The US constitution was drawn up in the years following the Declaration of Independence made in 1776 by 13 states on the eastern seaboard of America. Under the presidency of George Washington, a constitutional convention was established to formulate a blueprint by which the world’s newest republic would be governed. It formally met in 1787 at the State House in Philadelphia (soon to become America’s first capital), to set up a system of government.

By 12 September of that year, the document was complete and ready to be ratified. Of the 42 delegates present, 39 signed the Constitution. It was then put to a vote in the legislative assemblies of the individual states. When New Hampshire became the ninth of the 13 states to ratify it on 21 June, 1788, it automatically achieved full legal status as the founding document of the USA.

The Bill of Rights

By 1791, the Constitution had acquired its first ten amendments, collectively known as the Bill of Rights. These guaranteed to each citizen, among other things, freedom of assembly and freedom of worship, the right to bear arms, and the right not to have soldiers quartered in your home without your permission. These principles drew political inspiration from a number of earlier examples, including England’s 1689 Bill of Rights and Magna Carta.

According to its own preamble, the purpose of the Constitution is “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.

Amendments 1 to 10, the Bill of Rights, were added to the Constitution in order to ensure that citizens were accorded basic rights, which couldn’t be removed from them under any circumstances by the State.

It is sometimes said that the value of an unwritten constitution is that it provides for a greater access of liberty to the individual citizen, who may do as he or she pleases, unbound by legal articles, unless a particular activity has been specifically forbidden. The 10th Amendment is the nearest the US Constitution comes to addressing this issue:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Most of the remaining amendments concern electoral legislation, such as eligibility to vote, and limitations to the terms of office of presidents, vice-presidents and congressmen and women.

The 13th Amendment provided for the abolition of slavery, and triggered the American Civil War, as the southern states refused at first to be bound by it. The 19th Amendment introduced votes for women. Only one Amendment has ever been repealed: the prohibition of alcohol, enacted by the 18th Amendment in 1919, was overturned in 1933 by the 21st Amendment.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness

In the Declaration of Independence, the text that announced the severance of political ties once and for all from the mother country, the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, announced that the business of getting rid of bad government was not simply a right of an oppressed people, but a moral obligation. More than a century after England had made its own attempt to rid itself of rule by arbitrary monarchical whim, the American colonists reminded them of the principle.

The specific wording of the Declaration, which guarantees “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as the right of every citizen, did not pass verbatim into the text of the Constitution, but its basic philosophy did. And it was to philosophers indeed that Jefferson looked – first and foremost, ironically, to the British philosopher John Locke, and his theory of individual liberty – when articulating the necessity for not suffering tyranny:

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

During periods when England moved to abolish particular forms of government, such as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which disposed of James II, it had to improvise a constitutional settlement that fitted the matter at hand. America’s Founding Fathers, mindful of the rough-and-ready nature of such arrangements, decided to set their hopes and grievances down in writing. Not just the British, but the world at large, could therefore see the rational and considered basis of their actions.