The Summer of 1787 takes us into the sweltering room in which the
founding fathers struggled for four months to produce the Constitution:
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 allotted 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.
