The Framers: Who Were They, and What Gave Them the Right?

Each delegate was formally appointed by his state's legislature or governor. This gave them legal standing to meet as representatives of their states. The state appointments meant the delegates were not a self-appointed group acting on their own initiative, but official representatives chosen through the political process of their time. However, Congress had called the convention only to revise the Articles, not to replace the entire form of government, although some states' instructions, such as Virginia's, were worded more broadly.

Twelve states appointed about 70 delegates, and 55 of them attended at some point during the summer. Rhode Island refused to send anyone, fearing a stronger national government would threaten its interests.

The appointments often came with instructions. Virginia was the first state to name its delegation, in November 1786, and Delaware's legislature told its delegates not to agree to any change that ended each state's equal vote.

The convention was called to open on May 14, 1787, but it could not begin work until a quorum of seven state delegations arrived on May 25. The pre-Constitution history page covers the events that led to the meeting.

On February 21, 1787, the Confederation Congress passed a resolution endorsing the Philadelphia convention. This gave the gathering an additional layer of official legitimacy under the existing legal framework. However, Congress's resolution explicitly limited the convention to revising the Articles, not replacing them. The Framers exceeded this mandate. Whether Congress's endorsement carried any binding authority was itself debatable, since the Articles required unanimous state consent for any amendments.

The resolution followed the Annapolis Convention of September 1786, called to discuss trade between the states. Only five states sent delegates, so the meeting adjourned after adopting a report, drafted largely by Alexander Hamilton, calling for a broader convention in Philadelphia the following May.

Congress's resolution described the convention's purpose as the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting the changes to Congress and the state legislatures for approval.

That limit mattered because Article XIII of the Articles required any amendment to be approved by Congress and confirmed by every state legislature. The Constitution's Article VII instead provided that ratification by nine state conventions would be enough.

The most compelling source of the Framers' practical authority was the crisis they were responding to. The Articles of Confederation were failing visibly and verifiably. Shays' Rebellion had just demonstrated that the national government could not maintain basic order. States were at economic war with each other. Foreign governments were exploiting American weakness. The framers could argue, and did argue, that necessity justified going beyond their technical mandate. A political system on the verge of collapse gave them moral authority to act even without formal legal authority.

Shays' Rebellion ran from August 1786 to February 1787, when several thousand armed farmers in western Massachusetts closed courts to stop foreclosures for debt. On January 25, 1787, they marched on the federal arsenal at Springfield. Because Congress had no money, the state's militia was paid for with loans from private merchants.

The national government's finances were equally weak. Congress could not tax; it could only request money from the states, which paid a small fraction of what was asked. It could not repay the war debt, and foreign lenders and the Continental Army's own veterans went unpaid.

Madison defended the convention's decision to exceed its mandate in Federalist No. 40, arguing that its plan was only a recommendation with no force until the people ratified it. The founders' choice of a republic page explains what they were trying to fix.

The Framers grounded the Constitution's authority in a revolutionary idea: the document derived its power not from the states or from Congress, but from the people themselves. The preamble's opening words, 'We the People,' were not decorative. They were a constitutional argument. By claiming to act in the name of the people directly, the Framers bypassed the legal question of whether state legislatures or the Confederation Congress had authorized them. They were appealing to a higher source of authority than any existing government institution. This was a radical move, and they knew it.

The first draft of the Preamble, prepared by the Committee of Detail in August 1787, listed the thirteen states by name after the words We the People. In September, the Committee of Style, whose draft was written largely by Gouverneur Morris, changed it to We the People of the United States, in part because no one could know which states would ratify.

Opponents noticed the change. At the Virginia ratifying convention in June 1788, Patrick Henry demanded to know who had authorized the delegates to speak in the name of the people rather than the states, arguing the phrase revealed a plan for a consolidated national government.

The argument proved decisive later. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Chief Justice John Marshall relied on the fact that the Constitution was ratified by the people, not by the state governments, to reject Maryland's claim that the states were sovereign over the national government. The case is among the landmark Supreme Court cases, and the full Preamble is on the Constitution page.

