Status Updates From These Truths: A History of ...

Where were the centuries of ideas and decades of struggle? What of the hard scramble American people and their fiercely fought debates? What of the near-fisticuffs over ratification? What of the feuds and the failures and compromises, the trials of facts, the battles between reason and passion?

It was as if the Constitution had been handed down from the heavens, tablets etched out of stone, sacred and infallible, from God to the first American president.

One popular print, Washington giving the laws to America, showed the archangel Gabriel in the heavens carrying an American emblem while Washington dressed in a Roman toga and seated among the gods holds a stylus in one hand and in his other hand a stone tablet engraved with the words “Therapy American Constitution”

PART 1 - CHAPTER 4
[After George Washington died] Americans read “Dear Washington” and looked at him in portraits and prints.