Plain, Honest Men and The Words that Made Us

A Comparative Analysis/Review

The history of the early American republic and the making of its new constitution may seem a subject where enough ink has been spilled. There are certainly countless works, across many decades, recounting the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, its antecedents, the debates within the walls of Independence Hall, as well as the various state ratification conventions that ultimately led to the adoption of the new U.S. Constitution. The rise of social history beginning in the 1970s—with a motivation to de-emphasize the voices of the politically powerful and draw attention to the historically marginalized and to elevate the voices of the subaltern have also played a role in this. Additionally, growing appeals for a more regionally-conscious Atlantic history (and global history) perspective, and the general loss in prominence of political history, have all contributed to sentiments that scholarship about the framers of the American republic and the U.S. Constitution are less important than ever. This is a precarious subfield, then, for scholars who see this history as relevant to questions regarding legitimate governance and those who believe that the marginalization of this history may well be culpable in the loss of civic knowledge among the population. Two works published in the past fifteen years, Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men and Akhil Reed Amar’s The Words that Made Us provide some of the best scholarship related to the founding of the early American constitutional republic that counter the assumption by those in the historical field that there is nothing new to offer regarding this history. Both works, considerably different from one another in tone and perspective, nevertheless demonstrate that more recent studies on the topic of the U.S. Constitution and its formation offer innovative analysis that are vital to the American history canon.

The differences between the two books begin with the authors themselves. Richard Beeman was a long-established historian of the United States whereas Akhil Reed Amar is a legal scholar. The books also differ in terms of the timeline examined. Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men focuses particularly upon the Philadelphia Convention, the immediate events preceding that informed it, and the state ratification debates that followed which established, legitimized, and constitutionally ratified the new United States Constitution which became the architecture of the U.S. federal government and the supreme law of the land beginning in 1789. Amar’s The Words that Made Us, however, applies a much broader scope to what the author calls the nation’s constitutional conversation, tracing the history from 1760 to 1840. One may wonder if the two works are thus capable of comparison due to this rather significant difference in temporal scope, but in fact, the history of the constitution-making process covered in Amar’s work is nearly equal—in pure number of words and pages—to that of Beeman. Amar’s The Words that Made Us may cover a much longer period of time but it does so across a rather substantial 698 pages. Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men’s narrower range is presented across 423 pages. Though the two books offer something rather different in their perspectives, as will be revealed presently, their relatively recent publications (Beeman’s in 2009 and Amar’s in 2021) and attention upon the historical significance of the events in Philadelphia in 1787, make them appropriate to compare, contrast, and evaluate.

Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men was published in 2009 by Random House. Its publication was part of a long and storied career by one of the giants in the field of early national America. Beeman died in 2016 after having been a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania for over forty years. He spent his entire academic career at UPenn, filling the role of chair of the history department numerous times. He was an important contributor to what was to become the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a nonpartisan public history and civics-promoting organization that serves to educate the American people on matters related to the American founding and to understanding the history and purpose of the U.S. Constitution. He was the author of eight books. His first, a biography of Patrick Henry, was published in 1974. His final book, which followed the publication of Plain, Honest Men, was a history of the American Revolution and the making of the Declaration of Independence, published in 2013. Beeman’s enormous influence as both a scholar and a professor were emphasized by Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, who observed that Beeman “made our national origins matter to generations of appreciative students, of which I was one. His books will keep his voice alive for many years to come.”¹