The Framers' most ingenious move was the ratification process they designed. Rather than submitting the Constitution to the existing state legislatures (which might have rejected it) or to the Confederation Congress (which would have seen it as a threat), they required ratification by specially convened state conventions, chosen specifically to vote on the Constitution. This gave the ratification process a democratic character: ordinary citizens elected delegates to conventions to vote for or against the document. When nine states had ratified, the Constitution took effect for those states. This process, though constitutionally irregular under the Articles, gave the document genuine popular legitimacy.

The ratification contest lasted about two and a half years. Delaware ratified first, unanimously, on December 7, 1787, and New Hampshire became the ninth state on June 21, 1788, putting the Constitution into effect. Virginia followed by 89-79 and New York by 30-27, and Rhode Island was last, by 34-32, on May 29, 1790.

Massachusetts found a formula that saved the Constitution. Its convention ratified 187-168 in February 1788 while recommending amendments, a model several later states copied and one that led directly to the Bill of Rights.

The new government began operating on March 4, 1789, and George Washington took the oath as the first President on April 30, 1789, in New York City, the temporary capital.

Madison arrived eleven days early, having spent months studying the history of republics and confederacies going back to ancient Greece. He drafted 'Vices of the Political System of the United States,' a systematic critique of the Articles, and brought a detailed blueprint called the Virginia Plan, which became the starting point for the convention's deliberations. No delegate worked harder or contributed more to the final document, and only Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson spoke more often. His meticulous notes on the convention's debates are the primary historical record of what happened inside Independence Hall.

Madison was 36 years old, younger than the delegates' average age of about 42. He spoke more than 160 times during the convention and sat near the front of the room so he could record every speech.

His notes stayed private for decades. Congress purchased them from his widow, Dolley Madison, and they were published in 1840, four years after his death, so the fullest record of what had been said inside the convention did not reach the public for more than half a century.

Madison's work continued after Philadelphia. As a congressman in 1789 he drafted the amendments that became the Bill of Rights, and he later served two terms as the fourth President, from 1809 to 1817.

Washington's role was more symbolic than substantive, but symbols mattered enormously. He had won the Revolutionary War, refused to become king, and returned to private life, making him the most trusted figure in America. His decision to attend the convention convinced skeptics it was a serious effort. He presided silently for most of the summer, rarely participating in debates, but his presence guaranteed the convention's credibility. His endorsement of the final document was essential to ratification.

The delegates elected Washington president of the convention unanimously on May 25, 1787, the first day they had a quorum. He sat in a chair carved with a half sun, facing the delegates, for nearly four months.

He spoke on the substance of the Constitution only once, on the final day, September 17, when he supported a motion to allow one member of the House for every 30,000 people instead of every 40,000. The change passed without objection.

Washington went on to become the only president elected unanimously by the Electoral College, in both 1789 and 1792. The President page covers the precedents he set.

Hamilton wanted an even stronger central government than what was ultimately adopted, including a president and Senate serving for life. His proposals were too extreme for most delegates and were largely rejected. However, he was instrumental in the ratification campaign: he organized and wrote the majority of the Federalist Papers, 85 essays published in New York newspapers making the case for the Constitution, alongside Madison and John Jay. The Federalist Papers remain the most authoritative commentary on the Constitution's meaning.

On June 18, 1787, Hamilton gave a speech of about six hours proposing an executive and senators who would serve during good behavior, essentially for life. His fellow New York delegates, Robert Yates and John Lansing, opposed a stronger government and left in July, which meant Hamilton could no longer cast New York's vote.

The Federalist Papers appeared between October 1787 and August 1788 under the shared pen name Publius. Hamilton wrote 51 of the 85 essays, Madison 29, and John Jay 5.

Hamilton then became the first Secretary of the Treasury, serving from 1789 to 1795, where he established the national credit and the first Bank of the United States. See the Department of the Treasury page.

At 81, Franklin was the oldest delegate and too frail to stand for extended periods. He was carried to and from the sessions in a sedan chair. Though he could not deliver long speeches, his presence carried tremendous moral weight, and his final address to the convention, delivered by a colleague because he could not stand to read it, urged every delegate to set aside their objections and sign the document. His closing argument acknowledged the Constitution's imperfections while making the case that it was the best achievable product of human deliberation.

