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.
Vox populi had nothing to do with it, just saying.
“We the People…” is a bit of an exaggeration.
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.
Copyright ©
Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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