"We the People:" Signing the Constitution
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect
Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, 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.
The Preamble to the
Constitution of the United States of America
It wasn't easy for the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention to agree on the document these
now famous words introduce. They spent the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia arguing, strategizing, and
eventually compromising until they produced the final version of the Constitution of the United States
of America on September 17, 1787. This landmark document provides the fundamental law of the nation and
is the oldest written national constitution in operation.
Today we marvel at the durability of this document, but when the Convention finally approved the
Constitution in September 1787, many people felt its future was uncertain and few thought it represented
the "ideal" form of government. Several EDSITEment lesson plans, among them Balancing Three Branches at Once: Our
System of Checks and Balances (grades 3-5) and The Constitutional Convention: What the
Founding Fathers Said (grades 6-8), cover the struggle between those delegates who favored a strong
central government and those who wanted to see the individual states retain most governmental powers.
This struggle persisted throughout the period of the Convention, and it took the Great Compromise to
finally get delegates to agree on the design of the federal government. Even then, ratification was no
sure thing. Finally, after almost a year of state-by-state reviews and the addition of the Bill of Rights, the
Constitution was officially proclaimed the law of the land (for a summary of EDSITEment resources
specifically related to the Bill of Rights, see This Month's Feature for July 2002).
A number of existing and newly created EDSITEment lesson plans offer teachers and students substantive
and focused learning activities for studying the historical origins and core values of the American
Republic. In The Constitutional
Convention: Four Founding Fathers You May Never Have Met (grades 6-8), for example, students learn
about the important contributions of four relatively unknown contributors to the U.S. Constitutional
Convention: Oliver Ellsworth, Alexander Hamilton, William Paterson, and Edmund Randolph. Two other
EDSITEment lessons for grades 6-8 present the ideas and contributions to the Constitution of two more
familiar figures: Jefferson and
Franklin: Renaissance Men and Jefferson and Franklin: Revolutionary
Philosophers introduce students to some of important precursor documents of the Constitution, such
as Franklin's Albany Plan of 1754,
available from the EDSITEment-reviewed Avalon
Project of the Yale Law School.
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