PREFACE

On September 18, 1787, the day following adjournment of the Constitutional Convention, an exhausted George Washington dashed off a quick note to the Marquis de Lafayette. He had promised his old comrade-in-arms a full account of the proceedings of the Convention, but, desperately eager to return to Mount Vernon, he could summon up only enough energy to offer a brief characterization of that summer's work. The "production of four months deliberation," Washington wrote, was "now a Child of fortune, to be fostered by some and buffeted by others. What will be the General opinion on, or the reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say any thing for or against it-if it be good, I suppose it will work its way good-if bad it will recoil on the Framers."

Nearly five months later, comfortably ensconced at Mount Vernon and warmed by a fire on a bitterly cold February day, the General's optimism about the proposed new Constitution had improved considerably. Writing again to Lafayette, Washington observed that it was "little short of a miracle" that the men gathered in Philadelphia that past summer could "unite in forming a system of government so little liable to well-founded objections." Catherine Drinker Bowen, began her stirring 1966 account of the making of the Constitution, Miracle at Philadelphia, with an evocation of Washington's more sanguine assessment of the Constitution. "Miracles," she wrote, "do not occur at random. . . . Every miracle has its provenance, every miracle has been prayed for." Her intention, she declared, was to celebrate the "most remarkable political document in history."

 Gouverneur Morris, a Convention delegate from Pennsylvania, had built his fortune by keeping his eyes fixed on an earthly balance sheet, not on the heavens.   Speaking of the document that emerged from the East Room of the Pennsylvania State House, Morris noted that "while some have boasted it as a work from Heaven, others have given it a less righteous origin.   I have many reasons to believe that it is the work of plain, honest men."

Morris's homely description, though perhaps less inspiring than Washington's or Bowen's, brings us closer to the truth. But it takes us only a part of the way toward understanding either the individuals or the set of circumstances that brought the American Constitution into being. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 effected a revolution in the nature of the American government. That revolution did not occur either by accident or by divine intervention. It was, in its inception, the work of a small group of men who had become convinced that America's experiment in republican liberty was in jeopardy and that bold action was necessary if that experiment was to flourish. Those men-most conspicuous among them Washington, James Madison, and two Pennsylvania delegates, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson-set the revolution in motion by introducing during the early days of the Convention a bold, even audacious,   plan for an entirely new form of national government. But their attempt at revolutionary change, once launched, proved difficult either to sustain or to control.

This book presents a full narrative account of the work of the fifty-five men who spent the summer of 1787 in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House crafting an entirely new form of continental government.    Much of their work occurred during the formal sessions of the Convention itself, running six days a week, with only Sundays off, between May 25 and September 17. But I intend also to take readers behind the scenes and beyond the debates, into the taverns and boardinghouses of the city, to present a full account of how the world's most important constitution was forged.   

 An important part of the story hinges on the individual and collective characters of the men responsible for the Constitution's drafting. Interspersed with the narrative of events of the Convention, I have sought to free our "Founding Fathers" from their bronze or marble likenesses and to bring them to life. Those men were-I state it unabashedly-extraordinary individuals. Their ultimate achievement, however difficult it may have been to come by, was magnificent. They were, however, mortals, not, as some have characterized them, "demi-gods."

As historian Gordon Wood has reminded us, the leaders of America's revolutionary generation were not men of the twenty-first century.   They were the product of a particular place and moment of the late eighteenth century.    They were deliberating at a point in history in which intellectualism and political activism could naturally, easily, co-exist.    The most influential of them could lay claim to being the intellectual and political leaders of their respective states-men confident of their abilities to put their ideas about politics into practical form.

For all of their ability to combine intellect and activism, however, they were also products of a provincial world-one in which the perspective of even the most cosmopolitan among them was limited by the vast expanse of the American landscape and the inadequacies of the communication networks that were necessary to enable them-whether residents of Georgia or Maryland or New York or New Hampshire-- to think of themselves as citizens of a single nation.

When viewed with the benefit that two hundred twenty-one years of hindsight give us, the creation of a durable, democratic nation among thirteen disparate and far-flung sovereign states assumes an aura of inevitability. But when viewed from the perspective of the summer of 1787, that outcome was more improbable than inevitable. It is my hope that the readers of Plain, Honest Men: The Creation of the American Constitution, will come to appreciate not only the extraordinary achievements of the Founding Fathers, but also the conflict, contingency, and uncertainty which marked their deliberations.

