All efforts to impose a monolithic set of motives on the assembled delegates at Philadelphia, whether economic or ideological, have been discredited. And the very effort to do so misses the most salient point, which is that the vast majority of delegates came as representatives of their respective states, so that no single interpretive category could do justice to their bafflingly complex angles of vision. What needs to be remembered and recovered is that no collective sense of an American identity yet existed in the populace at large.
