The Glorious Cause, page 81
Although the Convention modified portions of the report, it responded generally with favor. It left intact the structure of government recommended by the committee, and it accepted the enumeration of powers, though it would do much more about legislative power in following weeks. What the Convention refused to do may have been almost as important as any of its responses to the report. The committee of detail had recommended that the electors of the lower house be the same as those choosing the more numerous branch of the states’ legislatures. Gouverneur Morris feared or professed to fear that this provision invited tyranny. “The time is not distant,” Morris argued, “when this Country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers.” Morris doubted that these workers could resist the opportunity of selling their votes to the rich who would set themselves up as an aristocracy. To forestall this development Morris urged that the suffrage be confined to freeholders, men of property—”the best guardians of liberty,” as John Dickinson, who agreed, called them.46
The association of liberty with property had long found approval in England and America, and it proved hard at first for the Convention to resist Morris’s amendment. Wilson and Ellsworth disputed Morris’s claims at once, joined soon by Mason and Rutledge. Madison seemed for a time unable to make up his mind but he did state that on “its merits alone, the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories of republican liberty.” What prevented Madison from voting for Morris’s proposal may have been a feeling that the ordinary people of the nation would be repelled by it and would then reject the constitution. Benjamin Franklin helped reinforce this notion in an effective answer to Morris. Franklin reminded the Convention of the people’s “virtue and public spirit” which, he said, had contributed so much to the winning of the war. Debate stopped soon after Franklin spoke, and Morris’s motion was rejected.47
This decision on the suffrage did not consume much time. Yet it involved a revealing set of motives and premises. It drew on republican theory; it elicited short analyses of the American people and predictions of what they might become; it also forced the delegates to consider how politics actually worked. Was there anything else below the surface? A regard for property and a class bias surely were; they indeed inhered in republican theory.
All of these dispositions, motives, and concerns figured in the review of the rest of the report. By this time the delegates understood one another well, and for the most part they found explaining their assumptions unnecessary. They pushed through a variety of recommendations, accepting some, changing many, and postponing a try at cracking apparently uncrackable nuts. In the final week of August they put together another compromise, one that left them feeling uneasy and perhaps guilty.
The committee of detail had proposed that Congress be prohibited from taxing importations of slaves. As had become the practice of the Convention, the committee had not used the word “slave” but everyone understood which “persons” the committee had in mind in recommending the prohibition. The committee had also included a clause providing that no navigation act should be passed without the assent of two-thirds of the members present in each house.48
The barrier against taxing the slave trade was intended to ease the not-so-tender sensibilities of South Carolinian and Georgian planters. One of the Carolinians warned the Convention in the discussion that neither the Carolinas nor Georgia would approve the constitution if the slave trade were not protected. No doubt C. C. Pinckney and perhaps others as well were issuing similar threats. Whether such predictions were really necessary to obtain protection of the trade is doubtful. The Convention knew that it was near the end of its work, and its spirit was by this time very much in accord with compromise. Still there were members who felt revulsion at any concessions to slavery. Most who did seem to have said so. Rufus King, by this time thoroughly disenchanted with catering to planters’ interests, contained his anger and remarked only of the injustice of protecting one sort of property. John Dickinson was considerably blunter. George Mason reckoned the costs of indulging the slave interests in providential terms, saying that slave masters were petty tyrants. “They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As Nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.” These words undoubtedly came from Mason’s conscience—he himself owned slaves and lived off their labor. But Mason was a Virginian, and his state, which currently had a surplus of slaves, would profit by selling them southward should the importation be stopped. The Carolinians were convinced, as C. C. Pinckney said a few weeks later, that deprived of slaves, South Carolina would soon be a “desert waste.” Pinckney questioned whether Mason and the Virginians opposed the slave trade from principle—or from purse.49
Concern for purse was not confined to the deep southern states. Northern business would have been affected by the requirement of two-thirds approval for navigation acts, and so might southern planters with staples to sell. The southerners feared that a Congress controlled by the North might bar foreign ships from carrying American trade and that without such competition American shippers would plunder the southerners. Northern delegates naturally considered the proposed two-thirds provision to be unfair—it gave a veto to a minority in the southern states.
