Constitution Day: What They Didn't Teach You

Constitution Day marks the signing of the document in September 1787. We're using the occasion to ask a question that usually gets skipped: why was it written at all?

By the mid-1780s the states were barely united. The Articles of Confederation had carried the country through a war but couldn't govern it in peace. States printed their own currencies, taxed each other's goods, and left soldiers' war debts unpaid. In Massachusetts, armed farmers marched on courthouses to stop foreclosures and clashed with privately funded militias. Shays' Rebellion made the headlines, but the unrest it exposed was already simmering across the confederation.

That instability raises a question historians still argue over. Was the convention called to protect the people, or to protect the property and credit of the merchants and lenders the uprisings had frightened? It's a debate that has followed the Constitution since ratification, and it doesn't have a clean answer.

Katherine Thrailkill sets up the history over a drink, then the floor opens. Come with questions. Leave with a few new ones.