STATE CONSTITUTIONS
It must be clearly understood- whether the reader of this be a native-born American, a naturalized Citizen of the United States (no matter how long ago or how recent the naturalization) or even a citizen of another land- that, in the Federal System that makes the United States of America a federation of just those- united STATES, these States are the essential Unitary bodies in this System: that is, the political equivalent- without, of course, the independence- of Unitary Nation-States elsewhere in the World. In the closing years of the 19th Century, political scientist Hannis Taylor correctly- and wisely- pointed out that the equivalent of Parliament in Great Britain was not the Congress of the United States (although those two bodies do have in common being the legislatures of independent Nation-States recognized as such under International Law) but, rather, the legislatures of the constituent States of the Union.
The American Revolution itself was fought, at least in part, on the political theory (at least according to the ultimately victorious Patriot side in that conflict) that the colonial assemblies (which would soon evolve into State legislatures) were, in fact, "mini-Parliaments" and that the newly independent States were, therefore, "mini-Englands", the legislatures of which were as capable of making law on behalf of their citizens as Parliament in Westminster itself was for the subjects of the British Crown on the "home island"; therefore, as far as the Patriots were concerned, there need not necessarily be either interference or oversight from London. Along with the Loyalist side, the British Crown and its Ministers, of course, most strongly disagreed with this assumption- but, after all, they ended up on the losing side in this particular dispute- and, while the average American most likely has very little, if any, cognizance of his or her State's legislators being much more the lineal descendants of 18th Century MPs than his or her Congressman might claim to be, it would behoove the reader to recognize this simple truth in attempting to understand the American Federal System.
Thus, each State of the Union has its own written Constitution- one of the fundamental theses of American politics so requiring just such a written instrument of governance as the fundamental charter, the fountainhead of Law, of any jurisdiction with its own inherent Sovereignty. The fact of the matter is that the Federal System is, indeed, "federal" precisely because of its containing dual Sovereignty- that of the Federal Government on the National level and that of each constituent State of the federation known as the United States of America- and, in America, where there is Sovereignty, it must be defined by a written Constitution. Let there be any doubt of the truth of the first two paragraphs of this piece and it is shown most effectively by accessing this "Constitution.phtml" table and sorting its contents by other than the default alphabetical arrangement: 15 American Constitutions are seen to have been in force before the delegates to the Convention of 1787 which would frame the Federal Constitution had even arrived in Philadelphia in May 1787 (there were 11 of the "original 13" States which had drafted at least one Constitution by 1787 [Connecticut and Rhode Island, for the time being, opting to continue to use their colonial Charters as de facto "State Constitutions"]- 2 of these were on their second such document by 1787; Vermont- having declared itself independent of New York- had also drafted two Constitutions by 1787); add to this the fact that the Articles of Confederation which ostensibly governed the nascent United States of America prior to the 1787 Constitution- if only by definition of the very word "confederation"- recognized the quasi-independent status of the States and the point made in this introductory segment should be most clear.
Ordered Numbering
The ordered numbering of State Constitutions in the Constitutions.phtml table follows the best educated conclusions of the staff of TheGreenPapers.com. However, in quite a few cases, our numbering does not necessarily conform to that used by a given State; just to take one such example, the case of New Hampshire (where that State considers its current Constitution as being that dating from 1784, though the table on our site indicates otherwise) is instructive: likewise, a situation where a State has recodified its Constitution (that is, worked any and all amendments adopted thereto into the body of the document itself and, in addition, often rearranged its sections within Articles even where these sections have not been amended by those doing the recodification) subsequent to the document's original adoption/ratification.
Another dicey historical area involves 8 of the 11 States which seceded from the Union to form the old Confederacy (all but Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia) and, as a result, altered their State Constitutions in 1861, primarily to remove references in their fundamental documents to "the United States of America" and replace these with references to "the Confederate States of America"; some of these States count these altered Civil War-vintage documents as separate Constitutions, while others do not: upon reading each of these 1861 documents and comparing them to the Constitutions that would otherwise have been in force that year, the staff of TheGreenPapers.com has opted not to count any of these 8 as separate Constitutions.
Adoption date
The date of a Constitution's adoption is usually that on which the drafting body (much more often than not, a Constitutional Convention specifically called and elected for that purpose) gives final approval to the document; however, quite a few times, the date of adoption reflects the date the drafting body proclaimed the document to be the Constitution of the State after a separate ratification (often by a vote of the People of the State). A careful reading of any notes (besides any notation re: the date the drafting body convened) underneath the Adoption date should indicate where this latter scenario was, indeed, the case.
Ratification date
In the early days of State Constitution-making, it was quite uncommon to submit the document to the People for their ratification by majority vote at the polls; the theory in the late 18th Century going into the early 19th was that a Constitutional Convention was as much a body representative of the People as the State's legislature itself and that there was, thus, no need to have the People ratify the work once such a drafting body had formally adopted the document and then proclaimed it the Constitution of the State. However, ever since the democratic waves of the so-called "Jacksonian Revolution" began to break upon the republican foundations of the several States of the Union in the early mid-19th Century, the concept of a drafting body not submitting a Constitution to the People for their approval as tantamount to ratification of the document has become quite the rare thing. The notes underneath a given date in this column should clarify not just when the document was ratified but also how it was ratified (that is, answer the question: was it submitted to the People by the drafting body or not?)
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/slg/explanation-constitution.phtml
