Altering
what we think we know of the Constitution’s
origins, Holton tells the history of the average Americans
who challenged the framers of the Constitution and
forced on them the revisions that produced the document
we now venerate.
Woody Holton is an associate
professor at the University of Richmond, where he
teaches early American history, and his previous book,
Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the
Making of the American Revolution in Virginia,
garnered much praise from the academic community.
His work has been included in the Organization
of American Historians’ Best American History
Essays 2006, and his articles and reviews have
appeared in American Historical Review, Journal
of American History, Reviews in American History,
William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Southern History,
among others.
Before he went into teaching,
Holton directed numerous campaigns and was founding
director of the environmental advocacy group “Clean
Up Congress.” He now lives in Virginia with
his wife, Dr. Gretchen Schoel, and their daughter,
Beverly.
Copyright © 2007
by Woody Holton. Published in October 2007 by Hill
and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
LLC. All rights reserved.
Thirteen North American colonies
left the British Empire in 1776, but that was not
really the birth date of the American colossus. History’s
wealthiest and most powerful nation-state was not
actually launched until the summer of 1787, at the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Revolutionaries
the world over have cribbed from the Declaration of
Independence, but the successful ones, those who manage
to overturn the social order and establish regimes
of their own, find their inspiration not in the Declaration
but in the Constitution. Anyone seeking the real origins
of the United States must begin by asking why it was
that, scarcely a decade after the free inhabitants
of thirteen British colonies proclaimed each of them
an autonomous state, they decided to meld those thirteen
sovereignties together and launch an empire of their
own.
Today politicians as well
as judges profess an almost religious reverence for
the Framers’ original intent. And yet what do
we really know about the motives that set fifty-five
of the nation’s most prominent citizens—men
like George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Alexander
Hamilton—on the road to Philadelphia? The Framers’
motivations remain nearly as obscure today as they
were that muggy summer of 1787, when the Constitutional
Convention delegates voted to maintain the strictest
secrecy—and thwarted eavesdroppers by keeping
the fetid chamber’s doors and windows closed
and latched.
High school textbooks and
popular histories of the Revolutionary War locate
the origins of the Constitution in the nasty conflicts
that kept threatening to tear the federal convention
apart—and in the brilliant compromises that,
again and again, brought the delegates back together.
Should every state have the same number of representatives
in Congress, or should representation be weighted
in favor of the more populous ones? Solution: proportional
representation in the House of Representatives and
state equality in the Senate. Should the national
government be allowed to abolish the African slave
trade? Solution: yes, but not until 1808. In apportioning
congressional representation among the states, should
enslaved Americans be considered people, giving their
owners bonus representatives? What about in allocating
the tax burden among the states—should slaves
be counted as people there? Solution to both controversies:
count each slave as three-fifths of a person.
Excerpted from
Unruly Americans and the Origin
of the Constitution by Woody
Holton. Copyright © 2007 by Woody Holton. Published
in October 2007 by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