Beeman describes Plain, Honest Men as “a full narrative account of the work of the fifty-five men who spent the summer of 1787 in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House [now known as Independence Hall] crafting an entirely new form of constitutional government… I intend also to take readers behind the scenes and beyond the debates, into the taverns and boardinghouses of the city, to present a full account of how the world’s most important constitution was forged.”² Underscoring that the history was far from inevitable, and that the framers were no monolithic philosophical entity, Beeman goes on to state that he hopes readers “will come to appreciate not only the extraordinary achievements of the Founding Fathers, but also the conflict, contingency, and uncertainty that marked their deliberations.”³ These aims are successful, and indeed the book’s greatest value may well be in the examination of the interpersonal relationships between the most prominent and influential of the framers. For example, the names George Washington and Benjamin Franklin come to mind, particularly for Americans, as two of the most famous names in the annals of the American Revolution and the early national period, and yet Beeman notes how the two men hardly knew each other at the dawn of the Constitutional Convention. “Washington did not even unpack his bags at the Morris Mansion before setting off to pay a visit to Philadelphia’s first citizen, Benjamin Franklin… Franklin had met the twenty-four-year-old Colonel Washington while on a postal inspection trip to Virginia in 1756, and the two met again in the fall of 1775, shortly after Washington had taken over as commander in chief of the Continental Army. But aside from those brief interactions, they were essentially strangers.”⁴ Plain, Honest Men earned high praise from both academic historians and popular authors upon its release. Historian Thomas Fleming wrote in his review in American Heritage that “Beeman's narrative grows richer by the page as the delegates begin to arrive in the City of Brotherly Love. One of the many virtues of Plain, Honest Men (the title is drawn from a remark by financier Robert Morris) is its attention to the amazingly varied gallery of characters who filtered into the Pennsylvania State House during May and June of 1787.”⁵ Popular biographer of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Benjamin Franklin, Walter Issacson remarked in his New York Times book review that “Beeman's work is distinguished by a gently judicious tone that allows us to appreciate, and draw some lessons from, the delicate balances that emerged out of that passion-filled Philadelphia crucible.”⁶ He also credits Beeman for avoiding “the overemphasis some historians place on the economic interests of the framers while still showing when they were motivated by parochial and personal concerns.”⁷ Issacson implies here the long shadow of the so-called economic thesis put forward by Charles Beard in 1913, which served as the standard interpretation in the field for decades before being challenged in the 1950s and 1960s by intellectual historians including Cecilia Kenyon and Bernard Bailyn. Beard’s economic thesis—that the making of the U.S. Constitution was primarily an exercise to serve the financial interests of the nation’s elite—ebbs and flows in support among scholars within the field ever since. Isaacson is correct to note that Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men is less ideologically-motivated than that of figures like Beard, and thus more nuanced.

If Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men can best be characterized for its pragmatic tone and focus upon the interpersonal relationships of the men who made up the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, Akhil Reed Amar’s The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760 – 1840 is both broader in scope (as previously mentioned) and somewhat more conceptual. As a political theorist and legal scholar rather than a trained historian, Amar approaches the relevant history quite differently. As he states in the book’s introduction, its aims are to “unite history and law in a wide-angled multigenerational narrative that seeks both to understand the past and to evaluate it using proper historical and legal tools of analysis.”⁸ Amar’s motivations are thus somewhat different from those of Beeman’s. If Beeman’s interests primarily lie in a deeper understanding of the relationships between the men of the Convention, how some of the most crucial conversations occurred off the record and outside of the halls of the State House, and in getting to something reminiscent of an on the ground accounting of the relevant participants, Amar is more prescriptive in his outlook. The Words that Made Us is not merely about the history of what the author calls the nation’s constitutional conversation, but also asserts that there is a right and a wrong way to interpret the arguments that informed it. Yet, Amar’s prescriptive approach and Beeman’s informative method are not what most distinguish the two works, as will be explained below.

Akhil Reed Amar is a giant in his own field of constitutional law. He has been a professor at Yale Law School for decades, has authored numerous books and articles, regularly conducts public talks (including with the aforementioned National Constitution Center), and has been an academic mentor to students who were later nominated to positions in the federal judiciary. Though identifying as a political progressive, he is an advocate of constitutional originalism. Among his vast scholarship, his 2005 book, The Constitution: A Biography, has proved influential to those in the field of law as well as constitutional historians. The Words that Made Us is thus both a continuation and an elaboration of his earlier work.

It is an understatement to frame many of the reviews for The Words that Made Us as glowing. The New York Times called it “deeply probing” and “highly readable.”⁹ The New York Journal of Books celebrated the “seamless way [Amar] melds history, political science, and legal scholarship to take the reader on a journey to understand the legal, philosophical, and political roots of our founding documents and the government they spawned.”¹⁰ Jessica T. Matthews in Foreign Affairs lauded the book for its “swiftly paced, highly iconoclastic narrative” that makes “important legal arcana accessible to all readers.”¹¹ The book did not escape criticism, however. Mark G. Spencer’s review in the Wall Street Journal warns that many people may come away from the book believing that it “plays down Native American and African-American voices. Others may believe he neglects the contributions of women.”¹² Historian Kevin Gutzman, author of numerous books including a biography of James Madison and a professor of history at Western Connecticut State University, was particularly disparaging. Noting Amar’s love of the Broadway musical, Hamilton, Gutzman’s review accuses the author of the same historical inaccuracies as those found in Linn-Manuel Miranda’s play. “Amar follows Miranda in grossly exaggerating Alexander Hamilton’s role in the creation of the US Constitution and repeats the myth that Hamilton had a pattern of antislavery activity.”¹³ Gutzman also criticizes Amar for what he calls “other odd choices, such as relying on Madison biographies by Lynne Cheney and Noah Feldman, rather than the huge body of publications by actual scholars of the subject.”¹⁴ He similarly condemns Amar’s conflation of the Constitution with The Federalist (colloquially known as The Federalist Papers), of which many historians have noted its unlikely influence upon ratification, its limited initial publication, and its occasional assertions that at times contradict or add to the Constitution’s limited express powers. “Somehow, however,” Gutzman muses, “Hamilton’s involvement in the Publius project gives him great authority in regard to the Constitution’s meaning in Amar’s telling.”¹⁵

Despite the critical reviews by figures like Spencer and Gutzman, The Words that Made Us has further contributed to Amar’s reputation as a constitutional scholar and, more controversially, a historian of the early American republic. Because of his status as a leading legal intellectual at Yale with influence upon those who now occupy federal judgeships, including justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, Amar’s influence should not be treated lightly, even as some flaws in his historical analysis—as observed by historians like Kevin Gutzman—are very real.

It is not some difference of opinion regarding the impact of Alexander Hamilton, however, that most differentiates Amar’s The Words that Made Us with Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men, nor is it the difference between Amar’s prescriptive tone versus Beeman’s informational approach. Probably the greatest difference between the two is in how improvisational and contingent Beeman treats the history whereas Amar frames the outcome as logical and essentially inevitable. Both authors similarly contemplate how conversations outside of the Pennsylvania State House informed the Constitution’s spirit and meaning (in Beeman’s case, the off-the-record discussions between members over dinner and other informal talks while on break from official deliberations; in Amar’s case, the various conversations among the direct participants, their immediate forebears, and the generation that followed that of the framers). However, the history that informed the creation and ratification of the Constitution is slippery and conditional for Beeman, but concrete and certain for Amar. This key difference may best represent the very distinct assumptions between a legal scholar on one hand versus a historian on the other.

Amar quite literally treats the intellectual history here as scientific and foregone, declaring that “we can see that most of the Constitution that emerged simply followed from the logic of that previous [1765 – 1787] conversation. The challenge confronting the delegates was akin to an intricate but solvable math problem in the tradition of Euclid and early expositors of algebra.”¹⁶ This is an astonishing assertion, and not one likely to be made by a historian. Understanding the role of variability, environment, individual human agency, etc., has made many modern academic historians critical of worldviews that see human beings as cogs in a machine, as passive participants in their own history, and of history itself presented as a process of unavoidable unfolding of events and phenomena. Akhil Reed Amar’s place in legal theory and political science appears to inform such a view, whereas Richard Beeman’s work routinely returns to an argument for not only a lack of inevitably regarding the Constitution’s creation, but also that of its success. This point, noted earlier, was forwarded by Beeman early in Plain, Honest Men when emphasizing how uncertainty marked the deliberations of the convention’s members. The human beings involved in this momentous occasion saw its outcome and its triumph as anything but a mathematical problem to be solved with the proper employment of logic and reason. It was in no small part an improvisation, a messy affair, requiring a combination of contemplation, principle, and compromise. One marker of this is in how the result did not match the many aims of the members. No single member of the convention got everything he wanted. Ironically, Amar concedes this point when he observes that “the document that emerged from Philadelphia did not closely track the preferred plan of any individual delegate.”¹⁷ Strange, then, to treat its development as one of empirically-correct conclusions to be deciphered through a seemingly scientific exercise.

There are also notable similarities in the observations of Amar and Beeman. Both scholars discuss the uncomfortable and very real capitulation and compromise with the pro-slavery interests at the convention, particularly Georgia and the Carolinas, which Beeman describes as “unsatisfactory decisions” that were nevertheless required for significant federal reforms to emerge.¹⁸ He later underscores that it was not the entirety of the southern slave states who made this the case, as the delegates from Virginia—a slave state that was otherwise rather similar in its aims with those of Pennsylvania—often sought to address matters for the greater good of the young nation. Beeman notes that the nationalism of the “lower South was of a decidedly different flavor from that of men like Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson of Pennsylvania or of Madison and, more silently, Washington in Virgnia, who believed that the… whole should in all cases be paramount to the interests of any particular state.”¹⁹ Amar’s The Words that Made Us is similar but more pointed on this matter, observing that some “accommodations of slavery was necessary to get the Carolinas on board—and without the Carolinas, Virginia’s southern flank would be dangerously exposed.”²⁰ Thus, even as Virginia was in many ways inclined to side with Pennsylvania delegates in a more nationalist vision, they could not afford to make political enemies of their geographic neighbors to the south and thus came to their defense time and again in the convention. This is not to underestimate the influence of slavery in Virginia at this time, which was significant, but the state was moving slowly (and, it turns out, temporarily) toward relaxing their slave laws, having legalized manumission five years earlier in 1782. Both Amar and Beeman note the heart-rending compromise over slavery at the convention, but both also agree that no new constitution would have been possible without this unfortunate concession.

