The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution

George Washington presided, James Madison kept the notes, Benjamin Franklin offered wisdom and humor at crucial times. The Summer of 1787 traces the struggles within the Philadelphia Convention as the delegates hammered out the charter for the world's first constitutional democracy. Relying on the words of the delegates themselves to explore the Convention's sharp conflicts and hard bargaining, David O. Stewart lays out the passions and contradictions of the often painful process of writing the Constitution.

It was a desperate balancing act. Revolutionary principles required that the people have power, but could the people be trusted? Would a stronger central government leave room for the states? Would the small states accept a Congress in which seats were alloted according to population rather than to each sovereign state? And what of slavery? The supercharged debates over America's original sin led to the most creative and most disappointing political deals of the Convention.

The room was crowded with colorful and passionate characters, some known -- Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Edmund Randolph -- and others largely forgotten. At different points during that sultry summer, more than half of the delegates threatened to walk out, and some actually did, but Washington's quiet leadership and the delegates' inspired compromises held the Convention together.

In a country continually arguing over the document's original intent, it is fascinating to watch these powerful characters struggle toward consensus -- often reluctantly -- to write a flawed but living and breathing document that could evolve with the nation.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

How Personalities Affected the Constitution, 2008-09-18
What difference did rooming assignments make on the founding of our nation? Quite a bit, it turns out.
It has never occurred to me to consider who slept at the same boarding house or sat at neighboring desks when wondering how the Constitution came to be, but David Stewart's approach in examining the creation of the country through the personalities of the founders was fascinating. Did it matter who brought their wives to Philadelphia that Summer? Turns out that it did. Of course the personalities of the people who worked together to craft the document found their reflection in their work.
Thank you for this important bit of scholarship.


0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Impossibly Dull., 2008-09-01
As one of the professional reviews in the beginning of the book states: "If you read only one book about the Constitution, let it be 'The Summer of 1787.'"
Good, because I'm not reading another. The ridiculous amount of time and effort required to slough through this book was not worth the knowledge that, admittedly, I did gain. I don't usually mind required reading for my classes. THIS was the exception. If this is the indicator for my year in AP U.S. Government, I'd better drop the class right now.

Hideous.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Three Stars, 2008-08-09
This book was an exciting telling of the events of that wonderful summer. However, I would have prefered more analyse of the events rather than straight story telling. Also for a book subtitled "The Men Who Invented the Constitution" it gives only basic biographical information of the men. The author also did not use footnotes which made it difficult to track down further information. An example of this would be the author citing another persons work, "A scholar once said..." and it wouldnt be given a reference number to the idex, so this basicly made it impossible to match up citations. Another downside is this book does not mention the judiciary. I know there was minimal debate over the judiciary at the convention, but it still deserves at least a few pages worth of ink. To conclude, those who are looking to read the basic story of how the United States constitution was made this book is for you. Those looking for deeper analyse should try another book.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

Like Making Sausage, 2008-07-25
Twain once said that there are two things you don't want to see made - sausages and laws. This is certainly true for the making of our Constitution and Mr. Stewart takes the reader into the kitchen to see how it was made.

This is a riveting account of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 where a host of interesting characters muddled, blundered, compromised, posed, blustered and worked diligently to come up with what is considered the greatest work of republican government. It wasn't pretty but the delegates got the job done.

Mr. Stewart provides a fast-paced and clear account of the convention with very good thumbnail sketches of the participants. There are no grand theorums in the book. This is straight historical writing; which is a good thing, because the history is often over-looked for the theorizing and "spinning".

What the reader does learn, in addition to what happened that fateful summer is just how difficult a task it is to come up with an entire scheme of government from a perfectly clean slate. No country had attempted to form such a government and no one knew, even after the Constitution was completed, just what the government would look like and how it would function.

This is an extremely good account that keeps the reader's attention throughout.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

A Fascinating Read on Many Levels, 2008-07-22
I took this book on my vacation to Hawaii and found that it was hard to put down. It was engaging, briskly written, and a fascinating insight into the men who wrote our Constitution, their biases, foibles, and prejudices drawn from the records, notes and letters of those involved. Author David Stewart spends a little time setting the historical context and then moves right into the topic. It helps to visit the America's most historic mile in Philadelphia to get a feel for what Stewart describes, but it is by no means necessary.

In addition, the book is a remarkable study in negotiation. There were certainly many compromises and trade-offs made in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, and if anything, Stewart spends a little too much time discussing slavery, but that is, in retrospect, perhaps appropriate in that the compromises made to accommodate slavery in the Constitution shaped the history of America thereafter.

The one area where Stewart gets off base, in my view, is near the very end when he criticizes the Electoral College process for selecting the President and suggests that a direct election would be preferable. The Founders knew better, and many of the issues that Stewart spends a great deal of time discussing in the book are lost in what is his seeming disappointment at the outcome of the 2000 election. After all, the Founders were concerned that the President would be the head of a Federal group of States, not of the most people. A direct election would cause candidates to focus just on the most populous areas and not on the several states. Without the Electoral College, the two party system would crumble into a number of splinter groups, and candidates would rarely be elected with more than 50% of the vote. In addition, the Electoral College has the effect of turning close elections into landslides when the electors are counted, with the result that the President becomes the elected head of the United States, not just of those states with the most people in them.

Aside from this criticism, though, Stewart's effort is a good one and an enjoyable read.

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