Miracle at Philadelphia

A review of sorts

Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787 (1966) has been reprinted in multiple editions since its original publication. My copy, acquired more than 35 years ago, is the twentieth anniversary Book of the Month Club edition.

The book is a narrative history of the events of one momentous summer. Bowen makes clear at the outset that the Constitutional Convention would not be known by that name until many years later. The Grand Convention or Federal Convention, as it was known in 1787, was sanctioned "for the express purpose of revising the Articles of Convention" (4). Although some members clung to this purpose, there were several who expected to replace the Articles from the very beginning. Had it not been for members maintaining secrecy of the contents of their day-to-day discussions, there likely would have been considerable public dissension. Bowen focuses on the men and their debates that summer as they crafted a constitution that still serves as the founding document for the United States government.

Although Miracle at Philadelphia has resided on my bookshelves for nearly four decades, it sat unread until this month. Long has been my impression that it supports a view popular in certain circles that our Constitution is a sacred text, that the "miracle" of 1787 was due to divine intervention.* Memory of how and when this book came into my possession is hazy, but likely stems from an active interest that I had during the mid-1980s in understanding the view that I believed it represented. I did not share that view then, and now reject it on the basis of deeper and broader knowledge than was mine then.

 

In the mid-1980s, a man whom I knew as a fellow member of a Bible study group suggested several times that I would enjoy Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and the Glory: Did God Have a Plan for America? (1977). "Since you like history, you'll love this book," he told me. I was employed as a substitute teacher while looking for a full-time job teaching high school history. After much prodding, I bought Marshall and Manuel's book, read it, and found it terrible. The authors began with a premise that is rooted in religious belief, offered shallow reference to some Bible verses, and then invested months looking for any scraps of evidence that confirmed their assumption. They even employed a large number of volunteer researchers to help with the task. Their narrative makes clear that accurate history was not the objective.

The Light and the Glory was written well-enough that is was easy reading despite obvious failures as a work of credible history. Even so, at the time I shared their vision for a Christian awakening in the United States. I did not agree that we had been a Christian nation from the beginning, at least not in the sense that they understood it.

A few years earlier, perhaps spring 1981, some of the views pushed by Marshall and Manuel were the focus of a film and rally that I had attended. Certain details are no longer clear in my memory. The film presented images of a religious rally in Washington D.C., where Christians gathered to pray. Perhaps it was the Washington for Jesus rally held in April 1980. My clearest memories of the event in Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum on the campus of Washington State University, where I was a student, are singing, holding hands with those beside me, and swaying from side-to-side. Throughout the evening a single Bible verse was repeated over and over again. "If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14).

Marshall and Manuel also deploy this verse.

I recall having the opinion that this verse had been wrenched from its context to apply it inappropriately to the United States. Central to this memory is the heated argument my friend Vic and I had as we walked back to our dorm. He did not share my concern that the Bible verse was misapplied. We were part of a religious group that emphasized careful Bible study, reading the Bible cover-to-cover annually, and memorizing Bible verses. I spent my first two summers during college at summer training in San Diego with this group. The second summer was devoted to four hours per day of careful and detailed study of a single book of the Bible (Colossians). I still value the close reading skills that I honed that summer, as they have proven useful for texts of all sorts.

Reading 2 Chronicles 7 as a whole does not lead me to think that it applies in any manner whatsoever to the United States. The belief that is does has had growing influence among the Religious Right since the 1980s. When this religious belief is supported by inaccurate history, it merits criticism.

When I acquired Miracle at Philadelphia, I intended to read it. More than likely, I expected that it would reveal itself part of the bad history pushed in The Light and the Glory. I was wrong.

George Washington wrote in a letter to Marquis de Lafayette:

It appears to me, then, little short of a miracle, that the Delegates from so many different States (which States you know are also different from each other in their manners, circumstances and prejudices) should unite in forming a system of national Government, so little liable to well founded objections.
Washington to Lafayette, 7 February 1788 (at Founders Online)

This quote appears as a headnote at the beginning of Miracle at Philadelphia. My assumption that the book's title represented a theocratic perspective should have been easy to dismiss. In fact, aside from a snark finding "odd" the "slight taint of the Sunday school"** concerning Washington, the entrance of divine power in Bowen's telling of the story of the Convention begins with Franklin's call to prayer near the end of June (28, 125-127). This episode is well-known and always struck me as illustrative of Franklin's pragmatism.

