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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 17, 1787
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
239 years ago
The signing of the United States Constitution at the Pennsylvania State House on September 17, 1787, at the close of the Constitutional Convention.
On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine delegates signed the Constitution of the United States in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, the same room in which the Declaration of Independence had been adopted eleven years earlier. They had been meeting since late May, through a hot summer, behind closed windows to keep their deliberations secret. Fifty-five delegates had attended at various points; some had gone home, and three who remained refused to sign.
The convention had been called to revise the Articles of Confederation, the loose arrangement under which the states had governed themselves since the Revolution. The Articles gave the central government no power to tax, no power to regulate commerce between the states, and no executive worth the name. Rather than repair them, the delegates set them aside and designed a new government from scratch, an act that exceeded their instructions and that they knew would be controversial.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Constitutional Convention of 1787, the four-month meeting in Philadelphia at which delegates from twelve states designed the framework of the American federal government.
The central disputes were about representation and about slavery. Large states wanted representation proportional to population; small states wanted equality among states. The result was the compromise that produced a House apportioned by population and a Senate with two seats per state regardless of size. Delegates from slaveholding states insisted that enslaved people be counted toward representation, and the convention settled on counting three fifths of them, a formula that inflated Southern power in Congress and in presidential elections for decades. The convention also barred Congress from prohibiting the importation of enslaved people until 1808 and required the return of people who escaped bondage.
The structure the delegates built distributed power deliberately: three branches with overlapping checks, a bicameral legislature, an executive chosen indirectly, and courts with lifetime appointments. Its authors were as concerned with limiting concentrated power, including popular power, as with enabling government to function. Benjamin Franklin, at eighty-one and too weak to deliver his own closing remarks, had them read out, saying he consented to the document because he expected no better and doubted his own infallibility.
Ratification was contested. Federalists argued for adoption in essays including those later collected as The Federalist Papers; anti-federalists warned of a distant, powerful central government and the absence of a bill of rights. The Constitution took effect in 1789, and the first ten amendments were ratified in 1791 to answer that objection. It has been amended twenty-seven times in more than two centuries, including the amendments that abolished slavery, defined citizenship, and extended the vote. It is the oldest written national constitution still in operation, and arguments about how to read it remain among the most consequential in American politics.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It created a durable framework for a large republic. Separation of powers, federalism, and a written text amendable by supermajority produced a government that has functioned continuously for more than two centuries and served as a model for constitutions worldwide.
It embedded compromises over slavery that led to civil war. The three-fifths clause, the protection of the slave trade until 1808, and the fugitive slave clause postponed a reckoning rather than resolving it, and the postponement ended in the deadliest war in American history.
Its interpretation is a permanent political battleground. Because the text is short, old, and hard to amend, disputes about what it means are decided largely through the courts, making constitutional interpretation one of the most consequential arenas in American public life.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine delegates signed a constitution that three of their colleagues refused to put their names to and that Benjamin Franklin endorsed on the grounds that he did not expect anything better. It has been amended twenty-seven times, survived a civil war caused by the compromises inside it, and is still the operating manual.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“I consent to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that it is not the best.”
— Benjamin Franklin, in his closing remarks to the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Constitutional Convention, the compromises over representation and slavery, the delegates who refused to sign, and the ratification fight that followed?
