WE THE PEOPLE

About this book

<b>The complete narrative history of the Constitutional Convention — Madison, Hamilton, Washington, the Federalist Papers, and the founding of the American republic in Philadelphia, 1787.</b> <p>On June 15, 1787, William Paterson rose to present the small states' counter-proposal. The Convention was in deadlock. Several delegates had threatened to leave. Benjamin Franklin proposed sessions begin with prayer — the delegates declined, noting they had no chaplain and no funds to hire one. What saved the Convention was Roger Sherman of Connecticut: a self-educated shoemaker-turned-lawyer who proposed the bicameral solution giving large states proportional representation in the House and equal-state votes in the Senate, breaking the impasse that had threatened to end the republic before it began.</p> <p>Historian Jonathan Aldous Mercer traces the full arc of the <b>Constitutional Convention</b> across 24 chapters: Shays' Rebellion and the crisis that forced the call to Philadelphia; Madison's Virginia Plan, drafted after he read every treatise on confederations from the Achaean League to the Dutch Republic; the <b>Great Compromise</b>; the Three-Fifths Compromise that embedded slavery into the republic's foundation; the ratification battles in Virginia and New York; and the <b>Federalist Papers</b> that <b>James Madison and Alexander Hamilton</b> produced to win public opinion.</p> <h4>Inside this Constitutional Convention history:</h4> <ul> <li><b>Shays' Rebellion</b> — Massachusetts veterans who had fought at Valley Forge tried to seize the Springfield arsenal in January 1787, shocking reluctant states into sending serious delegations (Chapters 2-3)</li> <li><b>Madison's Virginia Plan</b> — a blueprint for a genuinely national government that Madison arrived with eleven days early, framing the entire summer's debate (Chapter 5)</li> <li><b>The Great Compromise</b> — Roger Sherman's bicameral solution to the large-state/small-state deadlock that had delegates threatening to walk out (Chapter 7)</li> <li><b>Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise</b> — how southern delegates shaped the Constitution's structure to protect slavery, the founding moral failure (Chapter 8)</li> <li><b>The Federalist Papers and ratification</b> — Madison and Hamilton's 85-essay argument for the Constitution, and the close battles in Virginia and New York (Chapters 13-15)</li> </ul> <p>The <b>founding of the American republic</b> was a political invention without precedent — fifty-five men designing institutions for a future they couldn't foresee, in a Philadelphia July, with Washington's silent authority holding the room. Mercer's <b>narrative American history</b> traces the genius and the moral compromise of the framers, and the 240-year experiment their arguments produced.</p> <p><b>For readers of David McCullough's 1776 and Ron Chernow's ALEXANDER HAMILTON.</b></p>