225 years

Today is Constitution Day, the anniversary of the day in 1787 on which the oldest written constitution ever in continuous effect was signed. Julia Shaw at Heritage notes some aspects of it that people tend to forget. For instance:

When the 13th Amendment was ratified, not a single word of the Constitution needed to be deleted. The word “slave” or “slavery” never appears. In fact, the framers refused to use the words—opting instead for persons held to service or labor—to avoid legitimizing slavery and to emphasize that they were people, not objects.

The Constitution does not classify people according to race, not even in the oft-misunderstood Three-fifths Clause. Free blacks in the North and the South were counted on par with whites for purposes of apportionment. The three-fifths compromise was designed to prevent Southern states from magnifying their political power. .... [more]

Heritage's The Constitution of the United States, "The authoritative reference with expert, clause-by-clause analysis."

The Forgotten Constitution