The Constitution was written during the summer of 1787 in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by 55 delegates to a Constitutional Convention

 that was called ostensibly to amend the Articles of Confederation 

(1781–89), the country’s first written constitution. The Constitution

was the product of political compromise after long and often

rancorous debates over issues such as states’ rights, representation,

and slavery. Delegates from small and large states disagreed over

whether the number of representatives in the new federal legislature 

should be the same for each state—as was the case under the Articles

of Confederation—or different depending on a state’s population.

In addition, some delegates from Northern states sought to abolish

slavery or, failing that, to make representation dependent on the size

of a state’s free population. At the same time, some Southern

delegates threatened to abandon the convention if their demands

to keep slavery and the slave trade legal and to count slaves for representation purposes were not met. Eventually the framers resolved their disputes by adopting a proposal put forward by theConnecticut delegation. The Great Compromise, as it came to be known, created a bicameral legislature with a Senate, in which all states would be equally represented, and a House of Representatives, in which representation would be apportioned on the basis of a state’s free population plus three-fifths of its slave population. (The inclusion of the slave population was known separately as the three-fifths compromise.) A further compromise on slavery prohibited Congress from banning the importation of slaves until 1808 (Article I, Section 9). After all the disagreements were bridged, the new Constitution was submitted for ratification to the 13 states on September 28, 1787. In 1787–88, in an effort to persuade New York to ratify the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison published a series of essays on the Constitution and republican government in New York newspapers. Their work, written under the pseudonym “Publius” and collected and published in book form as The Federalist (1788), became a classic exposition and defense of the Constitution. In June 1788, after the Constitution had been ratified by nine states (as required by Article VII), Congress set March 4, 1789, as the date for the new government to commence proceedings (the first elections under the Constitution were held late in 1788). Because ratification in many states was contingent on the promised addition of a Bill of Rights, Congress proposed 12 amendments in September 1789; 10 were ratified by the states, and their adoption was certified on December 15, 1791. (One of the original 12 proposed amendments, which prohibited midterm changes in compensation for members of Congress, was ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. The last one, concerning the ratio of citizens per member of the House of Representatives, has never been adopted.)

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Citation

• Contributor:The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

• Article Title:Constitution of the United States of America

• Website Name: Encyclopædia Britannica

• Publisher: Encyclopædia Britannica, inc.

• Date Published:January 29, 2019

• URL:https://www.britannica.com/topic/Constitution-of-the-United-States-of-America

• Access Date:June 04, 2019