The United States Constitution
We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility...
The first publication of the United States Constitution, in The Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser of 19 September 1787 (no. 2690), the newspaper printed by John Dunlap (who had printed the first edition of the Declaration of Independence) and his partner, David Claypoole, the official printers of the Constitutional Convention. The Packet text is largely printed from standing type used to print the Official Edition of the Constitution, the first edition of the complete and final text, for the delegates of the Constitutional Convention and for the use of the Confederation Congress, and may be considered, essentially, as the second issue of that edition.
“The United States Constitution is the longest continuing charter of a national government in the world: the product of a revolution in political thought at least as important and far-reaching as the winning of American independence from Great Britain [and] the culmination of the intellectual ferment and political experimentation in the new republic"
Revolutionary-era Americans were a constitution-making people. On several occasions during the debate over the ratification of the Constitution of 1787, it was said that Americans knew more about the nature of government and liberty than any other people in the world. During the Revolutionary era, Americans wrote more than a dozen state constitutions, two federal constitutions, many amendments to these constitutions, and ordinances establishing the government for federal territories and the process for them to attain statehood.
"From a legal standpoint, [the Constitution] amounted to a revolution as great as the rebellion against Great Britain, or the Declaration of Independence"
Americans realized that if they succeeded in obtaining their independence, they would need to create new governments to replace the British imperial authority and the colonial governments that were formed under charters that had been granted by the king or by colonial proprietors such as William Penn. Thus, in May 1776, even before the approval of the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress recommended that the colonies replace their charters with constitutions amenable to the people. The new state constitutions were drafted and approved by provincial assemblies elected by the people. All of the governments were said to originate from the people, were founded in the social compact, and were instituted solely for the good of the whole.
The germ of the Constitution was, fittingly, contained in the same congressional resolution that led directly to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Richard Henry Lee’s 7 June 1776 resolution urging the dissolution of all political connection between the American colonies and Great Britain further averred "That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation." Just five days after Lee’s proposal was voiced, a committee of one delegate from each colony was appointed to draft a plan. Exactly one month after its appointment, 12 July 1776, the committee, chaired by John Dickinson, proposed for debate "Articles of confederation and perpetual union" among the thirteen states.
But the exigencies of war and the approach of the British to Philadelphia suspended the debate, and it was not until 15 November 1777 that Congress—by then sitting in York, Pennsylvania—adopted the Articles of Confederation and sent them to the various state legislatures, together with a circular letter urging their ratification, but the Articles were not formally ratified until 1 March 1781. The Articles provided that the states retained their sovereignty, freedom, and independence while Congress was limited to those powers expressly delegated to it in the Articles. Article XIII, however, did provide the semblance of a supremacy clause to Congress, but that body was given no coercive power to enforce state compliance. Thus, the emphasis on individual states’ rights in this "firm league of friendship" was doomed to fracture once the principal goal of the alliance—independence from Great Britain—had been achieved.
Despite its insufficiencies, as the first written constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation cannot be dismissed as entirely unsuccessful since it had yoked the individual states together in a "confederacy for securing the freedom, sovereignty, and independence of the United States" and offered a basis for what would become the Constitution as we know it.
“The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship …”
But just as the country seemed poised to splinter, Congress resolved on 21 February 1787 that "it is expedient that on the second Monday in May next a convention of delegates who shall have been appointed by the several states be held at Philadelphia for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the states render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union."
So, in May 1787 delegates from twelve of the thirteen American states—Rhode Island refused to participate—assembled at the Statehouse in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. Eventually fifty-five delegates took part in at least some sessions of the Convention, although thirteen of those left prior to 5 September. Forty-two delegates stayed through the adoption of the Constitution and adjournment of the Convention, and thirty-nine signed the Constitution.
After four months of debate behind closed doors, the delegates, who had been sworn to secrecy, finally agreed to submit a completely new form of federal government to the states for their ratification by popularly elected conventions. Americans eagerly awaited the Convention’s proposals. All of the country’s ninety newspapers had supported the Convention—several even encouraged their readers to accept whatever the Convention would propose.
Meeting in ostensible secret from May through September, the delegates crafted a charter that the vast majority supported. Perhaps the best justification for the adoption of the Constitution was given by Benjamin Franklin:
"I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best."
Credit: Public domain.
On several occasions, the Constitutional Convention ordered that the resolutions that had already been approved should be printed for the use of the delegates. The Convention had selected John Dunlap and David C. Claypoole of Philadelphia as its official printers. Since 1775, Dunlap had served intermittently as the official printer for the Continental and Confederation Congresses and had printed the official versions of the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.
On 24 July, the Convention appointed a five-man Committee of Detail to arrange the resolutions that had already been approved. The Committee (chaired by John Rutledge and including Edmund Randolph, Oliver Ellsworth, James Wilson, and Nathaniel Gorham) asked for a printed working copy of the resolutions for its use. After two weeks discussing the resolutions while the other delegates recessed, the Committee submitted its seven-page printed report to the Convention on 6 August (Evans 20815, ESTC W13935).
