Contact: rwetheri@smu.edu
Celebrating America, Part I
The Constitutional Convention
It was not a normal meeting of the Continental Congress when the delegates convened in Philadelphia during a rainy spring in 1787. They all knew, stepping into what is later to be called Independence Hall, that their Articles of Confederation were unwieldy, becoming more cumbersome each year since first ratified in July of 1776. The thirteen colonies, diversely populated, separated by their parochial interests, and sometimes contentious, needed more unification than the Articles provided.
Alexander Hamilton claimed that the Articles didn’t need revising, they needed replacing. Most
everyone agreed. But not Thomas Jefferson: A strong central authority is precisely what we fought against in our War of Independence!
There were dangers either way. And so they set their goal not to revise but to create, and the Continental Congress devolved into a Constitutional Convention. The arguments pro and con were intense, and for four months. Issues were debated and drafts replaced drafts and summer replaced spring, hot and oppressive. Federalists and Anti-Federalists finally agreed to terms in mid-September of that year and signatures of all 39 delegates adopted the new Constitution and sent it to the colonies for ratification.At the end of May in 1790—almost exactly three years after the Congress first met—Rhode Island became the
last state to ratify an audacious but promising Constitution of the United States of America. The colonists had transformed themselves into citizens. Their government would soon have a chief executive to manage their affairs, a Supreme Court to adjudicate their differences, and a legislature with the power to tax.
The devil, of course, is forever in the details, and they began working it out in 1791 when the Bill of Rights amended the document. It was “The Grand Experiment,” and we’re still working it out, 135 years later.
