This is the text of the Constitution with which Arizona entered the Union in 1912. It is, with one exception noted below, the same as the text of the 1910 Constitution adopted by the Constitutional Convention that met from October 10 to December 9 of that year. After President Taft objected to one provision and blocked statehood, the citizens of Arizona subsequently agreed to amend it to the version you see below.
As is to be expected with historical documents, multiple printings and copies have produced inconsistencies in the official wording and style of the original state Constitution. We have assembled this document from and checked it against three early printings of the Constitution. The first is the “Proposed Constitution for the State of Arizona” from 1910 (the original scans for which are available from our partners at the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records’s AZMemory Project, and hereinafter “1910”). The second is the The Records of the Arizona Constitutional Convention of 1910 (John S. Goff ed., State Bar of Arizona, 1991, hereinafter “Goff”). The third is the version which appears in the 1913 printing of the Revised Statutes (also available at the AZMemory project, beginning on page 125, and hereinafter “1913”).
Various printing and typographical errors exist in these various versions of the 1910/1912 Constitution; for benefit of scholars, these discrepancies are noted in endnotes. We have preserved the idiosyncratic spellings and punctuation of the original text.
Consistent with the original text, we have not included the section titles which were introduced in later revisions, since these titles have plausible interpretive and substantive content unknown to the original drafters. The one minor clarifying edit we have made is, consistent with subsequent versions of the Constitution, we have added two purely organizational “Part” markers to both Articles IV and VIII and marked these with brackets. The original text had these Parts—an organizational unit between Articles and Sections--but it did not assign a term to them.
Source: Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, History and Archives Division, Phoenix, #95-2492 [*]
Participants from left to right: A.W. Cole (secretary), R.B. Sims, S.B. Bradner, Thomas Feeney, George Hunt (president), Charles Roberts, E.A. Tovrea, John Bolan, Lamar Cobb. Original photo and identification available at the Arizona Memory Project.