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The successful creation of the Constitution is a suspense history. The Summer months of 1787 takes us in to the sweltering room where delegates battled for four months to produce the flawed but enduring document that could define the nation -- then and now.
George Washington presided, Adam Madison kept the records, Benjamin Franklin offered wisdom and laughter at critical times. The Summer months of 1787 traces the battles within the Philadelphia Convention as the delegates hammered out the charter for the world's first constitutional democracy. Relying on what of the delegates themselves to explore the Convention's sharpened issues and hard bargaining, David O. Stewart lays out the passions and contradictions of the often agonizing process of writing the Constitution.
It was a anxious balancing act. Groundbreaking principles required that the people have vitality, but could the people be respected? Would a better central government leave room for the states? Would the small states accept a Congress where seats were alloted matching to population rather than to each sovereign talk about? And what of slavery? The supercharged debates over America's original sin led to the most creative & most disappointing political offers of the Convention.
The room was congested with vibrant and passionate characters, some known -- Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Edmund Randolph -- and more largely ignored. At different factors during that sultry summer, more than half of the delegates threatened to walk out, plus some actually did, but Washington's peaceful management and the delegates' inspired compromises organised the Convention mutually.
In a country continuously arguing in the document's original objective, it is attractive to view these powerful characters have difficulty toward consensus -- often reluctantly -- to create a flawed but living and deep breathing document that can evolve with the nation.
