Genius of the People by Charles L Mee Jr

Author:Charles L Mee Jr [Mee, Charles L Jr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/United States/Revolutionary Period
ISBN: 9781612307404
Publisher: New Word City, LLC
Published: 2014-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

Perhaps something should be said about the weather. Beginning on June 11, the day on which Wilson and Pinckney put together their alliance on the three-fifths formula, the usual summer heat wave hit Philadelphia, and the delegates were plunged into a sweltering, humid torment that went on and on, relentlessly, with only an occasional break, for the remainder of the summer.

These Philadelphia summers were famous with travelers, who found the climate torturous - and they were excruciating especially for the New Englanders, who naturally wore their customary wool suits throughout the summer. Nor did it help that the delegates kept the windows closed. If, as sometimes happened when the room became impossibly stifling, the windows were thrown open, the flies came in, the notorious Philadelphia flies that lit on faces and hands, biting, and turning everything black with the filth they left behind.

Such days were enough to make one long for night - until, back at the inns and boarding houses, the decision had to be made again: whether to leave the windows open or closed. There were no screens. And flies and mosquitoes bred in the moist garbage in the back streets below one’s window. Not even the finest houses in the most salubrious neighborhoods escaped this plague. Just a hundred feet from the stately home of Bishop White, the garbage was piled so high that a stable owner complained he could not get his carts in and out. A hundred feet farther on was an open sewer, which, in addition to other effluvia, carried the infernal odors of the refuse of leather tanning from Howell’s tan yards.

The mosquitoes that sprang out of these breeding grounds and those of the nearby swamps were supplemented by those imported by the ships from the West Indies and Central and South America. Not surprisingly, Philadelphia was visited often in the summer by whooping cough, malaria, smallpox, and yellow fever. At least one man, driven to real desperation by these insects, brought a hornets’ nest into his house and hung it in place of a chandelier from the parlor ceiling to let the hornets feast on the mosquitoes and flies.

Under the circumstances, even the most equable of tempers began to flare after the midday sun had heated the State House up to the full fierceness of a Philadelphia summer day. Under the circumstances, too, it cannot be surprising if, by June 15, when the priggish and pretentious William Paterson came to present his alternate proposal to replace the Virginia Plan, a certain civility was on the wane.

Paterson’s proposal, commonly called the New Jersey Plan, was, in fact, a joint product of the delegations of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Delaware. It called not for a new plan of government but rather for the Articles of Confederation to be “revised, corrected, and enlarged” in such a way as to strengthen the central government while preserving the sovereignty of the states.

As soon as Paterson had finished presenting his plan, the New Yorker John Lansing rose to express his support.

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