“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
George Washington would write of all this, “We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.“ And, he further states, the government they had made was “a shadow without the substance”.
Thus, it became clear to all that the Articles needed, at the very least, amended heavily if the nation in some form was to survive at all.
A Rising, Not a Setting Sun
After some deliberation about this, it was decided to convene to fix the problem, and, much like Massachusetts had done the second time around, they decided to select delegates from each state to represent the people in these changes.
And so it was that 70 delegates were chosen from the 13 states, of which 55 ultimately attended the Convention. Noteworthy here, Rhode Island, who liked things as they were and wanted no changes, did not send any delegates. This group of who’s who in the nation, over the course of several weeks slowly began to trickle into Philadelphia. Also notably absent were arguably two of the most capable at such an endeavor in Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both of whom were overseas at the time- Jefferson serving in France, and Adams serving as America’s ambassador to England.
Critically, however, Adams had not been idle in Britain. During his time there, he began to hyperfocus and obsess over the United States’ issue, as well as on theory of government. The result was the first volume of his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, which was essentially a treatise on the various state governments in the United States, as well as an extremely in depth survey on theory of government in general.
