Maine Constitution - History

History

The Maine Constitution was approved by Congress on March 4, 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise, since the Maine Constitution did not recognize slavery. The State of Maine was previously the District of Maine in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. William King may have authored the largest part of the Maine Constitution – he was the president of the Constitutional Convention and later elected Maine's first Governor. Other authors of the constitution were Thomas Jefferson, John Chandler, Albion K. Parris, William Pitt Preble, and John Holmes. Thomas Jefferson authored the section of Article VIII on education. The Maine Constitution was approved by all 210 delegates to the Maine Constitutional Convention, which was held during October, 1819, in Portland, Maine.

The Maine Constitution is the fourth-oldest operating state constitution in the country.

Read more about this topic:  Maine Constitution

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)

    The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

    The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)