Belchertown

Readers might measure their understanding of the Constitution against that of the freemen of eighteenth-century Belchertown, Massachusetts, who described their reasons for considering the Constitution a threat to their rights and privileges as follows: 1st. there is no bill of Rights.

Ratification Pauline Maier 2010

Above all, it seemed important to keep Catholics from exercising power since, as Belchertown explained in draft instructions later discarded, “it has Ever been the Principale and Practice of the Papists to Persicute those of the Protestant Religion.”

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Note that the Dwight notes published in DHRC VI are from an imperfect transcription made by a high-school student in the late 1980s, before the original manuscript was stolen from the Stone House Museum in Belchertown.

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This and the following paragraph draw particularly upon the instructions of Belchertown both an early and the final draft, Fryeburg, Harvard, and Townshend, ibid.

Ratification Pauline Maier 2010

Readers might measure their understanding of the Constitution against that of the freemen of eighteenth-century Belchertown, Massachusetts, who described their reasons for considering the Constitution a threat to their rights and privileges as follows: 1st. there is no bill of Rights.

Ratification Pauline Maier 2010

In the end, the delegates from Belchertown and Oakham voted to reject the Constitution.

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Belchertown Hampshire County also mimicked Northampton, but only after what must have been a knockdown, drag-out fight.

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Only one town—Harvard, in Worcester County—said, like Luther Martin, that amendments to strengthen the Articles of Confederation would be better than the wholesale transformation of national government that the “proposed Constitution” would bring.78 Few towns, however, listed the flaws that needed fixing, perhaps because by late 1787 the problems were, as Belchertown said, “obvious.”

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Above all, it seemed important to keep Catholics from exercising power since, as Belchertown explained in draft instructions later discarded, “it has Ever been the Principale and Practice of the Papists to Persicute those of the Protestant Religion.”

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For extra credit, what might the freemen of Belchertown have been referring to as “many other obvious Reasons”?

Ratification Pauline Maier 2010