Massachusetts ratifies the U.S. Constitution
On this day · 6 February 1788
By a razor-thin vote, the Bay State said yes to the Constitution—but only after attaching a wish list that helped birth the Bill of Rights.
On February 6, 1788, Massachusetts became the sixth state to ratify the United States Constitution, voting 187 to 168 at its convention in Boston. The margin was uncomfortably narrow, and the outcome was anything but assured: the agrarian interior distrusted the proposed federal government, while the coastal trading towns largely favored it.
The breakthrough came through compromise. Anti-Federalist leaders, including John Hancock and Samuel Adams, agreed to ratify on the condition that the convention recommend amendments. Massachusetts thus became the first state to ratify while formally proposing changes—nine of them—asking that powers not delegated to the federal government be “reserved to the several States,” among other protections.
Those recommended amendments were meant to “remove the fears & quiet the apprehensions of many of the good people of this Commonwealth.”
This “ratify-then-amend” template was widely copied and fed directly into the debates that produced the Bill of Rights in 1791.
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