The two most revered figures in the early republic were undoubtedly Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and yet their teamwork has been little remarked upon in the centuries since, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Summer for the Gods points out. Chronicling a three-decade friendship, Edward Larson shows how an abolitionist inventor from Philadelphia and a slaveholding general from the agrarian south were the indispensable authors of American independence and the two key partners in the attempt to craft a more perfect union at the Constitutional Convention.