Maine
Constitution Essay Winner
“The Maine Constitution ”
Meagan Sturgis
Grade 6
Windsor Elementary School
“We the people, in order to establish justice, insure tranquility, provide for our mutual defense, promote our common welfare, and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessing of liberty.” Do these simple, but powerful words ring a bell? Of course they do! Why do they seem familiar? Well, these words are part of the preamble to the Maine Constitution. Why does the Constitution of Maine sound so important? It sounds important because it is important. Without this constitution, Maine would have had some pretty rough times.
To me, those words from the preamble explain the reason the Maine Constitution was written. It was written to keep the people of Maine living in harmony by explaining their rights to the people, and explaining how laws work. This document helped people to compromise and work out their problems. The Maine Constitution was like the blueprint for a building; it showed how to create something solid and lasting. Without a blueprint, a building would be poorly designed and fall apart, and without a constitution, the state would do the same. That’s exactly why Maine has stayed together for so many years—because the Maine Constitution was here to help.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Someone must have written the Maine Constitution—it couldn’t have just fallen out of the sky!” Well, you’re right, someone did write it. William King, Maine’s first governor, wrote the largest part, with the help of a few others whose names you might recognize—Thomas Jefferson, John Chandler, Albion K. Parris, William Pitt Preble, and John Holmes to name a few.
Remember when I mentioned that Thomas Jefferson, our second president, helped write the Maine Constitution? Thomas Jefferson wrote the section about education. This article stated that the legislature must make sure that each town provides a school for the children, and encourages education every way it can. Including this article in the Maine Constitution shows that our forefathers knew that the children were Maine’s future, and by helping those children learn, they would be helping the towns and the State as a whole. Since the Maine Constitution stated towns must provide education to Maine children, towns and cities had bright, well-educated young people to live in them, and help run them in the future.
As for the rest of the Maine Constitution, each part of the document has a law, and the Constitution explains how that law works. For example, in Article 3, there is a law about how the government’s power is to be distributed. It says that the powers of the government should be divided into three distinct departments, the legislative, executive, and judicial. Each branch plays an important role in state government, just like each actor is important in a play. The legislative branch can write laws and direct finances, but the executive branch may veto laws or refuse to spend money in a certain way, while the judicial may determine if a law is unconstitutional and which laws would apply to a certain case. The writers of the Maine Constitution did this so that one single group would not have all the power.
In 1819, at a Maine Constitutional Convention, 210 delegates approved the Maine Constitution, but it wasn’t official until 1820 when Maine became a state.
If you think about it, the state of Maine is amazing, but so is the Maine Constitution. It was, and forever will be, the amazing blueprint for Maine, the state we are lucky enough to call home.
