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TheDaily Constitution

Plain-language reading and reference for the Constitution of the United States. Independent, and not affiliated with any government body.

The record

A Timeline of the Constitution, 1787 to Today

The Constitution took four months to write, three years to ratify, and has been formally changed twenty-seven times in the two centuries since. This page sets the major dates out in order, with enough context to see how one event led to the next.

Two patterns are worth watching as you read. Amendments cluster, arriving in bursts after wars and reform movements with long quiet stretches in between. And the document’s silences mattered as much as its text: the original Constitution left voter qualifications entirely to the states, barred Congress from prohibiting the importation of enslaved people before 1808, and counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation while denying them any part in the government so apportioned.

A long shelf of identical unlabeled archive boxes receding down a dim storage aisle
Two and a quarter centuries of the record, from the Philadelphia signing to the last ratification in 1992.

1787: The Convention

  • May 25, 1787 — Delegates reach a quorum in Philadelphia. The gathering had been called to revise the Articles of Confederation. It produced a new frame of government instead.
  • September 17, 1787 — The completed text is signed by thirty-nine delegates. Not everyone present signed, and the absence of a bill of rights became the leading objection.
  • September 28, 1787 — The Congress of the Confederation transmits the document to the states, to be considered by specially elected conventions rather than by sitting legislatures.

1787 to 1790: Ratification

Article VII set the threshold: ratification by conventions in nine states would establish the Constitution among the states so ratifying. The public argument that followed produced the essays now known as The Federalist, published in New York newspapers under the name Publius between October 1787 and August 1788, along with an equally substantial body of Anti-Federalist writing.

  • December 7, 1787 — Delaware ratifies first, followed within weeks by Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut.
  • February 6, 1788 — Massachusetts ratifies while formally recommending amendments, a compromise several later states copied.
  • June 21, 1788 — New Hampshire becomes the ninth state, meeting the Article VII threshold. Virginia and New York follow within weeks.
  • November 21, 1789 — North Carolina ratifies, after a bill of rights had been proposed by the new Congress.
  • May 29, 1790 — Rhode Island ratifies last, completing the original thirteen.

1789 to 1791: The Government Begins

  • March 4, 1789 — The date set for the new government to begin. The First Congress reached a working quorum in both chambers over the following weeks.
  • April 30, 1789 — The first President is inaugurated in New York, then the seat of government.
  • September 24, 1789 — The Judiciary Act of 1789 creates the federal court system below the Supreme Court, which the Constitution had deliberately left to Congress.
  • September 25, 1789 — Congress proposes twelve amendments to the states. Ten are ratified promptly, one is never adopted, and one waits two centuries.
  • February 1790 — The Supreme Court sits for the first time.
  • December 15, 1791 — The first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, are ratified.

The Early Republic

  • 1795 — The Eleventh Amendment is ratified, limiting federal jurisdiction over certain suits brought against a state.
  • 1803 — Marbury v. Madison establishes in practice that a court may decline to apply a statute it finds inconsistent with the Constitution.
  • 1804 — The Twelfth Amendment gives electors separate ballots for President and Vice President, after the election of 1800 exposed a defect in the original method.
  • January 1, 1808 — The earliest date on which Article I, Section 9 permitted Congress to prohibit the importation of enslaved people. A statute doing so took effect that day.
  • 1819 and 1824 — McCulloch v. Maryland and Gibbons v. Ogden give the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Commerce Clause their first broad constructions.

1865 to 1870: The Reconstruction Amendments

Three amendments ratified within five years of the Civil War changed the document more than any set since 1791, and each gave Congress express power to enforce it by legislation.

  • December 6, 1865 — The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime.
  • July 9, 1868 — The Fourteenth Amendment establishes birthright and national citizenship and bars states from denying due process of law or the equal protection of the laws.
  • February 3, 1870 — The Fifteenth Amendment forbids denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

1913 to 1920: Taxation, the Senate, and the Franchise

  • February 3, 1913 — The Sixteenth Amendment permits a federal income tax without apportionment among the states.
  • April 8, 1913 — The Seventeenth Amendment provides for the direct popular election of senators, who had until then been chosen by state legislatures.
  • January 16, 1919 — The Eighteenth Amendment prohibits the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors.
  • August 18, 1920 — The Nineteenth Amendment forbids denying the vote on account of sex.

The 1913 pair is easy to underrate. Together they altered how the federal government raises money and removed state legislatures from the selection of senators, a change the Senate documents in its origins and foundations collection.

1933 to 1971: Terms, Repeal, and the Vote

  • January 23, 1933 — The Twentieth Amendment moves the start of congressional terms to January 3 and the presidential term to January 20, shortening the long gap between election and inauguration.
  • December 5, 1933 — The Twenty-First Amendment repeals the Eighteenth. It is the only amendment ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures, and the only one to undo another.
  • February 27, 1951 — The Twenty-Second Amendment limits a President to two elected terms.
  • March 29, 1961 — The Twenty-Third Amendment gives the District of Columbia electors in presidential elections.
  • January 23, 1964 — The Twenty-Fourth Amendment abolishes poll taxes in federal elections.
  • February 10, 1967 — The Twenty-Fifth Amendment sets out presidential succession, the filling of a vice presidential vacancy, and procedures for presidential disability.
  • July 1, 1971 — The Twenty-Sixth Amendment lowers the voting age to eighteen.

1992: The Longest Wait

On May 7, 1992, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment was ratified. It provides that a change in the compensation of members of Congress cannot take effect until an intervening election of the House. It had been proposed in September 1789 as one of the original twelve and sat unratified for more than two hundred years before enough states acted on it.

What the Sequence Shows

Congress has sent thirty-three amendments to the states and twenty-seven have been ratified. Many thousands more have been introduced and gone no further. The bar is deliberately high, as our page on the amendments explains: two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or a convention called by two-thirds of the states, and then ratification by three-quarters of the states.

The other half of the story is not on this list. A great deal changed through practice and through decisions construing clauses that were never rewritten, which is why a timeline of amendments alone understates the distance traveled. The full text and the ratification records are published by the National Archives, whose milestone documents collection reproduces many of the acts named above. The Constitution Annotated tracks how each clause has been read since. For the wider setting, see our page on the founding documents and the overview of the Constitution itself.