Constitution of the United States of America, the fundamental law of theU.S.federal system ofgovernment and a landmark document of the Western world. The oldest written nationalconstitution in use, the Constitution defines the principal organs of government and their jurisdictions and the basic rights of citizens. (For a list ofamendments to the U.S. Constitution,see below.)

Click here for the text of theConstitution of the United States of America.

Constitutional Convention

The Constitution was written during the summer of 1787 inPhiladelphia,Pennsylvania, by 55 delegates to aConstitutional Convention that was called ostensibly toamend theArticles of Confederation (1781–89), thecountry’s first written constitution. The Constitution was the product of political compromise after long and often rancorous debates over issues such asstates’ rights,representation, andslavery. Delegates from small and large states disagreed over whether the number of representatives in the new federallegislature should be the same for each state—as was the case under the Articles of Confederation—or different depending on a state’s population (seeNew Jersey Plan andVirginia Plan). 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 theconvention if their demands to keep slavery and theslave 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. TheGreat Compromise, as it came to be known, created abicameral legislature with aSenate, in which all states would be equally represented, and aHouse of Representatives, in which representation would be apportioned on the basis of a state’s free population plus three-fifths of its enslaved population. (The inclusion of the enslaved population was known separately as thethree-fifths compromise.) A further compromise on slavery prohibitedCongress from banning the importation of enslaved people until 1808 (Article I, Section 9). After all the disagreements were bridged, the new Constitution was signed by 39delegates on September 17, 1787, and it was submitted for ratification to the 13 states on September 28.

In 1787–88, in an effort to persuadeNew York to ratify the Constitution,Alexander Hamilton,John Jay, andJames 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 asThe 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 wascontingent on the promised addition of aBill 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 prohibitedmidterm changes in compensation for members of Congress, was ratified in 1992 as theTwenty-seventh Amendment. The last one, concerning the ratio of citizens per member of the House of Representatives, has never been adopted.)

The authors of the Constitution were heavily influenced by the country’s experience under the Articles of Confederation, which had attempted to retain as much independence andsovereignty for the states as possible and to assign to the central government only those nationally important functions that the states could not handle individually. But the events of the years 1781 to 1787, including the national government’s inability to act duringShays’s Rebellion (1786–87) inMassachusetts, showed that the Articles were unworkable because they deprived the national government of many essential powers, including directtaxation and the ability to regulateinterstate commerce. It was hoped that the new Constitution would remedy this problem.

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U.S. History Highlights: Part One

The framers of the Constitution were especially concerned with limiting the power of government and securing the liberty of citizens. Thedoctrine of legislative,executive, and judicialseparation of powers, thechecks and balances of each branch against the others, and the explicit guarantees ofindividual liberty were all designed to strike a balance between authority and liberty—the central purpose of Americanconstitutional law.