Story of the Constitution

The Making of the United States Constitution

Our nation was an exciting, interesting and somewhat scary place to be on July 4, 1776. This was the day that the men attending the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia signed the Declaration of Independence. This document said that the thirteen British colonies in North America no longer wanted Great Britain, the most powerful nation in the world, to be their government because the King and the British Parliament no longer treated them fairly. That is why July 4^th is considered the birthday of our nation. But on July 4, 1776, we really were not a nation yet. We did not have a national government. We did not have our own money. We did not even have a real army, which is one reason it was pretty scary that we were running the risk of making such a powerful nation mad. It is necessary to understand what led up to the Declaration of Independence and what happened in this country in the eleven years after it in order to understand how we came to have our Constitution.

Although we were not yet a nation on July 4, 1776, we were getting very close to it and the Declaration of Independence had some hints of what was to come. In the Declaration, the colonies were referred to as the “thirteen united States of America,” which was getting very close to calling us the United States of America. It was encouraging that the thirteen colonies, for the most part, got along very well with each other. Nevertheless, they still had their own democratic forms of government and they did not want or feel that they needed any kind of national government. They had come to Philadelphia for one reason only—to tell Great Britain that they no longer wanted to be ruled by them. They did not come together to form a new government to replace British rule. Each colony wanted to be its own state with no one else governing it. So how did the united States become the United States of America, “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all?”

The thirteen colonies began to sow the seeds of acting as one nation long before 1776. (See the Road to the Constitution timeline.) They also had a lot in common with each other, which would make it easy to form a united country. For example, they all spoke the English language so communication among the colonies was very easy. But the main thing that they shared in common was their beliefs about government:

· First and foremost, the thirteen colonies believed that governments should truly represent the wishes of the people that they governed and that the people should have the largest voice in government through representatives that they elected. They strongly believed that not a king nor a president nor a czar should have the most power. This belief was reflected in all of the colonies governments. They had democratic forms of governments, consisting mostly of some kind of law making (legislative) body.

· The thirteen colonies all believed that governments should have limited power. This meant that they felt that a government should have just enough power to protect everyone’s rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” It also meant that they believed that people are born with these rights and that they do not come from government.

· The thirteen colonies believed that when the people no longer could trust their government that the people had the right to get rid of that government and form a new government. They called this a social contract.

· The thirteen colonies all valued the rule of law. This meant that they believed everyone, including the highest government official, had to obey the law.

· The thirteen colonies highly valued freedom, especially religious freedom, and they felt that government should not interfere with these freedoms.

· The thirteen colonies shared a strong belief that they should not have to pay taxes to Great Britain unless they had representatives in the British Parliament in London—“no taxation without representation.” After all, the colonists were British, and they were well aware that Great Britain had the longest and proudest history in the world of giving the people a voice in government. It began in 1215 when the British people and their king signed the Magna Carta, the very first written piece of paper anywhere that said a ruler had to listen to his people. The Magna Carta is considered one of the greatest documents of all times as a champion for democracy. It was the first time that the people being ruled said that a government should have limits and that they should have some kind of voice in government. From that time on, Great Britain continued to change from being ruled completely by a king to becoming a parliamentary government—a government where the people elect representatives to speak on their behalf to the king and to make laws for them and a government where the people had many rights. This was the kind of government Great Britain had in 1776.

Despite their many similarities, it was not until 1754 when the colonists came together for a common purpose in Albany, New York. At that meeting, Benjamin Franklin tried to convince the colonists that they needed to unite to protect themselves against the Indians because the British were not doing a good job of protecting them. Neither the British nor the colonists supported his plan. But the colonists soon found other reasons to unite. For the most part, Great Britain largely had ignored its North American colonies because it was fighting a long and costly war with France. But when the war ended in 1763, Great Britain decided to solve its money problems by taxing the colonists. One of these taxes was the Stamp Tax, a tax on all important documents. In 1765, nine of the thirteen colonies came together to complain to King George and the British Parliament about the Stamp Tax and about the fact that they were being taxed without having representation in parliament. This group was called the Stamp Congress. King George and British Parliament ignored the protest and continued to make the colonists angrier by making them pay more taxes and refusing to treat them like full-fledged British citizens. For example, the colonists were forced to let the British soldiers live in their houses. They also were put in prison for not paying their debts and sometimes they were put in prison without being told why. They were denied speedy trials. Whispers of how maybe we would be better off being independent from Great Britain grew more frequent and little louder.

As the cries for independence became stronger, the colonies became more united. Twelve of the thirteen colonies (Georgia was the absent colony) sent representatives to the First Continental Congress in 1774, which sent more complaints to the British, which once were again ignored. The men at the Continental Congress decided that they should meet again in 1775 and further evaluate their situation with Britain. By the time they met in May, 1775, the first shots of the Revolutionary War had been fired in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. Now the colonies either had to unite against Great Britain or they had to say, “I am sorry,” to King George and live by British rule. The colonists tried a little bit of both—they wrote to King George and said they wanted peace but they also wanted a lot more respect and independence. King George would not even the letter to be delivered to him so the men at the Second Continental Congress agreed to unite and declare our independence from Great Britain, which they knew would lead to all out war. The men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence are called Founders because they founded our country.

The Second Continental Congress was in a very dangerous situation. There was no army. Each colony was trying to put together an army made up of farmers and other people who owned guns. The Congress asked George Washington to lead this poorly trained, poorly armed group and he took on the task. The Congress had neither money nor any power to tax the people to get money. In 1777, they wrote the Articles of Confederation, the first document that established us as a nation. We officially became the United States of America. However, the Articles still did not have a way for the new government to tax the people or coin money.

When the Revolutionary War ended in our favor in 1781 (with a lot of help from France), our country had a legislative body but no president or judges. There was no national money. There was no military because the Revolutionary soldiers all returned to their homes. Almost all of the power was in the state governments. Soon it became very clear that we were a weak and poor country and that Great Britain, or any major country, could easily beat us in another war and make us their colonies again. There was unrest in many of the states, too. Some states were taxing goods from other states, causing problems between the states. The national government had no power to settle these fights. Some states were not protecting the rights of their people and were putting people in prison for debts, just like the British had done. Many of the Founders and other state leaders suggested a meeting in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to improve the Articles. Many people were suspicious about the purpose of the meeting. Patrick Henry refused to come because he smelled a rat—the rat being a new constitution that would create a stronger national government. Rhode Island would not come either because, as a small state, it feared it would have no power in a country with a strong national government.

Some of the fifty-four men who came to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 probably did hope to be able to salvage the Articles of Confederation, but overwhelmingly, in a very short period of time, and secretly, the men at the convention decided a whole new government was needed—one that could coin money, raise an army and regulate trade with the states and with other countries. Creating a whole new constitution was the easy decision. Since these men would create or “frame” a new constitution they became known as the Framers. Deciding what the new government would look like was a much harder task. George Washington was chosen to lead the convention, but it was his fellow Virginian, James Madison, who emerged as the man with the ideas. For several years, James Madison had studied how to make the Articles of Confederation stronger and he came to realize that for the United States to survive it was going to need a strong, yet democratic national government. With another fellow Virginian, Edmund Randolph, Madison came prepared to the convention to suggest that the new government have three branches of government, with each having a check on the other. This is called separation of powers with a system of checks and balances. Madison also suggested that the national government have some powers, but that the states also have many powers. This is called federalism—a combination of national and state governments. These two elements of our government have been widely copied by other countries and have been proclaimed by many political scientists, both American and foreign, to be brilliant ideas! That is why James Madison is called the Father of the Constitution.

The Preamble of the Constitution is our best glimpse into the philosophy of government the Framers had:

We the People of the United States, in Order 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 to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

It’s clear from these words that the Framers wanted to improve our country, that they were concerned about safety in the states and about threats from foreign countries. It is also clear that they wanted a government that would protect the people’s freedoms.

The biggest battles at the convention were between the big and small states and the free and slave states. All of the delegates agreed that there needed to be a legislative body that was elected by the people. But how many men should each state be able to have in this body? Of course, the big states wanted it based on population and the small states wanted every state to have the same number of representatives. The solution to this problem is known as the Great Compromise: the legislative branch (Congress), the lawmakers, would be made up of two parts. The first part would be a House of Representatives. The number of representatives a state gets would be based on population, but every state, regardless of how small, would get at least one representative. The second part was a Senate where every state gets two Senators. This compromise passed by only one vote.

