The American Experiment Reclaiming Benjamin Franklin's Promised
Republic “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the
people; a change in their religious sentiments, their duties and
obligations. This radical change in the principles, opinions,
sentiments and affections of the people, was the real American
Revolution.” When the American Constitution was being signed at
the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin
Franklin remarked that he had often wondered whether the rays of
the sun painted in the chair of the president of the convention
signified a sunrise or sunset for the new country. According to
James Madison, Franklin expressed his satisfaction that “now at
length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not
a setting Sun.” The Constitutional Convention was an
extraordinary experiment, an attempt to determine, as Alexander
Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 1, “whether societies of men
are really capable or not of establishing good government from
reflection and choice, o