric in five of the states represented in the Convention. In their quest for “compromise,” the delegates exacerbated the existing contradiction in their nation regarding the core values of liberty and equality on which America had declared its independence. Indeed, they enshrined the institution of slavery within their new Constitution.

Although neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” is mentioned anywhere in the body of the Constitution, contention over slavery pervaded the Convention’s debates. It was impossible to discuss questions relating to the apportionment of representation without confronting the fact that the slave population of the South—whether conceived of as residents or property—would affect the calculations for representation. The delegates argued about the proper formula for how to “count” slaves through much of the summer. The final resolution of that issue—the Three-Fifths Compromise, a formula by which slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person in apportioning both representation and taxation—was a purely mechanical and amoral calculation designed to produce harmony among conflicting interests within the Convention. As many disgruntled delegates pointed out, it had little basis either in logic or morality, but in the end, the need for a consensus on the issue, however fragile that compromise might be, outweighed all other considerations.

The debate over the future of the international slave trade was in many respects even more depressing than that which culminated in the Three-Fifths Compromise. Only the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia were determined to continue what most other delegates believed to be an iniquitous trade, yet their insistence that the trade continue for at least another twenty years carried the day. However troubled delegates from the other states may have been, their concern for harmony within the Convention was much stronger than their concern for the fate of those Africans whose lives and labor would be sacrificed by the continuation of the slave trade. Between 1788 and 1808 the number of African slaves imported into the United States exceeded 200,000, only about 50,000 fewer than the total number of slaves imported to America in the preceding 170 years!

Finally, the delegates adopted without dissent a provision requiring that any “Person held to Service or Labour in one State . . . [and] escaping into another, . . . shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” By means of that tortured language, and without mentioning either the word “slaves” or “slavery,” the delegates made a fugitive-slave clause an integral part of our federal compact. It was the one act of the Convention that not only signaled the delegates’ grudging acceptance of slavery but also made the states that had moved either to abolish or gradually eliminate slavery in the aftermath of the Revolution actively complicit in their support of that institution.

##The Absence of a Bill of Rights

On September 12, just five days before the Convention was to adjourn, George Mason, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, proposed that the nearly-completed draft of the Constitution be “prefaced with a Bill of Rights.” It would, he said, “give great quiet to the people.” But the delegates did not embrace Mason’s proposal; indeed, when the matter was put to a vote, not a single state delegation supported Mason’s proposal. That decision would prove to be one of the most serious mistakes made by the men who drafted the Constitution. When Thomas Jefferson—then serving as ambassador to France—received a copy of the completed Constitution from James Madison, he was unable to contain his unhappiness at the absence of a bill of rights. “The omission of a bill of rights, providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms, for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters,” was, Jefferson wrote in dismay to his friend, a grievous error.

When the final draft of the Constitution was submitted to the people of the states for their approval, the absence of a bill of rights quickly emerged as one of the most serious objections to the proposed plan of union. If many of the supporters of the Constitution subsequently had not promised that they would quickly work to add a bill of rights to the Constitution once the new government commenced operation, it is likely that the document would have failed to gain the approval of the nine states necessary for its ratification. Fortunately, the First Federal Congress of the new government of the United States fulfilled that promise, and in one of its first actions added that bill of rights, making the “more perfect union” devised by the Framers still more perfect. Ironically, the person who took the lead in drafting a bill of rights in the first Congress was James Madison, who had opposed adding a bill of rights not only during the Convention, but also during the debate over ratification in his state of Virginia.

Nor was that the only occasion when the American people, acting through their representatives both in Congress and in their states, sought to further perfect the American union. “We the People” have added another seventeen amendments to the Constitution after the addition of the original bill of rights. The United States Constitution, which initially consisted of some 4,500 words on four parchments pages, is now a document with nearly 8,000 words, some of which advance the notion of equality not only for former slaves through the Reconstruction Amendments enacted after the Civil War, but also for women through the Nineteenth Amendment of 1920.

##“Approaching So Near to Perfection”

As the Convention prepared to adjourn, the delegates were hardly of one mind about many of the specifics of the Constitution they had created. But whatever their differences, nearly all of the them, true to their revolutionary heritage, had tried to create a government of limited powers which nevertheless had the requisite “energy” to do all the things promised in the Constitution’s preamble: “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.” This was a tall order, especially when they were pledging at the same time to create a government that divided power between the states and the nation in such a way as to allay people’s fears of an overbearing central power. As the delegates made their decisions about whether to sign the Constitution on September 17, 1787, there was little certainty among them about how this balancing act would work in practice, but they had at least made a start in creating a framework within which issues of state and national power could be negotiated.

