You don't have to take my word for it, here's what a document from the National Archives noted as to who, exactly, it was who was allowed to vote for the First Congress along with the First President and those who elected the legislative bodies which ratified the Constitution and who adopted the Bill of Rights in the First Congress.
At the time of the first Presidential election in 1789, only 6 percent of the population–white, male property owners–was eligible to vote.
The adoption of the Bill of Rights as it was badly written by the First Congress was hardly a matter of metaphysical legitimacy, nothing that any government that prevents the majority of its citizens to vote can have such legitimacy, it cannot get that from the habit of its substance being asserted to have such legitimacy. And, as I will never stop pointing out, the recent Supreme Courts in their gutting of the democratic reform of the Voting Rights Act as certainly as that led by Roger B. Taney has used the language of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to thwart the legitimate will of The People on anything like an equal basis.
In his great study of the framing of the Constitution from an economic analysis, the 20th century historian Charles Beard noted that far from being the expressed will of even those white, male, adult, propertied land-owners considered to be eligible citizens voted on the matter. Starting with the decision to call the Second Congress, the wrote the Constitution, to call them to write such a document or what it was to be like was not ever put to anything like a vote of those the "founders" decided they wanted to govern [see the chapters dealing with the ratification process]. The delegates to the Convention were not generally the product of anything like a popular vote and the ratification of the document was, if anything, a determined effort by the landed aristocracy to push it through against all possible objections by an informed public.
That is a matter of historical fact, the expansion of the vote to include anything like "universal suffrage" of white male citizens of the United States didn't come until much later as states gradually, very gradually in some cases, expanded the franchise to even all white male citizens. Some states, at the same time EXCLUDED, BY LAW, FREE BLACK MALE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND RETAINED THE EXCLUSION OF ALL WOMEN.
In every way, every extension of just the legal definition of who got to vote was more legitimate than the original Constitution was at the time of its adoption because nothing like a majority of We The People was either permitted or enabled to express their consent to it.
So if you accept the principle that the only legitimate government is one that has the due consent of those who are governed, the U.S. Constitution, as an 18th century relic which has not fundamentally, even now, been amended to full equality and a full protection of the most sacred act of government, a vote which will both be counted and made to count, the original Constitution and even as it stands now falls entirely short of that. The fact that Trump's bumbling lawyers are trying to reproduce what the Bush family lawyers were able to do in 2000 and that the process doesn't reject that out of hand shows how dangerous it really is. If Trump and McConnell had succeeded in staffing the courts with neo-fascist Republican goons they'd have succeeded by law as what their efforts may do in fact, thwart the will of the decided majority in the election we just had and which has yet to conclude.
That we retain the dangerous relic of allowing a lame duck president to wreck as much as he can to leave the person who beat him in the election to deal with it is just another thing that the worship of the "founders" and the deification of the Constitution not only permits but, now that it's been done, will quickly become the norm for the worst people in our politics. The thing doesn't work to produce egalitarian democracy, it is a minefield to prevent even the conception of democracy which the white, male property-owning class of the 1780s feared would thwart their pursuit of wealth and power. The struggle to expand the franchise was violent and bloody and cost enormous amounts for The People in general and the results are anything from secure, as the Roberts Court and Rehnquist Court showed when they attacked the voting rights of Black People, etc. in their gutting of the Voting Rights Act on the basis of that Constitution. Making it a thing above criticism and of mindless reverence is dangerous.
That's how I dare to say what I did.
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