(CONSTITUTION) The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser

Sale 2432 - Lot 150

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FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE COMPLETION OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION (CONSTITUTION.) The Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser, No. 2689. 4 pages, 19 1/2 x 11 3/4 inches, on one folding sheet, disbound; minor foxing; edges uncut. Laid into a modern full morocco folder. Philadelphia, 18 September 1787

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After months of negotiations in Philadelphia, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed their final masterwork on 17 September. It was then presented to Major William Jackson of South Carolina, the convention's secretary, who was charged with delivering it to the Congress of the Confederation. The Pennsylvania Packet, the leading newspaper in Philadelphia at the time, was unable to print the full text of the Constitution the next morning, but did offer this announcement on page 3:
"We have the heart-felt pleasure to inform our fellow citizens that the Federal Convention adjourned yesterday, having completed the object of their deliberations. And we hear that Major W. Jackson, the secretary of that honorable body, leaves this city for New-York, this morning, in order to lay the great result of their proceedings before the United States in Congress."
The celebrated first public printing of the Constitution appeared in the Packet the following day, on 19 September. On 20 September, Major Jackson reached New York and read the proposed Constitution before the assembled congressmen, and the long state-by-state process of ratification began.