55 Men (Stackpole Classics)

The 55 men who traveled to Philadelphia on horse and by stagecoach in the spring of 1787 as delegates to a Convention on the Articles of Confederation had been warned by the states that sent them to do nothing more than make a few changes in the flimsy articles.
But when they went back to their home states, after working and debating through four long months of a hot Philadelphia summer, they had done a great deal more: they had done a great deal more: they had set down on paper the foundation of the United States. They had drafted the Constitution.
What happened during the secret Constitutional Convention? What did these 55 Founding Fathers actually say in the debates? Fred Rodell bases his book directly on the much neglected day-by-day notes which James Madison took during the Constitutional Convention and on the hastily scribbled papers of a few other delegates. In these frank recordings, the true story of the birth of the Constitution is found. 55 Men: the Story of the Constitution is a stirring drama of the 55 personalities who shaped a crucial moment in our country’s history.

“Our knowledge of what happened in the meetings of the Constitutional Convention—and all of them were secret in the sense that no reports of the proceedings were allowed to reach the public—is derived almost entirely from the brief notes taken by James Madison which were not published until many years later. What Professors Rodell has done is to expand these notes from a few other sources and to retell their story in a most readable and interesting manner which brings out the hidden drama of the proceedings.” – NY Herald Tribune (New York Herald-Tribune)