The Constitution

Most people don’t know this, but the Constitution of the United States was not the “idolized” document it is today.

We originally had the Articles of Confederation, which were adopted in 1777, and one of the requirements was that consent by 100% of the colonies was required to make any changes.

But after the war for independence was over in 1783, nobody could actually agree on much of anything. There was gridlock.

A new Constitution was written, but the authors knew they couldn’t get every colony to ratify it, so they simply decided nine of the thirteen would be enough, even though there was no legal basis for this change.

But even that proved a hurdle, and it took another two years of arm-wrangling and backroom deals to get nine colonies to ratify a document that was intentionally designed to line the pocketbooks of the wealthy.