While most of the delegates came to Philadelphia hoping to create a significantly strengthened continental government, none of them could have imagined the goliath of a nation that America was to become. And few of them could have imagined that this goliath would become a democratic nation. The vast majority of the Founding Fathers were republicans, not democrats, which is to say that they had rejected monarchy and hereditary rule and they had embraced unequivocally the idea of representative government. But there were nearly as many different answers to the question of the nature of the relationship between representatives and the citizens they served as there were delegates to the Convention.   At one extreme, some believed that representatives had an obligation to mirror faithfully the views of their constituents and, at the other, many of the Convention delegates believed that the best form of representative government was one in which the virtuous few, once elected or appointed to office,   acted independently of the whims of public opinion to serve "the public good."

Just as the delegates regarded "democracy" with varying degrees of enthusiasm, so too did they differ in their understanding of the meaning and character of the very structures of government they were creating.   As the delegates began their deliberations in late May they most often spoke of creating a "national" government; as they ended their deliberations in mid-September they tended to describe their creation as "federal."    Within a few months of their adjournment, James Madison was speaking of the proposed new government as "part-national" and "part-federal," but there was precious little agreement among even those who had drafted the Constitution as to the precise meaning of this new definition of federalism.

 If the debate over the "national" or "federal" character of the Constitution was often confusing, that over the nature of the American presidency was pure torment. Although all of the delegates wished at all costs to avoid creating an "elective monarch," there agreement ended. What should be the relationship of the new American President to the new Congress or, more problematically, to the people of America at large? Again, the delegates' answers to those questions varied enormously, and few among them had much confidence that their attempt at harmonizing those differences of opinion-in the creation of an electoral college-would prove a durable and workable solution.

Democracy, federalism, executive power---these are words that have been at the center of our political life, and our political and constitutional debate, from 1787 forward. There is still another word-equality--that has come to define the very nature, the highest aspiration, of the American experience. Yet neither that word, nor its antithesis--slavery-is anywhere mentioned in the text of the Constitution. The seemingly anomalous existence of slavery in a nation founded on a revolutionary promise of equality was not-at least in the minds of the framers--the central issue at stake in the making of the American Constitution, but it was certainly more important than most previous histories of the Constitutional Convention have made it out to be.

This history of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 will devote more space to the delegates' inconclusive and, in the end, unsatisfactory decisions about the place of slavery in the new republic than any previous work of its kind.    In dealing with this vexed subject, I have been mindful once again that the framers of the Constitution were men of the late eighteenth century, a time when the enslavement and subjugation of one group of human beings by another was more often the commonplace, rather than the exceptional, occurrence. This fact does not excuse the failure of the Founding Fathers to eradicate what historian Bernard de Voto long ago called "the paradox at the nation's core," but it does provide a frame of reference for understanding the causes of that tragic failure.   

Americans began to argue about how their Constitution should be interpreted from the very moment that the new government under that Constitution commenced. Those arguments have persisted, sometimes with extraordinary vehemence, down to the present day. Politicians, jurists, and ordinary citizens insist, at one extreme, that ours is a "living Constitution," intended by the founders to be interpreted in light of constantly changing circumstances or, at the other, that it is a straightforward legal text, to be interpreted according to the "plain meaning" of the words on the page, as understood by the people of the United States at the time it was drafted. One of my hopes in writing this book is that those who profess a self-confident certainty about either the "intent" of the framers" or of the "original meaning" of the words written on the Constitution's four parchment pages will, as they confront the uncertainty and humility with which the framers approached their task, admit to a bit more uncertainty and humility in their own pronouncements about our nation's fundamental charter.   

The most important purpose propelling this work is--dare I say it?-a patriotic one. The American experiment in liberty and constitutional governance has had its rocky moments, but our Constitution has proven to be not only the world's most durable written frame of government, but also, I believe, its most just and equitable. The men who drafted it knew that they had not created a "perfect" constitution, but they were nevertheless committed to continuing the quest for a "more perfect union." They knew that they were embarked on an important experiment, one that could achieve success only by a combination of conscientious stewardship and an openness to further experimentation and change.          Americans of the twenty-first century are the stewards of the United States Constitution, and perhaps we will be able to learn some valuable lessons both from the humility and the audacity of those men who came together in Philadelphia to affect the revolution of 1787.