Connecticut also had as spokesmen two strong individualities—­Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth.  Maryland spoke through James McHenry and Daniel Carroll and three others of greater obscurity.  Virginia had George Washington, President of the Convention, and James Madison, active, resourceful, and really accomplishing; and in addition to these two:  Edmund Randolph, the Governor; George Mason, Washington’s hard-headed and discreet lawyer friend; John Blair, George Wythe, and James McClurg.  From South Carolina went three unusual orators, John Rutledge, C.C.  Pinckney and Charles Pinckney, and Pierce Butler.  Georgia named four mediocre but useful men.

In this gathering of fifty-five persons, the proportion between those who were preeminent for common sense and those who were remarkable for special knowledge and talents was very fairly kept.  Most of them had had experience in dealing with men either in local government offices or in the army.  Socially, they came almost without exception from respectable if not aristocratic families.  Of the fifty-five, twenty-nine were university or college bred, their universities comprising Oxford, Glasgow, and Edinburgh besides the American Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.  The two foremost members, Washington and Franklin, were not college bred.  Among the fifty-five we do not find John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who, as I have said, were in Europe on official business.  John Jay also was lacking, because, as it appears, the Anti-Federalists did not wish him to represent them in the Convention; but his influence permeated it and the wider public, who later read his unsigned articles in “The Federalist.”  Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Richard Henry Lee stayed at home.  General Nathanael Greene, the favorite son of Rhode Island, would have been at the Convention but for his untimely death a few weeks before the preceding Christmas.

Owing to delays the active business of the Convention halted, although for at least a fortnight the members who had come promptly carried on unofficial discussions.  Washington, being chosen President without a competitor, presided, with perhaps more than his habitual gravity and punctilio.  The members took their work very seriously.  The debates lasted five or six hours a day, and, as they were continued consecutively until the autumn, there was ample time to discuss many subjects.  The Convention adopted strict secrecy as its rule, so that its proceedings were not known by the public nor was any satisfactory report of them kept and published.  At the time there was objection to this provision, and now, after more than a century and a third, we must regret that we can never know many points in regard to the actual give and take of discussion in this the most fateful of all assemblies.  But from Madison’s memoranda and reminiscences we can infer a good deal as to what went on.