Considering the length of the Constitution -- more than five thousand words -- the cost of handsetting, the scarcity of paper, and the small size of newspapers at the time, to provide readers so promptly with the full text of so technical a document would demonstrate an impressive public spirit. Of about eighty newspapers publishing in the colonies at the time, by October 6 -- only twenty days after the convention had adjourned -- at least fiftyfive had printed the full text. By the end of October the participating newspapers numbered some seventy-five. Even before Delaware, the first state, met in its ratifying convention on December 3, 1787, the number of separate printings of the Constitution in newspapers or other formats came to more than one hundred and fifty. . . .

Unlike a unique [handwritten] document, to which access could be controlled, printed copies spread with the wind. No one could be sure who had read what, or when, or what any reader had found in it for himself. The multiplying copies of the printed proposed Constitution were symbols of an opening society in which eventually all would have a right to know and judge the public business.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe