A Brilliant Solution

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A BRILLIANT SOLUTION

"A story all modern Americans need to know--the exciting and true tale of our nation's origins, as narrated by one of our best historians."--Professor Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University

"The liveliest and most concise account yet of the adoption of the Constitution. A sparkling, fast-paced, and always engaging introduction to the modern world's first great exercise in constitutional invention."--Jack N. Rakove, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic

Auteur
CAROL BERKIN is Baruch Presidential Professor of History at the City University of New York. Her books include Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence, The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America's Liberties, and A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, and has also contributed to several collections of articles and textbooks. Berkin was a commentator for the A&E series Founding Fathers and Founding Brothers, as well as a commentator for the PBS documentary, Benjamin Franklin. She lives in New York City.

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Historian Carol Berkin's A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution is a rich narrative portrait of post-revolutionary America and the men who shaped its political future.

"Just as the Constitution was a brilliant solution to the problems of the 1780s, Carol Berkin's book is a brilliant account of the making of that constitution. Written with great verve and clarity, it nicely captures all the contingency and unpredictability in the framing of the Constitution."?Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon S. Wood

Though the American Revolution is widely recognized as our nation's founding story, the years immediately following the war ? when our government was a disaster and the country was in a terrible crisis ? were in fact the most crucial in establishing the country's independence. The group of men who traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 had no idea what kind of history their meeting would make. But all their ideas, arguments, and compromises ? from the creation of the Constitution itself, article by article, to the insistence that it remain a living, evolving document ? laid the foundation for a government that has surpassed the founders' greatest hopes.

Revisiting all the original historical documents of the period and drawing from her deep knowledge of eighteenth-century politics, Carol Berkin opens up the hearts and minds of America's founders, revealing the issues they faced, the times they lived in, and their humble expectations of success.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Call for a Convention

"Our present federal government is a name, a shadow"

THE YEAR WAS 1786. It was the tenth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the third year of life in a new nation, but political leaders everywhere feared there was little cause to celebrate. Dark clouds and a suffocating gloom seemed to have settled over the country, and these men understood that something had gone terribly wrong. From his plantation in Virginia, George Washington lamented the steady stream of diplomatic humiliations suffered by the young Republic. Fellow Virginian James Madison talked gravely of mortal diseases afflicting the confederacy. In New Jersey William Livingston confided to a friend his doubt that the Republic could survive another decade. From Massachusetts the bookseller turned Revolutionary strategist, Henry Knox, declared, "Our present federal government is a name, a shadow, without power, or effect." And feisty, outspoken John Adams, serving as the American minister to Great Britain, observed his nation's circumstances with more than his usual pessimism. The United States, he declared, was doing more harm to itself than the British army had ever done. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Monroe, Robert Morris-in short, men from every state-agreed that a serious crisis had settled upon the nation. The question was could they do anything to save their country?

It seemed like only yesterday that these same men, along with Americans everywhere, had greeted the future brightly. In 1783 Americans had looked forward confidently to reaping the benefits of independence. British political oppression, with its threat to natural rights and traditional liberties, had come to an end, and with it the challenge to America's most dearly held principle, "No taxation without representation." In every colony turned state, lawmaking was safely in the hands of a representative assembly, and a guarantee of citizens' rights was written into most state constitutions. British economic oppression had ended as well. Free from the restraints imposed by British navigation, or trade, laws, American shippers, farmers, and planters looked forward to selling tobacco and wheat directly to foreign nations, and entrepreneurs looked forward to manufacturing finished products for sale to markets abroad. New Englanders were equally optimistic, for John Adams's dogged persistence had won them the right to fish the outer banks of Newfoundland. Independence also meant that the rich farmlands west of the Appalachians were at last open to settlement, good news for ordinary farmers and perhaps even better news for major speculators like George Washington, the Lees of Virginia, and even Benjamin Franklin, who owned shares in large land companies.

Unfortunately, each of these blessings soon proved to have a darker side. True, the restrictions and injustices suffered in the colonial era had been eliminated but so, too, had many of the advantages of membership in the British empire. An independent American merchant marine was free to carry American products to the ports of their choosing, but they no longer enjoyed the protection of the British navy on the high seas. New England fishermen had won the right to fish off Newfoundland, but they had lost the guaranteed British Caribbean markets for their catch. Chesapeake tobacco planters had renounced their debts to Scottish merchants and English consignment agents when they declared independence, but in the process they had lost their most reliable sources of credit. And settlers faced no barriers to westward migration, but they could no longer rely on a well-trained and well-equipped army when Indians attacked. Slowly, Americans realized their new dilemma: Who would provide the protection colonists once found in the sheltering arms of their mother country?

The pessimism slowly engulfing men from Maine to Georgia was intensified by the lingering postwar depression in the South and in New England. Two major British military campaigns had left the Carolinas in shambles, with scores of homeless and penniless still to be cared for. Rice planters had to replace much of their labor force as hundreds of slaves had run away or found refuge in British army camps. Farther north peace, not war, had dealt the crushing blow to New England's economy. Despairing, idle fishermen could be seen in every seaport town, helpless in the face of British trade restrictions against them in the West Indies. Local agriculture fared no better. Far from the battlefield during most of the Revolution, New England farmers had expanded their production to meet the demands for food in other regions. Now that farming had resumed in every state, New Englanders were scrambling to meet mortgage payments for land they had cleared and planted during the Revolution. A wave of foreclosures and evictions swept across the western counties of Massachusetts, and local prisons soon overflowed with debtors. In Berkshire and Hampshire Counties, the busiest workers were local carpenters, called upon to construct larger jails.

These nagging economic problems had not brought Americans closer together. Wherever one looked, the competing interests of c…