““Roughly speaking: more than forty held government bonds. More than twenty were moneylenders. Over fifteen were slave owners. The rest an assortment of land and debt speculators. And most dabbled in more than one category. George Washington, for example, was a slave owner, a moneylender, a land speculator, and the largest holder of government IOUs in the country. Who was not at the Convention is as interesting as who was: unrepresented were small farmers, shopkeepers, Revolutionary War veterans, laborers, indentured servants, and, of course, slaves, Indians, and women. What we have instead is a small circle of capitalist elites with George Washington at the center. They were (if we’re to believe only half of what Beard tells us) a rogues’ gallery of scoundrels, scalawags, moneylenders, stockjobbers,XXIX embezzlers, and, as it would turn out, traitors. Not to mention lawyers. Men, it would be fair to say, drawn to the power of their own purses.””
