Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution

"We know a lot about the federal convention because Madison assigned himself the task of taking daily notes about what was said. And we know a fair amount about many or most of the authors of the Constitution. So we can reconstruct a narrative about how the Constitution was framed day by day, issue by issue. Rick Beeman does that very successfully. Framing a constitution through this kind of convention was a great novelty. Most of the state constitutions, which had been done a decade earlier, were written quickly by delegates who had other duties to perform. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention came to Philadelphia from 12 of the 13 original states and sat together, sealed up in Independence Hall, from May through September. Some of the delegates spoke very little, about 15 were active speakers, others sat back and absorbed or seemed terribly bored. They came in good moods and bad. Some ate too much for lunch and napped in the afternoon. It got pretty hot in the hall. Reconstructing what it was like, week by week, to draft a new federal plan makes a great story. The Bill of Rights was framed as a postscript to the Constitution. Once ratified, the Bill of Rights did not see much action until the 1920s. So it was important to the politics of ratification but was applied only against the national government, which didn’t do that much. Most government in America took place at the state level. It was not until the aftermath of World War I that the Supreme Court began applying the Bill of Rights against the states."