My Thoughts:
Below is a background of the Founding Fathers and the kind of men they were. Much respect needs to be there for them, for they were looking after you and I, in my opinion. They were raised up for the very purpose of writing the Constitution. We must, as a nation, do all we can to preserve our Constitutional Rights and not allow the Constitution to be destroyed. America is a choice land and we must not take it for granted. The Church is very supportive of our right to be free and the Constitution as was inspired of God and written by these men.
Our Founding Fathers:
In the Doctrine and Covenants, [one of the Standard Works of the Church] the Lord said that he had “raised up … wise men” for the “very purpose” of writing the Constitution of the United States. (D&C 101:80.) President George Albert Smith added, “I am saying to you that to me the Constitution of the United States of America is just as much from my Heavenly Father as the Ten Commandments.” (Conference Report, April 1948, p. 182.)
Who were the men who wrote the Constitution? What personal characteristics qualified them for the task of creating a document which the Lord says he “established”? (D&C 101:80.)
We can divide the fifty-five men who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 into three groups. First, there were those who wanted a strong central government; their leaders were James Madison, James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, Robert Morris (not related), and Alexander Hamilton. They believed that the states had already demonstrated their inability to survive as a loosely knit confederation and that governmental power must be centralized or America would be split into small, warring nations as was Europe.
Second, at the other end of the political continuum were Elbridge Gerry, Roger Sherman, William Patterson, and Luther Martin. This group feared the overpowering control of a strong national government above all else and felt that the states were the only place to trust the bulk of governmental power. They believed that the federal government’s chief function should be to protect the United States from foreign nations and wanted to limit the federal government to regulating foreign trade and to maintaining an army.
In the middle was a third group led by George Mason, John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, and John Rutledge. This group wanted a strong central government, but also believed that the states must play an important role in the affairs of their own citizens.
There were two men whose roles in the Convention were so significant that they must be considered separately. One, George Washington, was elected president of the Convention and therefore did not participate in the debates except as a moderating influence. The other was the aged Benjamin Franklin, whose role was to mold divergent opinions into a working compromise. These men were so revered by their countrymen that their very presence gave the Convention’s work a stamp of approval.
The Philadelphia summer of 1787 was stifling hot. The members of the Constitutional Convention were so determined that their work would be free from outside pressures that one of their first rules prohibited talking with any outsider about Convention proceedings. To prevent some enterprising newspaper reporter from crouching below an open window and taking notes, the doors and windows were locked. No breeze softened the oppressive heat of Constitutional Hall or cooled the rising tempers of its occupants.
Few would have supposed that a worthy document could ever be produced under such difficult circumstances. Yet that was the situation in which the Founding Fathers did their work. Let us now examine the characteristics they had in common which qualified them for their task.
The framers of the Constitution were mostly young men, aggressive and energetic. Their average age was forty-four. That included Benjamin Franklin, who was eighty-one years old and at least fifteen years the senior to everyone else. Five of the delegates were in their twenties. Many others, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, were in their thirties. James Wilson, Luther Martin, and Oliver Ellsworth were between forty-one and forty-five. George Washington and a few others were fifty-five. Only four were sixty or older.
The Founding Fathers were well educated. Of the fifty-five, thirty-one had been to college, and these included all of the active participants. William Samuel Johnson of Columbia and Abraham Baldwin of Georgia were college presidents; James Wilson, George Wythe, and William C. Houstoun were or had been college professors; and a dozen others had taught grammar school at one time or another. James McClurg and Hugh Williamson were physicians. Four of the delegates had studied law at the prestigious Inns of Court in London.
Yet they were significantly more than scholars—they were men of wisdom. “In no other period of history,” writes Edmund Morgan, “would it be possible to find in politics five men of such intellectual stature as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson; and there were others only slightly less distinguished.”
His point is well taken. In 1740, a mere generation before the Revolution, the intellectual life of America was dominated by clergymen; by 1840, a generation or so after the Revolution, it would be dominated by scientists and inventors. Only for the brief span of a single lifetime would America’s statesmen and her brightest thinkers be the same men.
They had at their fingertips the best wisdom of their age, for they were in constant touch with the exciting minds of the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Pope, Mandeville, Locke, and Adam Smith.
In those days, no education could be considered complete without a thorough background in ancient and modern history. The Founding Fathers were conversant in the history and philosophy of the Greek democracies, the Roman republic, and the British constitutional system. Their study and their experience combined to qualify them for their role in the Convention by preparing them to test their theories against the whole history of mankind’s struggle for freedom.
