Customer Reviews

The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution

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The author Philip Roth once said: "History is where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable." There is a tendency among many Americans to approach the founding of the United States with this attitude. If Washington had not led the Continental Army to victory, then someone else could just as easily have done it. And if James Madison and his colleagues had not provided the impetus for the Constitutional Convention, we somehow would have still ended up with the government we have today. Those who read Mr. Stewart's fine recounting of the events of 1787 will quickly become disabused of that notion. There was nothing inevitable about the creation of our central government.

Mr. Stewart tells a great story and he relates it succinctly and eloquently. Though his is certainly not the first telling of these events, he does a remarkable job of explaining the sectional differences among the delegates. Perhaps most illuminating are his descriptions of the personality quirks, prejudices and idiosyncrasies of the participants, all of which profoundly influenced the end product: our Constitution. And even though you know the outcome of the story, Mr. Stewart creates considerable suspense. More than once, you will remark to yourself: "How on earth did they ever agree on ANYTHING let alone a document that has served as the foundation for the greatest democratic experiment in history"?

Highly recommended.

Often the "epic" moments of history that earn the attention of our best writers are battles, wars, or disasters. Luckily for us, David Stewart turned his remarkably gifted writing talents to a turning point in history where the fight was over ideas and the weapons of choice were words.
The book is spell-binding. One cannot read "The Summer of 1787" without feeling as if one were present at one of those very rare moments in history where all the forces converge to make something better of us. Anyone who reads this book will never be able to say again that history is boring. When in the hands of an author like Stewart, history reads like the best novel of today.
But more important than the fact the book is well written is that "The Summer of 1787" goes a long way to humanizing the Constitutional Convention. Sadly most Americans, because of the way our history is taught, regard the Convention as almost a religious moment when a group--appropriately nicknamed "Founding Fathers"--delivers to the public a document almost in the manner by which Moses brought the Commandments down from the mountain. Instead, Stewart shows how the final document was the result of politics and compromise. In other words, it was the product of mortals.
This is important because as long as we regard these men as God like we will continue to raise up generations of young people who feel that such accomplishments are beyond their power. Instead, we should be leading them to believe we expect greater and better things from them.
Do us all a favor and buy this book for a young person today.

In a world where the talking heads are forever making pronouncements on the sacred status of what the founding fathers intended when they wrote the Constitution, this work will come as a refreshing revelation: our founding fathers had high ideals indeed, but they could also be horse traders and scheming politicos when they had to be, which was usually. Stewart has written a riveting tale of the colorful, larger than life characters, bizarre incidents and unintended consequences that created the world's greatest document, the Constitution. And best of all, it reads better than a novel.

David Stewart may be a lawyer by profession, but by nature he's a born storyteller. THE SUMMER OF 1787 shows the touch of a novelist, lifting the Founding Fathers out of dry textbooks and breathing life back into them. As in a novel, I got a sense of the players as characters in a drama. As in a novel, chapters end on suspenseful notes. You may know how this story comes out, but you're on the edge of your chair all the same.

I learned something too: The antecedents of, and reasons for, the Electoral College. Before Reading THE SUMMER OF 1787, I never realized the degree to which slavery shaped its development. David Stewart's explanations and examples are clear and insightful.

THE SUMMER OF 1787 is American history the easy way. Factual and enlightening to be sure, but also fun to read. Why couldn't they have taught it this way in school?

-- The reviewer is the author of To Love Mercy, a novel.

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.

Wow. Never thought a book on what amounts to legal history could be a page turner; this one is. In less than 300 pages Stewart somehow succintly impresses upon the reader the intricacies of the legal issues invloved, the personalities of the individual delegates, the regional and factional interests, and the pulse of the nation waiting outside the walls of Independence Hall.

The pace and feel of the read even mirrors that of the delegates as they moved through the convention: From the universally accepted ineptitude of the Articles of Conferderation, to the optimism of the opening days, to the frustrations of the swealtering mid-summer sessions, to the impatient and anticipatory emotions of the final draft writings.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Revolutionary Period or legal history. One of the best book I've read in years.

OK, dear reader, so you know a good deal about Franklin, Hamilton, Washington, Madison and the other marble-statue heavyweights who created the U.S. Constitution. Well, how about James Wilson, Abraham Baldwin, Luther Martin and David Brearley? They were there too, and our Constitution might have ended up something quite different had they not had their say.

