They did not agree on much. The Constitution was a bargain struck among rivals — soldiers and scholars, radicals and skeptics — who together built something none of them could have made alone.
“Founders” is a loose word for a remarkable generation: the delegates who wrote the Constitution, the leaders who won independence, and the writers who argued the new nation into being.
They were flawed and often at odds — many, including several honored here, enslaved other human beings even as they wrote of liberty. Understanding the founding means holding both truths at once: the ideals they set down, and the distance between those ideals and their own conduct.