Notre Dame Law School NDLScholarship Journal Articles Publications 1987 Law and the Experience of Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century North Carolina: North Carolina Considers the Constitution Walter F. Pratt Notre Dame Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, Law and Politics Commons, Legal History Commons, and the State and Local Government Law Commons Recommended Citation Walter F. Pratt, Law and the Experience of Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century North Carolina: North Carolina Considers the Constitution, 22 Wake Forest L. Rev. 577 (1987). Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/378 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. LAW AND THE EXPERIENCE OF POLITICS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NORTH CAROLINA: NORTH CAROLINA CONSIDERS THE CONSTITUTION Walter F. Pratt,Jr.* In mid-summer 1788, nearly three hundred delegates assembled in Hillsborough to consider whether North Carolina would ratify the Consti- tution drafted the previous year in Philadelphia.1 When the convention began the delegates were certain of two facts: First, regardless of their decision, a government would soon be established; ten states had already ratified the Constitution, one more than necessary.2 Second, the oppo- nents of the Constitution knew they had a substantial majority in the * Associate Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame. I am indebted to the editors of the Documentary History of the Constitutional Convention at the University of Wiscon- sin, Madison, for so graciously allowing me access to their files.