Civics Library Of The Missouri Bar

Amazing Facts about the Constitution

  1. The Constitution consists of four sheets, approximately 28 ¾ by 23 5/8 inches.  It has 4,543 hand-written words.
  2. Because it was hand-written, there are some spelling and grammar errors.  Most common is “Pensylvania,” and the use of “it’s,” British spellings, such as “chuse,” “defence,” “controul,” and “labour.”
  3.  Established on Nov. 26, 1789, the first national "Thanksgiving Day" was originally created by George Washington as a way of "giving thanks" for the Constitution.
  4. At 81, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania was the oldest delegate at the Constitutional Convention and at 26, Jonathon Dayton of New Jersey was the youngest.
  5. George Washington was unanimously chosen as president of the Constitutional Convention. He was the only founding father who did not go to college. 
  6. The original Constitution is on display at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, it was moved to Fort Knox for safekeeping.
  7. It is considered so valuable that it is stored in a bullet-proof case, with helium and water added to protect the paper. At night, it is kept in a vault designed to withstand a nuclear explosion. Only page one and four are on display daily. The Constitution is called the “living document” because it can be changed by amendments to meet any challenges that may arise.
  8. It is both the shortest and oldest national constitution
  9. “Democracy” does not appear in the Constitution, nor is there mention of education.  
  10. Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution, and New Hampshire was the ninth state. 
  11. One of the amendments in the original Bill of Rights that the states considered was a requirement that each representative in the House of Representatives only represent 50,000 people.  It did not pass. That is a good thing because if it had, we would 5,990 representatives!  Today we have 435 representatives because that is the number of chairs that will fit in the House chambers in the U.S. Capitol.  So every 10 years, after the census is taken, Congress divides the population by 435 and decides how many representatives each state gets.
  12. Virginia was the most populous state when the Constitution was ratified and today it is California.  Six states have only one representative.  Rhode Island, which was the least populated in 1787, now has two representatives. 
  13. More than 11,000 amendments have been introduced in Congress. Thirty-three have gone to the states to be ratified and 27 have received the necessary approval from the states to actually become amendments to the Constitution.
  14. John Adams said the Constitution is “the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen.”

For more Amazing Facts, go to www.constitutioncenter.org.