ABSTRACT
From the fall of 1774 until 1800, when John and Abigail Adams left the city for the new capital in Washington, the leading members of America's great generation walked the streets of Philadelphia, along with many visitors from abroad, including Thomas Paine. This chapter discusses that the continuity of class cohesion and authority was responsible for the high level of political debate in the great generation that made a revolution and produced the Constitution of the United States. The pattern of upper-class political and social hegemony in colonial Massachusetts and the far less stable authority structure in colonial Pennsylvania clearly influenced the constitutional histories of the two states after the colonies declared their independence from the British empire. The demand for a state constitution in Massachusetts came from the extreme western frontier county of Berkshire and was led by a fighting parson, Thomas Allen, who had fired the first shot at the Battle of Bennington.
