Alexander Hamilton America’s unique electoral college system was designed to be both democratic and anti-democratic. From the very beginning, it has often been manipulated. As a staunch advocate of taking the initiative in both military and political matters, Alexander Hamilton actively intrigued with the electoral college. In the first presidential election in 1789, Hamilton lobbied with correspondents throughout the country to get electors to cast one of their votes for someone other than John Adams, arguing that there was a danger of a tie vote between Adams and George Washington in which c ..read more

This portrait of Thomas Jefferson was painted by John Trumbull in 1788. Jefferson is seen as he would have looked in 1776 with unpowdered reddish hair and wearing clothes then fashionable. White House Collection/White House Historical Association. In 1769, at the age of twenty-six, Thomas Jefferson was elected to the colonial Virginia legislature. He proposed but failed to get a bill passed to make it easier for owners to emancipate their slaves. Allied with other young, radical legislators, Jefferson opposed Britain’s new imperial policy that attempted to wield greater control over the coloni ..read more

Alert! Alert!An Attempt to De-Certify the Ratification of ConstitutionPennsylvania, 2 January–29 March 1788            During the Revolutionary era, Pennsylvania was arguably the most politically divided state in the Union. This political divisiveness primarily centered around maintaining or replacing the state’s extremely democratic constitution of 1776. Not surprisingly, Pennsylvanians were also divided over the newly proposed federal Constitution in 1787 as Pennsylvania became the first state to call a convention to consider the ratific ..read more

Thirteen-star American Flag, in use from 1777 to 1795. June 14 is Flag Day. On that day in 1777, the Second Continental Congress resolved “that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” We now honor the “Stars and Stripes” that contains fifty stars and thirteen stripes. But, for a brief quarter of a century, America’s flag contained a different number of stars and a different number of stripes. Fifteen-star/fifteen-stripe U.S. Flag (the “Bradley flag”), in use from 1795 ..read more

Side profile of Charles Montesquieu, anonymous artist, 1753–1794. Throughout the debate over the ratification of the Constitution and the drafting and adoption of the Bill of Rights, Americans often referred to political and legal writers and writings. A tabulation of these references in the indexes of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights show the frequency with which these writers were cited. Two writers stand out—Baron de Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws and Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Common Law of England. One reason why these ..read more

Articles of Confederation signature page. The signing of America’s three organic documents of the Founding era have a superficial similarity but differ significantly from each other. The signers of the engrossed manuscripts of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution all placed their signatures grouped together by their state delegations arranged geographically north to south in two columns, starting with New Hampshire in the right-hand column and ending with Georgia in the left-hand column—the order in which all votes were recorded in Congress and i ..read more

First page of the engrossed copy of the U.S. Constitution. On Saturday afternoon, 15 September 1787, near the end of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates approved the final draft of the Constitution and ordered it engrossed on parchment to be ready for signing on Monday morning, 17 September. The Convention selected Jacob Shallus, the thirty-seven-year-old assistant clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, to be the calligrapher. Shallus was probably recommended for the job by Thomas Mifflin, a Pennsylvania Convention delegate who, as Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, had signed many ac ..read more

Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), 1752 Article 7 of the Constitution provides that once nine state conventions ratified the Constitution it would be implemented among the ratifying states. This was controversial because it violated the provisions in Article 13 of the Articles of Confederation that specified that amendments to the Articles needed to be approved by Congress and then unanimously ratified by the state legislatures. Although the legitimacy of such an alteration was highly contested during the public debate over the Constitution, only one state legislature objected t ..read more

The most prolific and profound public debate in American history occurred over ratifying the Constitution in 1787–1790. Much of this debate occurred in the print media—newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets. Thousands of anonymous essays signed with a pseudonym appeared either as a single, stand-alone essay or as part of a series. After their original printing, essays were often reprinted in other newspapers and were sometimes compiled in pamphlet anthologies with other like-minded essays. For a wider distribution, individual essays were occasionally published as a pamphlet; while broadsides ..read more

Fifty-five dollar note, 1779. The Constitutional Convention was called in 1787 to increase the powers of the Confederation Congress and to place restraints on the states. Article I, section 10 of the eventually proposed and ratified Constitution listed a number of powers denied to the states. Some prohibited powers were not controversial, such as the prohibition to enter into treaties or alliances, to grant titles of nobility, and to pass bills of attainder or ex post facto laws. Other prohibited powers were quite controversial, such as the prohibition to emit bills of credit or to make anythi ..read more