Florida Constitution History — Florida

Florida has operated under six constitutions since achieving statehood on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state admitted to the Union. The FSU College of Law State Constitutional Law Research Guide identifies those six documents as the core primary sources for understanding Florida's governmental evolution: the constitutions of 1838 (pre-statehood), 1865 (post-Civil War), 1868 (Reconstruction), 1885 (post-Reconstruction), and 1968 (modern reform), along with the 1861 Ordinance of Secession. The 1968 document, ratified by voters on November 5, 1968, remains in effect today. Each constitution reflected a distinct political rupture — territorial ambition, Confederate secession, federal Reconstruction, conservative white Democratic restoration, and mid-twentieth-century urban reform — and each left structural marks that subsequent documents either codified or dismantled. The State Archives of Florida preserves original manuscripts of each constitution through the Florida Memory Project. The current constitution is published in full, with amendment histories, by the Florida Senate.

The first Florida constitutional convention convened on December 3, 1838, in St. Joseph, a Gulf Coast town in what is now Gulf County, reflecting the political dominance of the Middle Florida planter class in the antebellum period. The Florida Memory Project series description records that 56 delegates attended, with Robert Raymond Reid presiding as president and Joshua Knowles serving as secretary. The delegates drew heavily on the constitutions of neighboring states — particularly Alabama — and produced a handwritten document titled Form of Government for the People of Florida, preserved today at the State Archives of Florida.

As documented in the Florida Memory Project item record for the 1838 constitution, the document addressed the executive, legislative, and judicial departments alongside articles on suffrage, education, the seat of government, taxation, and internal improvements. Article XV designated Tallahassee as the seat of government. Although Florida's voters ratified the constitution shortly after the convention concluded, Congress did not admit Florida to the Union until March 3, 1845 — seven years after the convention. That gap between ratification and admission underscores how thoroughly Florida's founding constitutional moment was shaped by national debates over the balance of free and slave states, with Florida and Iowa admitted together on the same day to maintain sectional equilibrium.

The three constitutions produced between 1861 and 1868 compressed into seven years political changes that would define Florida's racial and civic order for nearly a century. Florida's 1861 Ordinance of Secession preceded a wartime constitutional arrangement that formally aligned the state with the Confederacy. After the war's end, the 1865 constitution — a 67-page handwritten document according to the Florida Memory Project — was drafted under Presidential Reconstruction and retained racial restrictions on suffrage that had characterized the antebellum document.

The 1868 Reconstruction constitution represented the most radical break. Compelled by federal military authorities as a condition of re-admission to the Union, it extended suffrage to male persons regardless of race, displacing the racial restriction of 1865. As documented in the Constituting America essay on Florida's constitutions, Governor Harrison Reid delivered his inaugural address in June 1868, and the 1868 document was adopted by Florida voters as a condition of re-entering congressional representation. However, the same source notes that by 1877, efforts to enfranchise emancipated slaves had largely been reversed through political and extralegal pressure, setting the stage for the constitutional retrenchment that followed.

The 1885 constitution was drafted after the end of Reconstruction and reflected the consolidation of conservative white Democratic — or Bourbon Democrat — power in Florida. As documented by the Florida Memory Project's Civil Rights learning unit, the 1885 document legitimized poll taxes as a prerequisite for voter registration, a provision that disproportionately disenfranchised African Americans and many poor whites throughout the former plantation belt counties of North Florida and the panhandle. That structural form of state government persisted for 83 years, until 1968.

The drive toward a new constitution was rooted in Florida's post-World War II transformation into an urban, rapidly growing Sun Belt state, which made the malapportioned legislature and overlapping executive agencies of the 1885 framework increasingly inadequate. According to the Associated Industries of Florida's CRC history page, a revision commission first met in December 1965; the full commission worked from November 1966 to January 1967. Chesterfield Smith chaired the drafting committee, and former Governor LeRoy Collins also served on the commission. The Florida Legislature passed the revised constitution in July 1968, and voters ratified it on November 5, 1968. As described in the University of Florida Law faculty publication The Same River Twice, the 1968 document was a nearly complete revision of the prior constitution and eliminated the prior ban on racially integrated schools that had persisted under the 1885 framework.