There were three areas that the Framers compromised on regarding slavery. The first is the 3/5 Compromise—for purposes of representation and taxes, a slave would count only as a 3/5 person (Article I, Section 2, #3). The second was the Fugitive Slave Clause, which required free states to return escaped slaves to slave owners (Article IV, Section 4, #3). The third was a clause saying that Congress would not stop the importing of slaves until 1808 (Article I, Section 9, #1). Although many of the Framers had hoped to forbid slavery in the new constitution, and many northern states had already abolished slavery, the Framers knew they could not get the support of the southern states for the new constitution unless they made these compromises.

The Framers signed the Constitution on September 17, 1787. Then the battle began to get the states to approve, or ratify it. A group called the Federalists was for the Constitution as it was written. Another groups called the Anti-Federalists fought against the Constitution and said they could only support it if some things were added, most of them about individual rights, some about giving states the governmental powers that the national government did not have. Many states were concerned about the Supremacy Clause—if there was conflict between a state and national law, the national law was supreme, or what won. In order to get the Constitution passed, the Federalists promised that if the states approved the Constitution, they would write a Bill of Rights to add to the Constitution. In the fall of 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to approve the constitution, which was the necessary number of states for the Constitution to become the law of the land. On December 15, 1791, enough states approved the Bill of Rights as the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Surprisingly, in the 215 years since then, there have only been 17 other amendments. The most notable of those are:

The Civil War Amendments—13, 14, 15. They outlaw slavery, give free black men the write to vote and make sure the states protect the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
The 19^th Amendment, which gives women the right to vote.
The 26^th Amendment, which lowers the voting age to 18.

As you can see, these amendments provided that those people who were left out at the Constitutional Convention were now included in our government. The other major factor in the history of our Constitution is the role the Supreme Court of the United States has played in interpreting it, especially in the last fifty years. The Court has found a constitutional basis for ending school segregation, gender segregation, banning school prayer, and forbidding evidence in a criminal case where the police did not act properly. Generally, in the 21^st century, we look to the Supreme Court for guidance in how the Constitution affects our lives.

Fun and Interesting Facts about the Constitution

Established on November 26, 1789, the first national "Thanksgiving Day" was originally created by George Washington as a way of "giving thanks" for the Constitution.

One of the amendments in the original Bill of Rights that the states considered was a requirement that each representative in the House of Representatives only represent 50,000 people. It did not pass and that is a good thing because that would mean today that we would 5,990 representatives! Today we have 435 representatives because that is the number of chairs that will fit in the House chambers in the U.S. Capitol. So every ten years, after the census is taken, Congress divides the population by 435 and decides how many representatives each state gets.

Virginia was the most populous state when the Constitution was ratified and today it is California. Six states have only one representative. Rhode Island, which was the least populated in 1787, now has two representatives.

At 81, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania was the oldest delegate at the Constitutional Convention and at 26, Jonathon Dayton of New Jersey was the youngest.

The original Constitution is on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, it was moved to Fort Knox for safekeeping.
More than 11,000 amendments have been introduced in Congress. Thirty three have gone to the states to be ratified and twenty seven have received the necessary approval from the states to actually become amendments to the Constitution.

For more fast and fun facts, to www.constitutioncenter.org .

The Road to the Making of the Constitution

1584-1732 Colonies come into existence. The thirteen original colonies (Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Virginia) come into existence and write constitutions that establish various forms of democratic governments. The English first came to Virginia in 1584 and established a government in 1607. In 1732, Georgia became the thirteenth British colony in America.

1754 First try at acting as one country. The Colonists meet to discuss how to protect themselves from increased Indian uprisings. Benjamin Franklin suggests they form some kind of unified group, but neither the colonists nor the British rulers like the idea.

1765 Stamp Congress. Nine of the thirteen colonies met in New York to send a letter to Great Britain protesting the Stamp Act, which was a tax on many things, including letters and playing cards. This meeting in New York became known as the Stamp Congress. At the same time, a group called the Sons of Liberty was forming in almost all of the colonies and they were calling for independence from Great Britain.

1774 The First Continental Congress. Twelve of the thirteen colonies (Georgia did not attend) met in Philadelphia to discuss the many ways they felt that Great Britain was being unfair to them. Mostly, they did not like the taxes Great Britain was making them pay. There had been several protests in many of the colonies, including the famous Boston Tea Party in 1773.

1775 The Revolutionary War Begins. There was no declaration of war. It began with militias in some of the colonies, notably in Concord and Lexington Massachusetts, having some fights with the British troops. The Second Continental Congress meets after these battles and begins to form an army. George Washington is appointed Commander-in-Chief. The Second Continental Congress tries to reach a peaceful solution with Great Britain but the king refuses.

