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The Making of the American Constitution
Random House
March 2009
On Sale: March 17, 2009
544 pages
ISBN: 1400065704
EAN: 9781400065707
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
“While some have boasted it as a work from Heaven, others
have given it a less righteous origin. I have many reasons
to believe that it is the work of plain, honest men.”
–Robert Morris, delegate from Pennsylvania to the
Constitutional Convention From distinguished historian Richard Beeman comes a dramatic
and engrossing account of the men who met in Philadelphia
during the summer of 1787 to design a radically new form of
government. Plain, Honest Men takes readers behind the
scenes and beyond the debate to show how the world’s most
enduring constitution was forged through conflict,
compromise, and, eventually, fragile consensus. The delegates met in an atmosphere of crisis, many Americans
at that time fearing that a combination of financial
distress and civil unrest would doom the young nation’s
experiment in liberty. When the delegates began their
deliberations in May 1787, they discovered that a small
cohort of men, led by James Madison, had prepared an
audacious plan–revolutionary in its view of the nature of
American government. The success of this bold and brilliant
strategy was far from assured, and the ultimate outcome of
the delegates’ labors–the creation of a frame of government
that would enable America to flourish–was very different
from what Madison had envisioned when he launched his grand
scheme. Beeman captures as never before the dynamic of the debate
and the characters of the men who labored that summer in
Philadelphia, among them James Madison, as brilliant as he
was unprepossessing; the mercurial Gouverneur Morris of
Pennsylvania, arrogant, combative, but ultimately effective
in shaping the language of the completed Constitution;
Maryland’s Luther Martin, a pugnacious (and often
inebriated) opponent of a strong national government; Roger
Sherman, the straightforward Connecticut delegate who helped
broker some of the key compromises of the Convention; and
General George Washington, whose quiet dignity and forceful
presence helped keep under control the clash of egos and
words among the delegates. Virtually all of the issues the delegates debated that
summer–the extent of presidential power, the nature of
federalism, and, most explosive of all, the role of
slavery–have continued to provoke conflict throughout the
nation’s history. Plain, Honest Men is a fascinating
portrait of another time and place, a bold and unprecedented
book about men, both grand and humble, who wrote a document
that would live longer than they ever imagined. This is an
indispensable work for our own time, in which debate about
the Constitution’s meaning still rages.
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