on September 17 1788 the Philadelphia Convention reported that they had completed their work uh George Washington was the first to put his name to the new U.S Constitution and Ben Franklin famously said quote gentlemen you have a republic if you can keep it the Confederation Congress sent the convention's final draft of the Constitution to the individual states and it was the individual states who had convened special conventions to consider the momentous question as to whether or not to approve this document or ratify the document and by ratifying the document the state would be agreeing to join the union that this document created and over the next 10 months Americans from all walks of life earnestly debated the merits of the new constitution a national debate unfolded on every street corner every Wharf every Tavern a debate raged in churches newspapers political pamphlets and workplaces the question to ratify dominated American correspondence at this time and speeches but it was the special State conventions that controlled the destiny of the individual states and the delegates that were appointed to them understood very well their responsibilities for example Edward Livingston a delegate to the New York State Convention was quoted as saying my participation in this moment is the greatest transaction of my life attendees to the Massachusetts convention were refused to leave their seats in the gallery even to take lunch or even to use the restroom and in Richmond the Virginia convention had trouble accommodating the throngs of citizens who clamored to witness the debates in that state the nation had truly arrived at the critical moment of its critical period of American history and yet the question to ratify the Constitution bitterly divided the American people there was great anxiety about this constitution there's great fear about the type of government and the strength of the government that this constitution would create and in a lot of the states there was great division among the people as to what to do some states uh the population were fairly unified behind ratification other states the population was very divided and this division among the population of the States was reflected in the delegates that were appointed by the states to go to the special conventions to consider whether or not to ratify and it was Within These conventions we saw an ideological battle take place pitting two groups of Americans against one another they were known as the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists and I want to speak just a little bit about these two groups so that we understand what their arguments were in favor of ratification or against ratification and we're going to start with the Federalist the Federalist uh these were the group of Americans and the delegates to the conventions that advocated for the ratification of the Constitution and it was the Federalists that had the advantage in this ideological battle they had already made a proposal and already produced a proposal for a new government in the form of this new constitution they were young they were energetic uh they typically were 10 to 12 years younger on average than their political opponents and many of them had actually been members of the Philadelphia Convention and thus were familiar with uh with disputed issues that were already in the document they were much more organized and they were better prepared the gentleman you see on the screen here these were three of the more prominent and more uh vocal uh Federalist leaders at this time this is of course James Madison who was the principal author of the U.S Constitution in the middle is Alexander Hamilton a leading Federalist at this time as well as John Jay from New York there the other group of Americans were the anti-federalists and they were a group of Americans who had serious and valid concerns about the scope power and organization of the new constitution some of the Anti-Federalists wanted to retain the Articles of Confederation others wanted to start over completely with a brand new Constitutional Convention and still others wanted to heavily revise the current proposal under consideration no the concerns of the Anti-Federalists were valid for example they argued the new national government would eventually grow to become oppressive that it would be eventually grow and become corrupt and probably tyrannical a Philadelphia newspaper decried The Proposal is quote representing the aristocratic party intent on creating a monarchical government they argue The Proposal lacked a Bill of Rights that would enumerate and protect the individual rights of the citizens and the individual rights of the States from the power of this new national government and this ideological battle between Federalists and Anti-Federalists raged over the course of the 10 months in which the Constitution was bitterly debated and eventually uh approved by the required number of states now the Federalists were able to quell a lot of the Americans fears they harbored towards the proposed Constitution uh when leading Federalists produced a collection of uh essays a totaling 85 that explained how the new government would work and were designed to dispel the rumors and the misinformation that were being spread by the Anti-Federalists and these 85 essays are known as The Federalist Papers and they were written over the course of set of these 10 months in which the Constitution was debated and they were written primarily uh by John Jay who was a leading member of the Federalist group from the state of New York he wrote essays and that dealt with how the judicial branch was going to work and how it would function uh Alex Xander Hamilton was another principal author of The Federalist Papers a delegate from the state of New York to the special conventions uh he wrote about kind of the economic uh powers of the new government and how the government would work in terms of the national economy but the most essays were written by of course the principal author of The Constitution himself uh James Madison uh he wrote by far the most of these essays and he wrote some of the more famous of these essays but I want to talk just a little bit about the Federalist Papers as a whole because the Federalist Papers were very important in dispelling the misinformation that Anti-Federalists were spreading about the new Constitution and the Federalist Papers were instrumental in helping to convince the American people to support the ratification of this new Constitution which thereby uh put pressure on their delegates in the individual conventions so what were in The Federalist Papers well I'll give you some examples of how the Federalists dispelled the uh arguments of the Anti-Federalists for example The Federalist Papers routinely argued that the United States was a republic which was grounded in radically new Notions that the people right not a monarch or not a king would be the sovereign and that the rule of law would prevent tyrants from violating the civil rights of the citizenry and one of the best examples I can give you of this comes from Madison's Federalist number 10 essay in which he can turns conventional wisdom regarding republics on its head now he argued that from ancient times it had always been assumed that republics or representative governments could only exist among small and homogeneous populations but Madison argued that that was actually the opposite he