We the People: THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION AFTER 200 YEARS : ‘The Miracle in Philadelphia’ : Torn by differences, 13 states find common ground and produce the Constitution.

Befitting the lofty aspirations of the grand “foederal convention,” Philadelphia--a metropolis with cobblestone streets, sidewalks and a population of about 40,000--fancied itself the pre-eminent American city in 1787.

And it was. While pale in comparison to London or Paris in size and sophistication, it boasted of its libraries, eight newspapers and an impressive list of learned societies and energetic benevolent organizations. It counted painters, writers and scientists among its residents. Far-wandered travelers found hospitality and relative comfort in more than 100 inns and taverns. Its shops were increasingly stocked with consumers’ dreams from Europe.

Philadelphia was at once a bastion of the American gentry, now in its third and fourth generations, and a raw, smelly, vibrant river town in some ways physically and spiritually wedded to the frontier in an agricultural country of 4 million people. Even for a seaport, its streets and markets collected an extraordinary human menagerie: Quakers in their broad-brimmed black hats, German farmers, Delaware and Shawnee Indians, woodsmen in buckskins, businessmen and diplomats from across Europe and merchant seamen from around the world.

At the Crossroads

The birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, the near-geographical-center of a nation reaching no more than a few hundred miles inland but stretching all the way from Maine to the northern border of Spanish Florida, Philadelphia sat at the crossroads of a turbulent new nation still seeking to right itself in the wake of the Revolution.

In dramatic evidence of the city’s growing importance, a new coach service was introduced in the spring of 1787, making it possible to travel all the way from New York to Philadelphia in a single day--as long as none of the horses fell dead or pulled up lame.

Late in the afternoon of May 3, 1787, the fast coach from New York arrived more or less on time with 36-year-old James Madison as one of its passengers.

Less than a year earlier, the slight, balding Madison had been one of a dozen delegates from five states who had met in Annapolis, Md., to grapple with a host of threatening economic problems that descended upon post-Revolutionary America. The conference failed, but it produced a call for a Philadelphia convention to address both the troublesome issues and the manifest shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, the governmental charter adopted by the 13 newly independent states in 1781.

Thereafter, Madison had set about persuading his own state of Virginia to take the lead by selecting a slate of delegates. He had also worked furiously at an exhaustive examination of political systems down through history, writing in detail his ideas for a new government in America.

Hero of the Revolution

More important still, he had set out to persuade a reluctant George Washington to leave retirement at Mount Vernon, his estate on the Potomac River in Virginia, and come to Philadelphia as a delegate. The hero of the Revolution was still--six years after Lord Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown--the most revered man in America and indisputably the crucial figure in the planned conclave. He was the only man in the country with the stature to calm fractious delegates riven by disparate interests.

Initially, he had been ambivalent about the Philadelphia venture. Yet not even Madison felt more deeply than Washington the ineffectiveness of Congress, the lack of provision for common security and the debilitating conflicts between the states. By the time Madison arrived in Philadelphia, the general, then 55 years old, was preparing to leave Virginia for the convention.

Washington’s Welcome

He set out before dawn on the morning of May 9, traveled through bone-chilling spring rains and arrived in the Pennsylvania capital on Sunday afternoon, May 13. Escorted into the city by officers of his wartime staff and outriders surrounding his carriage, he was welcomed by ringing church bells, booming cannons and cheering crowds that filled streets ordinarily vacant on the Sabbath.

Madison’s scenario called for the general to be promptly elected chairman of the convention, where Gov. Edmund Randolph of Virginia would put forth a detailed plan Madison and his fellow Virginia delegates were busy crafting--a plan that would replace the Articles of Confederation with a substantially new system of national government.

That scenario appeared a long way from reality the next morning when Washington and Madison walked to the State House; a more likely prospect was that the most admired man in America had made a long journey for nought. Few other delegates had arrived, and 11 days of waiting would go by before the convention could even muster a quorum.

Washington, Madison and the rest had good cause to fret and wonder whether the convention would amount to anything. The 13 states existed as quarrelsome, independent little nations, loosely associated only through the ineffective Congress. Because state legislatures sometimes did not even bother to send representatives, Congress itself often could not meet for lack of a quorum.

Most crippling, when Congress attempted to carry out its most important task--raising money from the states to pay the country’s obligations--it was often casually ignored or answered with stinginess. Indeed, Congress would have sat in Philadelphia in 1787 had it not ingloriously fled to New York four years earlier to escape war veterans’ demands for back pay.

Seven states had their own navies. They made their own foreign policies, more often than not at the expense of their neighbors. They printed their own currencies and engaged in cutthroat trade competition. Waterways were the avenues of commerce as well as boundaries; Virginia and Maryland feuded over the Potomac River; Pennsylvania and New Jersey quarreled over the Delaware.

