On this day in 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the Constitution, by a vote of 46-23. Pennsylvania was also the first large state to ratify the nation’s founding legal document.
Conservatives in the Pennsylvania Assembly took swift action to call a ratifying convention, which met in Philadelphia on Nov. 21. The Federalists, favoring ratification, promptly elected a majority of delegates and carried the day.
When the new nation came into being, Pennsylvania remained its most ethnically and religiously diverse state. About a third of Pennsylvanians spoke German as their first language.
The chairman of the ratifying convention, the Rev. Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, was the son of a leading German Lutheran minister and a grandson of Conrad Weiser (1696-1760), who had been a leading colonial Native American interpreter and German-speaking political leader.
James Wilson (1742-1798), born in Scotland as one of 26 children and a future Supreme Court justice, championed the Federalist cause. Thomas McKean, a Delaware-born Scots-Irishman, led the anti-Federalist opposition.
During the war for independence, a strongly anti-British and anti-Native American Scots-Irish faction had seized control of the state government. Pennsylvania drafted a state constitution that excluded Quakers and other pacifists unwilling to take oaths of allegiance to the Revolutionary cause.
Pennsylvanians ratified the U.S. Constitution only after pacifists were once again allowed to vote. Large states had the most to lose by joining a strengthened union.
Recognizing the problem, Wilson plugged the delegates’ handiwork as calling for layers of sovereignty around a federal hub, using the solar system as an analogy.
Anti-Federalists found themselves in the hypocritical position of criticizing the federal Constitution for failing to codify the freedom of religious practice they had recently denied their fellow citizens.
Original article source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1207/7315.html
