To these procedural rules might be added a social convention that promoted amity and cooperation. Philadelphia was a smallish town of forty thousand people, and the delegates could not help but see each other socially at their homes and clubs. They might gather around the mulberry tree in Franklin’s yard, or dine at the India Queen inn, the Convention’s unofficial club, where many of them stayed. On Sundays they took trips together to visit Valley Forge or Bartram’s Garden. At their request, Washington might join them for dinner, to elevate the tone. Many of the delegates knew each other from past congresses, or from the Revolutionary Army. Those who had been strangers quickly fell in with each other to cut the deals that kept the Convention from falling apart.
THE DELEGATES
Virginia led the way in planning for the Convention. It appointed a delegation that included George Wythe, George Mason, James Madison, and George Washington. Mason was the author of the June 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, from which much of the Declaration of Independence had been cribbed. Washington was the Indispensible Man, without whom the Revolution would have failed. Having retired to Mount Vernon at a time when he might easily have assumed a dictatorship over the country, he was a world figure, regarded by his countrymen with awe.
Besides the prominent Virginians, the delegates included John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, and James Wilson. When he learned their names, Jefferson described them as “demigods” in a letter to John Adams.13 They included sixteen lawyers, four judges, seven politicians, four planters, and two physicians.14 Twenty-nine of them had undergraduate degrees, including nine from Princeton, four each from Yale and William and Mary, and three each from Harvard and King’s College (Columbia). Three had attended college in Great Britain, at Oxford, St. Andrews, and Glasgow. Six had been trained at the Inns of Court in London.15 Most would have been seen as the natural aristocrats of American society, and half were on Mrs. John Jay’s dinner invitation list, which was the social register of the time.16
That said, some of the more prominent delegates took little part in the proceedings. Wythe’s wife took ill and died, and he left after a week. Franklin was 81 years old, and often had to be carried on a litter the three blocks from his home to the Convention, by prisoners from the local jail. His speeches were read for him, and he seldom spoke closely on an issue. As the Convention’s elder statesman, his primary concern was to smooth over disputes and produce compromises, and this he did most effectively; but since he rowed with muffled oars, most historians have discounted his contributions. Hamilton was absent for much of the Convention and did himself no favors by freely advancing his strong conservative views. He wanted a strong national government, loathed democracy, and saw little difference between it and the kind of republic the delegates were considering. It was “pork still, with a little change of the sauce,” New York’s Robert Yates heard him say.17
Many of the delegates are deservedly obscure today. Half of them failed to make a contribution to the discussion, and some absented themselves from Philadelphia for long periods. Forrest McDonald described a group of dirt farmers, religious crackpots, and impecunious bootlickers straggling into town to represent their states.18 “You may have been taught to respect the characters of the members of the late Convention,” said George Mason.
You may have supposed they were an assemblage of great men. There is nothing less true. From [New England] there were knaves and fools and from the states southward of Virginia they were a parcel of coxcombs and from the middle states office hunters not a few. 19
One delegate, it seems, sold information about the proceedings to British agents.20
Fortunately, the politicians most opposed to tampering with the Articles stayed away from the Convention. Backwoods populists such as William Findley refused to travel to Philadelphia when told they wouldn’t be reimbursed for their expenses. Radical demagogues such as John Hancock and Patrick Henry also stayed home. Henry had been appointed a delegate but declined to travel to Philadelphia, saying “I smelt a rat.”21 Samuel Adams thought himself too old to travel and stayed in Boston, where he served as president of the state senate. More than any other state, Rhode Island had cheapened its currency to benefit debtors; and no one from that state showed up. An apologetic Rhode Islander told Washington that most of the state’s legislators were “licentious . . ., destitute of education, and many of them, Void of principle.”22
THE VIRGINIA PLAN
As the delegates arrived in Philadelphia, one thing was clear to all of them, and most of all to those from Virginia: as the most populous state, the Old Dominion would play a leading role in the Convention. Virginia was the oldest overseas colony of Britain, and until the early 1780s laid claim to all the land from Kentucky to Manitoba. It supplied much of the revolutionary leadership and four of the first five presidents. Without Virginia, the American Revolution would have been an isolated revolt by Massachusetts hotheads, easily suppressed by Britain.
In addition, the impetus for the Convention had come from Virginia. Under the Articles of Confederation the national government lacked the power to regulate interstate commerce, and after the Revolution the states began to levy tariffs on each other’s goods. Virginians, including George Washington and George Mason, wanted to open the Potomac up to trade, but the river lay almost entirely within the borders of Maryland, and navigation rights were disputed between the two states. A trade agreement made sense, and delegates from the two states met in Alexandria in March 1785 to relax trade barriers (even though the Articles of Confederation prohibited interstate treaties of this kind).
The conference was so successful that, when it ended at Mount Vernon, the Virginia delegates proposed a further conference of all thirteen states. This was held in Annapolis in September 1785. John Dickinson from Delaware was chosen president; James Madison and Hamilton attended. Eight states stayed away, however, and five states was too small a quorum for a national agreement. A third conference would be needed, and was called for May 14, 1787, in Philadelphia. Hamilton drafted the Annapolis conference report. The delegates, he said, were unhappy with the “important defects” in the Articles of Confederation, which had rendered “the situation of the United States delicate and critical.” The Philadelphia Convention would be charged with remedying these defects, a task that would require “an exertion of the united virtue and wisdom of all the members of the Confederacy.”23
The Virginians arrived in Philadelphia before any of the other out-of-state delegates. James Madison was there on May 5, and the rest of the Virginians arrived by May 17. A quorum of seven states was not in place until May 25. Had everyone arrived on time, the Convention would likely have begun cautiously; but having arrived early, the Virginians used the opportunity to steal a march on the other delegates. Madison later recalled that “on the arrival of the Virginia Deputies at Philada, it occurred to them that from the early and prominent part taken by that State in bringing about the Convention some initiative step might be expected from them.”24 And so they met as a group for two to three hours a day to prepare a plan for a new constitution.25
The first day of substantive business was May 29. The delegates arrived at the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House (now Independence Hall), where eleven years before eight of them had