It was on this day, in 1787, at the Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Constitutional Convention got underway. Many people agreed that the Articles of Confederation under which the colonies organized after the revolution was not working. The colonies had remained relatively independent of each other, almost like separate countries, and the result was a sort of anarchy.
So the Congress agreed that a stronger central government was necessary to keep the country from falling apart. Thomas Jefferson was not there. He was in Paris. John Adams was in England. Patrick Henry refused to come. He was suspicious that a stronger form of central government would lead to tyranny.
The convention decided to scrap the Articles of Confederation and start over, and so they decided to work in secret. The windows were nailed shut, guards were posted, not a word was leaked to the press. 55 delegates were there of 74 who had been invited to come. Most of them were young; only four of them over 60, five of them still in their 20s. Rhode Island didn't send anybody. They didn't approve of the whole thing.
George Washington would have preferred to stay home, but he presided over the convention. Other delegates had persuaded him that his prestige was necessary to guarantee success. He rarely spoke during the debates, but his presence alone affected what people said. Many of the delegates later said that they had been reluctant to give the office of the president much power for fear of creating a king, but when they saw Washington up front and imagined that he would soon hold that position, they felt better about granting the head of state more power.
It took some persuading to get the constitution adopted, but today ours is the oldest written national Constitution in the world. It's also one of the shortest, at only 7,591 words.
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