Members of the Committee of Detail
During the next seven weeks, the delegates made many changes and additions to the Committee of Detail report. On 8 September the Convention elected another five-man committee to revise the style and arrange the articles that had already been approved. Consisting of William Samuel Johnson, chairman, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, James Madison, and Rufus King, this Committee of Style was also instructed to prepare an address to the people, which would accompany the Constitution when it was presented to Congress.
The Committee of Style submitted its manuscript report on 12 September. With Morris taking the lead, the Committee reduced the 23 approved articles and 40 sections to seven articles and 21 sections. The next day, 13 September, the Committee recommended that the last two articles that suggested the procedure for the ratification of the Constitution and the procedure for electing presidential electors be deleted from the body of the Constitution and be included as separate resolutions in the Convention’s report to Congress. The Committee also prepared a draft cover letter and totally revised the Preamble by changing the introductory phrase from an enumeration of the states—“We the People of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, …” &c.—to “We the People of the United States” and by felicitously stating the reasons for proposing the Constitution. On 12 September, the Convention read the Committee’s manuscript report, approved the draft letter, and ordered them printed for the use of the delegates (Evans 20816, ESTC W13936).
Members of the Committee of Style
The draft printings from the committees of Detail and Style, while vital steps towards the Constitution, should not be misunderstood to be early editions of the Constitution. They are crucially important working papers, printed on rectos only, and as such exhibit extensive differences from each other and from the Constitution as adopted by the Convention. Just as the Committee of Style extensively revised the report of the Committee of Detail, so the Convention, acting as a committee of the whole, made more than twenty changes in the Committee of Style’s report.
On Saturday, 15 September the Convention approved the Constitution and ordered that it be engrossed on vellum by Jacob Shallus, assistant clerks of the Pennsylvania Assembly, and that 500 copies be printed by Dunlap and Claypoole to be distributed to the delegates and sent to Congress and the states. On Monday, 17 September, the engrossed and printed copies of the Constitution were ready for final approval. Before signing, the delegates made a final change in the ratio of apportioning representatives. Dunlap and Claypoole quickly made the correction and printed a six-page edition, composed of a bifolium stab-sewn together with a single leaf, that included the text of the Constitution, the names of the delegates who signed the Constitution, the two appended resolutions, and the cover letter addressed to the president of the Confederation Congress signed by George Washington as the Convention’s president.
On 19 September 1787 Dunlap and Claypoole printed the Constitution in their Pennsylvania Packet. Dunlap had come to America from Ireland as a ten-year-old apprentice to his uncle, William Dunlap, who was a printer in Philadelphia. By the t.mes he was nineteen, John Dunlap had taken over the shop, initially printing sermons, as well as handbills and other jobbings ephemera. In 1771, he started the Pennsylvania Packet: and the General [later Daily] Advertiser, as a weekly newspaper that subsequently became a tri-weekly. Then, in partnership with David C. Claypoole, the Packet became the country’s first successful daily newspaper, appearing every morning except on Sundays. Four other Philadelphia newspapers also printed the Constitution on 19 September, but scholars have recognized the Packet as the first public printing of the Convention’s report. Only about thirty copies of the 19 September issue of the Pennsylvania Packet have been located, mostly in libraries and historical societies. Since the present copy last appeared at auction almost forty years ago, in the Constitutional bicentennial year of 1987, only four other copies are recorded in Rare Book Hub.
The Packet’s printing of the Constitution retained most of the type that Dunlap and Claypoole had used in printing the Convention’s official six-page privately distributed issue two days earlier. The Preamble, however, was reset using a much larger type size that filled nearly the entire width of the Packet’s first page. The type of the Convention’s report was also reimposed so that the official six-page report fit into the Packet’s four-page format. The Packet’s publication also corrected an error that Dunlap and Claypoole made in the Official Edition, changing the date “one thousand seven hundred and eight” in Article V to “one thousand eight hundred and eight.”
The Packet’s printing of the Constitution contributed mightily to the ratification debate. By enlarging the typeface and centering the Preamble on the first page it brought attention to this important introduction to the Constitution that provided for ratification by the people instead of by the states. On the last page of the Packet’s printing, George Washington’s name appears three t.mes s in large typeface—once centered toward the top of the page in signing the Constitution as the Convention’s president and as a Virginia delegate, once in the middle of the page as the signer of the appended resolutions, and once the bottom of the page as the president of the Convention in signing the five-paragraph cover letter to Congress.
Written with the assistance of Gouverneur Morris, the letter urges ratification and describes the spirit of compromise that forged the Constitution:
“In all our deliberations on this subject we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence. This important consideration, seriously and deeply impressed on our minds, led each State in the Convention to be less rigid on points of inferior magnitude, than might have been otherwise expected; and thus the Constitution, which we now present, is the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensible.”
Although Washington refused to take a public stance on the Constitution during the ratification debate, everyone could see that he endorsed the Constitution when viewing the last page of the Packet. All of the many other printings of the Constitution in newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, magazines, and almanacs followed the Packet’s replication of the arrangement of the Convention’s Official Edition, including the cover letter with Washington’s signature. Opponents of the Constitution found it hard to nullify Washington’s implicit support.
