50 Fun Facts About Constitutional Convention

Which delegate said at the Constitution's signing that the sun on the presiding officer's chair was rising, not setting?

Benjamin Franklin, at 81 the oldest signer, admitted he had spent the summer unsure which way that sun was heading.

Which state refused to send any delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and became the last to ratify?

Rhode Island held out until May 1790 and gave way only when the other states threatened heavy tariffs on its trade.

Which state's name is spelled with a letter missing beside its delegates' signatures on the original US Constitution?

Pennsylvania appears as Pensylvania, a spelling that was accepted in the 1700s and is also cast into the Liberty Bell.

Which delegate, unanimously elected to preside over the 1787 Constitutional Convention, barely spoke in its debates?

George Washington broke his silence on the final day, backing a change to smaller House districts of 30,000 residents instead of 40,000.

Which future president missed the 1787 Constitutional Convention because he was serving as American minister to France?

Thomas Jefferson followed the news from Paris and, in a letter to John Adams, described the delegates as an assembly of demigods.

What fraction of a state's enslaved population did the 1787 Constitutional Convention count toward its House seats?

Three-fifths was a ratio borrowed from a failed 1783 amendment, and it gave slaveholding states extra weight in Congress for decades.

What form of government did an elder delegate tell Elizabeth Powel the 1787 Constitutional Convention had produced?

A republic was the reply recorded in delegate James McHenry's journal, with a warning that it would last only if Americans could keep it.

Which document, America's first national charter, was the 1787 Constitutional Convention officially called to revise?

The Articles of Confederation could be changed only if all thirteen states agreed, so the delegates quietly dropped their brief and started afresh.

Which Virginia delegate, later the fourth US president, is remembered as the Father of the Constitution?

James Madison reached the city days ahead of the opening, drafted the plan that set the agenda, and took the fullest notes of the debates.

In which city did delegates meet from May to September 1787 to write the United States Constitution?

Philadelphia's State House, now Independence Hall, lent the delegates the same room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed eleven years earlier.

Which New York delegate told the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the president should be chosen to serve for life?

Alexander Hamilton became New York's only delegate when his two colleagues walked out in July, which left the state unable to cast a vote.

Which Connecticut delegate devised the Great Compromise that ended the 1787 standoff between large and small states?

Roger Sherman is the only person to have signed all four of the country's great founding papers, from the Continental Association to the Constitution.

Which small-state proposal at the 1787 Constitutional Convention wanted a one-house Congress with one vote per state?

The New Jersey Plan was the work of William Paterson, who reminded the delegates they had been sent to repair the existing government, not to found a national one.

Which governor presented the Virginia Plan to the 1787 Constitutional Convention but later refused to sign the result?

Edmund Randolph switched sides again in 1788, voting for ratification so Virginia would not be left out, and went on to become the first US attorney general.

Which peg-legged delegate gave more speeches than anyone at the 1787 Constitutional Convention and wrote the Preamble?

Gouverneur Morris, who lost his left leg after a carriage accident, spoke 173 times and is remembered as the Penman of the Constitution.

Which Virginia planter, master of Gunston Hall, refused to sign the Constitution because it lacked a bill of rights?

George Mason had written most of Virginia's 1776 Declaration of Rights, which later served as a basis for the very amendments he wanted.

Which 1786 uprising of indebted Massachusetts farmers convinced many leaders that the national government was too weak?

Shays' Rebellion had to be put down partly by a privately funded militia, because Congress could not pay for troops of its own.

Which state became the first to ratify the US Constitution, approving it unanimously on December 7, 1787?

Delaware approved it by 30 votes to 0 and still goes by the nickname The First State.

Which phrase, written extra large on the parchment, opens the Preamble of the United States Constitution?

We the People first led into a list of all thirteen states, until the final draft swapped the list for the words of the United States.

Which Massachusetts delegate refused to sign the Constitution in 1787 and later died in office as US vice president?

Elbridge Gerry later gave his name to gerrymandering, after Massachusetts approved new voting districts during his time as governor.

Under the Great Compromise of 1787, which body gives every state the same number of votes regardless of its size?

The Senate nearly lost its equal votes: the deal passed by five states to four on July 16, 1787, with Massachusetts split down the middle.

Which method of picking the president did the 1787 Constitutional Convention adopt after dropping election by Congress?

An electoral college also let the delegates cut the president's term from seven years to four, since he would no longer owe his job to Congress.

Which series of 85 essays, published under the pen name Publius, urged New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution?

The Federalist Papers poured out of New York's presses at a furious pace, with several new essays sometimes appearing in a single week.

Which state became the ninth to ratify the Constitution in June 1788, the number needed to put it into effect?

New Hampshire voted 57 to 47, beating Virginia to the decisive place in the queue by just four days.

Which 1786 meeting on trade, attended by only five states, called for the gathering that wrote the Constitution?

The Annapolis Convention drew just twelve delegates, who gave up on trade and instead urged every state to send representatives to a wider meeting the next May.