The 1968 constitution established four pathways by which Floridians may amend their governing document. The Florida Division of Elections identifies these as: a legislative joint resolution approved by three-fifths of each chamber, a citizen initiative petition placed on the ballot by statewide signature-gathering, a proposal from the Constitutional Revision Commission, and a proposal from the Taxation and Budget Reform Commission. All proposed amendments require at least 60 percent voter approval to take effect — a supermajority threshold that was itself ratified by voters as a legislative joint resolution in 2006.

The Constitutional Revision Commission (CRC) is the mechanism most distinctive to Florida in American state constitutional law. As described in the Talbot D'Alemberte reference guide published in the St. Thomas Law Review (Vol. 5, Issue 1, 1992), Article XI, Section 2 of the 1968 constitution empowered the CRC to meet ten years after adoption and every twenty years thereafter, with the authority to submit proposed revisions directly to the electorate, bypassing the Legislature entirely. A 2021 Florida Senate Judiciary Committee analysis of HJR 1179 confirms that three CRCs have convened: 1977–1978, 1997–1998, and 2017–2018. The commission's membership is composed of the Attorney General, 15 members appointed by the Governor, 9 by the President of the Senate, 9 by the Speaker of the House, and 3 by the Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court. The 1998 CRC produced Revision No. 13, which was adopted by voters and repealed certain provisions of Article IV; the Florida Senate's published constitution records its effective date as January 5, 1999. The next CRC is scheduled to convene around 2037–2038.

Two citizen-initiated constitutional amendments in the 2018 and 2024 general elections illustrate the practical operation of the 1968 document's amendment framework. In November 2018, approximately 65 percent of Florida voters approved Amendment 4, a citizen-initiated measure that restored voting rights to most individuals with felony convictions upon completion of their sentences, as reported by the Brennan Center for Justice. That amendment reversed a disenfranchisement structure with roots in the Reconstruction-era and post-Reconstruction constitutional frameworks.

In November 2024, Florida voters considered a different Amendment 4 — a citizen-initiated measure that would have protected abortion access up to the point of fetal viability. The measure received 57 percent of the vote but fell short of the 60 percent supermajority required for passage, as reported by NPR. NPR also reported that this made Florida the first state to reject such a proposal since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leaving Florida's six-week abortion ban in effect. The outcome demonstrated how the 60 percent threshold — a structural feature of the 1968 constitution — shapes the practical difficulty of constitutional change through the citizen initiative process. In 2021, the Florida Legislature considered HJR 1179, a measure that would have placed before voters a constitutional amendment to abolish the CRC; the Legislature did not pass it, leaving the commission's authority intact pending its next scheduled convening.

The 1968 constitution defines the structure of all three branches of Florida state government, delineates the rights of residents across all 67 counties, and sets the boundaries of county and municipal authority — making its historical development directly relevant to contemporary governance debates. The arc from the 1838 slave-state document through the 1865 and 1868 Reconstruction constitutions to the 1885 Bourbon Democrat restoration, and finally to the 1968 reform, is not merely archival: the 1885 framework's poll tax provisions shaped voting patterns across North Florida's majority-Black counties for most of the twentieth century, and their legislative dismantling through the 1965 federal Voting Rights Act and the 1968 state document together redrew the civic landscape.

The UF Law faculty study The Same River Twice observes that the population of Florida has grown so dramatically since 1968 that each successive cohort of voters participating in a CRC cycle is substantially different from the one before — a structural dynamic unique to Florida's Sun Belt trajectory. The citizen initiative process, the CRC mechanism, the 60 percent amendment threshold, and the pending question of whether a future Legislature might again attempt to limit or abolish the CRC are all live issues in Florida's civic and legislative discourse, each rooted in decisions made at the 1838 St. Joseph convention, in Tallahassee during Reconstruction, and in the 1966–1967 drafting sessions that produced the document governing Florida today.