To recap these events:

Working from May 25, when a quorum was established, until September 17, 1787, when the convention voted to endorse the final form of the Constitution, the delegates gathered in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House were actually obligated only to revise or amend the Articles of Confederation. Under those Articles, however, the government was plagued by weaknesses, such as its inability to raise revenues to pay its foreign debts or maintain an army. From the outset, most the convention’s organizers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton chief among them, knew that splints and bandages wouldn’t do the trick for the broken Articles.

The government was broke –literally and figuratively– and they were going to fix it by inventing an entirely new one. James Madison had been studying more than 200 books on constitutions and republican history sent to him by Thomas Jefferson in preparation for the convention. The moving force behind the convention, Madison came prepared with the outline of a new Constitution.

A reluctant George Washington, whose name was placed at the head of list of Virginia’s delegates without his knowledge, was unquestionably spurred by the events in Massachusetts (Shay’s Rebellion, a violent protest by Massachusetts farmers). Elected president of the convention, he wrote from Philadelphia in June to his close wartime confidant and ally, the Marquis de Lafayette:

I could not resist the call to a convention of the States which is to determine whether we are to have a government of respectability under which life, liberty, and property will be secured to us, or are to submit to one which may be the result of chance or the moment, springing perhaps from anarchy and Confusion, and dictated perhaps by some aspiring demagogue.

On September 17, Washington signed the parchment copy first, as President of the convention. He was followed by the remaining delegates from the twelve states that sent delegates in geographical order, from north to south, beginning with New Hampshire. (Rhode Island was the only state that did not send a delegation.) When the last of the signatures was added –that of Abraham Baldwin of Georgia– Benjamin Franklin gazed at Washington’s chair, on which was painted a bright yellow sun. He then spoke, as James Madison recorded it:

I have, said he, often in the course of a session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell if it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.

In another perhaps more apocryphal tale, Franklin left the building and was confronted by a lady who asked, “Well Doctor, do we have a monarchy or a republic?” The witty sage of Philadelphia replied,

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

This post is excerpted from America’s Hidden History, which offers fuller account of the Convention and the events that led to it.  You can also read more about the Constitutional Convention and the Constitution in Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition.

For more about the Constitution, visit these sites:
The National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia:

James Madison’s Montpelier:

Charters of Freedom at the National Archives

In 1941, on the 150th anniversary of the ratification, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that December 15th would be Bill of Rights Day.

Now it may not be circled red on your calendar, but few events in American history are more important –or the source of more controversy — than the ratification of the Bill of Rights. These Ten Amendments (not Commandments!) are at the heart of the most precious rights guaranteed by the Constitution, including the First Amendment’s guarantees of speech, religion, the press, peaceable assembly and the right to petition. They are also at the heart of some of our most pressing controversies, including the right to bear arms, the rights of the accused under the American system of justice, and the power of the states versus the federal government.

Here is the Preamble to the Bill of Rights:

Congress of the United States
begun and held at the City of New-York, on
Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine.

THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

The full text and history of the Bill of Rights can be found the site of the National Archives.

In Philadelphia, they celebrate Bill of Rights Day at the Constitution Center and you can find some good resources there.

I hope you’ll take some time to read these precious Amendments today. It doesn’t take long and it is well worth the effort.

Happy Bill of Rights Day!

[The news story about the Tea Party Convention: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/politics/26teaparty.html?src=tptw]

It began as a populist uprising against –surprise, surprise—the bankers and lawyers who were making the rules back in Boston, men derided as “thieves, knaves and robbers” by the average people of Massachusetts. During the first economic crisis in a nation then ruled by the Articles of Confederation, sweeping foreclosures threatened farms and businesses, unfair tax systems were crushing American families, and there was no credit to be had. Sound familiar? Plus ça change…

Fighting back, hundreds of these average men came together under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays and came to be called Shays’s Army. The politicians called them “insurgents.”

Many of the men, like Shays, were veterans of the Revolution and had fought in every battle from Bunker Hill to Yorktown. Some had suffered through the winter at Valley Forge. Now some of them had been told they couldn’t vote. So they began their second American Revolution in the winter of 1786 and the early winter of 1778. On January 25th, after a raging storm left four feet foot of fresh snow in the Berkshire hills, more than a thousand of these men – farmers, tradesmen, shopkeepers – marched on the federal arsenal in Springfield, hoping to take the artillery and muskets stored inside, and continue on to Boston to overthrow the state government.

Apparently, they believed these words from the Declaration of Independence:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it . . .”

Lightly armed and poorly organized, the “Shaysites” were repulsed by a small militia army, bought and paid for by the power brokers of Massachusetts. Among those in power was patriot icon Samuel Adams, who said of the rebellious farmers,

“In monarchies, the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death..”

Indeed a few of the rebels did die that day in Springfield. Several volleys of grapeshot killed a handful of men; the others scattered in panic. More federal troops eventually rounded them up. Daniel Shays, an outlaw, made his way to the “Republic of Vermont,” not yet a state. (Eventually pardoned, he lived out the rest of his life as a struggling farmer in upstate New York.)

The “horrid and unnatural Rebellion and War,” as the Massachusetts legislature called the uprising, ended with a few small bangs and a whimper. And Americans killing each other.
Thomas Jefferson, hearing the news in Paris, wrote back to America,

“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

George Washington was not so philosophical. “Are your people mad?” an incredulous Washington wrote to one of his former aides in New England. The prospect of more Shays Rebellions provided the urgency for Washington, James Madison, and other “Framers” to collect in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution. The angry “teabaggers” of western Massachusetts had pressed America to become “a more perfect Union.”

“Shays’s Rebellion” was far from the first time populist anger boiled over violently in America. There had been numerous uprisings throughout colonial America in which the poor and powerless struck out at the earliest generation of American “Elites.” And populist anger has remained a constant throughout our history. It is anger born of economic dislocation, but is often fueled by darker streaks — race and religion have frequently stoked the coals of populist rage. And these tales are usually untold in our schoolbooks. They don’t fit the tidy picture of American History.

In the past, populist movements like the “Tea baggers” have usually flamed hot before burning out –co-opted or absorbed by the major parties. Whether the fractious and increasingly fractured “Tea Party” is one more of these flameouts remains to be seen. But the history of populist anger is a real one. And as the Senate race results in Massachusetts –scene of Shays’s Rebellion– recently proved, people are mad. The bloodletting may be symbolic this time. But Jefferson’s “Tree of Liberty” may be refreshed with more political bloodshed before too long.

You can read more about Shays’s Rebellion and its impact in America’s Hidden History