Article VII

Section I

George WashingtonThe Ratification of the Conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.

The Word, "the," being interlined between the seventh and eighth Lines of the first Page, the Word "Thirty" being partly written on an Erazure in the fifteenth Line of the first Page, The Words "is tried" being interlined between the thirty second and thirty third Lines of the first Page and the Word "the" being interlined between the forty third and forty fourth Lines of the second Page.

Attest William Jackson Secretary

done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth In witness whereof We have hereunto subscribed our Names,

Full text taken from the US government transcript site.

the meaning of Article VI.

US FlagThis article is also about the Constitution only in this case it is talking about ratification of the document. Remember Ratification is a vote of yes from the convention in each state to accept the new government document. The end of the Convention and sending out of the new proposed government document was really just the beginning. Because the meetings were held in secret there were already a number of worried and angry citizens ready to argue over everything. The best and most public arguments are in a series of open letters sent between the founders by way of the newspapers of the time. They have been put into two collections; the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. The collections are worth reading if you want to learn more of how your country works and what the Founding fathers really intended for each section of the constitution. I also recommend .James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention if you want to see what the delegates at the convention were so worried about.

MinutemanSection I

The first thing is the ratification clause. It simply states that the ratification (a yes vote from the states) from 9 out of the 13 states would be enough for the new government to become active. It goes on to say that the new government will only include the states that have ratified the new Constitution. That means that any states that didn't vote yes would be left on their own. Those states would run their own government without any of the federal rules or any agreement with the ones that ratified the Constitution.

The next part is just some notes by the secretary of the Convention, William Jackson, on a few word additions further back in the document. They didn't have computers that allowed a document to be editied along the way. In fact they didn't even have white-out or erasers to remove writing mistakes.

Finished!The final bit of Article VII states that the document was made with the complete agreement of all the states that were still at the convention (New York's representatives had already left and Rhode Island refused to come). A couple of the delegates wanted a second convention to come up with the first set of Amendments from the different states to help protect individual freedoms. After some discussion the vote was held and they all voted in favor of the document. There were 39 delegates left at the convention when the document was signed by the attendees. William Jackson, the secretary signed the document also as a witness to the other signatures.

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Where you can go now.

I highly recommend reading the Bill of Rights and thinking about the rights that our founders thought were so extremely important that they needed to be detailed in the supreme law of the land so there would be less chance of them being violated. You can read the Bill of Rights at the US Government archives web site. I have some other interesting links in the side bar and on the "Links of Interest" page of our site.

.Moving onward, CHARGE!