characters Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787
A classic history of the Federal Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, the stormy, dramatic session that produced the most enduring of political documents: the Constitution of the United States.
From Catherine Drinker Bowen, noted American biographer and National Book Award winner, comes the canonical account of the Constitutional Convention recommended as required reading for every American. Looked at straight from the records, the Federal Convention is startlingly fresh and new, and Mrs. Bowen evokes it as if the reader were actually there, mingling with the delegates, hearing their arguments, witnessing a dramatic moment in history.
Here is the fascinating record of the hot, sultry summer months of debate and decision when ideas clashed and tempers flared. Here is the country as it was then, described by contemporaries, by Berkshire farmers in Massachusetts, by Patrick Henry's Kentucky allies, by French and English travelers. Here, too, are the offstage voices--Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and John Adams from Europe.
In all, fifty-five men attended; and in spite of the heat, in spite of clashing interests--the big states against the little, the slave states against the anti-slave states--in tension and anxiety that mounted week after week, they wrote out a working plan of government and put their signatures to it. Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787
Required reading for every American - followed by or concurrent with a visit to Independence Park in Philadelphia to get a sense of the beginning.
It is painfully apparent, if you have been following politics in the last 5 years, that many of our policitians today (including our Constitutional Scholar President Mr. Obama), who all by the way take an oath to protect the Constitution, simply are not familiar with the document or how it came to be, or why it is unique in the world. They need to read this book and understand that it is Non-Fiction.
I would be happy to borrow them my dog-eared copy.
The thought that these men came together from all over the country, undeniably the best our young nation had to offer, and put their minds to form a government unique in the world while building relative consensus and offering compromise - while not quite coming to blows - and agreeing to keep this all under wraps until consensus had been reached, is breathtaking. Particularly when compared to modern politics. As you move through all the politicking and legal argument offered by the delegates through the book and hear their points of view you begin to understand the general overall sense of purpose these men had. Truly they all had their foibles and colloquial interests which they attempted to forward and they did kick the can of slavery down the road, but considering the times and social order of their century, with relative decency and no bloodshed, these men built a particularly strong foundation for what was to become America. When you reach the end of the story, the document itself and the plan it proposed seems so simple - representation by the people, checks and balances - and yet so new.
I particularly enjoyed the insights as to the characters and personalities of this group - we now call our Founding Fathers. From Washington seething on his chair at times (but keeping an even keel!), to the collective wisdom and youthful exuberance of Madison and Hamilton and of course the wise old Ben Franklin offering his insights - his presence at the proceedings offering a softer parental guidance to complement Washington.
This book should inspire you to get a current copy of the Constitution with all amendments and read it over. You owe it to yourself to understand what it is that makes our form of government unique and why that allowed our country to become so great so fast. It should also inspire you to exercise your right to vote - and to keep an eye on our politicians.
Educate yourself.
English The “miracle” that unfolded at the city of Philadelphia in 1787 took place in slow motion, as delegates to the United States Constitutional Convention gradually and painfully hammered out one compromise after another over five hot and humid summer months. Yet when that time was over, a miracle of sorts had occurred; thirteen fractious ex-colonies had the organic law that would bring them together as a strong and unified nation. And Catherine Drinker Bowen captures well the improbable, “miraculous” quality of that sequence of events in her 1966 book Miracle at Philadelphia.
Bowen, a former music student from the Philadelphia-area college town of Haverford, Pennsylvania, was a self-taught historian and biographer. While her work was sometimes pooh-poohed by “serious” academic historians, her biographies and historical works quickly gained a large and appreciative audience, and her biography of lawyer Sir Edward Coke won a National Book Award. Formal training or no, Bowen knew how to recount history with an emphasis on the drama and dynamism of what happened in a crucial historical moment; and this book – The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787 (the book’s subtitle) – is a history that reads like a suspense novel with an 18th-century setting.
After emphasizing the turbulent circumstances under which the Constitutional Convention met – Shays’ Rebellion had occurred just one year earlier, and the existing Articles of Confederation had proved absolutely unworkable as a system of government – Bowen captures the drama of moments like that when delegate Roger Sherman of Connecticut saw a seemingly unbridgeable divide and came up with a way to bridge it.
