Top Highlights

• As James Madison, who would do more than anyone else to guide the First Congress along its path, put it, “We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.”
• To secure ratification of the Constitution in the South, Yankee delegates agreed that each slave would count as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning the size of a state’s delegation in the House of Representatives. Slave states thus received bonus seats for 60 percent of their enslaved population, giving them clout in Congress f...
• bewilderingly disparate kinds of money were in use, many of them counterfeit: Spanish doubloons and pistoles, Dutch guilders, British pounds, French guineas, and a multitude of state-issued currencies. In 1787, the New York legislature declared all the copper currency in circulation to be officially fake. So many coins had already been clipped or t...