Constitution: History of Its Ratification Term Paper

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Male voters had to own property. Thus voting was still the province of land-holding elites rather than all the people under the rule of constitutional, national, and state law. The fact that Senators were appointed by the state legislature not only allocated more rights to the states as desired by Southerners, but also further filtered the popular voice, as expressed in the House of Representatives. The Electoral College system also filtered access to power via the voting box when it came to voting for the executive authority. "The large states got proportional strength in the number of delegates, the state legislatures got the right of selecting delegates, and the House the right to choose the president in the event no candidate received a majority of electoral votes." (NARA, 2004)

The Electoral College system again underlines the republican, or filtered rather than pure democratic system of governance, as a chief executive could lose the popular vote but still win the Electoral College. Theoretically, one of the elected 'electors' could change his mind after judicious consideration and refuse to vote for the chief executive 'he' was expected to elect. The theoretical principle of equality of all human beings upheld in the Declaration of Independence thus did not mean as a point of fact, in the Constitution, that all had equal access to power, as a way of tempering the will of the people and individual rights for the common good.

The framing of the Constitution thus is and was a compromise of individual and collective rights, and of Southern desire for state's rule and Northern desires for federal dominance that could more effectively negotiate with other nations.

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Indeed, it looked like the constitution would not pass at first. The compromise did not end with the signing of the Constitution, as only after a bill of rights was included did it seem that ratification by all the states would go through. But unlike the previously weak Articles of Confederation, the Constitution proved to be a document flexible enough to grow with the needs of the nation through the amendment process. Some of this growth was relatively uncontroversial, as all viewed the amendments as keeping with the founder's original intentions, such as allowing senators to be directly elected. Others caused the civil war, such as allowing African-Americans the right to vote. Still others proved to be noble, failed experiments like prohibition. Regardless, the Constitution itself was an experiment at first -- but a successful one that still lives on today.

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