On Monday, May 14th – opening day of the Convention – only Pennsylvania and Virginia were represented in the State House. That week it rained, and the roads were deep in mud. Of Georgia’s four delegates, two came from Congress in New York, but the other two had 800 miles to travel. By May 24th, Rufus King of Massachusetts was still obliged to write home that he was “mortified” because he alone was present from all New England. The delegates from New Hampshire did not arrive for another eight weeks because, it was rumored, the state had no money in its treasury to pay their expenses. It was May 25th before a quorum of seven states was finally obtained.
As the delegates drifted into Philadelphia, local newspapers announced their arrival, pleased and proud that the Convention was meeting in their city instead of New York’s City Hall, where Congress sat. The newspapers, plainly proud of the social and political distinction of the representatives, used an elaborate social classification: there was Excellency for governors of states; Honorable for justices and chancellors; then honorable again – with a small h – for Congressmen, and ending up with a list of respectable characters. The traditions of the mother country were apparently not so easily shed.
There was no limit set on members for the delegations from each state, and Pennsylvania, for obvious reasons, was represented by the most – eight in all, including Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris, Governeur Morris (no relation to Robert), a witty, worldly politician, whose grasp of the ways of men and governments was unexcelled. There was Thomas Mifflin, prominent businessman, political leader, former quartermaster general of the Continental Army and participant in the infamous Conway Cabal; two of Philadelphia’s foremost merchants, Thomas FitzSimons and George Clymer; a canny lawyer-politician named James Wilson, and Jared Ingersoll, son of the Jared Ingersoll who had tangled so many years ago with Connecticut’s Sons of Liberty over his appointment as a Stamp Act collector. The younger Jared had since renounced his father’s Loyalist sympathies and had made his home in Philadelphia.
Virginia’s seven-man delegation was perhaps the most prominent, both socially and politically, and the Old Dominion was justifiably proud of her showing. The Convention Journal listed two Excellencies – General Washington and Governor Edmund Randolph; one Honorable, Judge John Blair, and four Esquires – the peerless James Madison, George Mason, whose fame and eloquence as a spokesman for human rights were second only to Thomas Jefferson; George Wythe, the influential jurist and professor of law; and James McClurg. Patrick Henry was conspicuous by his absence; named to the Convention, he had refused to attend. “I smell a rat in Philadelphia,” Mr. Henry had snorted. James Madison conjectured that he had declined so that he would be freer to oppose the new charter if he disliked it. John Adams, however, had been far more realistic when he had observed that there was a breed of Violent Men, skillful and dedicated in the intrigues of revolution, but often lacking the qualities to erect a government. Better hands at pulling down than at building, he had observed.
Sam Adams, too, remained in Boston. He had not been named to the Convention, and he was suspicious “of a general revision of the Confederation.” Though he came around in the end, Sam Adams long opposed the new Constitution vigorously. Neither was Tom Paine on the scene. He had gone to Europe, hoping to promote his newly invented iron bridge, for which he had failed to find backers in America.
No other state could match the talents from Virginia and Pennsylvania, but there were good and capable men from all over – Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, and scholarly William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut; there was the distinguished John Dickinson of Delaware, the Pennsylvania Farmer, whose letters in the 1760s had sharpened many a colonial’s sense of the issues. If Massachusetts had had no Adams available for once, and if John Hancock had just been elected governor, the state was nevertheless well represented by the likes of Elbridge Gerry and Rufus King. There were John Rutledge and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, and William Paterson of New Jersey. New York’s three-man contingent, appointed by Governor Clinton’s anti-nationalistic faction, was smaller than it might have been, but Alexander Hamilton had enough talent and nationalistic zeal for an entire delegation.
Taken together, this assemblage was rich in political experience, legal training, and worldly wisdom and accomplishments. Their social and economic backgrounds varied, but the men were predominantly of established families and of comfortable, even affluent circumstances. More than half had at least some college training; the majority, in fact, were lawyers and the rest merchants and farmers-planters. 32 of the 55 members were to become future leaders in United States affairs – among them two Presidents, two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, and six future state governors.
Yet it was a young gathering by modern-day standards; men aged sooner and died earlier in those days, and Benjamin Franklin’s 81 years were certainly the exception; even George Washington at 55 was already above average age. John Adams at 37, invited to give a speech in Boston at the very beginning of the Revolutionary period, had already claimed that he was “too old to make declamations.” At Convention time, Charles Pinckney was only 29; Alexander Hamilton 32, Governeur Morris – he of the suave and worldly manner – was 35, and even the staid and careful legal scholar, James Madison, the Father of the Constitution was only 36 years old. Yet Richard Henry Lee wrote from Virginia that he was glad to find in the Convention “so many gentlemen of competent years.” But even the youngest member was already politically experienced. Nearly three-quarters had sat in the Continental Congress. Many had been members in their states’ legislatures and had helped write their state constitutions. Eight had signed the Declaration of Independence, seven had been state governors, and 21 had fought in the Revolutionary War. When Thomas Jefferson in Paris read the list of names, he said it was “an assembly of demi-gods.”