Big states like Virginia and Massachusetts wanted proportional representation, as that would give them power within the stronger Union proposed by the convention’s organizers. Small states like Delaware, by contrast, wanted the same representation for each state, so that they could not be overwhelmed by the large states. James Madison, who took extensive notes (even though delegates to the Convention were not supposed to do so), recorded that Sherman “proposed that the proportion of suffrage in the 1st branch [the House] should be according to the respective number of free inhabitants; and that in the second branch or Senate, each state should have one vote and no more” (p. 94). It was the “Great Compromise” that helped to make a great nation.
Yet not all compromises are great, or even good. Once the big-state, small-state issue had been ironed out, the convention had to move on to the issue of slavery. The states of the Deep South – meaning, at that time, Georgia and the Carolinas – had made it painfully clear that they would not sign on to any new Constitution that challenged their “right” to hold fellow human beings in bondage. The South wanted enslaved people counted for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives, but not for taxation. The North wanted enslaved people counted for taxation, but not for representation.
What ultimately resulted is what Bowen aptly calls “a bargain…with a kind of brutal expediency”; under a particularly grotesque compromise, “slaves would be counted, for purpose of representation and taxes, in the proportion of five slaves to three free white inhabitants – the ‘federal ratio’” (pp. 200-201). This was the infamous “three-fifths compromise” – in effect, a declaration that an enslaved African American would be counted as three-fifths of a white person. The mind recoils at the idea – and at the realization that, in spite of passionate denunciations of slavery by delegates as diverse as Gouverneur Morris and George Mason (himself a slaveholder), the Framers effectively kicked the issue down the road. It was left to the Civil War generation, 75 years later, to end slavery and give the American Union a new birth of freedom.
Bowen tries gamely to make the best of the Framers’ decision, writing that “Without disrupting the Convention and destroying the Union they could do no more. The time was not yet come” (p. 204); but to this day, it is painful to read the Constitution and see the elaborate contortions of language by which the original document refers to slavery without ever using the word “slavery.”
Bowen also emphasizes the difficulties over ratification of the Constitution, once the document had been passed out of the Convention and sent to the states. Article VII of the Constitution specified that, in order to have the force of law, the Constitution would have to be ratified by nine out of the thirteen states. The original Constitution had no Bill of Rights – Alexander Hamilton was among those who considered a Bill of Rights unnecessary – but many Americans were concerned about a document that so greatly strengthened the United States Government without providing some measure of protection for the rights of individual citizens.
This concern made for some inspired debates in the individual states. In Virginia, for example, Governor Edmund Randolph, as a delegate to the Philadelphia convention, had refused to sign the Constitution in its original form; but once he was back at home in Virginia, and the Constitution was up for a yes-or-no vote, he called for ratification. In order that the United States of America might have “a firm, energetic government”, Randolph said, he was willing “to concur in any practical scheme of amendments” (p. 301) – even if that meant waiting until after the Constitution was ratified to amend it with a Bill of Rights. Opposing Randolph, with all the famous power of his oratory, was Patrick Henry, who thundered that “To enter into a compact of government, and then afterwards to settle the terms of this compact, was an idea dreadful, abhorrent to his mind” (p. 302). No one, whether Federalist or Anti-Federalist, could help being moved by such a debate. It would have been a great thing to witness first-hand.
Some readers of Miracle at Philadelphia might have wanted to see more emphasis on the manner in which the Framers settled upon the Electoral College as a method of choosing a president. Bowen dutifully notes that it took 60 ballots to settle the question, and that “repeatedly, delegates fell upon it as if never before debated.” She adds that James Madison “remained opposed to popular election, one of his arguments being that people would prefer a citizen of their own state, thereby subjecting the small states to a disadvantage” (pp. 189-90). Many of the Framers, coming as they did from the elite of their respective states, were famously distrustful of direct democracy, seeing in it the potential for “mob rule.”
Yet we now live in a time when two of the past six presidential elections have seen the loser of the popular vote win the Electoral College and become president. In 2016, Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by three million votes -- three-quarters of the entire population of the United States in 1790, according to the first federal census -- and yet still became president. Would the Framers really have considered such an outcome appropriate? Would their distrust of democracy really have gone so far?