Probably the greatest similarity between Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men and Akhil Reed Amar’s The Words that Made Us is in their conviction regarding the indispensable role of George Washington in the U.S. Constitution’s success (in its creation, its ratification, and its early execution). Beeman emphasizes how the architect of the Philadelphia Convention, James Madison, knew that its success was both in getting Washington to attend and to appeal to Washington’s shared desire for more centralized national power. “Madison summarized in a long letter to Washington the argument he was preparing to make at the convention. Knowing that Washington had experienced firsthand [as General of the Continental Army] the effects of a weak central government and did not need to be reminded of the structural flaws of the Confederation.”²¹ If Beeman highlights that Washington’s participation in the convention gave it legitimacy—and his support of the finished draft was similarly integral to its ratification by the separate states—Amar emphasizes Washington’s importance in being the first executive to shape the new constitutional government, with his appointments as well as in those he saw as important figures of influence. “As America’s first president, [Washington] succeeded in making the Constitution succeed. Others succeeded because of him. [James] Wilson sat on the Supreme Court because Washington put him there. Wilson’s opening law lecture, a grand event in the development of a mature and independent American jurisprudence, was immeasurably ennobled by Washington’s attendance.”²²

Akhil Reed Amar’s The Words that Made Us and Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men provide evidence that new scholarship relating to the early American republic, the making of the Constitution, and the history surrounding the debates over national power remain important to the historical field. Not only does this history address matters including worries over concentrations of power and the role of the sovereignty of the people in a representative republic, they also remind us, scholars and laypersons alike, that these are not apprehensions that are ever truly laid to rest. They are evergreen, and thus deserving of ongoing academic investigation and scrutiny. Each work addresses the history and provides analysis uniquely. Amar’s The Words that Made Us, because it is the work of a legal scholar, carries a more prescriptive tone. However, the author’s treatment of the Constitution’s success as akin to solving a mathematical problem, and thus logically certain, reveals how much of a historian Akhil Reed Amar is not. It is a belief in the inevitable that few historians would subscribe to and, in the case of Plain, Honest Men by Richard Beeman, is something roundly rejected. For this reason, in terms of historical analysis, Beeman’s work is the superior of the two. Plain, Honest Men, in distinction from The Words that Made Us, emphasizes the improbability of the history at hand, and the contingency of the results. What Richard Beeman accomplishes in his work, which the non-historian Akhil Reed Amar fails to do, is recognize that the only inevitability in the history of human action, is uncertainty.

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[James M. Masnov is a Columbian Distinguished Fellow at George Washington University’s History Department in Washington, DC and author of Rights Reign Supreme: An Intellectual History of Judicial Review and the Supreme Court, available here.]

1. Drew Gilpin Faust, “Richard R. Beeman (1942 – 2016),” January 9, 2017, Perspectives on History, Perspectives Section – In Memoriam, Historians.org, https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/richard-r-beeman-1942-2016-january-2017/.

2. Richard Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (New York: Random House, 2009), x.

3. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, xi.

4. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, 35.

5. Thomas Fleming, “Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution (Review),” Summer 2009, American Heritage 59, Issue 2, accessed through EBSCO.

6. Walter Isaacson, “A Delicate Balance: A Review of Plain, Honest Men by Richard Beeman,” April 12, 2009, New York Times, accessed through ProQuest.

7. Ibid.

8. Akhil Reed Amar, The Words that Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760 – 1840 (New York: Basic Books, 2021), xii.

9. Adam Cohen, “The Words that Made Us (Review),” May 4, 2021, New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/04/books/review/the-words-that-made-us-akhil-reed-amar.html.

10. Jerry Lenaburg, “The Words that Made Us (Review),” May 4, 2021, New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/words-made-us.

11. Jessica T. Matthews, “The Words that Made Us (Review),” August 24, 2021, Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/2021-08-24/words-made-us-americas-constitutional-conversation-1760-1840.

12. Mark G. Spencer, “The Words that Made Us (Review),” June 23, 2021, Wall Street Journal, accessed through ProQuest.

13. Kevin Gutzman, “The Words that Made Us (Review),” January 22, 2022, Taylor & Francis Online: History, Reviews of New Books, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03612759.2022.2012412.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Akhil Reed Amar, The Words that Made Us, 185.

17. Amar, The Words that Made Us, 195.

18. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, xii.

19. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, 331.

20. Amar, The Words that Made Us, 215.

21. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men, 32-33.

22. Amar, The Words that Made Us, 214.