In the some 200 years since the Constitution was first created, there have been a total of 27 amendments. Originally, there were only 10, and the men who signed them were more bizarre than you might think.
Here are just a few of the odd facts about the signers of the Constitution.
A Real Ladies’ Man Wrote the Preamble.
Odds are you had to memorize the preamble — you know, the bit that goes “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union…” — in school, but did you know that the guy who wrote it was a real ladies’ man? Gouverneur Morris lost a leg in a carriage accident, so he had to wear a wooden one for the rest of his life. He also had a palsied right arm from a childhood accident, but that didn’t stop him from loving the ladies. He was well known for seducing women everywhere — even in convents and carriages.
Washington Wasn’t Very Good at Law.
When the framers elected General George Washington as the president of the convention on day one, he more or less let everyone know that he didn’t know too much about law. He actually spent the rest of the convention just hanging out at the head of the room, purposefully staying out of arguments.
One Signer Believed in Extraterrestrials.
Back in the 18th century, the word “alien” meant someone from another country, but that didn’t mean the word “extraterrestrial” didn’t exist, or that people didn’t believe in them. Hugh Williamson was a physician by training, who also dabbled in astronomy. He speculated that the universe was so vast that extraterrestrials simply had to exist. “How small, how few, are the ephemerons of this globe,” he wrote, “when compared with the countless myriads who inhabit five millions of worlds!”
It’s not uncommon to find some weird facts about a legal statute or two when doing legislative history research on one of the some 300 bills waiting for Senate action. Maybe you might find out that a law’s legislative intent was not what it appeared to be, and maybe you might find a legal statute that makes something totally mundane illegal. What you may not find when doing law research are weird facts about the folks who made the legal statutes, so hopefully you enjoyed this little bit of info-tainment.
If you know of any other amusing facts, feel free to share in the comments!