July 27, 1787: Adjourned

John Rutledge by John Trumbull, 1800

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.97.190?destination=node/63231%3Fedan_local%3D1%26edan_q%3Djohn%252Brutledge

"Yesterday we completed the great Principles, which we have been so long considering, and Committed them to five Gentlemen to put into proper form and detail."

--David Brearly to Jonathan Dayton

Friday, July 27, 1787: The Convention Today

The Convention was in recess until August 6 to give the Committee of Detail time to draft the Constitution of the United States. The members of the committee were:

• John Rutledge (SC)
• Edmund Randolph (VA)
• Nathaniel Gorham (MA)
• Oliver Ellsworth (CT)
• James Wilson (PA)

Rutledge, the chair, was an enslaver; England-trained lawyer; and politician with deep experience before, during, and after the Revolutionary War.

No record exists of the deliberations of the Committee of Detail while they incorporated the resolutions of the Convention into a draft constitution.

Synopsis

• The Convention began a lengthy adjournment while the Committee of Detail drafted the Constitution.

Delegates Today

• Johnson (CT) wrote from Stratford, Connecticut, to Rev. Samuel Peters in London, reporting that he had been in Philadelphia all summer at a convention of the states for strengthening the Union and vesting more power in the general government.
• Washington (VA) dined at Robert Morris’s (PA) and drank tea at Mr. Powel’s mansion on Third Street south of Walnut.
• Paterson (NJ), who had earlier been ready to leave the Convention if New Jersey was deprived of an equal vote, now wrote from Philadelphia to Lansing (NY), encouraging him and Yates (NY) to return to Philadelphia so that New York would again be effectively represented in the Convention. He noted that, with the arrival of New Hampshire’s representatives, the return of New York’s delegates would make all the states except Rhode Island present for the completion of the Convention, which he anticipated would happen when it resumed on August 6.
• Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (SC) visited stable keeper Jacob Hiltzheimer to get a list of the best public houses on the road to Bethlehem, where he and his wife, Mary, were to visit for a few days.

Philadelphia Today

• The Philadelphia Street Commissioners met and paid for bricks, lime, labor, carpenters work, and tool sharpening for the new sewer in Fourth Street. They also noted a complaint: “Complaint is made of a Grate over the Vault of Richard Mason's House in Market Street, near the Coffee House, being much out of order.” Many Philadelphia houses had basements which extended out under the sidewalk and street in the forms of arched vaults with sidewalk grates to provide ventilation. These were rented to merchants to store goods in. Even public buildings were so used—in the 1790s, noted Philadelphia merchant Stephen Girard rented the cellar of Old City Hall (then the location where the United States Supreme Court presided) and stored gin there.