It was not until the end of July that New York finally ratified the Constitution. The vote was extremely close: 30 to 27. Like Massachusetts and Virginia, New York demanded a declaration of rights.
The long struggle to give the United States a strong central government was over. It took four months to write a new Constitution. It took 10 months to ratify it.
Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar says adopting the constitution was, in his words, “the most democratic deed in history.”
“For the first time ever in the history of the planet, an entire continent got to vote on how they and their posterity would be governed. And there were lots of exclusions from our perspective, but we wouldn’t exist as a democratic country, as a democratic world, but for that.”
The Continental Congress declared that the Constitution would become effective the first Wednesday in March, 1789. The last two states -- North Carolina and Rhode Island -- did not approve it until many months after that date.
Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, wrote down eight words when he heard that the Constitution had been ratified. "It is done," he said. "We have become a nation."
But before that, the nation’s founders had one more question to answer. How would the Constitution guarantee citizens’ rights? Delegates at the convention had raised the point many times. And several states made protecting citizens’ rights a condition for approving the document. The Bill of Rights will be our story next week.
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2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25
2013-11-25