Would you agree to attend meetings for an entire hot, humid Philadelphia summer, from March 15 through September 17, without a working air conditioner in the conference room?
That’s hard, but we’re not done.
Now imagine nailing all the windows shut the entire time, in order to ensure that the meetings remain completely secret. No air conditioning – and no open windows either. Now you’re talking.
That’s hard, but we’re not done.
Now imagine the well-known, persistent risk of disease in Philadelphia: measles and dengue, typhoid and malaria, and worst of all, the ever-present possibility of smallpox, a century and a half before the development of antibiotics.
Welcome to 1787 Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania state capitol, now reverently known as Independence Hall.
Back in 1774, and then again in 1775-76, the Continental Congress met in this storied hall, first to present a united front in the face of English tyranny, and then, gradually, to manage a War of Independence.
Once the war was fully engaged, the Confederation Congress designed a loosely structured, temporary government of sorts – under the Articles of Confederation, and they moved around repeatedly for the next ten years, borrowing, debating, and legislating as guests of Baltimore, Lancaster, York, New York, Princeton, Annapolis, and Trenton.
But now, in 1787, they were back in the Pennsylvania state capitol, with a difficult challenge before them. They were chartered to revise or replace the Articles of Confederation; to build a government somehow able to simultaneously possess the authority to repel invaders and provide a stable currency, while being sufficiently restrained to protect the citizenry from the kind of tyranny they had just fought a war to escape.
Again, each state sent delegates, most of whom had in some way served in the Continental Congress, though after eleven years of war and hardship, the attendees were sure to be different this time. General Washington, for example, had been around at the beginning of the Continental Congress, but he was busy on the battlefield by the time the Declaration of Independence was done; now he was back for the whole session. Jefferson and Adams, among the most important participants in 1776, were now in Europe on diplomatic duty. Only six men participated the whole time on the drafting of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and stayed to sign them both.
As has been commented many times in these two and a half centuries, it takes a different mindset, and perhaps a different skill set too, to start a war than it does to design a government.
This convention had the benefit of experience with a strong government – England’s government could do whatever it wanted, good or bad – and also had the benefit of experience with a weak government – the United States under the Articles of Confederation didn’t have the authority to abuse people, but it didn’t have the authority to provide the framework of a functioning economy either.
They were committed to find some middle ground, sufficient to secure the promise of liberty for the American people.
Over the course of that long summer, the 55 delegates (usually only about 30 to 40 at a time were there together) discussed the most effective formats, and debated both the upsides and downsides of every imaginable individual power.
Should the legislature be unicameral or bicameral? Should there be a president or not? How should they all be chosen, and how long should their terms be? What should each branch be authorized to do, and most importantly, what must none of them be allowed to do?
All the individual states, after all, had their own functioning governments, many of which had been in place for over a century.
While this new “United States” government was brand new (and stumbling hard already), there was nothing new or uncomfortable about the state governments, so that existing bedrock had to be retained without question. And of course the most important of all, following a popular revolution for liberty, was to ensure that none of these governments – local, state, or federal – could rob the sovereign citizen of his individual freedom in this new environment. We did not overthrow the Hanoverians to take up some other yoke upon our backs.
In studying the Constitutional Convention nowadays, we tend to focus on these debates – the tussle between the states and the federal government, the tussle between how to set the balance between the branches – but that really wasn’t the main goal of the Framers at all.
They didn’t think there was some philosophically superior choice to find, between the number of people in the House and the number of people in the Senate, or between the length of a presidential term and how long federal judges should serve. All these questions were simply in the service of that bigger question:
How do we best construct this new government so that it is strong enough without being too strong?
They needed to be able to collect taxes, but not too many taxes; to raise a military when needed, but not be so powerful as to use that military to subjugate their own people. They needed to be able to coin stable money that our businesses could use for international trade, but not have such a financially powerful government that it could weaponize the money supply to impoverish the public.
They needed this government to conduct foreign policy, and to send and receive ambassadors. They needed it to be able to adjudicate disputes between the states. They needed to be able to wage war or make peace, and to deal honorably with the indian tribes and other neighbors.
This government needed to be able to do a great many things, without being empowered to easily abuse that power.
And so they spent the summer in focused small committees, and also in committees of the whole, with General Washington presiding – rarely speaking himself, primarily serving to maintain decorum, and to keep the meetings moving respectfully along.
Some of the Framers, such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, had spent years in preparation for this conference, arriving equipped with lifetimes of study, able to quote the records of every significant republic from Athens to Florence and every kingdom from France to England. Some took robust notes, such as James Madison and Robert Yates. Some rose to speak frequently on every issue, like Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson. And some said little to the whole room, but dominated the small discussions in committee.
Back, now, to our earlier discussions of technology (or lack thereof):
As the delegates moved through the summer, thousands of ideas were proposed, countless thousands of words were voted up and down, again and again. They had no modern word processors, no laptop computers or even typewriters and paper to help with this task.
The committees would scribble notes on parchment with quill and ink, then keep the clauses that passed and scratch out the clauses that didn’t. Eventually, by the end of the summer, they had hammered out agreements on how to select three branches and on what each branch should do. They had hammered out ways to select or appoint the members, and ways to impeach them. They had even agreed on ways to amend the Constitution if improvements should ever be needed.
When they had finally agreed on as much as they possibly could, they had an utterly unorganized array of notes – 23 stacks of pieces of parchment, all handwritten, all covered with scribbles and scratch-outs, of which someone would somehow have to make some kind of sense.
At this point, lifelong New Yorker Gouverneur Morris (though attending the Constitution as a delegate for Pennsylvania), rose to the occasion, arguably his life’s greatest challenge.
It was Gouverneur Morris who took home these 23 stacks of scribbles and scratch outs, and organized them into the incredibly neat, sensible, coherent seven articles that we know today. His colleagues were amazed that he was able to find such beautiful order in their jumble of disjointed agreements.
Gouverneur Morris earned the name by which the historians know him – the Penman of the Constitution – creating a document that would not only serve us so well, it would inspire other lovers of freedom throughout the world, playing a key role in fact, in drawing to our shores so many of the immigrants who contributed to our great American Melting Pot in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Once the convention was happy with the final version – there were always tweaks even after Morris presented his splendid format – they sent it off to the printer and approved the final draft.
And on September 17, 1787, the 39 delegates who were still in town gathered to sign that approved version and announce the result of that long summer to an anxious world.
The ratification battle was yet to come – some states rushed to approve it, while others fought tooth and nail to stop it. The delegates were dispersed, hurrying back to their respective state capitols to carry the cause to their friends and allies back home. A letter-writing campaign, op/eds from both pro and anti-Constitutionalists – known as the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers – was designed for the state-by-state ratification process and grew to become among the most important political science collections in human history.
It took time and work – not to mention the minds of philosophers and the souls of saints – to complete what is arguably the greatest single accomplishment in the history of governance.
And even though later errors undermined its effectiveness – failure to enforce its provisions, countless elections of unworthy fools, even turning the very plan upside down with the lethal passage of the 17th Amendment – the fact remains that, in its time, and for the 120 years in which it remained the law of the land, the Constitution of the United States stands alone as a testament to liberty, and to the wisdom of our Founding Generation.
Happy Constitution Day!
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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