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America’s First Constitutions and Declarations of Rights
Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, the Continental Congress remained
in session in New York, helpless and acquiescent, a spectator, as it were,
to its own demise.
The Constitution of the United States that was to emerge from these
Philadelphia proceedings in September 1787, it is important to note, was
initiated by the States, not by the people at large or by the Congress. Thus
it was the States themselves that dissolved their own confederation. Never
again would the States together initiate a constitutional change, although
the Bill of Rights was the result of their recommendations. Since 1787,
however, all of the amendments that have been added to the Constitution have originated in Congress.
su gge st e d re adi ng
Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1980).
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1967).
James Dealey, Growth of American State Constitutions (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1915).
Walter Fairleigh Dodd, The Revision and Amendment of State Constitutions (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1910).
John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1888).
Charles Hyneman and Donald Lutz, American Political Writing During the Founding
Era, 1760–1805. 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983).
Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1959).
Marc W. Kruman, Between Authority and Liberty: State Constitution Making in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Leonard Woods Labaree, Royal Government in America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1930).
Donald Lutz, Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998).
Forrest McDonald, E Pluribus Unum: The Formation of the American Republic, 1776–1790
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979).