During a tense deadlock over representation on June 28, 1787, Franklin proposed that each session open with prayer. The motion was not adopted, in part because the convention had no funds to pay a chaplain.

His final speech on September 17 was read aloud by fellow Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson. As the last delegates signed, Franklin remarked that he now knew the sun carved on Washington's chair was a rising sun, not a setting one.

Franklin is the only person to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, the 1783 Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. In his last public act, as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, he petitioned Congress in 1790 to end slavery. The Black American history page covers the early antislavery movement.

Sherman was the only Framer to sign all four of the founding documents: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. A self-educated shoemaker turned lawyer and judge, he was one of the most practical voices at the convention. His Connecticut Compromise, also called the Great Compromise, broke the deadlock between large and small states by creating a bicameral Congress with proportional representation in the House and equal representation in the Senate. Without this compromise, the convention might have collapsed.

The compromise passed on July 16, 1787, by a single state: five states in favor, four opposed, and Massachusetts divided. It created the two chambers compared on the legislative chambers page.

Sherman served in the first House of Representatives and helped draft the Bill of Rights. He successfully argued that the amendments should be added at the end of the Constitution rather than woven into its original text, which is why they appear as a separate list today.

He later moved to the Senate, where he served until his death in 1793, making him one of the few framers to serve in both chambers he helped design.

Mason was one of the most accomplished legal minds at the convention, the primary author of Virginia's Declaration of Rights which had influenced Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Yet he refused to sign the Constitution primarily because it lacked a Bill of Rights. He argued that without explicit protections for individual liberties, the new government could become tyrannical. His objection proved prophetic: the absence of a Bill of Rights became the primary obstacle to ratification, and the first ten amendments were added specifically to address his concern.

Of the 42 delegates present on the final day, 39 signed. Three refused: Mason, Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Mason set out his reasons in a widely circulated pamphlet, Objections to This Constitution of Government.

Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights was adopted on June 12, 1776. Like many Virginia planters, he was a slaveholder, owning more than 100 people, yet at the convention he condemned the international slave trade and opposed protecting it until 1808.

He led the opposition at Virginia's ratifying convention in 1788, and the amendments that state recommended drew heavily on his Declaration of Rights. Many of those proposals became the Bill of Rights.

Several of the founding era's most important figures did not attend the convention. Thomas Jefferson was serving as American minister to France. John Adams was serving as minister to Britain. Patrick Henry, who by tradition said he 'smelt a rat' (no record from the time confirms the remark), refused to attend, suspecting the convention would create a government too powerful over the states. Samuel Adams was not selected as a delegate by Massachusetts. Their absence shaped the document in ways difficult to predict: Jefferson and Adams in particular might have pushed for a stronger Bill of Rights from the start.

Jefferson followed the convention from Paris through letters. When Madison sent him the finished Constitution, Jefferson replied in December 1787 that he liked much of it but objected to the missing bill of rights and to the absence of any limit on how many times a president could be reelected.

Several absent leaders shaped ratification instead. In Massachusetts, Governor John Hancock presided over the state's ratifying convention and helped broker its compromise of ratifying while recommending amendments, and Samuel Adams supported ratification once amendments were promised.

Patrick Henry remained the Constitution's most powerful opponent, arguing for weeks against ratification at Virginia's 1788 convention. His defeat there, and his demand for amendments, helped push Madison to draft the Bill of Rights.

The Framers were steeped in Enlightenment thinking, particularly the work of John Locke, who argued that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed and that people have natural rights to life, liberty, and property. They also read Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, which described the importance of separating governmental power into different branches to prevent tyranny. These ideas were not abstract to the Framers: they had lived through what they saw as British tyranny, and they were determined to design a system that made such tyranny structurally difficult.

Locke's Second Treatise of Government was published in 1689, and Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in 1748. Montesquieu's idea of dividing power among branches is explained on the separation of powers page.

The Scottish Enlightenment mattered as well. David Hume's essay Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth argued that a large republic could be more stable than a small one, an idea Madison developed in Federalist No. 10, which held that a large republic makes it harder for any single faction to dominate.

Many delegates were formally educated in these ideas. More than half had attended college, at a time when few Americans did, and several had studied at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton. The founders' choice of a republic page explains how these ideas shaped the government.

