Dennis C. Rasmussen - Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of Americas Founders

ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered one last time in the Assembly Room of what is now Independence Hall.

Franklin likely hoped that this speech would serve as the conventions poignant culmination, but it was not to be. Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts stepped forward to propose a last-minute tweak that would open the door for more representatives in the House. When the proposal was supported by none other than Washington himselfthe only time during the entire convention that he made a substantive recommendationit passed without opposition; no one in the room would have even considered defying the generals express wishes so directly and openly. Yet the harmony was not total. Three holdoutsEdmund Randolph, Elbridge Gerry, and George Masonrefused to sign the document, and the former two occupied more of the groups time with extended explanations of their internal struggles. The signing was then postponed still further by discussion of what to do with the official journals of the convention; the delegates agreed to leave them under Washingtons care. It was late afternoon by the time the thirty-eight signers finally lined up to put their names to the document, starting with New Hampshire and moving south down the Atlantic Seaboard to Georgia.

Yet Franklin managed to get the last word after all, at least according to the record kept by James Madisona coda even more poetic than the one that he had planned. As the last delegates were affixing their signatures, Franklin called attention to the high-backed mahogany chair that Washington had occupied at the head of the room all summer, which had a decorative half sunburst carved into the crest (and which is still on display at Independence Hallsee the frontispiece of this book for a photograph of the crest). Franklin remarked that painters often found it difficult to differentiate, in their compositions, a rising sun from a setting sun. I have, he said, often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that [sun on the chair] behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: but now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.

Whatever sense of hope the founders may have felt at the new governments birth, almost none of them carried that optimism to their graves. Franklin survived to see the government formed by the Constitution in action for only a single year, but most of the founders who lived into the nineteenth centuryor even to the dawn of the new century, like Washingtoncame to feel deep anxiety, disappointment, and even despair about the government and the nation that they had helped to create. This book tells the story of their disillusionment.

Americans no longer deify the Founding Fathers in quite the way we once did. We are keenly aware of their manifold and manifest flaws with regard to slavery and their treatment of the American Indians, for example. Yet we do still tend to exalt and even venerate what the founders founded, namely the Constitution and the American form of government. The US Constitution is the oldest extant charter of national government, and arguably one of the most successful. Whatever their political gripes, few Americans would even contemplate jettisoning any of the basic features of the constitutional order: the separation of powers into three branches, the checks and balances among those branches, the bicameral Congress, the division of sovereignty between national and local authorities, the Bill of Rights, and the like. This order has, after all, enabled the country to survive, grow, and generally prosper for well over two centuriesin fact, to develop into historys greatest economic and military power. Moreover, when our politics go awry we tend to assume that it is because we have failed in some way to live up to the founders visionthat if we could somehow fulfill their expectations then all would be well.