Hello and welcome to Whistlestop a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of CBS this morning.

We all know the dates of the American Revolution, right? 1773, between April 19th, the Battle

of Lexington and Concord, and the Treaty of Paris, where the British signatories were so peeved they didn't even sit for the official portrait.

That portrait hangs unfinished in the dining room of a museum in Delaware,

showing only the American signatories next to a big open blotch of empty.

That's not our story today.

Our story today is about the greater, to my mind, American Revolution,

or at least the second one, which took place without any muskets or whistling

sabers though it was carried off on the strapping shoulders of a general.

It happened in the spring of 1787 in the same Philadelphia State House where the Declaration of Independence had been signed 11 years earlier.

55 men of property and elite status argued for a summer in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention.

There has been no greater happening in American history, wrote historian Clinton Rossiter.

There have not been many greater, certainly of a political nature in the history of the world,

he wrote.

President John Adams also stacked up the superlatives, calling it the greatest exertion of human understanding,

the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen.

The meeting was such a grand historical moment because it

formed a radical and ultimately durable new framework for a nation at a time of

total chaos and uncertainty. Under the Articles of Confederation, the stout

revolutionaries who had licked the British were riding the struggle coach.

They'd created a loose Federation of Sovereignties but not a nation. The solution they came up with created a nation and

among its central innovations, in fact these central innovation was the office of the

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