argued that small republics typically fell victim to warring factions within them yet the United States Madison argued which was of great size and of great diversity that that would make it impossible for a single faction to form a majority that would corrupt the national government or corrupt Society at large he argued in these essays that the framers had created a legal and a political system that protected the rights of the minority while also serving the will of the majority that this constitution had divided the power of the government among three branches of a very large Republic and that that could work better than a small Republic to balance the Clash of interest that existed within the nation extend the fear Madison argued the sphere uh he argued and quote take a greater variety of parties and interest you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of the other citizens so it was things like Federalist 10 that were designed to alleviate Americans fears about what was going to occur should they support the Constitution and support its ratification and The Federalist Papers had a profound effect on the outcome of this ideological battle because it was amid these intense debates at the special conventions uh that the merits of The Federalist Papers and the merits of the Anti-Federalist arguments played out and support for ratification gained momentum at the end of 1787 when these essays began to appear you can see on the screen here that Delaware Pennsylvania Georgia New Jersey these were some of the first states to ratify the U.S Constitution they were States in which Federalists had a heavy majority and you can see later on that number six there that despite deep divisions within Massachusetts which was a very influential State at this time the state ultimately approved the measures but albeit by a slim vote of 187 to 168 and this was an early 1788. and finally then on June 21st 1788 New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the U.S Constitution now that number was important because in the U.S Constitution it stated that once two-thirds of the states had ratified the document it would then become the governing document of the country and that occurred then on June 21st 1788 when New Hampshire was the ninth State and then thereby reaching the minimum number of states required to approve it in order to for the proposal to become the law of the land but in spite of the Constitution becoming the law in the summer of 1788 we still had a problem and the problem if you look at this screen again is that Virginia and New York two of the most influential States two of the most powerful states had not yet ratified the document by the time New Hampshire had done so um New York uh uh and Virginia contained large and vocal opposition groups large and vocal groups of anti-federalists that were adamant just absolutely adamant that in in order to support ratification the new constitution required a Bill of Rights now the idea of a Bill of Rights is the idea that the constitution did not SP contain specific language that protected individual liberty and protected State sovereignty now the Federalists would have argued it didn't need that language that you didn't need to worry about the federal government trampling the rights of individuals or the powers of the states not delegated to the new government but the Anti-Federalists they were adamant especially in Virginia New York they were adamant that the document needed to contain that its specific information that restricted the federal government from violating individual liberty and state sovereignty and so in order to bring Virginia and New York on board an agreement was reached among leading Federalists and Anti-Federalists to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution but to include it in the form of constitutional amendments to the documents and so the states were asked then by the new federal government which came into existence in the summer of 1788 to send in proposed amendments to the Constitution and that the first U.S Congress which was going to meet later that year they would sift through all of these proposals and make recommendations to the individual states for ratification now when that first U.S Congress met in the fall of 1788 one of the first things it needed to do was go through all of the proposals that had been submitted and it turns out they received over 250 proposals to amend the Constitution with so many proposals it was clear that work needed to be done here to kind of Whittle these proposals down um and can make them concise condense them into a smaller number and so uh uh after uh uh this agreement was reached to amend the Constitution uh New York and Virginia ratified the document very close by the way in the state of New York and as promised uh the first the U.S Congress created a small Committee of two individuals uh those individuals were George Mason from the colony of Virginia he was a leading Anti-Federalist and the other person that comprised this special Committee created by the first Congress was James Madison and these two gentlemen were responsible then for framing and and what we called the Bill of Rights and the way they did this is they went to work sifting through all of these proposals uh and whittled them down to 12. possible amendments to the U.S Constitution and then made those recommendations to the Congress who then submitted those 12 possible amendments to the individual states for ratification now ultimately of the 12 proposals that were sent to the to the states for ratification 10 of them became law and became part of the Constitution and the first 10 Amendments of the U.S Constitution are referred to as the Bill of Rights now the Bill of Rights the first nine amendments of the U.S Constitution deal with protecting individual liberty it protects your right as an individual to things like freedom of speech freedom of press freedom of assembly freedom of Association um the right to bear arms freedom to uh you know the right to a trial by jury of your peers uh the protections of soldiers being quartered in your homes uh protection of Double Jeopardy and so on and so on and so on right the first nine amendments are specific enumerated language uh that specifically protects you from the government it does not extend to you rights these are rights that this country believes you are born with they are rights inherent in the citizenry and therefore the first nine amendments are protections of those rights from the power of the federal government the Tenth Amendment the last Amendment of the Bill of Rights reserves to the states all powers that are not specifically delegated to the national government and that was the way to protect States sovereignty now with the inclusion or with the agreement to include the Bill of Rights ultimately Virginia New York ratified the document uh there were a couple of holdouts for example North Carolina didn't ratify until late in 1789 in Rhode Island you know sticking the mud Rhode Island waited all the way until 1790 to ratify but the Bill of Rights the inclusion of it was very important to not only protecting individual liberty and state sovereignty in this nation but it was also significant in terms of bringing Virginia and bringing New York on board with this new proposal so with the debate over ratification concluded the new United States Constitution now promised to create a more powerful national