The story of the actual making of that Constitution by the people of America, assembled in their conventions, is a marvelous story. No American can fully grasp what an American really is unless he personally reads that story, not as told even by the most gifted writer, but as told by the recorded debates in the very conventions themselves of the very Americans who created the nation which is America, made themselves its citizens and, as _its_ citizens, made the only _valid_ grants of enumerated _national_ power, the grants in the First Article. In a later chapter, somewhat of that story will be told, mostly in the very words of those who made those grants. At this point, we are concerned only to set out the hour and the moment when American human beings, as such, in their _greatest_ Revolution, exercised their _exclusive_ ability to give their one government some _national_ power to interfere with individual freedom. Each of them was already a citizen of one of the existing nations. It was, however, as American human beings, always collectively the possessors of the supreme will in America, and not as citizens of any nation, that they assembled in the conventions and, in the exercise of that supreme will, created a new and one American nation, by becoming its charter members and citizens. That was the first and immediate effect of the signing of that Constitution in the ninth convention of the American people, the convention in New Hampshire, on June 21, 1788. That is the actual day of the birth of the American nation as a political entity. It is the day on which the American citizen, member of the American nation, first existed. While it is true that there yet was no actual government of the new nation, it cannot be denied that legally, from that June 21, 1788, there did exist an American nation, as a political society of human beings, and that its members were the human beings in the former nations of Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, and New Hampshire. The very moment the Americans in those nine former nations had signed that Constitution of government, they had constituted themselves a nation and had become its citizens.