State Ratifications and the Constitution

In my recent research, I was struck by the following point. When we look at the 1787 Constitution, we pay a lot of attention to debates in the states. This makes sense for many reasons. First, the Philadelphia Convention's deliberations were secret. Second, we have good records of many state convention proceedings. Third, we have The Federalist.

For the succeeding amendments, though, we pay almost no attention to state ratification debates. I wrote a book on the first ten amendments and learned that we know almost nothing about the state legislative debates on them from 1789-1791. In those days, state legislatures kept only bares-bones journals or minutes. The same goes for amendments 11 and 12.

For the 14th Amendment, we have only one detailed record on state ratification. There are transcripts of the debate in the Pennsylvania Legislature that look like The Congressional Globe. Perhaps this is also true for the 13th and 15th Amendments, but I've never looked into that.

On more modern amendments, the record is almost as sparse. Sometimes this is because the proposed amendment was rather simple. The 21st Amendment, for example, received virtually no scrutiny in those state ratifying conventions. None of them lasted longer than a day. In other cases the record is sparse because the state legislative records from, say, a hundred years ago are not detailed.

That said, I think that there is room for a scholarly project that gathers the state debates on the twentieth-century amendments. Maybe we'd learn something useful about, say, the 26th or 16th Amendments.