Near Act of War

Southerners and Western frontiersmen, recognizing the Mississippi River as crucial to marketing their crops and future westward expansion, considered it a near act of war when New England congressmen offered Spain control of the river in exchange for a generous sharing in Spain’s market for fish.

Socially, the states had surprisingly little in common to help them through their differences. Even confined to the East Coast, citizens were separated by religion and sometimes language. Americans were also isolated. Washington himself, one of the more traveled of the men who made up the convention, had never been south of Virginia nor north of Boston.

It was a chaotic situation, and Washington feared that it would lead to another war, a return to monarchy or both. There was the potential, Thomas Jefferson thought, for a conflict in which England would come to the side of one state and France into alliance with another.

Economic Deterioration

As the ‘80s wore on, an alarming deterioration in the economic climate added its massive weight to the arguments in favor of revising the articles that supposedly bound the states in “perpetual union.”

America had staggering debts from the war. It also had an enormous and growing appetite for European imports, and it was still an agricultural economy whose chief producers saw precious little hard currency. All this combined to produce a dangerous economic cycle: Pressed for payment by their creditors in London and elsewhere, importers from Boston to Savannah demanded payment from merchants and shopkeepers; the merchants and shopkeepers demanded payment from farmers who had in earlier times been able to survive by bartering hams and firewood for necessities.

Such demands for cash payments produced waves of farm foreclosures and sent farmers and the less skilled into debtors’ prison.

Shays’ Revolt

In January, 1787, Massachusetts farmers led by Capt. Daniel Shays, who had distinguished himself in Revolutionary War combat, launched an armed insurrection. With hundreds of his neighbors under arms, he set out to use force to end foreclosures.

His band set upon merchants, whipped lawyers and judges and disrupted courts. Three people were killed in a raid on the armory at Springfield, Mass., where Shays hoped to gain more arms and ammunition but found his target surrounded by 900 militiamen.

The specter of Americans set against each other in class warfare shocked the country as had nothing else since the Revolution. Following the lead of seven states that had already acted, the Confederation Congress belatedly endorsed the call for the Philadelphia convention.

Still, Congress said, the meeting should be “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” It should produce changes that would “render the federal constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government & the preservation of the Union.”

Finally, on the morning of May 25, as a daylong spring downpour drenched the city, 29 of the 55 delegates who eventually made it to the meeting--a quorum--took their places around green-baize-covered tables in the ground-floor chamber of the State House. In the same room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed nearly 11 years before, they unanimously elected Washington their chairman.

Washington was not to utter a substantive word on the convention’s work until the new Constitution was ready for signing in September. His silence in the chair hardly meant that he was a figurehead, however. He not only conveyed his thoughts through expression but made the rounds where delegates gathered on evenings and weekends, talking with them one by one and in groups.

And his position was all the more important--and sensitive--because almost all the delegates, like most of their fellow countrymen, assumed Washington would head the new government if such a thing eventually emerged.

‘Virginia Resolves’

As the convention began, Gov. Randolph put forward the “Virginia Resolves,” chiefly authored by Madison, which amounted to nothing less than the outline of a rudimentary constitution for a new national government.

Many years later, it would become fashionable for some to look at the convention as a gathering of rich men who had written a document to best serve themselves and who, motivated by their holdings in government bonds, had perpetrated a historic right-wing plot.

The impressive pro-nationalist membership indeed heavily represented the American gentry--”an assembly of demigods,” Thomas Jefferson called it. But historical records do not support the notion that it was all just bond market scheming, and the convention included a wide spectrum of society and political opinion. Along with politicians and lawyers, there was a scattering of farmers, merchants and planters, among them a few committed anti-Federalists.

Range of Personalities

There were several delegates, notably Maryland Atty. Gen. Luther Martin, who had excessive fondness for spirits. There were prudes--New Jersey’s William Paterson, who detested billiards and womanizing and was reputedly estranged from his own brothers because he thought that they had misused money he had lent them.

Of the 55 delegates, eight had signed the Declaration, 42 had served in Congress and 20 had taken a hand in writing their state constitutions. Half of them were not yet 40; their ages averaged only 43, the eldest being octogenarian Benjamin Franklin, the world-esteemed scientist and diplomat whose own plan for centralized government had died quietly in the Continental Congress 12 years earlier--too radical, it was considered.

Once they turned to work, behind closed doors and shuttered windows and surrounded by sentries outside lest they be overheard, the delegates’ weekly schedule ran from Monday morning until Saturday noon.

1787 Was Memorable

For some, life was relatively comfortable. Washington enjoyed the hospitality of Robert Morris, whose wealth had helped underwrite the Revolutionary Army, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts rented a house and brought his family down.

For others, it meant week after week crowded two to a room into boarding houses. The streets reeked of stables and festering garbage. Bedroom doors were shut tight to keep out flies, but bedbugs reigned beneath the covers.

