A hardy Constitution
On July 4, 1788, about 50 men gathered in Albany, N.Y., to celebrate Independence Day in their own way: They burned copies of the United States Constitution.Few Americans today would contemplate doing the same thing. But for these men, burning the Constitution was “a perfectly patriotic act,” writes Pauline Maier in Ratification (Simon & Schuster), her new account of the contentious process through which Americans approved the Constitution in 1787 and 1788. After all, the document burners believed that the Constitution threatened all that Americans had fought for in the Revolutionary War.Indeed, when the founding fathers concluded their Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on Sept. 17, 1787, their work was hardly finished. Specially elected conventions in at least nine of the country’s 13 states needed to ratify the Constitution for it to take effect. This process generated heated public debate. Along the way, several state conventions recommended amendments, some of which...