We The People: A New Constitution

As America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this year, the Peoria Riverfront Museum is sharing a weekly story exploring the American experience. Many of these stories are brought to life in The Promise of Liberty, the museum’s extraordinary exhibition featuring rare documents, historic objects, and works of art that trace America’s continuing experiment in liberty.

Today, we mark Constitution Day (and the kickoff of Constitution Week), recognizing the signing of the United States Constitution on September 17, 1787. We invite you to view the first public printing of the U.S. Constitution, dated September 19, 1787, in The Promise of Liberty exhibition.

We turn our attention to this remarkable document, the world’s oldest written national constitution still in effect, and the circumstances that made its creation necessary. Why, just a decade after declaring independence in 1776, did the new nation need an entirely new framework for government?

ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION

The Constitution was not America’s first constitution.

After declaring independence, the thirteen states faced an enormous question: How do you turn thirteen former colonies into a functioning country?

Their first answer was the Articles of Confederation.

Under the Articles, which went into effect in 1781, each state retained its “sovereignty, freedom and independence.” They joined together in what the Articles called a “firm league of friendship.” Americans had just fought a revolution against a powerful central government and were understandably reluctant to create another one.

A NEW CONSTITUTION TAKES ROOT

Winning independence and governing an independent nation turned out to be two different things.

Congress depended upon the states for money and lacked sufficient power to regulate commerce. There was no independent executive branch headed by a President and no national judiciary comparable to the federal court system that would come later.

Imagine trying to operate the United States today if Congress made decisions affecting the entire country but then depended on Illinois and every other state to provide the money and cooperation necessary to carry them out.

Americans, including George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin, increasingly recognized that the system was not working. A letter from Franklin in The Promise of Liberty reflects concerns about the problems facing the nation under the Articles.

Washington was worried, too.

After leading the Continental Army to victory, Washington had returned to Mount Vernon and was reluctant to return to public life. But in 1787, he agreed to attend a convention in Philadelphia. His presence gave the gathering enormous credibility, and the delegates unanimously chose him to preside.

They had come to revise the Articles of Confederation. They soon decided that wasn’t enough.

WE THE PEOPLE: THE GREAT COMPROMISE

Instead, they began creating a fundamentally different system of government.

Its authority would ultimately come from “We the People.” Power would be divided between the federal government and the states – the system we call federalism – and federal power would be divided again among legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

But the delegates disagreed fiercely about what the new government should look like. One of their greatest disputes concerned representation. Large states wanted representation based on population. Small states feared that would leave them permanently dominated by their larger neighbors.

The solution became known as the Great – or Connecticut – Compromise.

The House of Representatives would represent the people according to population. In the Senate, the states would be represented equally.

It is so familiar today that it can be easy to miss its ingenuity: Congress incorporated both ideas.

THE SUN RISES

The Constitution became an extraordinary balancing act – national power and state power, large states and small states, and legislative, executive, and judicial authority. It also included a way for future generations to amend the document rather than discard it and begin again.

For nearly four months during the hot, sunny Philadelphia summer of 1787, the delegates debated and compromised behind the closed doors and windows of Independence Hall, drafting the U.S. Constitution during the Constitutional Convention from May 14 to September 17, 1787.

At the front of the room was George Washington, seated on a chair with a sun carved into its back. Benjamin Franklin, then 81, observed the chair and had throughout the Convention wondered whether the carved sun was rising or setting.

On September 17, 1787, the delegates gathered for one last time.

There was still no complete agreement. Three delegates present refused to sign, and Franklin himself acknowledged he did not approve of parts of the Constitution.

But 39 delegates put their names to the document.

As the signing concluded, Franklin looked again at the sun on Washington’s chair. Now, he said, he knew. The sun was rising, signaling a bright future for the new republic.

THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

The Constitution survived a fierce ratification debate, one which helped produce the Bill of Rights. But the delegates had done far more than repair the Articles. They had created a new framework for constitutional government that brought together popular sovereignty, federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, representative government, and a means of amendment.

The Declaration of Independence announced a new nation. The Articles of Confederation tried to hold it together. The United States Constitution created a new way to govern America.

Preamble to the United States Constitution:

“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.”

Today, the United States Constitution remains the world’s oldest written national constitution still in effect.

VISIT THE 1787 CONSTITUTION IN THE PROMISE OF LIBERTY

This Constitution Day (and Constitution Week), visit The Promise of Liberty and discover the documents that tell the story of Americans learning that creating a nation was only the beginning; we still had to figure out how to make it work.

See the U.S. Constitution’s first public printing and the first newspaper printing: Dunlap & Claypoole’s The Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser, September 19, 1787.

The Promise of Liberty is sponsored by the Gilmore Foundation, Ashley and Josh Bellamy, McKinnon Family Foundation, America 250 Donors, Visionary Society, Friends of History.