David O. Stewart has reminded us of such things in this popular recounting of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The subject is, of course, a well-plowed field, and Stewart acknowledges his debt to Bowen, Rossiter and others who worked on it before him. But his own treatment, which places as much emphasis on personalities as on politics or ideology, is deft, readable and accurate. It tells the story with flair and with an eye on America's future as well as its past.

Several basic themes run through Stewart's narrative. Sectional interests --- North vs. South, big states versus small, defenders vs. deplorers of slavery --- were in play from the very start. There was basic disagreement over whether the convention was bound only to revise the inadequate Articles of Confederation or had the right to scrap them entirely and build anew. When the conclave began, no one knew exactly what the result would look like --- and sure enough, the final product was completely satisfactory to almost no one. Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the final draft, put it neatly: "I not only took it as a man does his wife, for better, for worse, but what few men do with their wives, I took it knowing all its bad qualities."

Compromise, so much out of fashion in today's politics, saved the day. The delegates knew that the only thing worse than what they had wrought was to give up and go home with nothing accomplished.

Readers will surely be appalled --- maybe even entertained in a macabre way --- by some of the loony ideas that were seriously proposed and rejected: A life term for the President; giving each voter the right to vote for three Presidential candidates; and (James Madison's pet project) allowing the federal government to veto state laws.

The slavery question dominated everything. Determined southern delegates wrung huge concessions from northerners in return for support of provisions that would benefit northern commercial and shipping interests. The most famous of these Faustian bargains created the infamous "three-fifths rule" under which slaves were to be counted at three-fifths of their actual number for purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. There was general agreement that pure "democracy," in the sense of giving too much power directly to the people, was an evil to be avoided.

Stewart nominates as major influences on the convention two men who were mostly silent presences --- George Washington, who presided, and the elderly Benjamin Franklin, who commanded enormous respect while saying little in formal debate. Powerful southerners like John Rutledge and George Mason also rate a tip of Stewart's hat for their effective politicking.

And there is a colorful cast of supporting players: Georgia's Abraham Baldwin, who at a critical moment changed his vote on the question of how votes in the Senate should be apportioned among the states; New Jersey's David Brearley, who crucially influenced decisions on the powers and duties of the President; and tedious Luther Martin of Maryland, who drove delegates crazy with his long-winded and boring speeches but made several major contributions nonetheless (one weary listener said Martin seemed ready to speak for two months).

The whole thing amounted to what Stewart describes an "an act of inspired improvisation."

One senses too that author Stewart may have an artfully hidden agenda of his own. He notes that direct popular election of the President was summarily rejected at the convention, but in a brief appendix he concludes briskly that the reasons given for creating the much-debated electoral college system no longer apply. Hmmmm, maybe so...

--- Reviewed by Robert Finn

The Summer of 1787 is simply spectacular. Stewart flawlessly weaves atmosphere, the tempers and personalities of the men at the convention, personal letters (and of course personal politics), as well as each piece of information that seems to possibly be available about the fateful Philadelphia summer into this gripping book. Without bias, this work portrays the genius, morality (although often defective - the issue of slavery played quite a significant role and this is not in any way overlooked by Stewart), integrity and diligence of the men who truly laid the governmental foundation for the United States of America. What I find to be the most compelling about this book is that Stewart, making great use of the limited historical resources available, really delves into the lives and personalities of the delegates, making the whole process seem more human. A great read for people interested in both history and modern politics. It's an old cliché, but you truly can't know where you're going until you understand where you come from, and this work concisely and effectively explains how the Constitution came about. To give yourself an edge in political debate, read this book (and the Constitution itself, of course) and truly understand the fundamental basis of your argument.

As a Canadian with spotty knowledge about the Constitutional Convention, I found this book to be fascinating. It manages to balance out the personalities, the setting, and the issues in an interesting (and dryly humourous) fashion. I highly recommend this book as an excellent buy for anyone interested in learning more about one of the most pivotal periods in U.S. history.

The general sense of some editorial reviews of this fine book, while rightly praising the author's stylistic dexterity and story-telling skills, was to question whether there was a need for another account of the great Constitutional Convention of 1787. This point of view finds its answer in the following verse, quoted in the preface of Catherine Drinker Bowen's earlier book on the same subject: "If all the tales are told, retell them, Brother./ If few attend, let those who listen feel."

David Stewart has retold well this most important of stories, and in doing so has brought the tale to a larger audience, and to a new generation. His judgment that this book was worth undertaking is amply justified by the result.