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Summer was hot in Philadelphia in 1787, and delegates to the Constitutional Convention were cloistered in the Pennsylvania State House since May. “Cloistered” is the right word, since the doors and windows were closed to give the convention privacy as they worked. Designing a new country is hot, sweaty work, and it must have smelled like a locker room behind those doors.

Opinion

This was the delegates’ second attempt at forming our new government. For their first try a few years prior, they designed a confederacy under the Articles of Confederation, and that didn’t work worth a damn. By September 1787, they had drafted our Constitution — a govern

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