Bowen's narrative of the call to prayer consists almost entirely of excerpts from Franklin's speech and the subsequent discussion as recorded by Madison and others. She begins with a physical description of Franklin, "sitting with the famous double spectacles low on his nose" (125). Then two paragraphs of Franklin's speech, summary of a portion of the speech, and then Franklin's call for action.

I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.
Benjamin Franklin, 28 June 1787, as quoted by Bowen (126)

Roger Sherman seconded Franklin's motion, there was a brief discussion, but no vote was taken. Decades later, before most of the primary documents became available, an account of this event was presented in a letter by a man who claimed to be telling a story as he learned it from one of those present. This letter was then published and widely distributed.

According to this account, after Franklin's motion:

The doctor sat down, and never (said Gen. D.) did I behold a countenance at once so dignified and delighted as was that of Washington, at the close of this address! Nor were the members of the Convention, generally less affected. The words of the venerable Franklin fell upon our ears with a weight and authority, even greater than we may suppose an oracle to have had in a Roman senate! A silent admiration superseded, for a moment, the expression of that assent and approbation which was strongly marked on almost every countenance ...The three days of recess were spent in the manner advised by Doctor Franklin; the opposite parties mixed with each other, and a free and frank interchange of sentiments took place. On the fourth day we assembled again, and if great additional light had not been thrown on the subject, every unfriendly feeling had been expelled; and a spirit of conciliation had been cultivated, which promised, at least, a calm and dispassionate reconsideration of the subject.
William Steele to Jonathan Steele, September 1825 (Records of the Federal Convention of 1787)

Although Bowen does not mention Steele by name, she references some of the contents of this letter: "it was rumored that Hamilton had said ironically the Convention was not in need of 'foreign aid'. This is palpable nonsense" (127). James Madison refers to the account in the letter as "erroniously given" (Madison to Jared Sparks, 8 April 1831, Founders Online).

The myth propagated by Steele may be better known than a more accurate narrative rooted in primary sources produced by those at the convention.

Debates continued without resolution, according to Bowen, and then the Convention took a recess. Up to this point in the book, Bowen's narrative follows the Convention day-by-day and does not steer far from the available primary sources. Then, she departs from the Convention itself to sketch in some details about the American people, the land, and some of the issues of the day, especially focusing on the ways these issues produced sectional divisions between north and south, large states and small, and conflicts over how the West should be developed and governed. When she returns to the Convention itself, she mentions a letter Franklin wrote to the Pennsylvania Packet three days after the Great Compromise. From there she works back to the compromise itself.

After two months of constant bickering between large states and small, it was finally agreed on 16 July 1787 that there would be equal representation of each state in the Senate and proportional representation of each state in the House.

Was Franklin's call to prayer the decisive turning point? Marshall and Manuel state that it was.

That speech--and the sober reflection in the silence which followed--marked the turning-point. Their priorities rearranged by Franklin's startling admonition, the delegates, nearly all of whom were believers of one kind or another, got on with the business of crafting a new constitution. (343)

Bowen's narrative of what led to the Great Compromise could be read as the hand of divine power, but also admits natural explanations: 

Perhaps the delegates would never have reached agreement, had not the heat broken. By Monday, July sixteenth, Philadelphia was cool after a month of torment; ... Even the mosquitoes were quiescent, though on the streets at noon the horseflies droned and darted. (186)

Bowen's narrative is a lively read. My neglect of this book for nearly four decades was an error. She contests rather than supports the myths propagated by Marshall and Manuel.

I do wish, however, that the author had not opted to leave out clear documentation. She states that she had copious footnotes and deleted them.

The book's opening paragraph sent me in search. It, too, was focused on the weather in that hot Philadelphia summer. She mentions a diarist stated there were fewer "cooling thunderstorms" and then, "Perhaps the new 'installic rods' everywhere fixed on the houses might have robbed the clouds of their electric fluid" (3). Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. The glimpse Bowen gives the reader here of the popularity of his invention and of the state of eighteenth century scientific understanding of the weather and human agency would be worth pursuing through the sources she does not divulge.


  
*Although principally authored by Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence also gets pulled into the orbit of those holding this view. See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997).

**Bowen mentions Parson Weems: "perhaps Parson Weems will never be lived down" (28). Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington (1800) was a popular book as is the source of many apocryphal stories about Washington and events that took place in eighteenth century America.