The convention of 1787, held in Philadelphia, which framed the Constitution of the United States and adopted that instrument on September 17 of that year, consisted exclusively of what [Alexander] Hamilton, one of its dominating spirits, called “the wealthy, the well-born, and the great.” There was no workingman present to degrade its councils. Labor was held in contempt, unfit to have a seat among the aristocrats who composed that body and controlled its deliberations.

Neither was there a woman among the delegates to ruffle the dignity of the grave and revered “fathers of the Constitution.” It was a place for the wise and mighty, and for powdered wigs, velvet knee breeches, silk stockings, and silver shoe buckles.

The democratic spirit so defiantly expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and which had sustained the patriots during the dark days of the Revolutionary War, had largely subsided, and nothing was further from the purpose of the delegates than that the government they had met to establish should be controlled by the people. As professor J. Allan Smith remarks in his Spirit of American Government: