39 men signed the Constitution. 42 were in the room. This is the story of what happened next — and it begins with the three who refused. George Mason turned his copy of the draft over and wrote his objections on the back of it, starting with the sentence that would organize the opposition for two years: “There is no Declaration of Rights.” Meanwhile the document travelled north to a Congress that the Constitution itself abolished, where Richard Henry Lee — the man who had moved American independence eleven years earlier — tried to amend it, demanded a recorded vote, and was outmaneuvered so completely that the entire debate was struck from the official record as the price of a compromise. What survives of it comes from one delegate’s private notes, which nobody read until 1959. It is the story of a word stolen, a record erased, and a question handed to conventions of ordinary men: nine states, or nothing.
Send us Fan Mail