Madison's preparation for the convention included an intensive study of ancient republics, including Athens, Sparta, and Rome, as well as more recent confederacies including the Achaean League, the Swiss Confederacy, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands. He used this historical research to identify the patterns by which republics failed: faction, tyranny of the majority, foreign interference, and the inability to maintain order. The Constitution's design reflects lessons drawn from this historical analysis as much as from political philosophy.

In the spring of 1786, Madison wrote a memorandum titled Of Ancient and Modern Confederacies, summarizing how each league he studied had been organized and why it had weakened or collapsed.

He and Hamilton turned that research into public argument in Federalist Nos. 18 through 20, which used the Greek leagues, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch republic as warnings about what happens when a central government depends on member states for money and soldiers.

The same comparative approach still informs how political scientists study governments today. The classifications of government and modern government systems pages compare the American design with others.

The Framers had not merely read about governmental failure; they had lived through it. They had experienced British taxation without representation, the quartering of soldiers in private homes, the suspension of colonial legislatures, and trials without juries. Under the Articles of Confederation, they had watched the national government be unable to pay its debts, enforce its laws, or protect its citizens. This direct experience with both tyranny and governmental weakness shaped every design choice they made.

Most had practical experience of governing. More than 40 of the 55 delegates had served in the Continental Congress, and roughly 30 had served in the Continental Army or state militias during the Revolution.

They had also watched the first state constitutions at work. Pennsylvania's 1776 constitution created a powerful one-house legislature and a weak executive council, which many delegates saw as unstable, while Massachusetts's 1780 constitution, drafted largely by John Adams, separated powers more sharply. The legislative chambers page compares one-house and two-house designs.

The Articles of Confederation, in force since 1781, were the most direct lesson. The pre-Constitution history page explains how that first national government worked and why it failed.

The most dangerous early conflict was between large states (Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts) and small states (New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut). The Virginia Plan, drafted by Madison and presented by Edmund Randolph, would have given large states proportional representation in both houses of Congress, effectively allowing them to dominate. Small states demanded equal representation regardless of population. The convention deadlocked. Roger Sherman's Connecticut Compromise broke the impasse: proportional representation in the House, equal representation in the Senate. This bicameral structure remains the foundation of Congress today.

The small states answered the Virginia Plan on June 15, 1787, with the New Jersey Plan, presented by William Paterson, which would have kept a one-house Congress in which every state had an equal vote. The convention rejected it four days later, but the small states refused to give up.

The final compromise passed on July 16 by a margin of a single state. As part of the bargain, bills to raise revenue must begin in the House, the chamber based on population.

The compromise still shapes American politics. Wyoming and California each have two senators despite a population difference of dozens of times, as explained on the Senate and legislative chambers pages.

Slavery was present in every major debate at the convention, even when not directly named. Southern states, whose economies depended on enslaved labor, extracted three major concessions. The Three-Fifths Compromise counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of congressional representation and taxation, giving Southern states more political power than their free population alone would have justified. The Slave Trade Clause prohibited Congress from banning the international slave trade before 1808. The Fugitive Slave Clause required Northern states to return escaped enslaved people to their owners. Several Northern delegates opposed these provisions but ultimately accepted them as the price of Southern participation. Critics both then and now have argued these compromises built slavery into the Constitution's foundation.

The three-fifths ratio was not new in 1787. The Confederation Congress had proposed it in 1783 as a way to apportion taxes among the states by population, an amendment to the Articles that was never ratified.

Congress banned the international slave trade at the first opportunity. A law signed by President Thomas Jefferson on March 2, 1807, made importing enslaved people illegal as of January 1, 1808. The Fugitive Slave Clause was enforced by federal laws passed in 1793 and 1850.

These compromises were undone only by war and constitutional amendment. The Civil War page covers the conflict, and the Black American history page traces the long struggle for freedom and equal rights.

The question of executive power was intensely contested. Some delegates wanted a plural executive, a committee rather than a single president, to prevent tyranny. Others wanted a very weak executive completely subordinate to Congress. The convention ultimately created a single president with substantial powers, including the veto, command of the military, and the appointment of judges and officials, constrained by Senate confirmation, congressional override of vetoes, and the threat of impeachment. The Electoral College, one of the convention's most debated inventions, was a compromise between direct popular election and election by Congress.

