What the Framers Believed

It is important to recognize at the outset what this book is not. It is not an original contribution to the literature of the Convention, like Beard’s Economic Interpretation or Forrest McDonald’s We the People, nor is it an original contribution to the literature on the political conditions of local America, like Robert and Katherine Brown’s Virginia 1705-1786. It is not, for the most part, a history of the ratification process, though that is touched on. It is not a history of the individual Framers, seeking to discover what they were like and why they were like that—though it does, to be sure, present capsule biographies of most of them. All of these would be good subjects for a book, but none of them is the subject of this book, nor does it make any claim to have them as its subject.

What it is, is something both less valuable than these in the long run, and much more useful in the short. It is, to start with, the sort of history which may be justly described as a retelling—a straightforward political narrative, arranged chronologically, having behind it the idea that men make history, and therefore having as its principal secondary purpose (after the re-telling) the re-evaluation of the work done by each of the Framers.

JL

About the Author

Jared C. Lobdell

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It is important to recognize at the outset what this book is not. It is not an original contribution to the literature of the Convention, like Beard’s Economic Interpretation or Forrest McDonald’s We the People, nor is it an original contribution to the literature on the political conditions of local America, like Robert and Katherine Brown’s Virginia 1705-1786. It is not, for the most part, a history of the ratification process, though that is touched on. It is not a history of the individual Framers, seeking to discover what they were like and why they were like that—though it does, to be sure, present capsule biographies of most of them. All of these would be good subjects for a book, but none of them is the subject of this book, nor does it make any claim to have them as its subject.

What it is, is something both less valuable than these in the long run, and much more useful in the short. It is, to start with, the sort of history which may be justly described as a retelling—a straightforward political narrative, arranged chronologically, having behind it the idea that men make history, and therefore having as its principal secondary purpose (after the re-telling) the re-evaluation of the work done by each of the Framers.