Notes

Virginia, and at George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon to discuss trade disputes involving the Potomac River. The Mount Vernon meeting was so profitable that the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia called for another trade convention in Annapolis, Maryland, that would include all thirteen states. The Annapolis Convention was not well attended; only five states bothered to send representatives. Alexander Hamilton, a delegate from New York, however, wrote a resolution calling for another convention to remedy the weaknesses of the Confederation government. Faced with growing discontent and fearful of anarchy, the Confederation Congress (which Washington described as a “half-starved limp- ing government”) reluctantly seconded the idea of a convention in Philadelphia for May 1787.
The Constitutional Convention
Heavy clouds rolled off the Delaware River and opened up as the delegates arrived for the opening session on May 25. The cool rain offered welcome relief from the already unbearably warm weather that had settled over the city. Old-timers agreed that it was the hottest summer in memory.
Drenched and mud-spattered, the delegates met at the Pennsyl- vania State House, where eleven years earlier the Declaration of Independence had been signed, an event which lends the old State House its present name of Independence Hall. Despite the wet weather, the delegates’ spirits were high. They were eager to get down to work and enthusiastic about what could be accomplished. Virginian James Madison—whose many ideas justifiably earned him the title “Father of the Constitution”—declared with a little indulgence that their work would “settle forever the fate of republi- can government.”
Thomas Jefferson, overseas at the time as minister to France, called the men who arrived for the Philadelphia Convention “an assembly of demigods”; they were indeed a remarkable gathering of talent. Numbered among the fifty-five delegates were the best political thinkers and finest lawyers in America, well read and well educated. Their talents, however, were not simply the product of book learning. They were practical men of experience, many of them as skilled with the sword as with the pen; half of them had fought in the Revolution. Thirty-nine had served in the Continental or Confederation Congresses, which gave them a broad range of practical political experience. Among these men were past, present, and future governors and two future United States presidents.
The Constitutional Convention was more than a gathering of talent, however; it was also a collection of regional and indi- vidual interests. Twelve independent states (Rhode Island refused to participate) were represented. These states, apart from war-time emergencies, had never been very neighborly. Diverse delegate in- terests, compounded by the hot Philadelphia summer, led to heated debates and threatened the survival of the convention. That these men represented their states’ interests could hardly be considered a vice because they were in fact elected as state representatives to the convention. Happily, though, many of them had a larger, national vision of their work and were able to hammer out compromises that