In Miss Bowen's view the Framers of the Constitution rejected alike the principle and the practice of the Articles, and, displaying a willingness to reach honorable compromise and a happy capacity for sound experimentation, these men of hope and vision produced the innovation of a federal republic to govern a vast territory democratically. State jealousies, she finds, invaded the meeting hall in conflicts concerning the apportionment of representatives, slavery, and commercial legislation. .
According to Miss Bowen, the crucial issue was the large and small state dispute concerning membership in Congress that threatened dissolution of the convention until the compromise of an equality in the upper house and proportionality in the lower house was reached. Although Miss Bowen maintains the Constitution was philosophically and legally a revolutionary change in government, she rejects the notion the Constitution was a conservative counterrevolution merely because the Founding Fathers sought to preserve order and protect property, and she suggests the revolution was unique in that neither a central power nor a strong man swept into power. The result of the Convention was a twofold balance of the executive and legislative powers and the states and the federal government, with the judicial branch, she feels, the umpire between them. According to the author, the Antifederalists lacked faith in this Federalist government of limited powers, but these men of restricted view or understanding could not prevent ratification of the Constitution.
Miss Bowen has produced a lively study of the creation of the Constitution that is both literate and scholarly, but her sense of drama, exemplified in her treatment of the daily dialogue of the Convention, tends to distort the importance of differences concerning the means of achieving consensual principles. While she correctly diagnoses the significance of the conflict between the large and small states, she underestimates the role of sectionalism in the convention.
