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Plain, Honest Men

Plain, Honest Men
by Richard Beeman

by Richard Beeman

The lesson we learn from reading Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution is the same lesson that applies to all things, everywhere: context is everything.
In the case of the Constitution, context is not just everything, but it’s crucial to understanding what that document says to us when we read it now, some 226 years after its creation.

For instance, take the fetish for “strict construction” that pervades so much of our political discourse today. Those who want to adhere to a literal interpretation of the Constitution like to cite the Framers’ intent when rendering their view of the document. But, as author Richard Beeman makes clear in his account of the Constitution’s creation, a lot of the ideas, articles, clauses--even individual words--in the Constitution did not reflect the unanimous views of the Framers. Or even, for that matter, a consensus among a minority of those men. Several provisions that made it into the final draft of the Constitution lived to achieve enshrinement only because they proved to be compromises that no one liked, but that everyone in the room hated least. Are such parts of the text really worthy of sacred treatment today, when the very men who committed them to parchment had such mixed feelings about them then?

Thus, Professor Beeman’s account of the constitutional convention renders a very valuable service: it reminds us that, to use the well-worn cliche, the Constitution is a living document--not simply due to the intent of those who wrote it, but also because of the tension that went into creating it. As the narrative makes clear, agreement was a rare commodity in Philadelphia during that summer of 1787, and the document that resulted from almost five months of debate comes down to us as a mixture of genius and warts, one that practically begs future generations to interpret and modify its meaning and intent.

Nowhere is this fact more clear than in how the delegates dealt with slavery. Beeman tells us that, for the delegates, the slavery question mostly loomed over issues of representation and power relationships among the states; the moral dimension held little sway during the debates. While a few members of the convention did express their moral outrage over the institution, such ethical concerns had little effect on the ultimate compromise that apportioned representation by counting slaves as three-fifths a person. The author rightly calls out for their failings these representatives of a revolutionary generation that had declared, barely eleven years before, that “all men are created equal”; yet, he also makes perfectly clear that abolitionist sentiment was not going to make headway against the demands of delegates like John Rutledge and the Pinckneys of South Carolina. In the end, the compromise that made slavery a part of the Constitution happened because without it there might not have been a Constitution. Such were the dynamics of the meeting in Philadelphia, and Beeman gives his readers a clear picture of just how much difficulty went into creating the document by which we still live to this day.

Another great service rendered by Plain, Honest Men lies in the resurrection of a number of men who have been long since--but unjustly--forgotten. As Beeman’s story makes clear, the efforts of men like Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut--two key facilitators of the “Connecticut Compromise,” which created the bicameral Congress and apportioned representation by population in the House and by state in the Senate--should still be celebrated, though today those names are shrouded in obscurity. For this reader, learning about admirable and important members of the Pennsylvania delegation like James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris generated a great deal of pride for my birth state, thanks to their crucial contributions to the workings of the convention.

Of course, Beeman pays fair homage to more than just the forgotten. James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, gets his due for the groundwork he laid in getting the convention together and setting its agenda. And, hanging above all like a great portrait prominently displayed, the character of George Washington--his position as President of the convention, his formidable influence over the proceedings, what he meant to the people of the young nation--gives the narrative a powerful and heroic focus. Plain, Honest Men reminds us that we do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants; it is no wonder then that the nation they founded, with the Constitution they created, has been able to stride so far.

This wealth of historical erudition comes in a package that is accessible and inviting even for the casual reader. Beeman’s prose, while rarely elegant, does the yeoman’s work of telling the tale in a clear and intelligible voice. Occasionally, the text does get heavy; Beeman is forced to recap many of the key debate points several times throughout the narrative, given both the complexity of the issues and their reappearance throughout the narrative’s timeline (a product of the fact that the delegates themselves kept going back and reopening questions that everyone thought had been answered). Thanks to those recaps, certain parts of the book feel like a slog. However, the writing never gets so bogged down that the reader feels tempted to call it quits, and the rewards of reading Plain, Honest Men outweigh any negatives.

Of course, the greatest reward comes in the form of a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the Constitution and how it came to be. If more of today’s politicos and pundits read Plain, Honest Men and learned its lessons, we might achieve the kind of consensus we will need to guarantee success in the next two centuries of the American experiment.