1776 Declaration of Independence. Thomas Paine writes and distributes Common Sense, which calls for independence from Great Britain. The Second Continental Congress writes and signs the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War escalates. (The men who wrote and signed the Declaration founded our country and are called the Founders.)

1777 The Articles of Confederation. The Second Continental Congress writes the Articles of Confederation, the first governing document for the United States of America. There were no executive or judicial branches. There is no way for the new government to tax people to raise money or any authority to coin money.

1781 United States of America. The thirteen colonies accept the Articles of Confederation and the newly named United States of America wins the Revolutionary War.

1781-1787 The Articles of Confederation prove to be too weak. Without the right to tax, to coin money, to settle fights between the states, to regulate trade or to have a military, the national government has no power. It is clear that the United States is a poor, powerless country that could be attacked at any time, especially by Great Britain, who would like to make us colonies once again.

1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Men from every state but Rhode Island gather in Philadelphia to talk about how to improve the Articles of Confederation. But amid much secrecy, the men soon realize that the Articles are not worth saving and they begin to write or “frame” a new constitution. Hence, they are called the Framers. On September 17, 1787, the Framers signed our Constitution.

1787-1788 The fight to get the states to accept the Constitution. People like James Madison had to do a lot of writing and talking to convince the states that the new constitution was a good idea. In the end, it took a promise of a Bill of Rights to get most of the states to vote for the new constitution

1788-1791 Bill of Rights. As promised by the Framers, a Bill of Rights, the

first ten amendments to the Constitution, was written and added to the Constitution.

1791-2006 The Constitution continues to evolve. Seventeen more amendments are added to the Constitution to ensure rights for those left out of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It took a Civil War to get some added and a Women’s Suffrage Movement for another. Every year, the Supreme Court of the United States assists us in learning how our Constitution protects the rights so highly valued by the colonists almost 400 years ago when they first came to our shores.

2005 Constitution Day. It becomes law that every school must celebrate Constitution Day every year on September 17, that day in 1787 when the Framers signed the Constitution.

Activities and Discussion Points for Grades 7-12

1. Go to www.constitutioncenter.org and pull up a copy of the United States Constitution or refer to a written copy. After reading The Making of the United States Constitution and The Road to the Constitution, as a class look at the various articles of the Constitution and discuss how the Framers’ early experiences with democratic colonial governments and their beliefs about government influenced how they set up the new government. Also discuss how the abuses of the British government led to some interesting sections in the new constitution.

2. As a class, carefully study the preamble of the Constitution. How does the preamble sum up what the Framers thought a government should be about? Also, go to http://members.mobar.org/pdfs/educators/preamble.pdf for an excellent lesson plan on the preamble.

3. As he left the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin allegedly was asked what had come out of the convention and he responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” What do you think he meant by that? Why do you think we have been able to keep this republic? (A republic is a form of government where the people elect representatives to speak for them as contrasted with direct democracy where the people speak for themselves.)

4. Research both the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights. What ideas from these documents are contained in our Constitution? Compare and contrast a parliamentary government (Great Britain) and a republican form of government (United States).

5. Look at the first few paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. What ideas from this document are contained in our Constitution?

6. Consider some of the compromises the Framers made at the Constitutional Convention. Do you think the Great Compromise, which resulted in two houses of Congress, is still a good idea today? As you discuss this issue, consider how the formula for deciding the number of each state’s congressional delegation is the number of electoral votes each state gets. The other interesting compromises were about slaves. How would you have handled the slavery issue if you had been a delegate?

7. Do you think we need a constitutional convention to consider writing a new constitution? Why or why not. Why do you think our Constitution has survived for over 200 years? Do you think the proceedings of a modern constitutional convention could be kept as secret as the first one?

8. What do you think of the idea of federalism—the states have some powers and the national government has others? What powers do you think each should have—what decisions are better made at the national level? At the state level?

9. Our government is one of separation of powers and checks and balances. What do we mean by that? How does the Constitution provide for both of these concepts? Do you think the branches have equal power? Why or why not?

10. The Founders and Framers both feared an executive branch that was too strong; they did not want a king. How do you think they would view how the role of the president has changed over the last 200 years?

11. Go to www.archives.org for an extensive story about the making of our constitution. While on this website, look at the stories of the Framers of the Constitution.

12. Go to www.constitutioncenter.org and explore the interactive constitution.