The successful creation of the Constitution is a suspense story.
"The Summer of 1787" takes us into the sweltering room in which
delegates struggled for four months to produce the flawed but
enduring document that would define the nation -- then and now.
George Washington presided, James Madison kept the notes,
Benjamin Franklin offered wisdom and humor at crucial times. "The
Summer of 1787" traces the struggles within the Philadelphia
Convention as the delegates hammered out the charter for the
world's first constitutional democracy. Relying on the words of the
delegates themselves to explore the Convention's sharp conflicts
and hard bargaining, David O. Stewart lays out the passions and
contradictions of the often painful process of writing the
Constitution.
It was a desperate balancing act. Revolutionary principles
required that the people have power, but could the people be
trusted? Would a stronger central government leave room for the
states? Would the small states accept a Congress in which seats
were alloted according to population rather than to each sovereign
state? And what of slavery? The supercharged debates over America's
original sin led to the most creative and most disappointing
political deals of the Convention.
The room was crowded with colorful and passionate characters,
some known -- Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Edmund
Randolph -- and others largely forgotten. At different points
during that sultry summer, more than half of the delegates
threatened to walk out, and some actually did, but Washington's
quiet leadership and the delegates' inspired compromises held the
Convention together.
In a country continually arguing over the document's original
intent, it is fascinating to watch these powerful characters
struggle toward consensus -- often reluctantly -- to write a flawed
but living and breathing document that could evolve with the
nation.
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