What did the 1787 Constitutional Convention forbid Congress ever to tax, a win for the South's cash crops?

Exports remain off limits to federal taxation today. A Deep South delegate had warned of dire consequences if his region's farm produce could be charged on its way out.

Which French thinker's The Spirit of Law gave the Constitution's framers their model for separating government powers?

Montesquieu was cited by America's founders more often than any source except the Bible, and one leading delegate called him the oracle who is always consulted.

Which institution displays the original signed United States Constitution in its Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom?

The National Archives has displayed the parchment since 1952. During World War II it was hidden for safekeeping at Fort Knox.

Which silver object, made by Philip Syng in 1752, was used at the signings of both the Declaration and the Constitution?

An inkstand by Syng is one of only four objects that survive from the Convention itself, alongside the Liberty Bell and the presiding officer's chair.

What were more than half of the 55 delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention trained to be?

Lawyers by training made up more than half of them, and several had been judges, though only about a quarter earned their main living at the bar.

Which crime does the US Constitution define narrowly as levying war on the United States or aiding its enemies?

Treason was defined tightly, and needs two witnesses to the same act, so that rival factions could not stretch the charge to destroy their opponents.

Which kind of test did the 1787 Constitutional Convention ban as a qualification for any federal office?

Religious tests were ruled out on a motion by Charles Pinckney, whose own state had an established Protestant church, and it passed with little opposition.

Which part of Article VI ranks the Constitution and federal treaties above any conflicting state law?

The Supremacy Clause began life in the small states' rival plan, which lost the vote at the Convention but left this idea behind.

Which building displays Howard Chandler Christy's 20-by-30-foot painting of the signing of the Constitution?

The US Capitol has hung it beside a House staircase since 1941. Christy hid the faces of two signers because no portraits of them could be found.

Which law banning slavery beyond the Ohio River did Congress pass while the 1787 Constitutional Convention sat?

The Northwest Ordinance passed on July 13, 1787, and made the Ohio River the dividing line between slave and free states as far west as the Mississippi.

Which method of removing an unfit president did the 1787 Constitutional Convention borrow from the British Parliament?

Impeachment was Parliament's weapon against the king's ministers, and one delegate got the phrase high crimes and misdemeanors added to its grounds.

Which five-man group, chaired by John Rutledge, produced the first full draft of the Constitution in summer 1787?

The Committee of Detail worked while the other delegates took a break from July 26 to August 6, and much of what it wrote reached the final text without debate.

Which Scottish-born delegate first proposed that the United States be led by a single executive, not a committee?

James Wilson won the vote within days, though many delegates feared that handing power to one man would lead straight back to monarchy.

Which 26-year-old delegate, the youngest signer of the Constitution, later became the third Speaker of the House?

Jonathan Dayton grew rich on land in the Ohio country, where a city now bears his name, and was later tied to Aaron Burr's alleged western conspiracy.

Which Convention secretary added his own signature to the Constitution to attest to four late corrections?

William Jackson had won the post by writing to the presiding officer as a hard-up student, and days after the signing he carried the finished text to Congress.

Which assembly clerk was paid $30 to handwrite the final parchment copy of the Constitution in September 1787?

Jacob Shallus's name appears nowhere on the document, and he was not identified as its scribe until an investigation for the 150th anniversary in 1937.

Which inventor showed 1787 Constitutional Convention delegates a working steamboat, twenty years before Robert Fulton?

John Fitch ran his boat Perseverance on the river beside the city on August 22, 1787, but it was Fulton who later made steam travel pay.

Which Maryland delegate attacked the Virginia Plan in a marathon speech and then walked out of the 1787 Convention?

Luther Martin, his state's attorney general for a record 28 years in a row, quit in September because he thought the draft violated states' rights.

Which New York delegate left the 1787 Constitutional Convention in July and vanished in 1829 while posting a letter?

John Lansing Jr. walked out with a fellow delegate after six weeks, and the two explained themselves in a joint letter to their state's governor.

Which printer, famous for the first broadsides of the Declaration, also printed the Constitution for its framers?

John Dunlap and his partner David Claypoole then gave the public its first look at the text in their own newspaper.

Which river did Virginia and Maryland agree to share at 1785's Mount Vernon Conference, a step toward the Constitution?

The Potomac deal went so smoothly that Virginia invited every state to a wider meeting on trade the following year.

Which state, the twelfth to ratify, joined the Union only in November 1789, after the new government had begun work?

North Carolina's first convention voted 184 to 84 neither to ratify nor to reject, holding out in the hope of a bill of rights.

Which presidential power did the framers of the Constitution call a revisionary power and refuse to make absolute?

The veto was modelled on the only two state versions then in existence, in Massachusetts and New York.

Which New York diplomat wrote five of the 85 essays defending the Constitution and became the first Chief Justice?

John Jay wrote four of the first twenty essays but added only one more to the rest of the series.

Which article of the US Constitution, the last of the original text, laid out how the document would be ratified?

The seventh and final article needed only nine states to say yes, sidestepping the old rule that every state had to agree to any change.