government that was capable of managing the rapidly growing Republic yet it was one thing to ratify this new Constitution and it was quite another to make the new government run smoothly and as it turns out with each passing year after ratification the United States debated how to interpret the Constitution and how to apply the provisions of the Constitution and during the 1790s the federal government would confront Rebellion it would confront States threatening to secede from the union or leave the union it would confront International tensions it would confront Foreign Wars and it would even confront the formation of competing political parties known as the Federalist Party and the Democratic Republican Party and so while the nation had survived the crisis of the 1780s it was now going to face a long difficult and divisive decade in the 1790s so I wanted to conclude this lecture with just a brief uh discussion about the significance of the U.S Constitution uh the U.S Constitution was designed to fix all the problems that were associated with the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution does a very good job of doing that uh if you ever want to know you know what were the framers intending to do with this constitution they explained to you very clearly in what's known as the Preamble of the U.S Constitution which is the first paragraph of the document now if you grew up in the public schools of the United States you grew up learning the Preamble memorizing it and you're probably in elementary school maybe even Middle School recited it every morning uh during the Pledge of Allegiance or before the Pledge of Allegiance um but you probably never really dived into the meaning of these words so let me put it in context for you these words of the Preamble need to be understood in the context of what was it being experienced under the Articles of Confederation during the 1780s and so if you look at the Preamble now understanding the Articles of Confederation and all the problems that were associated with it and weaknesses of it the Preamble will probably make a lot more sense for example since we the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union in order to form a more privileged Union as a reference to the fact that the Articles of Confederation just did not adequately bind the states together the people establish this government for justice that was a reference to there was no judicial branch under the article's Confederation to ensure domestic tranquility this is a reference uh to Shay's Rebellion uh an internal disturbances like Shay's Rebellion to provide for the common defense this is a reference to the articles of confederation's inability to fund the military and protect the nation's borders then to promote the general welfare this is a reference to the articles of confederation's inability to help stimulate the economy pay down our debts so on and so forth and so the point then of this constitution was to fix all of these problems in order to quote secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity when the framers say their their posterity they're talking about you they did this to ensure this country would survive to place the country in a stronger position to withstand the world that existed at the time to test you know to to uh stand uh the test of time uh and so that was one reason I think the United States Constitution is worth studying because this is what uh was designed to fix all of the problems associated with the Articles of Confederation and to help secure the country right to help secure the nation and allow it to to continue on in a much stronger position but the other reason the Constitution is significant is that Madison really was a genius when he made the when he when he formulated the Virginia plan which became the basic blueprint for the Constitution because Madison was a student of history and he understood why governments such as the one he was creating had always failed and the reason governments like that he was creating republics that had always failed is that there was a problem with what is called federalism and Federalism is a system of government in which you have multiple levels of government operating at the same time for example here in the United States we are a federalist system of government created by the U.S Constitution and that means that we have a national government and in some cases that national government is a hundred percent Sovereign it has the absolute power and authority to do certain things and that because the Constitution says it does but we also in this country have state governments and according to the Ninth Amendment any power not delegated to the con to the new federal government is therefore reserved to the states so that means we have a national government operating at the same time that state governments are operating and they have certain powers between them and what had always happened with republics in the past or with Federal systems of government is that one of those two levels of government ended up getting all of the Power uh and it ruined it wrecked the system if you place too much power and authority in a national government it will squash the state governments but if you place too much power and authority in the state governments that's going to squash the power of the national government and preventing the national government from doing basic things that a nation needs so let me give you some actual examples that we've already talked about if you place too much power in the hands of a national government at the expense of the state governments you're going to have the relationship that existed between the British Parliament and the colonial legislatures in the lead-up to the American Revolution and that didn't work very well on the opposite side of the equation if you place all of the power and authority in the state governments and deprive a lot of power and authority from a national government you're going to have the Articles of Confederation so what the United States Constitution does is it creates beats what is known as a sovereign Union of sovereign states and what this term or concept refers to is that we have a national government that has specific Powers delegated to it that can effectively bind a country together promote the general welfare provide for the common defense establish justice you see where I'm going with that but we also then have powers that are reserved for the states so the idea that we have a sovereign Union is the idea that we have a federal government that in some cases is the end-all be-all authority but we also are a sovereign Union of sovereign states which means in some cases the state governments are the supreme authority on on certain issues and essentially what the idea is is we've taken all the power that will be required to govern a country and we have kind of balanced it between Regional or state governments and a national government and this balancing of power which is a Hallmark of course of the Constitution it's really what makes the document work we have not had a constitution since this one other countries have multiple constitutions they're always creating new ones but this is the one that this is the only the second constitution in American history and we're still on this one which means that the document that was created here this balance of power this power sharing uh uh structure works really well