Convention Day-by-Day
Walk through Madison's Notes as they happened — each of the 116 sessions annotated with the questions debated, the votes taken, and the deals struck.
The Founders wrote the charter.
You decide whether it still governs today.
Read the record. Ask the Founders. Add your name.
Receive answers sourced only from the Constitution, Convention debates, Federalist Papers, Anti-Federalist Papers, Jefferson, Madison, and the founding records.
A public roll of citizens who hold the Constitution as ratified to be the lawful charter of these United States.
There comes a time in the life of a nation when the plain honest word for what has been installed is no longer government — it is occupation. We hold this to be that time.
There was a Republic here once. It was small on purpose. It taxed lightly, borrowed reluctantly, spoke rarely, and left men mostly alone. Its powers were counted on the fingers of two hands, and everything not counted was denied to it by law. Coin was gold and silver. Speech was the citizen's, not the platform's. Justice moved through juries drawn from the neighborhood. War required a declaration, and the declaration required a debate. This was the design. It is written down. It has never been amended out of existence — only ignored, papered over, and quietly buried under a century of emergencies.
In its place stands an apparatus none of the Founders would recognize and every one of them warned against:
None of this is in the founding document. None of it was ratified. It arrived one crisis at a time, one court decision at a time, one omnibus bill at a time, on the theory that the Constitution was too rigid to survive the modern world. We hold the opposite. The modern world will not survive without it.
A Reset. Not by force — force is what they have. By the older, harder instrument the Founders left us: the collective withdrawal of consent. The Declaration of Independence did not raise an army in its first paragraph. It stated a principle. It named grievances. It gathered signatures. The army came later, when the principle had already been won on paper. We intend to gather the signatures first.
That the Constitution of 1789, together with the Bill of Rights and the founding-era record, remains the lawful charter of these United States; that the departures from it — in currency, in war, in surveillance, in regulation, in taxation, in speech, in the elections themselves — are unlawful whether or not they are ongoing; and that the undersigned withdraws his consent from the continuance of those departures and calls for their peaceful reversal by every lawful means: by primary and by vote, by Article V, by nullification, by jury, by state, by non-cooperation, and by the plain refusal to pretend that what is written is not written.
That is the sentence. Sign it, or do not. But do not tell us it cannot be said.
Peacefully. The word is not decorative. Violence is the argument of governments that have run out of them. We have not run out of ours. We have the document.
Publicly. Every signature bears a name. There is no anonymous conscience here.
Permanently. Signatures are written to a public ledger — cryptographically, immutably, on-chain. They cannot be erased by us, by a future administration, by a platform, or by the passage of time. The Founders staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. We are asked to stake considerably less.
Cumulatively. We are not scheduling a vote. We are opening a roll and leaving it open. The first hundred sign into a small thing. The first hundred thousand into a movement. The first million into a fact of national life. We do not know which number it takes. Neither did they.
Signing is free, public, and permanent. Choose how your name appears — Real Name, Initials, Username, or Anonymous. Every signature is unique.
Every signature is public, numbered, and permanent. Click a name to verify.
Every founder question and its cited answer is preserved and searchable. Here are a few from the archive. Search the full Bank →
The documents themselves — ink, quill, and hand. Each card opens the official archival scan, free and public domain.
Scans courtesy of the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress, and Yale's Avalon Project. All originals are public domain.