The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — The U.S. Constitution Is Signed

On this day in 1787

On September 17, 1787, 39 delegates signed the Constitution — three refused, one was too frail to speak, and the closing line was written to make a divided vote look unanimous.

The Off-Key Bard stands inside the Pennsylvania State House after a long, hot summer of argument. The men in the room have disagreed over representation, federal power, slavery, commerce, and the very structure of the new government. What lies on the table is not a document everyone considers perfect.

"But perhaps that is the most important thing to remember about the Constitution. It was never a finished answer. It was an attempt to build a government capable of continuing the argument."

On this day in 1787, delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia for the final time and signed the document that would become the Constitution of the United States. Thirty-nine of the 42 delegates present signed. Three — George Mason of Virginia, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts — refused. Their refusal was itself a form of participation in what the Constitution was trying to create: a system in which disagreement could be expressed without the collapse of the whole enterprise.

The convention had opened four months earlier with considerably narrower intentions. Delegates arrived from twelve states — Rhode Island declined to participate throughout — intending to revise the Articles of Confederation, the governmental framework that had held the states together since the Revolution. By June, the delegates had concluded that revision was insufficient. What they were constructing, through acrimonious debate over a sweltering Philadelphia summer, was an entirely new framework of government.

The Arguments That Made It

The debates inside the Pennsylvania State House were fierce and sometimes nearly fatal to the whole project. Large states and small states clashed bitterly over representation until the Connecticut Compromise produced a bicameral Congress — proportional representation in the House, equal representation in the Senate — that satisfied neither side fully but both sides enough. Delegates fought over the powers of the executive, the reach of federal authority, the regulation of commerce, and the mechanisms for amendment.

When the Committee of Style completed the final text on September 12, Gouverneur Morris — who had done more than any other single person to draft the document's language — made a deliberate political choice in the closing attestation formula. The convention had not been unanimous. But Morris wrote the closing sentence to read that the Constitution was endorsed by "the Unanimous Consent of the States present" rather than by the delegates themselves. It was a clever legal construction: the vote of each state delegation was recorded as the state's consent, not the individual votes within it, making it possible to describe the result as unanimous even though individuals within delegations had dissented. He had also replaced the original preamble's state-by-state list — which would have reflected which states eventually ratified — with three words: "We the People of the United States." The change embedded popular sovereignty as the document's foundational authority.

What the Document Left Out — and Left In

The Constitution signed on September 17 contained no Bill of Rights. The omission had been debated during the convention, and Mason — who had authored Virginia's Declaration of Rights, one of the most influential statements of political liberty in American history — proposed adding one near the end of the convention. The delegates, exhausted after months of work and eager to conclude, voted against it. That decision cost the Constitution support and contributed directly to Mason, Randolph, and Gerry's refusal to sign.

During the ratification struggle that followed, the absence of explicit protections for individual liberties became the central line of attack by opponents. Supporters of the Constitution eventually promised that amendments would be proposed immediately after ratification. That promise held. The first Congress sent twelve amendments to the states in September 1789; ten were ratified by 1791 as the Bill of Rights.

The document also contained profound moral compromises. The Three-Fifths Compromise counted three-fifths of the enslaved population when determining representation and direct taxation, dramatically increasing the political power of slaveholding states while giving enslaved people themselves no political rights whatsoever. A separate provision prevented Congress from prohibiting the international slave trade before 1808. These were not accidental features. They were the price of southern participation, and they encoded the institution of slavery into the nation's foundational law.

Franklin's Rising Sun

Benjamin Franklin, at 81 the oldest delegate at the convention, was too infirm to deliver his final speech himself. He had James Wilson read it for him. In it, Franklin acknowledged that there were parts of the Constitution he did not approve of — then urged the delegates to sign it anyway, reflecting that he had learned through long experience to doubt his own certainty. He had set out many times with opinions he was sure of, he said, only to find he had been wrong. The Constitution, imperfect as it was, was the best this assembly of men was capable of producing. He hoped their opponents would recognize the same.

Franklin reportedly observed, as the signing concluded, the carved sun that decorated the back of George Washington's presiding chair. Throughout the long summer, he said, he had often looked at it and wondered whether it represented a rising or a setting sun. Now, he said, he believed it was a rising sun.

The Long Road to Ratification

September 17 did not make the Constitution the law of the United States. Article VII required ratification by nine of the thirteen states. Delaware ratified first, on December 7, 1787, followed in quick succession by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut. Massachusetts ratified narrowly in February 1788, after supporters promised immediate amendments. New Hampshire became the ninth state on June 21, 1788, satisfying the constitutional threshold. The new federal government began operating on March 4, 1789.

The last holdout — Rhode Island, which had refused to send delegates to the convention in the first place — finally ratified on May 29, 1790, by a vote of 34 to 32, after the new federal government had already been operating for over a year.

The system that emerged from that contentious summer was designed, through Article V, to be amended. Americans have used that mechanism to abolish slavery, establish birthright citizenship and equal protection, extend voting rights to formerly enslaved people, to women, and to those 18 and older, limit presidential terms, change the method of electing senators, and make numerous other changes the delegates of 1787 either could not agree on or could not have anticipated.

"With ink and quill the names were laid,
A government from compromise made.
Not perfect then, nor frozen through —
A framework left for us to renew."

History reminds us: the Constitution was not a finished answer. It was a framework for continuing the argument — built by people who disagreed with each other, containing compromises some of them found repugnant, signed by men three of whom refused to sign it, and closed with language carefully written to make a divided convention look unanimous. That it has endured, been amended, fought over, and reinterpreted for 239 years is not a sign that it was perfect. It is a sign that the argument it was built to sustain has continued.

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