US Constitution: seats in the first House

The clause fixed the size of the first House of Representatives before any census existed, and the listed numbers add up to sixty-five seats. They run from ten for Virginia down to one for Delaware. The spelling chuse for choose is the original and runs through the whole document. The first census of 1790 fixed new numbers, and the House has been reapportioned after almost every census since.

Where this text comes fromThe numbers in this clause are a negotiation, not a measurement. No census existed when it was written, so the delegates argued their way to a figure for each state and wrote the result straight into the document. That is why the passage reads like a ledger rather than like prose: thirteen names, thirteen figures, and not one word of reasoning offered for any of them. The states are named here and again at the foot of the document, where the signatures are grouped state by state, and nowhere else among the articles. What you copy is a political settlement frozen as arithmetic, in the spelling and capitalization of 1787.

What you might not noticeThe word choose is spelled chuse throughout the document, and this clause carries it. It was an ordinary English spelling in 1787 and is now found almost nowhere outside eighteenth-century texts. Source

What it trainsTwenty-nine capital letters and twenty-eight of them inside the sentence: the heaviest sustained Shift work available on this site, and it comes from a list of state names each of which takes a capital. On top sit fourteen commas in a single sentence of seventy words, so you are alternating between Shift and comma almost continuously. Two hyphens and one semicolon complete the load. The archaic spelling chuse arrives in the middle, where correcting instinct is strongest.

Read the full text at the publisher: U.S. National Archives