Miracle At Philadelphia

The Constitutional Convention established a new form of government and supreme law of the United States, but as Bowen shows, the delegates were under severe pressures of time and politics, compromising on some issues and leaving others unaddressed to arrive at a satisfactory result. From the moment of its ratification, the US Constitution has been the subject of intense argument over its precise meaning and broader purposes. Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the Bill of Rights, 10 amendments to the Constitution added very shortly after ratification. Another example is that the precise powers of each branch with respect to foreign policy remain undefined. The president is named commander-in-chief, and Congress holds the power to declare war and raise armies, but as early as the Washington administration, there was disagreement within his own cabinet over the president’s ability to act independently of Congress with respect to the military and treaty partners. The most severe early test to the Constitution was the question of slavery. The Constitution avoids the actual word, but also banned the importation of enslaved people within 25 years of ratification. For many, this implied a general aversion to the practice and a desire to see it gradually phased out of existence, but since abolition was not explicitly stated, others argued that slavery was not only permissible but also sacrosanct, and that there was no Constitutional barrier to its expansion into the territories.