Our Constitution: the people did not speak
The U. S. Constitution is the primary legal and political document in
our history, our heritage, our political organization and our culture.
It was written largely by wealthy white men (about two-thirds of them
were lawyers), and about 4% of the population voted for the delegates who
ratified it.
“We the People…” is a bit of an exaggeration.
How we got the Constitution is not a well-known story.
I guess some folks may imagine that it was originally written on tablets
by those mythical great men, The Founding Fathers.
To make a very long story short, the Constitution is a grotesquely politicized
document that was conceived more or less on the sly by colonial delegates whose
mandate merely was to fix up the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union
(ratified 1781).
The Articles of Confederation permitted little centralized power in the
brand new republic, and they proved close to useless in the initial efforts to
effectively govern the independent colonies, defend their sovereignty and
manage their internal trade and civil affairs.
On February 21, 1787, the
Congress convened state delegates in Philadelphia for the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of
Confederation" and to “render the federal constitution adequate to
the exigencies of government and the
preservation of the Union."
Generally, the
delegates were the same elite group of men—wealthy and politically connected—who
dominated the state legislatures after the Revolutionary War.
They went hog
wild and cooked up the Constitution with centralized “federal” powers that were
feared by many political and commercial interests. They did back room
bargaining and political horse trading in Philadelphia and among the states to
ultimately engineer ratification of the Constitution by state legislatures or
specially convened assemblies in 11 states in late 1788. North Carolina and
Rhode Island finally joined the crowd in 1790.
By the way,
there was no popular vote on the Constitution. In fact, only about 150,000
white men voted for the delegates to state conventions that ratified the
document. In 1787, the total white population of the 13 former colonies was
about 3,671,000.
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