How the Founding Fathers' Arguments Became the U.S. Constitution

America's leaders have a lot to learn about the Constitutional Convention, says Richard Beeman, author of Plain, Honest Men: The Making of America's Constitution. Beeman, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, recently spoke with U.S. News about the birth of the Constitution, the flawed men who created it, and reasons behind its success. Excerpts:

What motivated you to write this book?
I've loved the subject of the Constitutional Convention since I was in high school. It's a subject I've always loved. I've been teaching the subject as a professor at Penn for the last 41 years. A few years ago, I decided I was ready to have my say on the subject.

In what ways do the traditional accounts get it wrong?
Getting it wrong is perhaps too strong. There has been a tendency among all Americans to regard the Founding Fathers as these mythic, carved-in-marble or cast-in-bronze figures. There has been throughout the whole historiography of the Constitutional Convention this notion that these folks were demigods. That was actually Thomas Jefferson's phrase to describe them, which is interesting because Jefferson was not really a guy to believe in divine intervention. I wanted to make them real human beings. But I wanted to make them 18th-century human beings, not 21st-century human beings.

How do you emphasize that point in your book?
One of the great achievements of the Constitution is the genius of what we call federalism: the division of power between state and nation. That new definition of federalism comes out of six weeks of actually very painful debate in the convention over how representation in the Congress, the House of Representatives and the Senate, should be apportioned. And that really is often interpreted as this great flash of insight that these great men came to understanding. But in fact, it's really the product of very hard bargaining between the large states and the small-state delegates.

One other thing: There have been two tendencies in writing about the really tormented subject of slavery. For most of the history of writing about the convention, historians have just skimmed over it. More recently, scholars inclined to be critical of the Founding Fathers write about the convention as if slavery was the only issue in front of the founders. And what I've tried very hard to do in this book is not to underplay it—it was very, very important—but to really understand that dilemma in its 18th-century context.

Why should President Obama read Plain, Honest Men?
One thing that I would hope that he would learn is that in our current debates over constitutional interpretation—the debates, although they've been pushed off the front pages by the economic crisis, continue and they're going to reappear as President Obama has opportunities to appoint people either to the Supreme Court or the various levels of federal courts—that he would be somewhat humble, just as the Founding Fathers were, in developing his own views on how the Constitution should be interpreted. I think the people, frankly, who are least humble right now are the people like Justice [Antonin] Scalia, who is absolutely emphatic in his view about how the Constitution should be interpreted, which according to Scalia should be interpreted according to the ordinary meaning of the words written on those four parchment pages. I think that if one reads this book, one gets a better sense not only of the humility but of the fundamental uncertainty that these guys in the Constitutional Convention had as they went about crafting this government. They didn't have an expectation that it was going to last for 221 years. It was very much an experiment for them.

Why hasn't the American experiment with democracy failed?
Of course, it did fail, because of the paradox at the nation's core, between 1861 and 1865. And that's not a trivial failure, the 600,000 lives that were lost in the American Civil War. But by and large it has endured beyond anything the founders anticipated. And I truly believe that it has endured because, at least up to this point, of the very careful stewardship of those politicians placed in charge of the government. One very wise historian at Princeton, a man by the name of John Murrin, described the nation at the time of the Constitution as a roof without walls. And the Constitution provided the roof over this barely formed edifice. And we've been building the edifice ever since. The stewards of the Constitution did have an appropriate sense of humility and were not absolutely certain that everything they believed was right and everything their opponents believed was wrong. That's what's a little scary about our present moment of intense partisanship. That really does seem to be not in the spirit of the founders.