Note (return) — Chapter I

It is scarcely necessary to remind the well-informed reader that the terms, "Constitution of the Federal Government," employed above, and "Federal Constitution," as used in other proceedings of that period, do not mean the instrument to which we now apply them; and which was not then in existence. They were applied to the system of government formulated in the Articles of Confederation. This is in strict accord with the definition of the word constitution, given by an eminent lexicographer:29 "The body of fundamental laws, as contained in written documents or prescriptive usage, which constitute the form of government for a nation, state, community, association, or society."30 Thus we speak of the British Constitution, which is an unwritten system of "prescriptive usage"; of the Constitution of Massachusetts or of Mississippi, which is the fundamental or organic law of a particular State embodied in a written instrument; and of the Federal Constitution of the United States, which is the fundamental law of an association of States, at first as embraced in the Articles of Confederation, and afterward as revised, amended, enlarged, and embodied in the instrument framed in 1787, and subsequently adopted by the various States. The manner in which this revision was effected was as follows. Acting on the suggestion of the Annapolis Convention, the Congress, on the 21st of the ensuing February (1787), adopted the following resolution: