Excerpt from The Summer of 1787 by David O. Stewart, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

As with any group deliberation involving dozens of people, the dynamics of the Convention were complex. Delegates played the roles dictated by personality and relationships, by their beliefs, and by the politics and economies of the states they represented. Some, like Madison and Wilson and Gouverneur Morris, pushed to the front of the stage and speechified on a daily basis; others, like Franklin, were more selective in their remarks, but exercised important influence offstage; and some, like Blair of Virginia and Jared Ingersoll of Pennsylvania, sat mute for four months, leaving scarcely a trace that they had been there.

For ingenuity in making oneself heard, no one matched John Adams, then on diplomatic duty in far-off London. Beginning on May 18 and every Friday thereafter, the entire front page of the Pennsylvania Mercury was devoted to excerpts from Adams's recently published "Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America." Adams's prose was still appearing weekly when the Convention finished on September 17, though its impact on the delegates is doubtful. "Men of learning find nothing new in it," Madison sniffed, adding, "men of taste many things to criticize."

Though important contributions came from many delegates, including Connecticut's late-arriving men of compromise, the Convention's central actors were concentrated among the Virginians and Pennsylvanians, and with the third delegation to achieve a quorum in Philadelphia -- South Carolina.

John Rutledge of Charleston reached Philadelphia on May 17 and stayed briefly at the Market Street home of James Wilson, with whom he had served in the Confederation Congress. Young Charles Pinckney moved into Mrs. House's lodgings on the same day. The two remaining delegation members arrived a week later on the same ship -- General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney with his wife and Major Pierce Butler with his wife and four daughters.

The South Carolina contingent was an ingrown affair. The Pinckneys were first cousins, but that was just the beginning of the interconnections. The sister of General Pinckney's wife had married Rutledge's brother, while Major Butler's wife was cousin to the two sisters who had wed General Pinckney and the Rutledge brother. All four men owned plantations in the state's Low Country, using slave workers to grow rice and indigo. All but Butler were lawyers, with both Rutledge and General Pinckney having read law in London. Despite their claustrophobic web of relationships, the Carolinians came to Philadelphia with an appetite for work, and they would exercise an outsized influence.

Rutledge was their leader. The forty-eight-year-old lawyer had been near the center of American affairs since the Stamp Act Congress of 1765. A feared trial lawyer -- "possibly the most successful lawyer in the American colonies" -- he could be overbearing. Pleasant enough when he wanted to be, Rutledge did not play the courtly southerner. Some complained that he cut them off abruptly, to the point of rudeness. Despite his success in the courtroom, many rated him no more than middling on his feet, "too rapid in his public speaking to be denominated an agreeable orator."

When he met Rutledge in 1774, John Adams saw in the fast-talking southerner "no keenness in his eye, no depth in his countenance. Nothing of the profound, sagacious, brilliant or sparkling in his first appearance." Rather, Adams described Rutledge in terms worthy of Shakespeare's Iago, as maintaining "an air of reserve, design, and cunning." (Sadly, Rutledge left no record of his first impression of Adams.) Rutledge's hard edge was evident when he insisted that the South Carolina Assembly give the state's delegates free rein to take any necessary action at the Continental Congress in 1774. What, the objection arose, if those delegates did the wrong thing in the dispute with Britain? "Hang them," was Rutledge's reply.

Copyright © 2007 by David O. Stewart