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Magna CartaThe Magna Carta came to represent the idea that the people can assert their rights against an oppressive ruler and that the power of government can be limited to protect those rights. These concepts were clearly foundational and central to both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. -
The Stamp ActThis was the first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British Parliament. It came at a t.mes when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and looking to its North American colonies as a revenue source. Colonial resistance to the mandate was vehement, not only because of its financial exploitation, but because it markedly raised doubts about the colonists’ status within the British Empire. -
The Repeal of the Stamp ActAfter months of protest, an appeal by Benjamin Franklin before the British House of Commons, and at the urging of British merchants fearful of colonial reprisals, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766. However, the same day, Parliament passed the Declaratory Acts, asserting that the British government had free and total legislative power over the colonies. -
A Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies of North-America, now Met in General Congress at Philadelphia, Seting [sic.] forth the Causes and Necessity of their taking up ArmsThe first pamphlet printing of one of the most important congressional precursors of the Declaration of Independence. -
Olive Branch PetitionThe last concerted effort on the part of the Continental Congress to reconcile with Great Britain. -
The December 1775 Prohibitory ActA final attempt to crush the Revolution by economic sanctions, the act outlawed American trade with foreign nations. All American ships (regardless of the owner’s political sympathies) were to be considered enemy vessels that could be captured by the British Navy and declared prizes of war, their cargos sold to the highest bidder. Declaring the colonists to be rebels and outlaws, the act removed the colonies from the King’s protection. The text, issued over the name of John Hancock, as President of Congress, goes on to detail the losses of property and personal rights, as well as the atrocities committed by the British at Lexington and Concord, that have compelled them to take up arms. -
Virginia House of DelegatesThe genesis of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the Proceedings published the momentous resolution of 15 May 1776 “that the delegates appointed to represent this colony in the General Congress be instructed to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent states. …” This resolution, introduced by Richard Henry Lee to the Continental Congress on 7 June 1776—just two days after the adjournment of the Virginia Convention—led directly to the appointment of a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. -
Declaration of IndependenceThe Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress on 4 July 1776, and later signed on 2 August 1776. The first book-form printing of the Declaration of Independence, a stop-press addition to a Philadelphia political tract, was made just a day or two after John Dunlap first printed the revolutionary Congressional resolve. -
The Constitution of the Common-Wealth of PennsylvaniaThe first independent state constitution issued after the Declaration of Independence. Although the Pennsylvania constitution was not ratified until 28 September 1776, the state’s constitutional convention presided over by Benjamin Franklin first convened on 15 July—just nine days after the Declaration of Independence. -
The Constitution of the State of New-YorkThe first constitution of the state of New York, written by John Jay. When the British occupied New York City, the constitutional convention fled to White Plains, Fish-kill, and Kingston. Jay’s draft was adopted in Kingston on 20 April 1777. Unlike the 1776 constitution of Pennsylvania, the New York constitution provided for a bicameral legislature, a governor, and a supreme court. -
Articles of ConfederationOne of the great documents of American history and the vital stepping-stone to the United States Constitution. “In 1776, to defend themselves against one of the world’s most fearsome military powers, the thirteen colonies entered into a solemn alliance with one another. It did not take long for some Americans to propose that this ‘continental’ polity needed a constitution of its own” (Colonists, Citizens, Constitutions, p.55), and the Continental Congress began to draft the present “firm league of friendship,” in which each state retained “its sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” -
Continental CongressWith individual state constitutions emerging across the country, it became evident that the political systems and initiatives of the state constitutions would be vital to the construction of the Federal Constitution of 1787. -
United States Constitution is signedThe longest continuing charter of government in the world was signed by thirty-nine delegates on 17 September 1787. -
Dunlap and Claypoole’s PacketThe present lot. Two days after the Constitution was signed, on 19 September 1787, Dunlap and Claypoole printed this copy in The Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser. Printings like these were highly influential amidst the ratification debate that followed the document’s adoption. -
United States Constitution is ratifiedAfter an arduous series of debates, the Constitution finally became official on 21 June 1788, after the state of New Hampshire became the ninth of thirteen states to ratify it.
In November 2021, Replica Shoes 's offered the Goldman Constitution, one of two privately owned copies of the official first printing of the Constitution, which sold for a milestone $43.2 million and set the record for any book, manuscript, or printed text sold at auction:
PROVENANCE
Sotheby’s New York, 13 May 1987, lot 5 (undesignated consignor); sold to — a private collects
or; by bequest to — his widow; given to — a New England Educational Institution
REFERENCES
Evans 20819 (the Packet is the only Philadelphia newspaper printing of the Constitution included); Brigham 2:942; Richard B. Bernstein. Are We to Be a Nation? The Making of the Constitution (Cambridge, 1987); Merrill Jensen, ed. The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. Volume I: Constitutional Documents and Records, 1776–1787 (Madison, 1976); Leonard Rapport, “Printing the Constitution: The Convention and Newspaper Imprints, August–November 1787,” in Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives (vol. 2, no. 2, Fall 1970): 69–90.
Sotheby’s is grateful to John P. Kaminski, Director, Center for the Study of the American Constitution, University of Wisconsin-Madison, for his generous assistance with this description.
