Few days over the course of the summer of 1787 were as historically relevant as August 20. Time was dragging on and the weather was not helping. The delegates that had convened in the State House in Philadelphia in May were weary of the oppressive heat and the ideas for polishing off the draft presented on August 6 by the Committee of Detail were coming fast and furious. August was a busy month for the framers, particularly, Monday, August 20.

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Long ago scholars identified the arches and loops of John Locke’s fingerprints on the writings of James Madison. Evidence of this influence is often noted in Madison’s espousal of Lockean liberalism in the arguments set forth in the Federalist, particularly Federalist, No. 51. That Madison benefited from Locke’s analysis of the machine of government and its relationship to the virtue of a people is indisputable, but to describe all Madisonian philosophy as some sort of diluted mimicry of Lockean principles is lazy and incorrect.

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What a dreadful Spirit that Man possesses, who can put a private Appetite in balance against the universal Good of his Country, and of Mankind. -- Cato

As tensions with England intensified in the years leading up to 1776, the United States became a “laboratory of proposals and revised forms of union and confederated government.” One of the concoctions brewed in this laboratory was the Articles of Confederation.

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Wars are seldom tidy, and often the unfinished business from one war provides the spark and tinder for the next. The forts that guarded Charleston Harbor in the latter half of the 19th century were part of a series of coastal defenses planned after the War of 1812 to protect all the principal seaports of the United States. Like most of the system, the forts in Charleston were still unfinished in 1861. Not long after the war with the British, America became preoccupied with battles within, as wars with Indian tribes continued through most of the century.

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