Your right, its changed ever so slightly over time.



led by beliefs conserning old english, dutch, and other common laws, including church law and its influence via the reformation etc:

Puritan Religion theory guided the development of compacts, which were the first form of government utilized here by europeans (non-indegious/invaders) that we know of; voyages of Lief Ericson, Henery Sinclair, and the Clovis or others not withstanding.

Along with this we had a second type of government established called a charter company. Whose purpose was to exploit the natural resources from the new world.

The third type of government existed as proprietary companies. The king allowed individuals to set up a colony. The individuals became the sole proprietor.

And of course we had the areas ruled from abroad by their parent colonies directly or by royal grants such as NY, NJ, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Carolina.

Then came the Articles of Confederation 1781-1789 our first constitution in the new world. Many problems arouse from it in that people were loyal to their states and did not see them selves as Americans. There was not an Executive or Judicial branch and Congress had only one house giving each state one vote.

Another problem was that states produced more laws than the national government. At this time they were experiencing excessive democracy and states printed their own money.

So we had a Constitutional Convention.

The purpose of the convention was to revise the articles of confederation. The meeting was to be in Philadelphia from May 25th – September 17th 1787.

The recommended number of delegates was 74, but only 55 attended. The membership had a world view that included economics, military politics. The two most respected Americans at the meeting were Ben Franklin and George Washington, which gave the convention legitimacy. Instead of revising the delegates wrote a new constitution.

Most of which was designed by a small group of men, and they were greatly influenced by the reaserch done by one of them on all sorts of different governmental types of which the Republic of Rome was seen as most preferable to modulate with some revisions. This man (Madison) is ussually not mentioned all that much, but he is technically the architect of our government amongst our other founding fathers according to some historians.

Wanting democracy to be included in some form as the Romans had managed to do in their own government the convention tackled the question of equal representation.

Which led to several compromises like the the New Jersey Plan and the Virginia Plans which in turn became "The great compromise" and the "Three-fifths compromise" which apeased southerners who wanted to count slaves for population purposes.

The new constitution would be signed by 39 of 55 delegates on September 17, 1787. Those that supported the constitution were called Federalist and those who opposed the Constitution were called Anti-Federalist would soon be at odds so they came out with "The Bill of Rights" which had been on the table previously but rejected as being nessesary to include in the final draft.

The first ten amendments to the constitution is the Bill of Rights. The call for a bill of rights had been the anti-Federalists' most powerful weapon. Attacking the proposed Constitution for its vagueness and lack of specific protection against tyranny, Patrick Henry asked the Virginia convention, "What can avail your specious, imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances." The anti-Federalists, demanding a more concise, unequivocal Constitution, one that laid out for all to see the right of the people and limitations of the power of government, claimed that the brevity of the document only revealed its inferior nature. Richard Henry Lee despaired at the lack of provisions to protect "those essential rights of mankind without which liberty cannot exist." Trading the old government for the new without such a bill of rights, Lee argued, would be trading Scylla for Charybdis.

A bill of rights had been barely mentioned in the Philadelphia convention, most delegates holding that the fundamental rights of individuals had been secured in the state constitutions. James Wilson maintained that a bill of rights was superfluous because all power not expressly delegated to the new government was reserved to the people. It was clear, however, that in this argument the anti-Federalists held the upper hand. Even Thomas Jefferson, generally in favor of the new government, wrote to Madison that a bill of rights was "what the people are entitled to against every government on earth."

By the fall of 1788 Madison had been convinced that not only was a bill of rights necessary to ensure acceptance of the Constitution but that it would have positive effects. He wrote, on October 17, that such "fundamental maxims of free Government" would be "a good ground for an appeal to the sense of community" against potential oppression and would "counteract the impulses of interest and passion."

Madison's support of the bill of rights was of critical significance. One of the new representatives from Virginia to the First Federal Congress, as established by the new Constitution, he worked tirelessly to persuade the House to enact amendments. Defusing the anti-Federalists' objections to the Constitution, Madison was able to shepherd through 17 amendments in the early months of the Congress, a list that was later trimmed to 12 in the Senate. On October 2, 1789, President Washington sent to each of the states a copy of the 12 amendments adopted by the Congress in September. By December 15, 1791, three-fourths of the states had ratified the 10 amendments now so familiar to Americans as the "Bill of Rights."

Benjamin Franklin told a French correspondent in 1788 that the formation of the new government had been like a game of dice, with many players of diverse prejudices and interests unable to make any uncontested moves. Madison wrote to Jefferson that the welding of these clashing interests was "a task more difficult than can be well conceived by those who were not concerned in the execution of it." When the delegates left Philadelphia after the convention, few, if any, were convinced that the Constitution they had approved outlined the ideal form of government for the country. But late in his life James Madison scrawled out another letter, one never addressed. In it he declared that no government can be perfect, and "that which is the least imperfect is therefore the best government."

Democracy has taken a number of forms, both in theory and practice. The following kinds are not exclusive of one another: many specify details of aspects that are independent of one another and can co-exist in a single system.

Representative democracy involves the selection of government officials by the people being represented. If the head of state is also democratically elected then it is called a democratic republic. The most common mechanisms involve election of the candidate with a majority or a plurality of the votes.

The term republic has many different meanings, but today often refers to a representative democracy with an elected head of state, such as a president, serving for a limited term, in contrast to states with a hereditary monarch as a head of state, even if these states also are representative democracies with an elected or appointed head of government such as a prime minister.