Edmund Randolph of Virginia argued that a single executive would be the foetus of monarchy, while James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that only a single person could act with energy and be held accountable. The convention chose a single executive on June 4, 1787.

The Electoral College emerged in September from a committee on unresolved issues, after delegates had repeatedly rejected both direct popular election and election by Congress. The Electoral College page explains how it works today.

The grounds for removal were settled late. On September 8, Mason proposed adding maladministration as an impeachable offense; Madison objected that the term was too vague, and Mason substituted high crimes and misdemeanors. The impeachment page covers how the process has been used.

On September 12, 1787, five days before the convention ended, Elbridge Gerry moved, with George Mason's support, to prepare a Bill of Rights. The motion was defeated, with exhausted delegates voting it down in about ten minutes. The majority view was that the Constitution created a government of limited, enumerated powers, and therefore explicit protections for individual rights were unnecessary. This decision nearly killed ratification. Anti-Federalists made the absence of a Bill of Rights their central argument against the Constitution, and Madison eventually promised to add one as the price of ratification in key states. The first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791.

The motion, made by Elbridge Gerry and seconded by Mason on September 12, 1787, failed with no state voting in favor. Hamilton later defended the decision in Federalist No. 84, arguing that a bill of rights was unnecessary and could even be dangerous, because listing some rights might imply the government had power over others.

Madison introduced his proposed amendments in the House on June 8, 1789. Congress sent twelve amendments to the states on September 25, 1789, and ten were ratified on December 15, 1791. The full text is on the Bill of Rights page.

One of the two unratified amendments had an unusually long afterlife. The proposal barring congressional pay raises from taking effect until after an election was finally ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment, more than 202 years after Congress proposed it. See all the amendments.

Northern commercial interests wanted Congress to have broad power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, including the ability to pass navigation laws that would require American goods to be shipped on American vessels. Southern states, which relied on exports, feared this would allow the North to charge monopoly prices for shipping. An early draft, reported by the Committee of Detail on August 6, 1787, required a two-thirds supermajority for navigation acts. This provision was later dropped in the final text, and Congress ultimately received broad commerce power by majority vote.

The problem was visible under the Articles, when states taxed one another's goods. New York, for example, charged duties on goods arriving from New Jersey and Connecticut, and neighboring states retaliated.

The final outcome came from a bargain in late August 1787. New England delegates agreed to protect the international slave trade until 1808, and in exchange delegates from the Deep South dropped their demand that navigation laws require a two-thirds vote.

The resulting Commerce Clause became one of the most important sources of federal power. Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) gave it a broad reading, and Wickard v. Filburn (1942) extended it to wheat a farmer grew for his own use; both are among the landmark Supreme Court cases.

No women were delegates to the convention, and no women voted in the ratification conventions. Abigail Adams had famously written to her husband John Adams in 1776 to 'remember the ladies' when building the new government. John Adams's reply dismissed the concern. The Constitution contained no protections for women's rights and did not address their right to vote, own property, or participate in civic life. The Equal Rights Amendment, proposed in 1972, has still not been definitively added to the Constitution. Women had no nationwide guarantee of the right to vote until the 19th Amendment in 1920.

One state was a partial exception. New Jersey's 1776 constitution allowed all inhabitants who met a property requirement to vote, and some unmarried women and free Black residents did, until a 1807 state law limited voting to white men. The voting rights page follows the expansion of the ballot.

The organized movement for women's rights began at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in July 1848, where participants adopted a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on the Declaration of Independence and, after debate, a resolution calling for women's right to vote.

The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, when Tennessee became the 36th state to approve it. The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress in 1972, but only 35 states ratified by the extended 1982 deadline; the status of later ratifications is discussed on the proposed amendments page.

Approximately 700,000 people were enslaved in the United States in 1787, roughly one in six Americans. None were represented at the Constitutional Convention, and yet the question of slavery shaped nearly every major debate inside it.

