A few fun facts about the Constitution

Let’s celebrate Constitution Week, September 17-23!  The U.S. Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787. Here are a few facts about the Constitution’s signing.

• Six men signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: George Read, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Morris, George Clymer, and James Wilson.
• Four of the signers of the Constitution were born in Ireland.
• The oldest delegate, at age 81, was Benjamin Franklin who had to be helped to sign his name, and was carried most days to the Pennsylvania State House due to gout. The youngest person to sign the Constitution, Jonathon Dayton of New Jersey, was just 26.
• Of the 42 delegates who attended most of the meetings, 39 actually signed the Constitution. Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts refused to sign due in part to a lack of a bill of rights.
• William Few of Georgia was the only member to represent the yeoman farmer class, which comprised the majority of the population of the country. Nineteen of the members who were chosen to represent their state never attended a meeting.
• George Washington and James Madison were the only presidents who signed the Constitution.
• Vermont ratified the Constitution on January 10, 1791, even though it had not yet become a state.
• Rhode Island was the only state that refused to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention and was the last state to ratify the Constitution (May 29, 1790).
• When Paul Revere learned that Sam Adams and John Hancock were reluctant to offer their support for the Constitution during the ratification fight, he organized the Boston mechanics into a powerful force and worked behind the scenes for the successful approval by the Massachusetts convention.
• 11,000 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed, but only 27 have been approved. The first 10 amendments were ratified together in 1791, and are called collectively “The Bill of Rights”.
• As evidence of its continued flexibility, the Constitution has only been changed seventeen times since 1791!
• Only one Amendment to the Constitution has been repealed—the 18th (Prohibition).
• John Tyler was the first Vice President to assume the responsibilities of the Presidency upon the death of William Henry Harrison in 1841. There was nothing in the Constitution that provided for the vice president to BECOME the president. Article II, Section 6 of the Constitution states that: “In case of the removal of the President from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President…” The Article did not state that the vice president would BECOME the President! Tyler immediately began to refer to himself as the President with no actual Constitutional authority to do so, and every succeeding vice president in the same position did the same. It was not until the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was passed in 1967 that the vice president technically BECAME the president. This amendment legitimatized Tyler’s unconstitutional assumption!
• The last time the Constitution was moved (to return it after preservation treatment to the renovated Rotunda in 2003), it was transported by a convey of guarded trucks. In 1921, however, ”Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam went to the State Department, signed a receipt, placed the Declaration and Constitution on a pile of leather U.S. mail sacks and a cushion in a Model-T Ford truck, returned with them to the Library of Congress, and placed them in a safe in his office.” Since 1952, the Constitution has been on display in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. Currently, all four pages are displayed behind protective glass framed with titanium. To preserve the parchment’s quality, the cases contain argon gas and are kept at 67 degrees Fahrenheit with a relative humidity of 40 percent.
• The four pages of the Constitution are on permanent display at the National Archives. But there is a fifth page. It is the Letter of Transmittal of the newly written Constitution to the Congress that existed under the Articles of Confederation. The letter, which briefly describes the Constitution, is signed by George Washington, president of the Constitutional Convention.
• Benjamin Franklin proposed allowing presidents to be impeached in order to avoid assassinations.
• The formal term “The United States of America” was used for the first time in the Declaration of Independence.
• During an event to celebrate the Constitution’s Sesquicentennial in 1937, Harry F. Wilhelm recited the entire document through the newly added 21st Amendment from memory. He then obtained a job in the Sesquicentennial mailroom.

Thank you to the Northeast State Office of Student Life for sponsoring this week’s observance.  You can read a transcription of the Constitution at the link below provided by the United States National Archives:  https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript.