Why was the US Constitution written?
The Constitution had to be written because the original organization of the new states under the Articles of Confederation failed to turn the individual colonies into a true nation. Under te Articles of Confederation the individual states retained their own sovereignty, freedom and independence from each other and more importantly from a federal government. States were free to issue their own money, fix their own tariffs, and maintain their own militia. There was no president or federal judiciary. There was a need to stop the states from acting in their own self interests rather than in the intersts of the states as a nation. The Articles of Confederation were replaced by the US Constitution, creating “a more perfect union.” Even though the prior union was not perfect and there is no such thing a “more perfect.
Ink was not terribly expensive and had been around a long time. By 400 A.D. a stable form of ink developed, a composite of iron-salts, nutgalls and gum, the basic formula, which was to remain in use for centuries. Its color when first applied to paper was a bluish-black, rapidly turning into a darker black and then over the years fading to the familiar dull brown color commonly seen in old documents. As to the need for writing a Constitution as opposed to having a verbal constitutional tradition (i.e., common law). In the western world the tradition of writing governmental agreements goes back a long time, at least to Magna Carta [1215] as a protection of the terms of the agreement. Societies without a written language relied on sages who were trained to have exact memories and to always reliable to repeat agreements exactly as they were agreed to. Such people didn’t exist at the time of the writing of the Constitution. As to the reason of a need to write a constitution. There is the m