On that final day of the Constitutional Convention, it was left to the Convention’s oldest delegate, eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, to sum up the nearly four months of debate, disagreement, and occasional outbursts of ill temper that had marked the proceedings of that summer. Franklin observed that whenever “you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?” The wonder of it all, Franklin asserted, was that the delegates had managed to create a system of government “approaching so near to perfection as it does.”

Franklin acknowledged that there were “several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve,” but, he added, “the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment and pay more respect to the judgment of others.” Franklin concluded by asking each of his fellow delegates to “doubt a little of his own infallibility” and step forward to sign the Constitution. In that spirit of humility, thirty-nine of the forty-two delegates present on that last day would take that important step forward and, in the process, move America one step forward in achieving a “more perfect Union.” If there is any one lesson that American citizens, and their political representatives, might most profitably learn from the Framers of the Constitution, it is that injunction from the sagacious Dr. Franklin: our own body politic would function more effectively, and with a greater degree of civility, if all of us could occasionally put aside our own sense of “infallibility” and engage in the political process with the same spirit of compromise that guided the Founding Fathers of 1787.

Find the essay on the National Constitution Center's website

[[☃ explanation 1]]

This is an excerpt from Jeffrey Rosen and David Rubenstein's essay, "The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights."

At the National Constitution Center, you will find rare copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. These are the three most important documents in American history. But why are they important, and what are their similarities and differences? And how did each document, in turn, influence the next in America’s ongoing quest for liberty and equality?

There are some clear similarities among the three documents. All have preambles. All were drafted by people of similar backgrounds, generally educated white men of property. The Declaration and Constitution were drafted by a congress and a convention that met in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia (now known as Independence Hall) in 1776 and 1787 respectively. The Bill of Rights was proposed by the Congress that met in Federal Hall in New York City in 1789. Thomas Jefferson was the principal drafter of the Declaration and James Madison of the Bill of Rights; Madison, along with Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson, was also one of the principal architects of the Constitution.

Most importantly, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are based on the idea that all people have certain fundamental rights that governments are created to protect. Those rights include common law rights, which come from British sources like the Magna Carta, or natural rights, which, the Founders believed, came from God. The Founders believed that natural rights are inherent in all people by virtue of their being human and that certain of these rights are unalienable, meaning they cannot be surrendered to government under any circumstances.

At the same time, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are different kinds of documents with different purposes. The Declaration was designed to justify breaking away from a government; the Constitution and Bill of Rights were designed to establish a government. The Declaration stands on its own—it has never been amended—while the Constitution has been amended 27 times. (The first ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights.) The Declaration and Bill of Rights set limitations on government; the Constitution was designed both to create an energetic government and also to constrain it. The Declaration and Bill of Rights reflect a fear of an overly centralized government imposing its will on the people of the states; the Constitution was designed to empower the central government to preserve the blessings of liberty for “We the People of the United States.” In this sense, the Declaration and Bill of Rights, on the one hand, and the Constitution, on the other, are mirror images of each other.

Despite these similarities and differences, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are, in many ways, fused together in the minds of Americans, because they represent what is best about America. They are symbols of the liberty that allows us to achieve success and of the equality that ensures that we are all equal in the eyes of the law. The Declaration of Independence made certain promises about which liberties were fundamental and inherent, but those liberties didn’t become legally enforceable until they were enumerated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In other words, the fundamental freedoms of the American people were alluded to in the Declaration of Independence, implicit in the Constitution, and enumerated in the Bill of Rights. But it took the Civil War, which President Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address called “a new birth of freedom,” to vindicate the Declaration’s famous promise that “all men are created equal.” And it took the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, to vindicate James Madison’s initial hope that not only the federal government but also the states would be constitutionally required to respect fundamental liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights—a process that continues today.

##Why did Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence?

When the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia in 1775, it was far from clear that the delegates would pass a resolution to separate from Great Britain. To persuade them, someone needed to articulate why the Americans were breaking away. Congress formed a committee to do just that; members included John Adams from Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, Robert R. Livingston from New York, and Thomas Jefferson from Virginia, who at age 33 was one of the youngest delegates.

Although Jefferson disputed his account, John Adams later recalled that he had persuaded Jefferson to write the draft because Jefferson had the fewest enemies in Congress and was the best writer. (Jefferson would have gotten the job anyway—he was elected chair of the committee.) Jefferson had 17 days to produce the document and reportedly wrote a draft in a day or two. In a rented room not far from the State House, he wrote the Declaration with few books and pamphlets beside him, except for a copy of George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and the draft Virginia Constitution, which Jefferson had written himself.

The Declaration of Independence has three parts. It has a preamble, which later became the most famous part of the document but at the time was largely ignored. It has a second part that lists the sins of the King of Great Britain, and it has a third part that declares independence from Britain and that all political connections between the British Crown and the “Free and Independent States” of America should be totally dissolved.

