One of the most curious things about the U.S. Constitution is that it is written down. Words may seem like an obvious feature of any constitution, but they do not appear in much of the constitution of Great Britain, the country from which the United States seceded. Historians have often assumed that the peculiar American practice of putting constitutions into single documents has its origins in the corporate charters of the 17th-century trading companies that founded more than half of the original thirteen states. But, as historian Mary Sarah Bilder has written, it is surprisingly difficult to explain the shift from corporate charters to modern constitutions with precision and persuasive power.

This article attempts to do just that, telling the story of a series of lawsuits that forced the Massachusetts Bay Company to treat the terms of its charter as if they were gospel. Drawing on original research into thousands of primary sources from the United States and the United Kingdom spanning from 1607 to 1793, this article presents an account of how a corporate charter evolved into a “Charter Constitution” in the United States, while the British Constitution remained intangible.

This article demonstrates that written words became a defining feature of American constitutionalism a century before the American Revolution, and that this distinction between American and British conceptions of constitutions contributed to American independence. The historical origins of American constitutionalism may also lend further depth to modern interpretive debates about whether text alone can provide meaningful limits on government power without reference to external traditions, modes of enforcement, or evolving practices.

• Adjunct Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. For their mentorship and advice throughout the research of this article, I am immensely grateful to Emma Rothschild, Morton Horwitz, James Kloppenberg, and Ken Mack, as well as to the research librarians at the Massachusetts Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the National Archives in London. I am grateful to Mary Bilder, Jud Campbell, David Ciepley, Andrew Crespo, Charlie Donahue, Dan Farbman, Michael Klarman, Anna Lvovsky, Daphna Renan, and Rebecca Scott, as well as to participants at the Harvard Center for History and Economics Workshop, the Boston College Legal History Workshop, and the Annual Conference of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, for their thoughtful comments and critiques. I am grateful to the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, as well as the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, for their incredibly thorough work in checking every source in the article and suggesting improvements to the text. I thank the editors of the Stanford Law Review for their incredibly thorough work in checking each source of the article and suggesting improvements to the text.