September 17 · This Day in America
After a summer behind shuttered windows in Philadelphia, the delegates stop arguing and sign. Thirty-nine names go onto four pages of parchment that begin not with a king or a state but with three words: We the People. It is a compromise, and a flawed one — it counts enslaved human beings as fractions and leaves slavery alive. The fight over what those opening words really mean is not finished; in some ways it is the whole American argument. But the machinery is built: a government that can be amended, checked, and held to account by the people it claims to serve. Benjamin Franklin, watching the sun carved on Washington's chair, says he has finally decided it is a rising sun, not a setting one. Then the delegates walk out into the city and the experiment begins.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1862
Near Sharpsburg, Maryland, the armies meet at dawn and do not stop. By nightfall some 22,000 men are dead, wounded, or missing along a cornfield, a sunken road, and a stone bridge. It is the bloodiest day the country has ever known, or will. The Union holds the field, and that grim half-victory gives Lincoln the moment he has waited for: five days later he issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
Source: www.battlefields.org
“I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”Benjamin Franklin, 1787