Much of what we hold dear as Americans we owe to what our Founding Fathers accomplished in the summer of 1787 and the extraordinary document they signed on Sept. 17. Constitution Day should be celebrated throughout our country but rarely is. That day comes and goes every year without ever coming up in our conversations. Local and national media rarely mention it. Perhaps a review of the circumstances surrounding the Constitution’s creation will awaken us from such neglect.

The Continental Congress was a provisional government concerned primarily with prosecuting the Revolutionary War. The first attempt at establishing something permanent was the Articles of Confederation. The government thus created was weak by design. The founders feared that a strong central government would take away the liberties they had fought to secure, but they were too cautious. Consequently, laws enacted by the Confederation Congress were little more than recommendations, and within four years after defeating Great Britain, the United States was in chaos. Foreign nations expected our fledgling country to collapse. Civil unrest in Massachusetts and other states was seen as proof that the public was incapable of governing itself.