US Founding Documents for collectors 2: The Constitution of the United States

On Monday, January 20, 2025 Donald Trump will swear an oath that makes him President of the United States.

And, he won’t swear to the American people or land, he will swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

This is the second great Founding Document of the US after the Declaration of Independence.

And it still - 235 years after it was ratified and came into effect - basically decides how America is run.

And, in anything close to its original or early states it can be extremely valuable as an historical document.

Washington Crossing the Delaware

Washington Crossing the Delaware, but the Revolution was forged with ink and paper as much as with guns and swords. 

The History of the US Constitution

Starting a nation isn’t easy.

And it’s made considerably harder when you’re doing so against the wishes of the world’s current hegemonic imperial power.

So America was birthed in war.

And the Constitution’s drafting was materially affected by that.

It all started with a meeting, the Constitutional Convention that had its first quorate meeting on May 25, 1787.

By September 17, the document had been completed and ratification began.

That meant sending it around the US’s states.

That process finished in Rhode Island on May 29, 1790.

That meant all the 13 founding territories had accepted the Constitution.

The events leading up to the Constitutional Convention seem somewhat chaotic.

A number of meetings were held between state representatives who were trying to work out how to relate to each other as new sovereign states or constituents of a larger sovereign state. Trade regulations, rights to water and river navigation…

They had a framework, the Articles of Confederation of 1777.

The Articles of Convention

The Articles of Convention was the first US Constitution, a placeholder document that needed to be reformed. 

That’s the first American Constitution.

Like most of these documents it was written by committee, but guided by a single, strong voice, in this case Delaware’s delegate John Dickinson.

As a nation, the US was federal from the off. The 13 states retained all powers that weren’t specifically granted to the United States of America (a new term in this document) by the agreement.

From March 1, 1781 this document was the rule of law among this “league of friends.”

But the league wasn’t really strong enough to survive.

Leading revolutionary thinkers like George Washington saw their new country struggling as states went their own way.

They wanted a stronger central power, and the Constitutional Convention of May 1787 was designed to redraft their agreement to provide that.

The start of the Constitutional Convention was delayed by late arrivals, but they could start their work (with an oath of secrecy) by May 25.

Washington is elected convention president. The secretary is William Jackson.

You can find full accounts of their (often heated) debates elsewhere. They include the setting up of several single-issue committees to chew over difficult questions, usually producing named compromises.

On August 6, a Committee of Detail proposes that a 23-article constitution with a preamble should be agreed.

Signing of the US Constitution

An imagined signing of the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention.

This is streamlined into a seven article final document with preamble and closing endorsement.

An “engrossed copy” of the draft document was produced by Jacob Shallus.

On September 15, the convention votes unanimously to approve the document, which is signed two days later on September 17.

39 people signed the document. There were over 50 delegates, but not all agreed with the document's proposals. 

On September 18 the document is published.

The first printings are made by the Pennsylvania Packet.

On September 28 the decision is made to send the Constitution around the states for ratification via their own legislatures.

The first session starts in Pennsylvania on November 20, but Delaware is the first state to ratify the Constitution (unilaterally) on December 7.

By June 21, 1788 nine of the US’s 13 states have ratified the document and it’s considered to be in force in the new country.

During the process in the states large numbers of alterations are suggested.

The first US Presidential Election takes place from December 15, 1788 to January 10, 1789.

George Washington is elected alongside John Adams as his vice president.

Among the first business for the new government - meeting in New York - is to consider the suggested amendments.

Twelve amendments went through the US’s new democratic machinery, emerging as the Bill of Rights, which is both a document in its own right and part of the Constitution.

Bill of Rights

The Bill of Rights. 

These amendments (the third to 12th of those that were suggested) were added to the Constitution on December 15, 1791.

The United States Constitution as a document

The Constitution is in four parts.

The preamble is short enough to reproduce in full:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

There then follow seven articles that set up the government and what each part of it does: the Senate, the House of Representatives (or Congress), and a Supreme Court, the President and Vice President; how the states relate to each other and the Federal Government, and how new states should be admitted to the union.

There are now 27 Amendments to the Constitution.

The best known, and really the ones of most interest to collectors of original documents, are the Bill of Rights, perhaps most famously the First Amendment guaranteeing many individual freedoms and the Second Amendment, which guarantees the “right to bear arms”.

Amendments were ratified as recently as 1992, but the most recently proposed change was the 26th Amendment of 1971 that allowed 18-year-olds to vote.

The 13th Amendment in 1865 ended slavery and the 19th Amendment gave women the vote.

The Bill of Rights is a document in its own right that we will also look at.

Copies of the United States Constitution

You can now buy all sorts of reproductions of the Constitution.

And, the fact that it was relatively easy to print documents and relatively large numbers of people could read them (or hear them read) was an important factor in the revolutions and counter-revolutions of the 18th and 19th century.

The Constitution was a living document, put together through argument and conflict.

Printing it made it concrete.

Dunlap and Claypoole printing of the US Constitution

The Dunlap & Claypoole printing of the Constitution.

The first printing was made by a firm called Dunlap & Claypoole (who you may recognise as printers of the Declaration of Independence).

From 1778, the company had been the official printers of Congress.

In total, the drafting of the Constitution by the Constitutional Convention produced 1,320 printed copies of the Constitution.

820 of these were drafts.

500 were final copies for distribution in various ways.

Printing started from August 4, 1787, when a seven page broadside was produced by Dunlap for members of the Convention.

Broadsides are single-sided prints and they were often used for public announcements in poster form.

From September 12 a second draft was printed in folio form.

The third draft was the final one, and the Convention asked Dunlap to print 500 copies of it from September 15 with a publication date of September 17, 1787.

The 500 copies were produced as broadside over six pages in Caslon typeface.

Another 200 copies were ordered shortly after this printing.

There is no known surviving copy of the 500-copy print.

The first printing of the final constitution has an error in Article Five, where a date was accidentally written out in full word-by-word.

An alteration from the engrossed copy was also missed in the very first printed copies.

And they were printed before the signers of the document were finally known.

Once Dunlap had produced a full, final version of the document it started to spread through the states.

Printers did their best, no doubt, but also made mistakes, adding punctuation to their own style.

John McLean in New York was asked to produce copies to send to the states for ratification.

He made 100 copies, of which eight are known to survive. (These copies were produced “for Dunlap and Claypoole” and are sometimes counted as their copies.)

One was just sold for $9 million after sitting for decades in a filing cabinet in a property associated with the North Carolina Revolutionary-era politician Samuel Johnston.

Pennsylvania Packet newspaper

The Pennsylvania Packet and the General Advertiser was the first successful daily paper in the United States. These new publications were vital to spreading news of independence and a new form of government. 

The most valuable copies of all are the Dunlap prints.

There are 14 of these, including at least one McLean copy printed for Dunlap.

They can be found in:

The American Philosophical Society Library Philadelphia. A that belonged to Benjamin Franklin. 

The private collection of S Howard Goldman, who bought it for $43.2 million in 2021, it is on loan to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, a museum owned by the Walton family who own Walmart.

The Delaware Hall of Records in Dover, Delaware.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia owns the copy that George Washington had.

The Library of Congress Manuscript Division has two copies.

The New Jersey State Library Archives and History Bureau at Trenton.

The New-York Historical Society has a Benjamin Franklin copy.

The Public Record Office in London has a copy.

The Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Princeton University Library has a copy.

The “Adrian Van Sinderen” copy is due to be auctioned.

An unknown private buyer bought the Samuel Johnson copy (a John McLean print for Dunlap) in 2024.

So three are in private hands.

The Adrian Van Sinderen copy was due to be sold in 2022, but just before the sale Sotheby’s withdrew it to allow interested institutional buyers more time to fundraise for a possible purchase.

US Constitution Dunlap printing

The Samuel Johnson copy of the Constitution that sold for $9 million was printed by John McLean in New York. 

More copies of the US Constition?

There are potentially hundreds more copies of the original constitution in circulation.

Anyone who finds one can name their price.

Additionally there are many more newspaper prints.

Newspapers were a vital tool of the revolutionary government.

The definitive history of the printing of the document by Leonard Rapport says: “By October 6, only twenty days after the Federal Convention, at least fifty-five of the approximately eighty newspapers of the period had printed the...Constitution.”

These printings are sometimes discovered.

And many of them will have “mistakes” in them of some sort.

The modern document as it is used is usually based on an 1847 reprint prepared by William Hickey of the US Senate.

William Hickey constitution title page

 

William Hickey did a clean up job and his text is usually used as the basis for modern published versions of the US Constitution. 

He was tired of finding errors as he looked at copies of the document and prepared what became known as the Standard Edition from original documents.

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