The Delegates to the Convention
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them who in 1787 were the most prosperous, Robert Morris and James
Wilson, would later die bankrupt, while the delegate of the smallest
means, William Few, a Georgia frontiersman, ended his days as the wellto-do president of the City Bank in New York.
More than half the members of the Convention had been, or were,
judges or lawyers. A good many Framers had been teachers at one time
or another, and most were well educated. Many had studied at American
colleges, at Oxford or Cambridge, or at the Scottish and Irish universities.
The spirit of religion and the spirit of a gentleman, an Irish statesman
named Edmund Burke wrote in 1790, had sustained European manners and civilization. What, then, was the religion of these gentlemenpoliticians meeting at Philadelphia? At least fifty of the Framers would
have subscribed to the Apostles’ Creed. Among them were some twentythree Episcopalians, ten Presbyterians, seven Congregationalists, two
Catholics, two Lutherans, two Quakers, and at least one Methodist.
Two of the Framers professed a belief in the Almighty but did not belong
to any religious sect.
Such were the common elements among the fifty-five Framers. In general, they got on uncommonly well with one another. Despite their differences on political questions, the Framers formed almost a club of gentlemen that was united to secure an enduring social order. The civility of
the debates and the reasonable acceptance of compromises contrasts that
Great Convention with all other grand attempts, ancient or modern, to
form a new constitution. In an era of duelling, not one delegate ‘‘called
out’’ any other delegate to an encounter with pistols—though two of
them (Alexander Hamilton and Richard Dobbs Spaight) were in later
years killed in duels with enemies.
The first article of the Constitution provided that the United States
might grant no title of nobility, and that no office-holder should accept
a foreign title without the consent of the Congress. But the men who
framed that article were not opposed to the idea of a gentleman. What
they opposed were hereditary titles and special privileges based on birth.
Some of the Framers, especially the Episcopalians, had read Thomas
Fuller’s essays on the ‘‘True Gentleman’’ and the ‘‘Degenerous Gentleman,’’ published in Fuller’s big book, The Holy State and the Profane State
(1642). ‘‘He is courteous and affable to his neighbors,’’ Fuller wrote of the