Miracle at Philadelphia

I’m still reading Miracle at Philadelphia. It’s like CANDY to me and I don’t want it to end.

Catherine Drinker Bowen writes with an unabashed sense of import and admiration – and yet she also gets us down into the muck and everyday-ness of the Convention. These men are not gods, or statues. They were real men, separated from their families, burdened by financial problems, tormented by the heat … and yet there they were, day after day, hashing out this new Constitution. Drinker Bowen takes us into Independence Hall, and certainly takes us through the arguments pro and con step by step. We get to know who is for, who is against … we hear about this person’s speech on that day, and so-and-so’s rebuttal speech the next day – it’s that specific (and we get to hear about Hamilton’s now-famous 6 hour long speech) … but she also tells us the more mundane stuff. And it’s THAT stuff that really makes the book special: where they ate for dinner, the heat wave Philadelphia had that summer, what the 4th of July celebrations were like … You really feel like you were THERE.

I am well acquainted with the main characters. Ahem. Of COURSE. But there are a host of other characters I am not as close to, shall we say, and so it’s really fun getting to know them too. Charles Pinckney. Luther Martin. What a blowhard. A couple of other gentlemen at the convention mentioned his way-too-long speeches in their notes from the time. There seemed to be a unanimous agreement about it: Luther Martin talked too much. So he’s kind of new to me. George Mason. James Wilson.

In all the other books I’ve read, these guys of course are mentioned – but they’re peripheral. In a book about Thomas Jefferson, who’s gonna dwell on Luther Martin? But this book is the biography of an EVENT, not just one individual. So all the characters are important. Everyone who attended the Convention was important. We owe them ALL an enormous debt. Even chatty-Kathy Luther Martin.

Catherine Drinker Bowen has a novelist’s eye. She tells us the physical characteristics of each man (put together from first-hand reports), she gives us a few sensory details about each one (this one wore velvet suits, this one had one leg, this one didn’t wear a wig) … and they become characters – like in a book. But not in a folksy unreal kind of way. It’s just that she makes you feel like you are THERE in Independence Hall. I’ve said it before, but that would be the #1 place/time I would go if I had a time machine. I am loving the book.