“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
As previously mentioned, as Adams had hoped, when the delegates began to convene on Philadelphia, the first copies of his book also made their way across the pond to find their way into architects of the constitution’s hands. On top of this, the Pennsylvania Mercury began publishing a serialized version of it in May of 1787, and papers in Massachusetts, New York and, critically, Philadelphia, followed suit, coming out weekly while the U.S. Constitution was being drafted.
And its influence on those proceedings appear to have been significant, once again not because of any original ideas in it, but because of how it crystallized the existing ideas into concise, well organized form. Ben Franklin noted of the book during the Convention, it was “in such Request here”, with the then existing 40 full copies available in the United States being circulated among the delegates. Because there wasn’t enough to go around, efforts were quickly made to get an American printer to create an edition of it.
While historians to this day still debate how much influence this work had on the delegates, noteworthy, the “Father of the Constitution”, James Madison, himself referenced it in in his June 6 speech in the Convention, and countless other delegates brought it up explicitly, and frequently in the ideas they advocated, in many cases practically quoting the work. For example, with early criticism of the Virginia plan, James McHenry would state, “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions… None of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy” and thus the need for a powerful senate, or, as Adams would advocate, for a body comprised of the elite class as a check against the tyranny of the majority.