The preamble to the Declaration of Independence contains the entire theory of American government in a single, inspiring passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

When Jefferson wrote the preamble, it was largely an afterthought. Why is it so important today? It captured perfectly the essence of the ideals that would eventually define the United States. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Jefferson began, in one of the most famous sentences in the English language. How could Jefferson write this at a time that he and other Founders who signed the Declaration owned slaves? The document was an expression of an ideal. In his personal conduct, Jefferson violated it. But the ideal—“that all men are created equal”—came to take on a life of its own and is now considered the most perfect embodiment of the American creed.

When Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address during the Civil War in November 1863, several months after the Union Army defeated Confederate forces at the Battle of Gettysburg, he took Jefferson’s language and transformed it into constitutional poetry. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln declared. “Four score and seven years ago” refers to the year 1776, making clear that Lincoln was referring not to the Constitution but to Jefferson’s Declaration. Lincoln believed that the “principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” as he wrote shortly before the anniversary of Jefferson’s birthday in 1859. Three years later, on the anniversary of George Washington’s birthday in 1861, Lincoln said in a speech at what by that time was being called “Independence Hall,” “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender” the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

It took the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history, for Lincoln to begin to make Jefferson’s vision of equality a constitutional reality. After the war, the Declaration’s vision was embodied in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, which formally ended slavery, guaranteed all persons the “equal protection of the laws,” and gave African-American men the right to vote. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, when supporters of gaining greater rights for women met, they, too, used the Declaration of Independence as a guide for drafting their Declaration of Sentiments. (Their efforts to achieve equal suffrage culminated in 1920 in the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.) And during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his famous address at the Lincoln Memorial, “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

In addition to its promise of equality, Jefferson’s preamble is also a promise of liberty. Like the other Founders, he was steeped in the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, in philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, Francis Hutcheson, and Montesquieu. All of them believed that people have certain unalienable and inherent rights that come from God, not government, or come simply from being human. They also believed that when people form governments, they give those governments control over certain natural rights to ensure the safety and security of other rights. Jefferson, George Mason, and the other Founders frequently spoke of the same set of rights as being natural and unalienable. They included the right to worship God “according to the dictates of conscience,” the right of “enjoyment of life and liberty,” “the means of acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” and, most important of all, the right of a majority of the people to “alter and abolish” their government whenever it threatened to invade natural rights rather than protect them.

In other words, when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and began to articulate some of the rights that were ultimately enumerated in the Bill of Rights, he wasn’t inventing these rights out of thin air. On the contrary, 10 American colonies between 1606 and 1701 were granted charters that included representative assemblies and promised the colonists the basic rights of Englishmen, including a version of the promise in the Magna Carta that no freeman could be imprisoned or destroyed “except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” This legacy kindled the colonists’ hatred of arbitrary authority, which allowed the King to seize their bodies or property on his own say-so. In the revolutionary period, the galvanizing examples of government overreaching were the “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” that authorized the King’s agents to break into the homes of scores of innocent citizens in an indiscriminate search for the anonymous authors of pamphlets criticizing the King. Writs of assistance, for example, authorized customs officers “to break open doors, Chests, Trunks, and other Packages” in a search for stolen goods, without specifying either the goods to be seized or the houses to be searched. In a famous attack on the constitutionality of writs of assistance in 1761, prominent lawyer James Otis said, “It is a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.”

As members of the Continental Congress contemplated independence in May and June of 1776, many colonies were dissolving their charters with England. As the actual vote on independence approached, a few colonies were issuing their own declarations of independence and bills of rights. The Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, written by George Mason, began by declaring that “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

When Jefferson wrote his famous preamble, he was restating, in more eloquent language, the philosophy of natural rights expressed in the Virginia Declaration that the Founders embraced. And when Jefferson said, in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, that “[w]hen in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” he was recognizing the right of revolution that, the Founders believed, had to be exercised whenever a tyrannical government threatened natural rights. That’s what Jefferson meant when he said Americans had to assume “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.”

The Declaration of Independence was a propaganda document rather than a legal one. It didn’t give any rights to anyone. It was an advertisement about why the colonists were breaking away from England. Although there was no legal reason to sign the Declaration, Jefferson and the other Founders signed it because they wanted to “mutually pledge” to each other that they were bound to support it with “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Their signatures were courageous because the signers realized they were committing treason: according to legend, after affixing his flamboyantly large signature John Hancock said that King George—or the British ministry—would be able to read his name without spectacles. But the courage of the signers shouldn’t be overstated: the names of the signers of the Declaration weren’t published until after General George Washington won crucial battles at Trenton and Princeton and it was clear that the war for independence was going well.

##What is the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

In the years between 1776 and 1787, most of the 13 states drafted constitutions that contained a declaration of rights within the body of the document or as a separate provision at the beginning, many of them listing the same natural rights that Jefferson had embraced in the Declaration. When it came time to form a central government in 1776, the Continental Congress began to create a weak union governed by the Articles of Confederation. (The Articles of Confederation was sent to the states for ratification in 1777; it was formally adopted in 1781.) The goal was to avoid a powerful federal government with the ability to invade rights and to threaten private property, as the King’s agents had done with the hated general warrants and writs of assistance. But the Articles of Confederation proved too weak for bringing together a fledgling nation that needed both to wage war and to manage the economy. Supporters of a stronger central government, like James Madison, lamented the inability of the government under the Articles to curb the excesses of economic populism that were afflicting the states, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts, where farmers shut down the courts demanding debt relief. As a result, Madison and others gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 with the goal of creating a stronger, but still limited, federal government.

The Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania State House, in the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted. Jefferson, who was in France at the time, wasn’t among them. After four months of debate, the delegates produced a constitution.

During the final days of debate, delegates George Mason and Elbridge Gerry objected that the Constitution, too, should include a bill of rights to protect the fundamental liberties of the people against the newly empowered president and Congress. Their motion was swiftly—and unanimously—defeated; a debate over what rights to include could go on for weeks, and the delegates were tired and wanted to go home. The Constitution was approved by the Constitutional Convention and sent to the states for ratification without a bill of rights.

During the ratification process, which took around 10 months (the Constitution took effect when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify in late June 1788; the 13th state, Rhode Island, would not join the union until May 1790), many state ratifying conventions proposed amendments specifying the rights that Jefferson had recognized in the Declaration and that they protected in their own state constitutions. James Madison and other supporters of the Constitution initially resisted the need for a bill of rights as either unnecessary (because the federal government was granted no power to abridge individual liberty) or dangerous (since it implied that the federal government had the power to infringe liberty in the first place). In the face of a groundswell of popular demand for a bill of rights, Madison changed his mind and introduced a bill of rights in Congress on June 8, 1789.

Madison was least concerned by “abuse in the executive department,” which he predicted would be the weakest branch of government. He was more worried about abuse by Congress, because he viewed the legislative branch as “the most powerful, and most likely to be abused, because it is under the least control.” (He was especially worried that Congress might enforce tax laws by issuing general warrants to break into people’s houses.) But in his view “the great danger lies rather in the abuse of the community than in the legislative body”—in other words, local majorities who would take over state governments and threaten the fundamental rights of minorities, including creditors and property holders. For this reason, the proposed amendment that Madison considered “the most valuable amendment in the whole list” would have prohibited the state governments from abridging freedom of conscience, speech, and the press, as well as trial by jury in criminal cases. Madison’s favorite amendment was eliminated by the Senate and not resurrected until after the Civil War, when the 14th Amendment required state governments to respect basic civil and economic liberties.

In the end, by pulling from the amendments proposed by state ratifying conventions and Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, Madison proposed 19 amendments to the Constitution. Congress approved 12 amendments to be sent to the states for ratification. Only 10 of the amendments were ultimately ratified in 1791 and became the Bill of Rights. The first of the two amendments that failed was intended to guarantee small congressional districts to ensure that representatives remained close to the people. The other would have prohibited senators and representatives from giving themselves a pay raise unless it went into effect at the start of the next Congress. (This latter amendment was finally ratified in 1992 and became the 27th Amendment.)

To address the concern that the federal government might claim that rights not listed in the Bill of Rights were not protected, Madison included what became the Ninth Amendment, which says the “enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” To ensure that Congress would be viewed as a government of limited rather than unlimited powers, he included the 10th Amendment, which says the “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Because of the first Congress’s focus on protecting people from the kinds of threats to liberty they had experienced at the hands of King George, the rights listed in the first eight amendments of the Bill of Rights apply only to the federal government, not to the states or to private companies. (One of the amendments submitted by the North Carolina ratifying convention but not included by Madison in his proposal to Congress would have prohibited Congress from establishing monopolies or companies with “exclusive advantages of commerce.”)

But the protections in the Bill of Rights—forbidding Congress from abridging free speech, for example, or conducting unreasonable searches and seizures—were largely ignored by the courts for the first 100 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Like the preamble to the Declaration, the Bill of Rights was largely a promissory note. It wasn’t until the 20th century, when the Supreme Court began vigorously to apply the Bill of Rights against the states, that the document became the centerpiece of contemporary struggles over liberty and equality. The Bill of Rights became a document that defends not only majorities of the people against an overreaching federal government but also minorities against overreaching state governments. Today, there are debates over whether the federal government has become too powerful in threatening fundamental liberties. There are also debates about how to protect the least powerful in society against the tyranny of local majorities. . . .

The Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are the three most important documents in American history because they express the ideals that define “We the People of the United States” and inspire free people around the world.

Find the essay on the National Constitution Center's Website

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