Founding Documents

The fundamental documents of the United States of America are given below.   Each has a long history.   One can go back to the Mayflower Compact (1620) in the colonies, the Magna Carta (1215) in Britain, and Plato's Republic (370 B.C.E.) in ancient Greece to find roots to the founding documents.   One can cite then contemporary political writers like Montesquieu, Locke, and Paine whose works were known to the draftors of these documents, but whose precise influence is uncertain, although suspect, in the documents' language.   In addition to these influences, the 55 delegates to the Constitution Convention lived in a country with a tradition of many democratic institutions, some dating almost to the beginning of the colonies, a tradition that surely would have prevented them from designing anything but a republic.   These delegates deserve inestimable credit for crafting documents that resulted in a rich and powerful country with minimal injustices to its citizens.