I just finished reading “The Quartet” by Joseph Ellis and wanted to give a few thoughts. Overall I really liked the book — it was a short and sweet (220 pages w/o appendices and footnotes) dissertation on the origin and establishment of the United States Constitution, spanning most of the 1780s, but chiefly 1786-89. The quartet described by the title includes George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Had it been “the Quintet”, you could have thrown Gouverneur Morris in there, too, since he’s the guy who actually put pen to paper and wrote the finished document. “We the people of the United States of America” are his words (originally they wanted to list all the states, he decided on his own to use the country’s name since union was the object).

I underlined a number of passages but here is a favorite: “…the United States came into existence in an era ‘when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.’ Immanual Kant had yet to coin the term Enlightenment to describe this chapter in Western history, but even without the convenient vocabulary, Washington clearly grasped the central idea: namely, that the American Revolution had happened at a truly providential moment. It occurred when a treasure trove of human knowledge about society and government had replaced the medieval assumptions — that ‘gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition’ — and thereby provided Americans with an unprecedented opportunity to construct a society according to political principles that maximized the prospects for personal freedom and happiness more fully than ever before. In effect, European thinkers over the past century had drafted the blueprint for a new political architecture, which was now readily available for Americans to implement.”

This passage stood out to me because it puts forth the idea that, in a way, the Revolution was a foregone conclusion; it was only a matter of time before it would be demanded by the people, and whether the war took seven years or twenty, Britain was probably going to lose. How fortunate America was that this revolution was placed in the hands of incorruptible people like Washington and others, rather than despots, as took place in France the following decade. Also amazing that the Congress didn’t totally bungle the entire thing, though not for lack of trying. It was all a confluence of miraculous events, one after the other.

Before reading this book, and studying the period in general, I didn’t realize how very controversial the Constitution was when it was drafted. Some members of Congress even considered it “illegal” because it replaced the Articles of Confederation without explicit permission to do so. There was great resistance to nationhood; the states thought that after winning the war, they could go back to their disorganized and ineffective confederation. But Madison, who was a brilliant thinker if not a great orator, studied history and found that almost every other example of confederacy had been torn apart eventually by civil war or by foreign conquest. Long before the American Civil War, it was predicted by many as a very real possibility (and most knew the catalyst would be slavery). Without unity, the larger states would prey upon the smaller ones, and larger European countries with money and armies would eventually swoop in to snatch America’s considerable resources. The United States was burdened by massive war debt, no way to pay it off, and no international credit, or reputation. The country was on the brink of imploding, and wasting every effort made in the Revolution.

It was truly a miracle that the Constitution came together when it did, and so quickly, and by such intelligent people, with such obstacles in the way. Political parties did not yet exist (but they would very, very soon), which is one of the many reasons the convention will never again be replicated.