2024 - A Celebration of Constitution Day

The United States District Court for the Southern District New York joined cultureNOW, & the Lower Manhattan Historical Association for an afternoon symposium about our Constitution and its ratification.

Speakers:

Professor Kevin Arlyck, Georgetown Law

Honorable P. Kevin Castel, United States Southern District Court

Seth Kaller, Historical Documents & Legacy Collections

James von Klemperer, FAIA, President Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates

Honorable Laura Taylor Swain, United States Southern District Court

The Program

The Event

The Exhibition

Elevation

The United States Constitution

The job of the 55 delegates sent to the Constitutional Convention was to propose and report back to Confederation Congress suggested improvements to the Articles of Confederation. The delegates spent the summer sweltering in Independence Hall in Philadelphia as windows were closed for security as they argued about how to structure the government. With the Convention’s work completed on September 17, 1787, the first copies of the Constitution were printed through the night.

On the morning of September 18th, William Jackson took the proposed Constitution, the covering resolution and a letter signed by George

Washington, along with the unsigned printed copies to Congress then sitting at City Hall (now Federal Hall National Memorial) in New York City. The next 10 days were spent in heated debate before the Confederation Congress voted to send the document as written to the states for ratification. To that end, Charles Thomson, the Secretary of Congress, ordered the issuance of the printed archetype for sending to the legislatures of the original states for ratification.

It is that resolution with Thomson’s signature, that makes this the true official ratification edition of the Constitution. North Carolina’s copy which is one of only eight remaining known will be the highlight of a special program to celebrate Constitution Day.

Signing of the Constitution - Howard Chandler Christy (1940)

Howard Chandler Cristy’s 20' x 30' painting was commissioned in 1939 for the sesquicentennial. The painting depicts Independence Hall in Philadelphia on September 17, 1787. To achieve the greatest possible accuracy, Christy searched for portraits by the best artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, such as Charles Willson Peale and Gilbert Stuart. He located portraits of 37 out of the 39 delegates and the Secretary, William Jackson. Christy took some liberties in composing his scene: John Dickinson, whose signature was added by proxy, is included, and three men who were present but did not sign are not shown. He obscured the faces of the two signers (Thomas FitzSimons and Jacob Broom) of whom no portraits were found. The original is located in the U.S. Capitol Building.

The Ratification

The process of ratification was extremely contentious as each state convened a special convention and there were many articulate people advocating for each side.  The Federalists published 180 essays supporting the constitution including the 85 that Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison wrote known as the Federalist Papers.  Shown here is a timeline of the dates each state adopted the Constitution.  There are two maps; the one on the left shows the country at that time; on the right is the country 40 years later.