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The Achievement of the Philadelphia Convention
No subsequent constitutional convention, in any country on any continent, has enjoyed such success as America’s in dealing with great difficulties. And yet the greatest difficulty facing the country was not surmounted when the Philadelphia Convention wound up its business in
September of 1787. That difficulty was persuading the American public
that the new Constitution offered them important advantages. The exercise of the art of persuasion would be undertaken by Hamilton, Madison,
and Jay in The Federalist; by John Dickinson in his series of papers called
The Letters of Fabius; and by the speeches and pamphlets of other notable
delegates.
They were men of distinction, those gentlemen politicians, who could
design such a lucid Constitution and persuade the skeptics of thirteen
highly independent States to ratify it.
The Delegates to the Convention
The eighteenth-century gentlemen who drafted the Constitution did not
outwardly resemble the members of Congress or the State legislatures today, because they wore knee breeches and long coats. Many of them also
had short wigs on their heads. They looked very much like English gentlemen at a London assembly-room or in a London club, and very unlike
the ‘‘tradesmen’’ or ‘‘mechanics’’ who thronged the narrow streets in the
neighborhood of the old State House at Philadelphia. In addition, not
many years earlier, some of these gentlemen politicians had worn swords
at their sides.
Of the fifty-five delegates, twenty-one had fought in the Revolution
(some as high officers), forty-six had served in colonial assemblies or
State legislatures, twenty-four had been members of the Continental
Congress, thirty-nine had served in the Congress under the Articles, ten
had taken a hand in drafting State constitutions, six had signed the Declaration of Independence, and four had signed the Articles of Confederation. Twenty had been, were then, or later would be, governors of States,
and twenty were at one time or another United States Senators.
Almost all were men of some property. A half-dozen were American
aristocrats of great family and possessions, thirty-five were slaveholders,
and some were prosperous merchants. Not all were rich. The two among