Nonetheless, with all of its problems and imperfections, the United States Constitution remains a great formative document for the U.S.A. This nation, through all the turbulence of its history, has functioned under the same constitution for more than 230 years – a record that many other nations might envy. Moreover, the American constitution has inspired and influenced the constitutions of many other countries as they have endeavoured to establish or further democracy in their own societies. There was indeed something “miraculous” about the process by which the Constitution was written and ratified, and Catherine Drinker Bowen conveys the drama of that historical moment well in Miracle at Philadelphia. English I believe this is one of the most nuanced books I've ever read about the early years of our nation. I appreciate it's scholarly approach to source analysis from the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia that hot summer in 1787. I attribute this to the subtly of this book. Just when you begin to think one perspective/idea to be irrefutably true, the author shifts your perspective by using a different source. Then you see that--as the old political adage goes--where you stand depends on where you sit. It is this methodology that preserves the Constitution as a living document open to change and open to interpretation. So the next time you hear someone say that I'm a Constitution expert and I know that this is unconstitutional (I'm looking at you Fox News) just remember two things: 1) even the authors of the Constitution were so far from being Constitution experts that they had to hammer out compromises (a term which today draws derision from political zealots as being synonymous with appeasement, indecision, or spinelessness); and 2) that in our nation we all have the ability, through education, to become as much a constitutional expert as the windbags on cable t.v., talk radio, and in the blogosphere. Thank you Dr. Bowen for reminding us that. English Why Bowen is SO GOOD:
• Her pen drips with atmosphere. You can feel the sweat build under your shirt collar as you sit in that stagnant State House for hours on end, day after day, all the way through the sweltering Philadelphia summer.
• She contrasts the culture of New America versus Old France and Old Britain, and why it meant that the government conceived that summer could only work in America (these chapters on America's social scene were somewhat of an excursus from the main action but heightened the book considerably in my opinion).
• Her miniature portraits of the major players give a true feel for their differing personalities. She is especially good with Washington.
• She writes with a strong voice, giving the book a conversational feel.
• She clearly presents each issue and the arguments on both sides.
• She assesses the decisions that were made within the context of the time, not in retrospect where we have a clearer view.
• She conveys the weight of the moment. These men knew the burden of all generations to come was on their shoulders.
• She keeps a good pace. She shares detail where needed but never gets bogged down.
• While by no means exhaustive, her book is highly instructive. You will learn much.
• She is a storyteller. She doesn't just relay a narrative. Her writing allows you to become absorbed in all the drama and theatre and thrill.
• She builds to a sensational climax. The final chapter is absolutely gripping. The cast of characters in that final scene seems as if it could only be assembled in a dream, yet every one of them was real, every one of them was present, and every bit of the show worthy of the consequences that hung in the balance. English With all the talk about the Constitution these days, its alarming how little people really know about how it came to be.
Catherine Drinker Bowen has penned a fabulous, well-researched book that explains just how difficult it was to even create a document for consideration for ratification. Critics of the Constitution and its imperfections need to read this book to understand exactly what a remarkable feat it was.
The most frequent criticisms have to do with slavery and how it was dealt with in the Constitution. Readers will come to understand that the Constitution set the agenda for the elimination of slavery by making it an “interstate commerce issue” managed by the Federal government and not the individual states. Much has been made over the counting of slaves as 3/5 of a person but that criticism is just so much hyperbole and pandering. The South wanted all slaves fully counted for the purposes of representation in Congress and the North didn't want them counted at all (to reduce their influence in Congress). For those who wanted to diminish the influence of the slavery lobby in Congress, this mathematical compromise was a victory.
There are many startling revelations in this book. For example, it’s not common knowledge that New York had 20,000 slaves at the time of the Constitutional Convention.
This is one of the few books I have read more than twice. It's simply must reading for anyone curious about the Constitution in the context of today's political environment.
English
Bowen's history of the Constitutional Convention is a great read, and makes what at the time would have been endless debates nicely accessible. It breaks into two nearly even parts, where the first is a fairly chronological account of the first half, and the second instead goes topic-by-topic for the second half.
This was deliberate, and Bowen uses the adjournment of the Convention at the end of July as an opportunity to take a look at the overall condition of the states, and then picks up the by-topic narrative after reconvening on August 6. It makes for an interesting structure, and one that works out well, though I found myself enjoying the first half more (which shows my low tolerance for going into the nitty-gritty).
Naturally, there is also plenty of scene-setting, with the crises besetting the government under the Articles of Confederation leading to a convention to amend the Articles to make the new government less unwieldy and incapable. A whole new constitution was not part of the original program, but speedily became its object once in session. At the end, Bowen naturally also goes into the process of ratification, and the political fighting in the various states over the new Constitution. This part is a bit of a whirlwind in comparison, but still takes up three chapters.
