The Pros And Cons Of The Constitution

128 Words1 Pages
In the summer of 1787, delegates from 13 new American states, recently British colonies, met in Philadelphia to write a constitution for a unified nation. By September, they had produced a document that then began to circulate among the state legislatures for ratification. The new constitution provided a blueprint for how the national government would function, but it did not contain a section specifically outlining the rights of individual citizens. A public debate quickly arose. Advocates of the draft constitution argued that guarantees of individual rights were not needed. Others, however, aware of the explicit rights guaranteed in earlier documents such as the British Bill of Rights (1689) and the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776,