The Quartet by Joseph J. Ellis

Author:Joseph J. Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

All efforts to impose a monolithic set of motives on the assembled delegates at Philadelphia, whether economic or ideological, have been discredited. And the very effort to do so misses the most salient point, which is that the vast majority of delegates came as representatives of their respective states, so that no single interpretive category could do justice to their bafflingly complex angles of vision. What needs to be remembered and recovered is that no collective sense of an American identity yet existed in the populace at large. Even outright nationalists like Madison, Washington, and Hamilton recognized that they were arguing for a political framework that would consolidate the states into a union in which a truly national sense of allegiance would develop gradually over time. In effect, the national government they sought to establish would provide a political structure for a nation-in-the-making, thereby facilitating and accelerating the “making” process, much like an incubator for a newborn child.

Looked upon as a collective, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention were surprisingly young—average age forty-four—and disproportionately well educated. Twenty-nine had college degrees, and the same number had studied law. Their educational backgrounds were more conspicuous than their wealth, making them more an intellectual than an economic elite. Thirty-five had served as officers in the Continental Army, and forty-two had served in the Continental or Confederation Congress.28

This was the most important political indicator of all, for it meant that a sizable majority of the delegates had had intimate experience with the inadequacy of the Articles as a makeshift government during and after the war. Army veterans could testify more poignantly than anyone else that the very structure of the state-based government under the Articles had relegated their sacrifices to oblivion. Whether you served in the Continental Congress or the Continental Army, you tended to understand more palpably how the current arrangement under the Articles was not working.

For the next fifteen weeks, from May 25 to September 17, an ever-shifting collection of delegates from twelve states met in general sessions, on appointed committees, and in informal gatherings at City Tavern. Important if unrecorded conversations also occurred at Robert Morris’s mansion on Market and Sixth Streets, where Washington was staying. An important procedural decision was made early on to conduct most debates in a committee-of-the-whole format, which enhanced the seminar-like atmosphere in which delegates could try out arguments, then change their minds after listening to different opinions, without being forced to register a formal vote.

Since it proved to be the most consequential political gathering in American history, historians, political scientists, and constitutional scholars have gravitated to this moment in great numbers, generating a massive body of scholarship almost designed to discourage the faint of heart. The earliest historians, elegantly synthesized by George Bancroft in the late nineteenth century, tended to cast a spiritual haze over the proceedings, describing the delegates under “divine guidance,” and the Constitution itself as a product of “the divine power which gives unity to the universe, and order and connection to events.

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