The Founding Fathers were men of affairs. They had learned from experience to be down-to-earth, practical men. Most of the Southerners owned large plantations. George Mason, with 5,000 acres, was one of the most prosperous farmers in America. Pierce Butler was both planter and merchant. Their experience with the land had taught them to pay close attention to the myriad daily details of plowing, planting, harvesting, milling, marketing, and the like.
Their Yankee counterparts included many wealthy merchants who had built their success on careful attention to details. Boston’s Elbridge Gerry began as a shoemaker and became one of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts. Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris had once been a shopkeeper. Yet during the Revolutionary War he proved to be so talented at the art of high finance that he dominated both the politics and the economy of America by the time the Revolution ended.
Most of the Constitutional delegates were lawyers; eight were judges. All were accustomed to making decisions that affected the courses of other men’s lives. Each played important and complex roles in society. For example, Benjamin Franklin had often made decisions with international implications. He had associated with kings and generals, spies and pirates. He had little formal education, but he was one of the most learned men in America. He was printer, inventor, politician, wit, scientist, statesman, sage, and all-purpose, public-spirited citizen.
The framers of the Constitution were men of brilliance—but not the ivory-tower sort. They were practical-minded men who understood the enormity of their task and conducted themselves with a studied determination to succeed.
The Founding Fathers were men of vision and hope. George Washington expressed all of their attitudes when he wrote, “In the first place it is a point conceded, that America, under an efficient government, will be the most favorable Country of any in the world for persons of industry and frugality. …” They were all aware that they must not create a government which would stifle the individual enterprise of its people. They believed that America’s economic and cultural development depended upon the government they created.
John Adams predicted, “Many hundred years must roll away before we shall be corrupted. Our pure, virtuous public spirited, federative republic will last forever, govern the globe and introduce the perfection of man.”
Political freedom does not exist in a vacuum. The framers of the Constitution believed that political freedom would foster excellence in literature, the arts, science, and all other human achievements. Thomas Jefferson may have said it best of all: “We have spent the prime of our lives in procuring [for the youth of America] the blessing of liberty. Let them spend their lives in showing that it [freedom] is the great parent of science and of virtue; and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free.”
The Framers were religious men—in their own way. But we must be careful about making them religious in ways they were not.
There is a tradition among many that the Constitutional Convention began each day with prayer. That is not true. At one point, when their debate was exceedingly hot and Franklin feared that the Convention might fall apart on account of its intensity, he suggested they have a prayer. Since there was no clergyman in the Convention, they would have had to hire an outsider to come in and say the prayer. But Alexander Hamilton pointed out that the Convention had been in session for some time, and if it sent for a preacher, it now would be taken as a public announcement of deadlock or imminent failure. In the end, someone observed that the Convention had no money with which to employ a minister anyway, so the matter was dropped and no official prayer was ever pronounced at the Constitutional Convention.
That does not mean, however, that the individual members did not pray. Only a minority of the Founders, such as James McHenry, who was president of the first Bible Society in Baltimore, considered themselves “religious” men in the sense that they attended a church. Most of the Convention’s leaders were Deists.
These men, like Washington, Madison, and Jefferson, believed that the world had been organized by a Divine Creator. They recognized his majesty and glory as reflected in the order and beauty of his creations, but they did not believe that the organized religions of their time represented the omnipotent power, majesty, or wisdom of this great Creator. Their political enemies often called them atheists, but such a characterization was false and slanderous. These framers of the Constitution saw man’s intellect and his ability to act for himself as the surest evidence of the wisdom and power of a Divine Creator. Consequently, they viewed any infringements upon the freedom of that intellect as the most flagrant obstructions of the divine purpose. Thomas Jefferson expressed this philosophy in this single sentence: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
The writings of the Founding Fathers overflow with references to God and the divine nature of man. Freedom was their watchword, and reverence for the individual was their driving principle. In the Doctrine and Covenants the Lord says that he raised up these “wise men” to establish a government which would nurture and defend individual freedom, “that every man may act in doctrine and principle … according to the moral agency which I have given unto him.” (D&C 101:78.) The fundamental philosophy of the Founding Fathers was very consistent with that purpose.
Written by: Frank W. Fox and LeGrand L. Baker
