September 2, 1787: Fraying at the Edges

Part of the National Park Service's day-by-day account of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, September 1787.

A 55-dollar note of 1779.

"My situation here is extremely distressing; as I expected when I came away only to stay six weeks or two months at farthest, I made a money provision merely for that term…"
— Richard Dobbs Spaight of North Carolina

In the Convention: Sunday, September 2, 1787

The Convention took its usual Sunday recess.

The critics

Friday's debate on how the states would ratify the Constitution had revived serious — and conflicting — objections:

• Randolph (Virginia) wanted a second convention to consider amendments proposed by the ratifying states.
• Mason (Virginia) made clear he could not support the Constitution as it stood.
• Luther Martin (Maryland) feared the military power it gave the new government.
• Gouverneur Morris (Pennsylvania), unlike the others, wanted a second convention to make the national government stronger still.

Who signed, and who did not

Of the fifty-five delegates who attended, thirty-nine signed the Constitution and backed its ratification. Nine more left early for various reasons but still supported it. Three — Yates and Lansing of New York and Mercer of Maryland — opposed the plan and had already gone home.

Gerry, Martin, Mason and Randolph were still attending. The first three had already decided they could not support the plan, and Randolph would soon decide the same. Martin had made up his mind early — probably by mid-June, when the New Jersey Plan died; Gerry by August 21; Mason had announced his opposition two days before.

Yet all four kept working to improve the document, and none tried to make it less acceptable and so less likely to be ratified. Mason is the example: it was he who moved and supported ratification by nine states, when requiring more would have made ratification less likely.

The delegates' day

• Washington (Virginia) rode out to Bartram's Garden and the country around it, dined and took tea at Gray's Ferry, and returned to Market Street in the evening. He wrote his usual long letter of instructions to his nephew George Augustine Washington — asking, among other things, that a full-size model of Mr. Young's plough be sent to Robert Morris (Pennsylvania) so that Morris could make more. He also wrote briefly to John Paul Jones, under cover of a note to John Jay, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, asking Jay to pass it on or forward it if Jones had left.
• William Roberts wrote to Washington from Fredericksburg, Virginia, asking the General to employ him again and lend him 10 pounds.
• Spaight (North Carolina) wrote to John Gray Blount, brother of the delegate William Blount, about his money troubles. He had planned on two months and overstayed; forty-one dollars of his were still with a Mr. Blackledge, who was to have sent them on but had not been heard from. To pay his bills and get home he would have to borrow — a friend's name on a thirty-day note, discounted at the bank — and he begged Blount to send whatever money he held for him as fast as possible.

Sources

• National Park Service, Independence National Historical Park, "September 2, 1787: Fraying at the Edges," from The Constitutional Convention: A Day by Day Account for September 1787. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-september2.htm
• The original dates Martin's decision "probably by June 16 and the death of the New Jersey Plan"; this page says mid-June.
• Quotations are from the delegates' own writings of 1787; the rest is rewritten in hubnx's own words.