In Miracle at Philadelphia, Catherine Drinker Bowen tells the story of the stormy, brilliant session of 1787 in Philadelphia which saw the birth of the Constitution of the United States.

Looked at straight from the records, the Federal Convention is startlingly fresh and new, and Mrs. Bowen evokes it as if the reader were actually there, mingling with the delegates, hearing their arguments, witnessing a dramatic moment in history.

"In the Constitutional Convention, the spirit of compromise reigned in grace and glory," writes Mrs. Bowen. "As Washington presided, it sat on his shoulder like the dove. Men rise to speak and one sees them struggle with the bias of birthright, locality, statehood. . . . One sees them change their minds, fight against pride and when the moment comes, admit their error."

Here is the fascinating record of the hot, sultry summer months of debate and decision when ideas clashes and tempers flared. Here is the country as it was then, described by contemporaries, by Berkshire farmers in Massachusetts, by Patrick Henry's fringed-legginged Kentucky allies, by French and English travelers. Here, too, are the offstage voices—Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine and John Adams from Europe—all intensely concerned with what was going on in Philadelphia. 

Above all, here are the delegates to the Convention, their names reading like a roster for a Fourth of July oration: James Madison, who took such painstaking notes; and the conciliatory, eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin; Alexander Hamilton, rash, impatient with the slow-witted; Washington himself, who was silent during the long argument as to whether the nation should have three presidents or one and whether the executive should be given a salary or serve unpaid; James Wilson, born and reared in Scotland, who proved to be so remarkably farsighted; Luther Martin of Maryland, who sputtered and raged against the new Constitution.

In all, fifty-five men attended; and in spite of the heat, in spite of clashing interests—the big states against the little, the slave states against the anti-slave states—in tension and anxiety that mounted week after week, they wrote out a working plan of government and put their signatures to it.

From the dust jacket