All this compounded the strains that went with the secrecy of the proceedings, the intractable political differences between the delegates and the conflicting interests of large states and small.

A gloomy Pierce Butler of South Carolina said he had concluded that the interests of his state and the Eastern states were “as different as the interests of Russia and Turkey.”

During the one lengthy recess, Washington and Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris slipped away to Valley Forge to fish for trout.

There the general walked alone through cantonments where his army had spent its bitter winter 10 years earlier, and ragged American soldiers had left bloody footprints in the snow.

Only five days after it was called to order, the convention took the fateful turn that changed America, the boldest stride of all in what in the end became known as the “Miracle at Philadelphia.”

By a vote of 6 to 1--members voted within their state delegations, then each state cast a single vote--the seven states present decided to abandon the Articles of Confederation and create a new national government. It was the anti-nationalists’ worst nightmare come true.

The Virginia Resolves led with conciliatory language calling merely for modifications to the Articles of Confederation. As the fervently nationalistic Gouverneur Morris pointed out, though, the language was inconsistent with the central government established in the rest of the plan.

So delegates discarded the first resolve in favor of language boldly declaring that “a new national government ought to be established consisting of a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary.” That put the convention inexorably down the nationalist road.

Too Much Control Feared

Even so, fears of concentrated power remained: The strongest proponents of central government feared too much control directly in the hands of voters, for instance, and delegates from small states feared the larger ones would dominate the country.

How much democracy was tolerable? Should the power of the executive branch be vested in a single individual or in, perhaps, a triumvirate? How long should the executive serve? Would the executive exercise veto power over legislative acts? Should members of the legislative houses be chosen by state legislatures or direct vote? Would acts of the national legislature supersede laws of the states?

Most of all, would representation in the national legislature be proportional to state population?

In the first days, Randolph, Madison and their allies from the larger states won approval of section after section of their plan with scarcely a murmur. Benjamin Franklin optimistically foresaw early adjournment.

‘Rather Submit to a Monarch’

But the prospect of going home to report a new national legislature dominated by Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia was more than small state representatives could bear. On June 15, New Jersey’s Paterson smashed the veneer of consensus. New Jersey would never accede to the Virginia plan--”She would be swallowed up”-- he said, adding that he “had rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate.”

Paterson offered instead the New Jersey plan, an attempt to turn the convention away from proportional representation, away from radical change.

The substitute was debated for four days, with an intervening weekend that gave the delegates time to discuss it privately. It came to a vote after a systematic dissection by Madison and a daylong speech in which New York’s Alexander Hamilton offered alternative proposals that made the Virginia resolves seem mild in comparison.

When the vote came on Paterson’s substitute, only Delaware and New York--Hamilton was outvoted by the state’s other two delegates--sided with New Jersey. It was defeated 7 to 3.

Month of Debate

The resistance of the small states to large-state dominance was real, however, and it had to be addressed if the new charter were to win wide acceptance. A full month of debate would elapse before the convention reached the historic compromise that averted failure and saved the Constitution.

In the end, it was Connecticut’s Roger Sherman, along with John Dickenson of Delaware, who produced the basis for agreement: equal representation for each state in the Senate, with the House membership based proportionately upon state populations.

For Sherman, an awkward, unpretentious one-time shoemaker who had signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation, it was a fair, sound idea that he had first advocated 10 years earlier.

Compelling as it was, “The Great Compromise” divided the convention almost evenly when it finally came to a vote July 16. Madison regarded it as nothing less than a surrender of his hopes for a strong central government. Virginia and Pennsylvania held fast against it, and they were joined by South Carolina and Georgia.

Momentous Conclusion

But other of the big states divided and could not vote. North Carolina, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland voted yes, and the compromise carried, 5 to 4. The convention was within reach of its momentous conclusion.

Henceforth, the gravitational pull toward resolving differences would prove irresistible, though final agreement was weeks away on such issues as the precise scope of presidential powers and the consummately embarrassing, potentially explosive subject of slavery--on which weary delegates adopted a series of compromises that, in effect, left the issue to be settled by civil war.

On Sept. 17, with the final document officially committed to four parchment sheets in an elegant scroll, 38 delegates affixed their signatures, stepping forward in order of the states from north to south. Of those present, only three declined--Massachusetts’ Gerry, Virginia’s Gov. Randolph and George Mason.

U.S. History Had Begun

Though its roots stretched back through more than 150 years of Colonial and Revolutionary history and the fight over ratification would add the Bill of Rights and change the document profoundly, the history of the United States of America had begun.

Yet when Abraham Baldwin of Georgia had given the Constitution its last signature, James Madison concluded his journal on a surprisingly undramatic note:

“The constitution being signed by all the members except Mr. Randolph, Mr. Mason, and Mr. Gerry, who declined giving it the sanction of their names,” he wrote, “the Convention dissolved itself by an adjournment sine die.”