The Founding Documents and How They Fit Together

People often speak of "the founding documents" as though they were one thing. They are not. They were written across fifteen years, for different purposes, by overlapping but distinct groups, and two of them were arguments against each other. Knowing what each one was for makes all of them easier to read.

The Declaration of Independence, 1776

The Declaration is not a plan of government. It is a public justification for ending one. Adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, two days after the vote for independence itself, it states a theory of legitimate authority in its opening paragraphs and then spends most of its length listing specific grievances against the Crown.

It has no operative force as a governing charter. It creates no offices and confers no rights you could sue on. Its influence is of a different kind. The assertion that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed set a standard against which the later structure could be measured, and its language about equality was invoked again and again by Americans whom the founding generation's own practice excluded. The National Archives publishes the transcript along with images of the engrossed copy.

The Articles of Confederation, 1777 and 1781

The first American constitution is the one almost nobody remembers. Agreed to by Congress in November 1777 and finally in force in March 1781, once the last state ratified, the Articles created a "league of friendship" among thirteen states that each retained sovereignty and independence.

Its weaknesses are worth knowing because the Constitution is largely a response to them. There was a single-chamber Congress in which each state had one vote regardless of population. There was no executive and no national judiciary. Congress could request money from the states but could not tax, and it could not regulate commerce between them. Most decisive of all, amendment required the unanimous consent of all thirteen states, so repair was effectively impossible. By the mid-1780s the government could not reliably pay its debts.

The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 1787

A small meeting at Annapolis in 1786 on commercial disputes ended by calling for a broader convention. Delegates gathered in Philadelphia from May to September 1787, formally to revise the Articles. They wrote a new charter instead. Twelve states sent delegations, Rhode Island sent none, and the sessions were held in secret so that positions could change without public embarrassment.

The convention's central problem was representation. Larger states favored a legislature apportioned by population; smaller states insisted on equality among states. The settlement was the two-chamber Congress that appears in Article I. Slavery produced the other major bargains: enslaved people were counted as three-fifths of a person for apportionment, Congress was barred from prohibiting the importation of enslaved people until 1808, and a clause required the return of those who escaped across state lines. Thirty-nine of the fifty-five delegates signed on September 17, 1787. Several who were present refused.

Because the proceedings were closed, what was said in the room comes down to us mainly through delegates' private notes, the fullest of which were James Madison's. They were not published until 1840, four years after his death, so the convention's own record reached the public more than half a century after the document it produced was already governing the country. That gap is worth remembering whenever somebody claims to know exactly what the framers intended.

The Federalist and the Anti-Federalist writings, 1787-1788

Publication of the proposed Constitution set off a public argument conducted largely in newspapers and pamphlets, most of it pseudonymous.

The best-known contributions are the eighty-five essays published as The Federalist under the name "Publius," written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay to urge ratification in New York. They are advocacy, written to win a vote, and they should be read as such. They are also the fullest contemporary explanation of what the document was meant to do, and courts still cite them. The Library of Congress maintains a research guide to the Federalist Papers with the full texts.

Ranged against them were the writers now grouped as Anti-Federalists, publishing as "Brutus," "Cato," "the Federal Farmer" and "Centinel." Their objections were that the new government would be too distant and too powerful, that it lacked a bill of rights, and that a republic could not hold together across so large a territory. They lost the vote and won an important concession. Reading them is also the fastest cure for the impression that the Constitution was universally admired at birth.

Ratification, 1787 to 1790

Ratification proceeded state by state through specially elected conventions rather than legislatures. Delaware went first in December 1787. The ninth state, New Hampshire, ratified in June 1788, which under Article VII was enough to establish the Constitution among the states that had ratified it, though the outcome still looked uncertain until Virginia and New York followed within weeks. The new government began operating in the spring of 1789. North Carolina ratified later that year, and Rhode Island in 1790, after the new government was already running.

The Bill of Rights, 1791

Several state conventions ratified while formally recommending amendments, and in more than one of them the promise of a bill of rights was the price of ratification. The first Congress proposed twelve articles in September 1789. Ten were ratified by December 1791 and became the Bill of Rights. One of the two left over eventually became the Twenty-Seventh Amendment in 1992, which is covered along with the rest of the amendments.

How to hold them together

A rough division of labor makes the set easier to keep straight. The Declaration says why a people may govern themselves. The Articles of Confederation were the first attempt, and they demonstrated what a national government cannot do without. The Constitution is the working machine, the subject of our overview of the Preamble and seven Articles. The Federalist and Anti-Federalist writings are the argument over whether to install that machine. The Bill of Rights is the settlement that closed the argument.

All of them are short enough to read in the original, which is the whole premise of this site. Where to find reliable texts, including the National Archives' milestone documents collection, is listed on our primary sources page.