In 2004, Congress passed a law recognizing September 17th as Constitution Day. On that date in 1787, the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia put their signatures on the Constitution of the United States. Local celebrations of Constitution Day started over 100 years ago, but it didn’t become federal law until 2004.
The state delegates at the Constitutional Convention approved the draft of the new constitution on September 15, 1787. It was then given to Jacob Shallus, assistant clerk for the Pennsylvania Assembly, to write the official copy.
It took him about 40 hours to recopy the 4,543 words of the Constitution, and he was paid $30 for the work.
After the Constitution was signed, the ratification process began as each state held special conventions as laid out in Article VII. The Constitution states that the new government would go into effect once nine states had ratified it.
When Congress was informed that the New Hampshire convention had approved the Constitution, on July 2, 1788, it began preparing for the first presidential and congressional elections.
But what happened with the actual document? Brand new governments don’t have archives, so the four page document was given to the State Department for safekeeping. It moved around with the rest of the federal government from New York to Philadelphia to Washington, DC.
While the one page Declaration of Independence was frequently put on display, the four page Constitution was filed away.
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding signed an executive order transferring the Constitution and the Declaration to the Library of Congress. They both went on display there in 1924.
There was discussion of moving them when the National Archives was founded in 1934, but the founding documents were not transferred until 1952 when a military escort took them from the Library to the National Archives building. Since then, they have been on display in the specially designed Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom.
You can learn much more about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Framers of the Constitution on the National Archives website. You can also download high resolution copies of the Charters of Freedom.
Every year on Constitution Day, the National Archives hosts a naturalization ceremony in the rotunda of the Washington, D.C. building.
At last year’s ceremony, Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogan, said “These Charters are the bedrock of our democracy; but they are not static relics. They are a testament to the enduring values of freedom, justice, and equality that we are continuously striving to perfect. They are living promises—a covenant between the government and its citizenry.”
Illustrations, from above, from the National Archives: Constitution Day celebration in 1974 at the National Archives; the first page of the Constitution of the United States; and the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom, during Constitution Week at the National Archives in 1956.
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