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I
THE GEORGIA ASSEMBLY
CALLS THE STATE CONVENTION
26 October 1787
The Georgia Assembly called the state Convention on 26 October
in the midst of preparation for war with the Creek Indians, and prob-
ably without knowing what most of the other states were doing. The
only news of official action from other states published in Georgia
before the Assembly took action was the Pennsylvania Assembly's
resolutions calling that state's Convention which appeared in the
Savannah newspaper on 18 October (RCS:Pa., 101-2). Georgia's
Convention was also called before any public discussion of the Con-
stitution by Georgians in the state's two newspapers. Nor, so far as the
extant sources reveal, was there much private commentary about the
Constitution either before or after 26 October (see II below for pri-
vate commentaries on and public discussion of the Constitution by
Georgians).
Two different copies of the Constitution reached Georgia almost
simultaneously. On 10 October Governor George Mathews in Augusta
received the broadside copy which had been printed for the Consti-
tutional Convention on 17 September (CC:76). It was enclosed in a
letter written that day by the two Georgia delegates who were in the
Convention on the day it adjourned-Abraham Baldwin and William
Few. This copy of the Constitution was printed in the Augusta
Georgia State Gazette on Saturday, 13 October.
Two days earlier, on 11 October, a later broadside version of the
Constitution was printed in the Savannah Gazette of the State of
Georgia. It had been brought from New York by William Pierce, who
had arrived in Savannah on 10 October. Pierce had left the Conven-
tion for New York in July, and as a member of Congress, he was pres-
ent during the debate on the Constitution on 26, 27, and 28 Septem-
ber. The copy of the Constitution he brought to Savannah on 10 Octo-
ber was the congressional broadside of 28 September which con-
tained the Constitution and the congressional resolution of 28 Sep-
tember transmitting the Constitution to the states (CDR, 342n).
Meanwhile, when Pierce arrived on the 10th, he wrote to Governor
Mathews and enclosed Charles Thomson's circular letter of 28 Sep-
tember to the state executives, a letter which contained the congres-
sional broadside of 28 September (CDR, 340).