American Experiment by James MacGregor Burns Read Free Book Online Page A

pounds from the state treasury for his expenses, and in New York to receive news that he had been chosen president of the newly reorganized Columbia College. Delegates from New Hampshire did not arrive for eight weeks because, it was rumored, the state was too poor to pay their expenses. Delegates from Rhode Island did not arrive at all, because the legislators of Little Rhody were as suspicious of the convention delegates as the delegates were contemptuous of them and their cheap-money ways.
    On May 13 there was a great commotion outside Mrs. House’s lodging house: General Washington had arrived, escorted by the City Light Dragons and hailed by the pealing of the Liberty Bell, the booming of artillery, the flashing of sabers, and the huzzahs of a great throng. Mrs. House had tidied up her best rooms for the general, only to see the financier Robert Morris carry him off to his fine brick mansion, leaving her to hope that she could fill the rooms with Baptists, Cincinnati, or abolitionists, who were also then conventioneering in the nation’s first city.
    Washington had to wait twelve fretful days before a quorum was present, but Madison helped fill the time with caucus meetings of the Virginia delegates at the Indian Queen—to form, as Mason put it, “a proper correspondence of sentiments.”
    The Virginians got off to a good start when the assembly finally convened on May 25, a rainy Friday. Washington was unanimously elected president of the convention on the nomination of Morris and with the backing of Franklin, Washington’s only rival for world fame—a nice expression of unity at the start. Madison secured a seat up front, where he took a leading role in debate and, at the same time, kept the best and fullest record of the proceedings. He soon impressed the delegates with his lucid, low-voiced exposition of constitutional and political problems; he blended together, a Georgia delegate noted, “the profound politician with the scholar.” The prudent delegates devoted two days to laying out rules andprocedures, the most important of which was absolute secrecy about the debates. During these days they had an opportunity to begin taking the measure of their associates.
    What manner of men were these? The “bar of history” has rendered changing verdicts during two centuries of hindsight. For a hundred years or more the Framers were virtually deified, or seen at least as Olympians rising above petty self-interest and local prejudice to produce what Prime Minister William Gladstone would call, on the occasion of the Constitution’s centennial, “the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.” Then, in the iconoclastic Progressive era of the early twentieth century, the heroes were pulled off their pedestals and found to be crass conservatives who wanted to curb agrarian radicals and debtors, men of property who calculated that their holdings of land and securities and slaves would be safer under a national government judiciously removed from direct control by the masses. Interpretation followed interpretation. Marxists saw the Framers as products of class background and interest. Political theorists viewed them as ideologues responding to the dominant values of the time. Recently, political “realists” have analyzed them as state politicos maneuvering in the convention for regional advantage. Others have regarded them as nationalists and continentalists, still others as bold engineers engaged in a grand experiment. Two centuries later, the jury of history has rendered no final verdict from among these various theories.
    How did the men of Philadelphia view themselves? To see them as they appeared to one another in that hot chamber in the Pennsylvania State House is to raise them from immortality to mortality. All of them were unabashedly and even proudly political men to some degree,