Virginia ratifies, 89 to 79; the union's largest state is in
By the summer of 1788, the new Constitution needed nine states to take effect — and it had them, just barely, without Virginia. But a union that excluded the largest, most populous state in the republic would have been a union in name only. After three weeks of fierce debate in Richmond, where Patrick Henry thundered against centralized power and Edmund Randolph switched sides in a moment that shifted the room, Virginia ratified on June 25, 1788, by a margin of 89 to 79. The promise of a Bill of Rights was the price of the vote.
Virginia's ratification came with a condition that outlasted the vote itself. The convention's insistence on a Bill of Rights gave James Madison his mandate to draft the first ten amendments in 1789. George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Mason had refused to sign at the convention, became the direct template for that document — a defiant author's ideas enshrined in federal law over his own objections.
QWhy did Edmund Randolph refuse to sign the Constitution in Philadelphia — and then argue for its ratification in Richmond?
At the Philadelphia convention in 1787, Randolph objected that the Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights and concentrated too much power in a single executive. He was one of only three delegates who refused to sign the final document. By the time the Richmond convention opened in June 1788, his calculation had changed: New Hampshire's ratification had already put the Constitution over the nine-state threshold, and Randolph decided that Virginia standing apart from a functioning union was the greater danger. His floor speech in Richmond was a direct reversal of his Philadelphia position — and his credibility as governor made the switch count.
QHow did the Virginia Ratification Convention dates get recorded so inconsistently across historical sources?
The convention officially convened on June 2, 1788 — not June 12, as some summaries have it — and adjourned after the ratification vote on June 25. The September date occasionally attached to the convention refers to a separate reconvening to consider recommended amendments, which muddied later accounts. The core debate, Henry's speeches, Randolph's reversal, and the 89-to-79 vote all happened within that June window. The conflation of the two sessions has led generations of reference works to overstate both the duration of the convention and the timeline of the final vote.
QWhat happened to George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights after he refused to sign the Constitution?
Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776, twelve years before the Richmond convention. It enumerated freedoms of press, religion, and trial by jury — language that James Madison drew on nearly verbatim when drafting the Bill of Rights in 1789. Mason refused to sign the federal Constitution in Philadelphia precisely because it lacked such protections, and he opposed ratification in Richmond on the same grounds. He died in 1792, one year after the Bill of Rights was ratified. The amendments he demanded, modeled on his own prior work, became federal law — drafted by the colleague who had spent years outmaneuvering him.
