Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution »

Richard Beeman is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of five previous books on the history of revolutionary America; his biography of Patrick Henry was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received awards from, among others, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has served as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University. He also serves as a trustee and vice-chair of the Distinguished Scholars Panel of the National Constitution Center. Richard Beeman lives in Philadelphia.

A full-scale account of the deliberations of the Founding Fathers at the Constitutional Convention. Beeman goes beyond the debates to show how the world's most important constitution was forged through conflict, compromise, and eventually fragile consensus.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Books about the men who crafted the Constitution over the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787 tend to be either overly reverential or hypercritical. Constitutional historian Richard Beeman's account is, happily, neither. While he lauds the Founders for their achievement in establishing a workable framework for a strong, centralized American government, he also raises some necessary criticisms, such as the Founders' "collective indifference" to the immorality of slavery and their very real anxieties about direct democracy. As Beeman describes the daily debates in Philadelphia, from how to elect members of Congress to the powers of the president to the role of the judiciary, it becomes clear that passionate, ideological disagreements were commonplace. Beeman details the major divide between the interests of big states, which wanted Congressional representation by population, and small states, which wanted representation to be apportioned equally by state. He also describes the deep fissures between slave states and non-slave states. Because the Convention's deliberations were secret, Beeman is forced to focus on the one man who took copious notes, James Madison. Beeman shows how Madison's deeply held ideas about good government set the agenda in Philadelphia and fueled discussions among the Founders. Beeman does an especially fine job exploring "the most emotionally charged debate of the summer": the paradoxical status of slavery in a nation extolling liberty. Beeman's exhaustively researched and accessibly written account will appeal to anyone looking to understand the passionate intellectual conflicts that led to our Constitution. --Chuck Leddy

Preface ix

Key to the Frontispiece xvii

Principal Characters xviii

The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Chronology xxiii

Chapter 1 The Crisis 3

Chapter 2 The Indispensable Men of the Convention 22

Chapter 3 The Delay that Produced a Revolution 41

Chapter 4 The Convention Opens for Business 58

Chapter 5 A High-Stakes Gamble 86

Chapter 6 "We the People" or "We the States"? Creating the American Congress 105

Chapter 7 Imagining the American Presidency 124

Chapter 8 Counterattack 144

Chapter 9 "We are Now at Full Stop" 163

Chapter 10 The Fourth of July, 1787 190

Chapter 11 Compromise: Large States, Small States, Slave States, and Free States 200

Chapter 12 Beyond the Connecticut Compromise 226

Chapter 13 "The People are the King" 240

Chapter 14 Fashioning a First Draft of the Constitution: July 27-August 6 258

Chapter 15 Revising the Constitution: August 6-August 31 277

Chapter 16 The "General Welfare" and the Presidency 296

Chapter 17 "The Paradox at the Nation's Core" 308

Chapter 18 A Fragile Consensus: September 10-September 15 337

Chapter 19 September 17: Day of Decision 359

Chapter 20 The People's Constitution: "Federalists" Seize the Initiative 369

Chapter 21 Achieving a More Perfect Union: The Federalists Prevail 386

Epilogue: "A Republic, if you Can Keep it" 412

Acknowledgments 425

Appendix 1 Full List of Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 429

Appendix 2 U.S. Constitution (September 17, 1787), Article I-VII 431

A Note About Quotations 445

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works 447

Notes 449

Index 497