This is very much a readable history, and quite good at its job. Bowen doesn't try for any real 're-interpretations', but works with the exiting materials, and references to the notes and letters around the Convention, and spends a lot of effort to set the scene and get the atmosphere down. Instead long analyses of arguments pro and con, there is reference to the weather, to the physical world around the delegates from the states, to help understand the conditions they were working in. It does a great job as a look into the place and time, and leaves the hair-splitting to much dryer reads. English This is a knowledge-expanding book and is my favorite read so far this year. I read it slowly, taking 31 pages of notes along the way. As the subtitle suggests, it is a narrative of the five months of the Constitutional Convention but also describes the ratification process. This appealed to me, in part, because of what was left out. I never felt burdened with the author's analysis, speculation, or hindsight. It is simply a retelling of events, often using the delegates' own words. I not only enjoyed reading about the debates and unfolding of events but also about the Philadelphia of that singular summer, feeling the oppression of the heat and the flies. I highly recommend this book to all Americans.
Update: After a second reading, I still strongly approve this book. English AmblesideOnline year 9 book. Tells the story of the making and ratifying of the constitution. I found it interesting if a bit dry. Lots of quotes from primary sources which was nice. It’s a bit amazing to think of how many people took verbatim notes (by hand!) and preserved these happenings for us. Lots of stories and information you won’t get anywhere else. My year 9 student doesn’t like it and says it’s boring but I feel like it’s important to see both sides (federalist and anti federalist) of how we got the constitution. Many interesting considerations were raised that I had never thought about before. One thing I particularly liked was how Patrick Henry (a staunch Antifederalist) responded when his state ratified the constitution. A group of angry Antifederalist held a mass meeting determined to create measures for resisting and Patrick Henry told his colleagues that they had done their best in the proper channels and been defeated. Now he told them, “as true and faithful republicans you had better go home.” English A nation new to its independence dealing with issues internally and external, it’s nascent future hanging by a thread all comes down to 55 men from across its length and breadth to come up with a solution. In her 1966 historical review of what became known as the Constitutional Convention, Catherine Drinker Bowen chronicles how the future of the young United States was saved by a Miracle at Philadelphia.
Though the majority of the book focuses on the four-month long Convention, Bowen begins by setting the stage for why and how the convention came about with the ineffectual government that was the Articles of Confederation and the movement to amend them, which was led by James Madison and endorsed by George Washington by his attendance in Philadelphia. For those like myself not really versed in nitty gritty details of Convention it was interesting to learn that most of the work was done in ‘Committee of the Whole’ in which Washington while President was seated among the other delegates. The familiar highlights of the Virginia Plan, New Jersey Plan, and the Great Compromise are covered but in the historical flow of the debates within the Convention and decisions in-between of important elements within the Constitution. Throughout the Bowen introduces important personages and how their views remained constant or changed throughout the Convention resulting reputations being made or destroyed during and after the process of ratification. Bowen ends the book with a look at the ratification process, in particular the debates in Massachusetts and Virginia.
Covering approximately 310 pages, the book is efficient in covering the events of the Convention overall. However Bowen completely missed how the Great Compromise was voted in the Constitution, she just mentioned it. Besides that big miss within the Convention, Bowen spends chuck of the middle of the book covering a “Journey in America” that had nothing to do with the Convention but was just giving a glimpse of the nascent country that felt like filler than anything else.
Miracle at Philadelphia is a very good historical review of the Constitutional Convention that does not analyze but just reports history. Catherine Drinker Bowen does a wonderful job in juggling the various accounts of the Convention by the delegates and the official record to create very readable narrative. I highly recommend this book for those interested in this closing piece of the American Revolution. English Anyone interested in history and how the United States was founded should love this book.
Catherine Drinker Bowen tells us the story of the thinking and writing of the U.S. Constitution in the voice of the delegates who attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and made history.
The author used a plethora of sources to tell how the U.S. Constitution came to be step by step, day after day of the Convention. We learn that coming up with the historical document was certainly no easy work, and unity was hard to reach among delegates. We learn what delegates proposed, debated; what they agreed or disagreed on; how they voted several times on some issues; what they perceived as a real threat for Liberty in the future.
This history book both reads like a novel and is an unparalleled source of knowledge. This is certainly one of the best books I have been given to read. English
