Confederation Congress | A vital step towards ratifying the Constitution

Confederation Congress

The United States In Congress Assembled, Friday, September 28, 1787. Present—New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina, and Georgia, and from Maryland Mr. Ross.

Congress having received the Report of the Convention lately assembled in Philadelphia, Resolved Unanimously, That the said Report, with the Resolutions and Letter accompanying the same, be transmitted to the several Legislatures, in order to be submitted to a Convention of Delegates, chosen in each State by the People thereof, in Conformity to the Resolves of the Convention, made and provided in that Case. Charles Thomson, Secretary. 

Philadelphia: Printed by Dunlap & Claypoole, (1787)

Letterpress handbill (296 x 206 mm) on a half-sheet of laid paper (unwatermarked); lightly browned, very small hole in upper margin, tipped at head to a mat board.

The document that took the United States Constitution from proposal to governing charter: the resolution of Congress, upon receipt of the Official Edition of the Constitution to submit the same to the state legislatures for ratification.

When the Constitutional Convention adopted its final text on 17 September 1787 and ordered 500 copies to be printed by John Dunlap and David Claypoole (the printers of the present handbill), the delegates had appended to the Constitution the two resolutions of the Convention adopted on 17 September recommending the procedures for ratification and for the establishment of government under the Constitution by the Confederation Congress, as well as presiding officer George Washington’s influential cover letter of the same date to Arthur St. Clair, president of Congress, describing the document as “that Constitution which has appeared to us the most advisable.”

The first of the resolutions declared “That the preceding Constitution be laid before the United States in Congress assembled, and that it is the opinion of this Convention, that it should afterwards be submitted to a Convention of Delegates, chosen in each State by the People thereof, under the recommendations of its Legislature, for their assent and ratification; and that each Convention assenting to, and ratifying the same, should give Notice thereof to the United States in Congress assembled.”

Additionally, Article VII of the Constitution itself outlined a four-step process for ratifying the proposed charter: transmittal of the text to Congress; transmittal of the Constitution by Congress to the state legislatures; election of delegates to a special ratification convention in each state; and, finally, ratification of the proposed Constitution by three-quarters (or nine) of the state conventions.

But as Richard B. Bernstein writes, “The ratification process was studded with potential stumbling blocks, however. First, the Confederation Congress might refuse to send the Constitution to the states, on the ground that the Convention had violated its limited mandate to propose amendments to the Articles. Second, Congress might try to rewrite the Constitution or to submit it to a second general convention. Third, the states might accept the argument that the Convention had violated its mandate and refuse to hold elections for the ratifying conventions. Fourth, enough state conventions might reject the Constitution to prevent it from going into effect. Fifth, a negative vote by the legislatures or ratifying conventions of any or all of four key states—Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—might cripple efforts to put the Constitution into effect even if the required nine states did ratify it. These possibilities shaped the struggle for ratification that dominated American politics in late 1787 and 1788” (p. 201).

The first step in the ratification process was fulfilled when copies of the Official Edition of the Constitution were dispatched by the Convention to Congress and the Constitution was read to Congress on 20 September 1787 and assigned for consideration on 26 September. (Ten members of Congress attending during this period had also been delegates to the Constitutional Convention.) The second step was accomplished on 28 September when Congress adopted the resolution of the Convention for submitting the Constitution to the states in virtually the same language, as memorialized in the present handbill.

To accompany the present resolution, Congress also had printed a further one hundred copies of Constitution by John McLean of New York, although at least some state delegations to the Constitutional Convention—notably New Jersey’s—had proactively submitted copies of the Convention’s Official Edition to their legislators; moreover, the Constitution, with the Convention's two resolutions and Washington’s cover letter, had been widely reprinted in newspapers, beginning with Dunlap and Claypoole’s own Pennsylvania Packet on 19 September.

The struggle for ratification, to use Bernstein’s words, culminated on 21 June 1788, with New Hampshire provided the necessary ninth assent, with Virginia and New York rapidly following. The Constitution drafted in secrecy during the “Miracle in Philadelphia” was a reality.

Vital as the writing of the Constitution was, had Congress not acted on the Convention’s recommendation that the text be sent to the states for approval, it would have remained as an academic exercise in modeling a democratic government on paper. This resolve is the direct link between the Constitution as a proposed document and the Constitution as a daily presence in our lives as Americans.

Rare: we find only three copies in the auction records, none for more than two decades: Sotheby’s New York, 18 April 1988, lot 42 (bound with a year’s run of Dunlap and Claypoole’s Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser, including the Constitution issue of 19 September 1787); Sotheby’s New York, 5 June 2001, lot 295; Christie’s New York, 9 June 2004, lot 368. ESTC cites copies in just four institutions: Oxford University All Souls College Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Connecticut State Library, and the Library of Congress.

REFERENCES

ESTC W36310; Evans 20790; cf. Richard B. Bernstein, Are We to Be a Nation?: The Making of the Constitution (Cambridge, 1987); The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Volume I: Constitutional Documents and Records, 1776–1787, ed. Merril Jensen (Madison, 1976)