. Pinckney and Charles Pinckney, and Pierce Butler.
Georgia named four mediocre but useful men.

In this gathering of fifty-five persons, the proportion between those
who were preeminent for common sense and those who were remarkable for
special knowledge and talents was very fairly kept. Most of them had
had experience in dealing with men either in local government offices
or in the army. Socially, they came almost without exception from
respectable if not aristocratic families. Of the fifty-five,
twenty-nine were university or college bred, their universities
comprising Oxford, Glasgow, and Edinburgh besides the American
Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. The two
foremost members, Washington and Franklin, were not college bred.
Among the fifty-five we do not find John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,
who, as I have said, were in Europe on official business. John Jay
also was lacking, because, as it appears, the Anti-Federalists did
not wish him to represent them in the Convention; but his influence
permeated it and the wider public, who later read his unsigned
articles in "The Federalist." Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and Richard
Henry Lee stayed at home. General Nathanael Greene, the favorite
son of Rhode Island, would have been at the Convention but for his
untimely death a few weeks before the preceding Christmas.

Owing to delays the active business of the Convention halted, although
for at least a fortnight the members who had come promptly carried on
unofficial discussions. Washington, being chosen President without a
competitor, presided, with perhaps more than his habitual gravity and
punctilio. The members took their work very seriously. The debates
lasted five or six hours a day, and, as they were continued
consecutively until the autumn, there was ample time to discuss many
subjects. The Convention adopted strict secrecy as its rule, so that
its proceedings were not known by the public nor was any satisfactory
report of them kept and published. At the time there was objection to
this provision, and now, after more than a century and a third, we
must regret that we can never know many points in regard to the
actual give and take of discussion in this the most fateful of all
assemblies. But from Madison's memoranda and reminiscences we can
infer a good deal as to what went on.

The wisdom of keeping the proceedings secret was fully justified. The
framers of the Constitution knew that it w