272
The Achievement of the Philadelphia Convention
in dissent. Three gentlemen who were present declined, for various reasons, to sign the Constitution. They were George Mason and Edmund
Randolph of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.
No signer of the Constitution considered the document to be perfect,
but all were ready to explain it to citizens of the republic. In its final form,
the Constitution gave far less power to the Federal government than
James Madison had intended by his Virginia Plan. Indeed, the document
that was presented for ratification followed moderate lines approved by
that wise old man John Dickinson, even though Dickinson had not presented the Convention with a separate plan of his own.
As one looks back on these proceedings two hundred years later, it is
easy to understand why historians have often referred to the Constitutional Convention as ‘‘the Miracle of Philadelphia.’’ It seems incredible
nowadays that such an event could actually occur, and even then it was
viewed by the American people and foreign observers as an extraordinary affair. Here were fifty-five individuals, all prominent leaders of their
States, many traveling long distances under primitive means of transportation, gathered in one room for four months to forge a new system of
government such as the world had never seen. At considerable personal sacrifice—and many had already suffered severe losses during
the Revolution—they were away from their homes, their families, their
businesses, and their farms for an entire summer. A deep sense of civic
pride and virtue, and a feeling of moral responsibility for the welfare of
the American people and future generations, explain only in part what
motivated these gentlemen. They were also driven by a profound intellectual and emotional attachment to individual liberty. What is truly remarkable is that they all realized at the time the historic significance of
what they were seeking to accomplish. For never in recorded history had
a society had the opportunity, under the direction of its natural leaders
and best minds, to deliberate at such length on the best form of government, to write a fundamental law for a whole nation, and to establish a
constitutional republic for liberty, order, and justice.
In Philadelphia, the American people said their final good-bye to the
baleful influences of arbitrary and unrestricted government, feudalism,
class privilege, and other stultifying and corrupting Old World influences. The great German thinker and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe