For the first time, the National Archives Museum is showing every page of a constitution draft marked up by George Washington at once. The timing is deliberate: Constitution Day, in the nation’s 250th birth year.
The document goes back to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, before Washington was president. Most days it sits in a climate-controlled vault. The exhibit runs through Sept. 27.
National Archives Historian Jessie Kratz, in an interview with Spectrum News on Monday, said the pages are a working record of the convention. “He did a very meticulous, basically transcription of what was happening. So, everything that he wrote down were amendments that had passed to the constitution,” she said. “It was George Washington and William Jackson noting what was transpiring during the Constitutional Convention.”
A country that might have been
The draft shows a government that never existed. Kratz said it had no vice president yet, and the president was chosen by the House of Representatives for a single seven-year term. “So, we didn’t have an electoral college. We weren’t even voting for the president then,” she said.
Visitors can walk from the draft to the Constitution itself, displayed steps away in the same rotunda, and compare the two. Kratz said that is the point. “So, you can always look at it, take an interesting tidbit, and say, ‘Oh, this is the way it could have been,’ or ‘This is the way it could have been,’ and then ultimately see what eventually happened with the Constitution.”
The rotunda exhibits are open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with last admission 30 minutes before closing. Tickets are not required, though free timed reservations are available online.
