What the Constitution Means to Me

The United States Constitution is arguably the most significant document to be produced in American history—not to be confused with the Declaration of Independence, which was signed on July 4th, 1776, effectively founding the country as a separate entity from England during the Revolutionary War, although the creators of the two texts share an overlapping cast of characters. Congress’s first version of a constitution was the short-lived Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. Ratified in 1789 by all 13 original colonies, the Articles protected the sovereignty of individual states to govern themselves independently while forming a Perpetual Union, which was a deliberately minimal central government in which the states were more like individual countries, but they were also part of the federation and not permitted to secede. After the Revolution, however, it was apparent that to survive as a united country, the United States needed a document that established a more powerful central government. Therefore, in the summer of 1787, a Constitutional Convention made up of 55 men gathered in the increasingly sweltering (now-called) Independence Hall with the intention of revising the Articles of Confederation. These delegates fought unrelentingly over issues that affected different states in different ways, such as slavery and proportionate representation in legislature.