The Constitution was signed on a Monday. That much everyone knows. What the official record tends to skip is what happened right afterward. Forty-two men – some of them barely on speaking terms, three of them having refused to sign at all – stepped out of the Pennsylvania State House into the thin September air. Their wigs were damp from the long, sticky summer. Instead of heading back to their lodgings at the Indian Queen or Mrs. Marshall’s boarding house, they turned south on Chestnut, walked a couple of blocks, and went to City Tavern.

At the tavern, on the corner of Second and Walnut, they sat down and ate together. George Washington, who had presided over that bruising summer mostly in silence, wrote about it later in his diary with his usual economy: “The business being thus closed, the Members adjourned to the City Tavern, dined together and took a cordial leave of each other.” Twelve words. The republic’s public life started with dinner.

We remember the chamber across the street. We’ve turned State House – now Independence Hall – into a shrine, put it in a park, made it a place of pilgrimage. The room nearby never quite got the same treatment. No bell tower, no famous chair, no painting that ends up in textbooks. What it had was Madeira, porter, punch bowls, servants, musicians, weekly bills and the occasional breakage.

Self-government needs more than a document on parchment. It needs men who can lose an argument in the morning and still sit around the same table that evening.

Self-government needs men who can lose an argument in the morning and sit around the same table that evening

Self-government needs men who can lose an argument in the morning and sit around the same table that evening

City Tavern was built in 1773 by subscription – 53 of Philadelphia’s leading citizens put up the money. The local paper deemed it the largest and most........

© The Spectator