Legacy Read Online Free PDF

cheering. Running to glimpse what might be happening, I saw coming down the middle of the street an amazing sight, a glassed-in ornate sedan chair of the kind used by European kings. It hung suspended from two massive poles which rested on the shoulders of eight huge prisoners from the local jail. Inside, perched on pillows, rode an old, baldheaded man who looked like a jolly bullfrog. It was Dr Franklin, most eminent of the delegates, and the oldest at eighty-one. Gout, obesity and creaking joints made it impossible for him to walk, hence the sedan chair. When the six prisoners carried him into the hall, someone alerted him that I was present. Calling 'Halt!' to the prisoners, .he beckoned me to approach, and when I did he reached out with both hands to embrace me, and tears came into his eyes: 'Son of a brave man, be like him.'
    Eight men were on hand, however, whose pres- Franklin, like General Washington, played almost ence gave not only Simon Starr but all the other no role in the deliberations; they were ornaments delegates a sense of awe. These were the men of the most valuable kind, since they reminded the 1 35
    other delegates of the grandeur of the Revolution and the gallant acts that led up to it. There was one more delegate who had signed the Declara- tion, and he was to become a major influence on Starr:
    I was in the assembly hall one morning when I felt a tug on my arm, and turned to see a man I did not know. He was a short, pudgy fellow in his mid-forties, bald and with heavy eyeglasses. There was nothing about his appearance that was memorable, and when he spoke, it was with a heavy Scottish burr which made his words almost unintelligible. 'Hello, lad,' he said. 'Am I right in thinking you're Jared Starr's boyT When I said I was, he smiled: 'I'm James Wilson, Scotland and Pennsylvania, and I relied upon your father's help at the Declara- tion of Independence. I suppose your father spoke of meT Father had said nothing, and I knew nothing about the man who faced me, but as the weeks and months of our assembly passed, this very ordinary-looking man with no oratorical graces emerged as the great solid rock of the Convention, and I noticed that when he spoke, which he did repeatedly, others stopped to listen, for not only was his knowl- edge encyclopedic but he also talked sense. He was without peer the brains of our effort, for with his merciless logic he killed faulty ideas and with his Scottish enthusiasm he made other men's good ideas palatable. Great orators like Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania and Dr William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut made fiery speeches, half of them wrong, but James Wilson in his quiet way was always right, and
    36
    after he had been knocked down for six days in a row, he rose on the seventh with fresh argu- ments to win the day. If our Constitution is a workable success, it is so largely because Wilson hammered its ideas into shape.
    Simon was aware that his journal notes now said that two men were of prime influence on his voting in the Convention, Hamilton and Wilson, so he added a note lest someone judge him to have been fickle in his loyalties:
    I am aware that I said Hamilton was my guide, and now I'm saying that Wilson was. The expla- nation is simple. The New York delegation con- sisted of three men, Hamilton and two others, but these two scorned what the convention was struggling to do and after a few days they stalked out in a huff and never returned. That left poor Hamilton high and dry, for as I said, we voted by states, and with two of New York's three delegates gone, the state could never have a quorum. Thus, one of the most brilliant men in the nation was left without a vote, so in disgust he rode back to New York, being absent during the sweltering days when men like Madison, Mason and Wilson hammered out the crucial details. So it's simple. Hamilton was not present, Wilson was, and I followed the won- derfully sane and solid leadership of the latter.
    And now we come