The most consequential result was the Three-Fifths Compromise, codified in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution. The relevant clause apportioned representatives by adding the whole number of free persons to three fifths of all other persons.

That phrase, "three fifths of all other Persons," was a carefully chosen euphemism. The word "slavery" does not appear anywhere in the original Constitution. The Framers used indirect language throughout: "Person held to Service or Labour" in the Fugitive Slave Clause (Article IV, Section 2), and "such Persons" in the Slave Trade Clause (Article I, Section 9), which prohibited Congress from banning the importation of enslaved people before 1808. Madison said on the convention floor on August 25, 1787, that he thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution that there could be property in men.

Understanding the Three-Fifths Compromise requires understanding what it actually was: a political bargain over congressional power, not a statement about human worth. Southern states demanded that enslaved people be counted as whole persons for apportioning House seats and Electoral College votes. This was not an argument for Black humanity, it was an argument for Southern political power. Those same Southern delegates denied enslaved people every legal right of personhood while simultaneously demanding they be counted as full human beings when it benefited the slaveholding class.

Northern delegates argued the opposite: if Southern law defined enslaved people as property, they should be counted the way you count horses and cattle, which is not at all. You do not get extra congressional seats because you own more livestock. But the Northern position was not a moral argument for racial equality either. Most Northern delegates simply did not want the South to gain more power in Congress. Neither side was arguing for the full humanity of Black people.

The Three-Fifths Compromise was a political bargain between two groups of white property owners arguing over power, with enslaved people having no voice in the outcome whatsoever. The compromise landed at three-fifths, giving the South more representation than the North wanted to grant but less than the South demanded. Without any compromise, the South would have had fewer seats. With full counting, it would have had more. Three-fifths split the difference, and the South accepted it because it was better than nothing.

The result was that Southern states gained substantial additional congressional representation and Electoral College votes from a population that could not vote, hold office, or claim any legal rights. This arrangement shaped American politics for 75 years, giving slave states outsized power in Congress and the presidency until the Civil War.

The Three-Fifths Clause was nullified by the 14th Amendment in 1868, which required representatives to be apportioned by the whole number of persons in each state. With slavery abolished by the 13th Amendment, formerly enslaved people were now counted in full, meaning the South ironically gained more congressional representation after the Civil War than it had held before it.

Resolving the Constitution's fundamental contradiction between its rhetoric of liberty and its protection of slavery ultimately required a Civil War and three amendments: the 13th (abolishing slavery), the 14th (establishing citizenship and equal protection), and the 15th (guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race).

Native Americans, who constituted a substantial portion of the continent's population, were entirely absent from the convention and explicitly excluded from the Constitution's political community. The Commerce Clause lists "the Indian Tribes" separately from both foreign nations and the states. Native Americans were not recognized as citizens of the United States until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, nearly 140 years after the Constitution's ratification.

The original text also excluded Indians not taxed from the population count used to apportion seats in the House, a phrase carried over into the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.

Relations with tribes were conducted largely through treaties ratified by the Senate, several hundred of them between 1778 and 1871, when Congress ended formal treaty-making. The Native American history page covers that era.

The Supreme Court recognized tribal sovereignty in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), but the federal government carried out Cherokee removal anyway, forcing thousands west on the Trail of Tears in 1838. In 1988, Congress passed a resolution acknowledging the influence of the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois, Confederacy on the framers' thinking.

Even among white men, representation at the convention was skewed toward the wealthy. All delegates were property owners, most were lawyers or merchants, and many were among the wealthiest men in their states. The poor white farmers who made up the majority of the American population had no direct voice in the convention. The voting requirements in most states excluded property-less men from ratifying conventions as well, though some states had broader suffrage than others.

The Constitution did not set voting qualifications itself. Article I provided that voters for the House would have the same qualifications as voters for the larger branch of each state's legislature, leaving property requirements to the states. The Constitution text shows the clause.

Property requirements faded gradually. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, state after state dropped them, and by the 1850s almost every state allowed white men to vote without owning land, though many kept taxpaying requirements for years.

Wealth-based barriers lasted longer in other forms. The Twenty-fourth Amendment banned poll taxes in federal elections in 1964, and in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) the Supreme Court struck them down in state elections too. See the voting rights page.