Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776

Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776

The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 has been described as the most democratic in America and was authored primarily by Timothy Matlack, Dr. Thomas Young, George Bryan, James Cannon, and Benjamin Franklin. The French, notably Turgot, Condorcet, and the Rochefoucauld admired it and this informed the decision to make France's legislature a unicameral one.

Innovations of the 1776 Constitution

The 1776 Constitution contained five of the six points of the United Kingdom's People's Charter over 50 years before it was written. Some of the radical innovations included:

* Voting franchise for all tax-paying free men.
* A unicameral legislature with members elected to one-year terms.
* A thirteen-member Supreme Executive Council to administer the government.
* A judiciary appointed by the legislature for seven-year terms, and removable at any time.
* The provision that all legislation should be held until the next session of Assembly, so that the people of the state could assess the utility of the proposed law.
* A President elected by the Assembly and Council together
* A Council of Censors (elected every seven years) to conduct an evaluation of the activities. They could "censure" actions by the government deemed to have violated the constitution. The Council of Censors was the only body with the authority to call a convention to amend the constitution.

The constitution also made Pennsylvania's official title the "Commonwealth of Pennsylvania". The term "commonwealth" is used by only four states - Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Kentucky. The revolutionaries in Vermont directly copied many of the provisions of the Pennsylvania constitution. This happened because Dr. Thomas Young, a participant in the writing of the Pennsylvania constitution and mentor for Ethan Allen, wrote a letter to the Vermont constitutional convention suggesting both that Vermont be the new republic's name and that Vermont model its constitution on the new, radically democratic Pennsylvania one.

External links

* [http://www.docheritage.state.pa.us/documents/constitution.asp Doc Heritage on Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776]
* [http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/states/pa08.htm Avalon Project's Copy of the 1776 Pennsylvania Constitution]
* [http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/mclean/ddhc3.pdf Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the Declaration des Droit de l'Hommes et du Citoyen]

Pennsylvania during the American Revolutionary War


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