Given the mood of the Convention a compromise was almost inevitable, and in the last week of August it was concluded. A provision against any prohibition of the slave trade before 1808 was agreed to, and, a few days later, the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia supported a change to a simple majority for passage of navigation acts. At the time of the concession to the advocates of the slave trade, Madison remarked laconically: “Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves.” Gouverneur Morris’s comment had more bite: he was for making the clause read that “importation of slaves into North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia shall not be prohibited.” Luther Martin laid bare the savage irony of the situation—a people opposing Great Britain’s attempts to enslave them now take measures to assure themselves a supply of slaves, all the while claiming freedom on the grounds of the natural rights of mankind. But Madison’s final judgment a few months later that “Great as the evil is, a dismemberment of the union would be worse”—was more persuasive to most white Americans.50
On August 31, two days after beating back an attempt to untie this arrangement, the Convention selected a committee on unfinished parts to bring in a report on still unresolved questions. Included among these questions was a recommendation of the committee of detail that Congress receive power
to provide, as may become necessary, from time to time, for the well managing and securing the common property and general interests and welfare of the United States in such manner as shall not interfere with the Governments of individual States in matters which respect only their internal Police, or for which their individual authorities may be competent.51
This grant was immense. It summed up earlier proposals by Madison and Sherman, and the already approved resolution by Bedford. The committee on unfinished parts had to decide whether to include this clause in the general enumeration of Congressional powers or to set a more modest limit. It had also to consider how taxing authority should be defined, for what purposes, who should originate money bills, the powers of the Senate, and the method of selecting the President.
This last problem had already vexed the convention for weeks—both Madison and Wilson agreed that it had caused more heartburn than anything else—and it continued to undergo discussion. The committee made its recommendations on it and the other questions in the early days of September. The President, it said, should be elected by the people through an electoral college, serve for four years, and be eligible for re-election. Should no candidate receive a majority, the Senate should choose from the five receiving the most votes. The committee cut the Senate down to size by proposing that it not make treaties and choose Supreme Court judges and ambassadors, responsibilities the Convention had seemed determined to vest it with. Nor would the Senate be permitted to originate money bills although it might amend them. The massive grant of power to do virtually all things in the name of the general welfare was quietly discarded, replaced by a narrower but still powerful authorization. This grant pertained to the authority of Congress to spend and lend: “The legislature shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States.”52
This wording made its way into the Constitution as did the other solutions proposed by the committee. The one important revision of the committee’s work concerned the method of electing the President. By this time the electoral college had won acceptance, but disagreement persisted over who should act if it was unable to reach a majority. The committee on unfinished parts had recommended that the Senate choose, a recommendation acceptable to most of the small-state delegates. After further discussion and much unsuccessful maneuvering the convention apparently was swayed by Mason and Wilson who argued that giving the Senate this power would create “an aristocracy worse than absolute monarchy.” Roger Sherman suggested a way out of this tangle: election by the House of Representatives, each state delegation casting one vote.53
The most important work of the Convention was completed by September 8, when one more committee was chosen—a committee of style and arrangement—charged to revise the mass of articles into the coherent form of a constitution. Madison and Alexander Hamilton both sat on this committee, but the real work was done by Gouverneur Morris, who had the pen of a gifted editor. Morris slashed the accumulation of excess words, reorganized those remaining, and rewrote the Preamble. When he and the committee were done, they discovered that they had satisfied the Convention, a body not easily satisfied.54
On September 17, the delegates signed. George Mason, still unhappy over the decision to drop the two-thirds requirement for the passage of navigation acts, refused as did Edmund Randolph and Elbridge Gerry. Randolph explained that without promise of another convention which would consider amendments he would have to withhold his signature, although he had not decided on whether to oppose or support ratification. Gerry’s reasons do not seem entirely clear; a sympathetic account of his refusal lays it to his belief that the Constitution was not appropriate to a republican people.55
The others did not agree and signed, apparently sharing a hope that ratification might follow without difficulty. Ratification was given in the next nine months, but not without difficulty and a certain amount of strain. Perhaps the difficulty was inevitable. On the whole it was minor, given what the Americans had already overcome.
26
Ratification: An End and a Beginning
What had happened in the Constitutional Convention? A fairly common opinion in 1787 had it that there had been a withdrawal of the original commitment to the principles of the American Revolution. Those of this persuasion pointed out that the Constitution virtually destroyed the old Confederation of sovereign states and replaced it with what they called “consolidated” government. In this government, power and sovereignty lay at the center—not in the individual states. In the year following the close of the federal Convention there were to be many variations on the meaning of consolidation.
Since 1787 many historians have expanded these opinions, and describe the Constitution as the expression of a conservative movement. Not many any longer see it as the product of a conspiracy by holders of public securities, all bent on lining their own pockets and those of their class. Perhaps more argue that in the Constitution an elite established a frame of government which, for a short time at least, successfully curbed a growing democracy. The Constitution in this interpretation was a conservative response to a profound move toward democracy stimulated by the Revolution. In 1776, we are told, the democracy captured the Revolution and proclaimed its great principles. In the process, democratic political arrangements were fashioned, in particular the state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation. These institutions and the ideals they embodied presumably all revolved around the premise that sovereignty lay in the people. The historians who detect a democracy surging into public life in 1776 insist that the years from 1776 to 1781 saw the Revolution defined, and they judge all that took place afterwards against those years, against what they presume to be the true standard of revolutionary action.
This argument is parochial and in some ways ahistorical, presuming as it does to lay down a norm against which later history is rendered invalid. For the Revolution was a complex set of events taking place over almost thirty years, events which in fact went through a number of phases. To assume that one phase is more “revolutionary,” or more “conservative,” than another inhibits understanding of them all.
Once independence was won and peace made, revolutionary issues changed. The period before 1783 had one set of problems, all connected to establishing independence. The period following concerned many of the same problems, especially of how free men should govern themselves. Yet these periods differ too—a war dominated the years between 1775 and 1783, a war with its own imperatives and objectives. Everyone recognized that some of the methods of governance resorted to in war were not suitable for peace. Thus, though the problems after the war look similar to those of the earlier years, concerning as they did governance, they were in fact different because they occurred in a context of peace. It is true that in the 1780s Americans had to face problems inherited from the war, but independence and peace put these problems in a new setting.
When the war ended, men of affairs—merchants, lawyers, large farmers, and planters—were running the Congress, the state legislatures, and the army. They were men of vision and not without passion, but the concern for a virtuous republic probably was not as prominent in their minds as it had been earlier, or as it had been in the minds of the likes of Samuel Adams. Rather, efficiency in commerce and energy in government seemed almost as important as virtue—and essential to it. Their vision, perhaps their dreams, now focused on large organizations, including the nation, and the power that these organizations could muster. Their preoccupations were natural given the problems that remained from the war and given their own experience in government, especially in the Congress and the army.
Such men wrote the Constitution. They did so in a mood marked by disenchantment. For the delegates shared the widespread suspicion that virtue might be in flight from a deteriorating America. But they were not devoid of hope based on the American achievements of the previous thirty years. These achievements remained so dazzling that few if any among the delegates were disposed to give up an equally powerful conviction that the American experiment in republicanism would yield a great example to the world.
These complex attitudes give evidence of the persistence of Protestant and Whiggish values which had saturated American atmospheres in the 1760s and up to at least 1779. They testify as well to the strength of the old morality and its power to shape perceptions of politics. For public life in the 1780s, as before the war, was understood to derive its health from the morality of the people. A virtuous people, most Americans agreed, were a people who valued frugality, despised luxury, hated corruption, and preferred moderation and balance to extremes of any sort, especially in the orders of society. Above all else they were a people who retained a sense of responsibility to public interests even when those interests clashed with private purposes.
The slackening in these old standards and the lust for private gain that seemed to follow the war convinced the delegates to the Convention that a reordering of American government was necessary. Their disillusionment with the people’s behavior forced them to admit to themselves the truth of a previously inadmissible proposition: the people themselves might be the source of tyranny. This recognition marked the appearance of a new realism in American constitutionalism which, like the radical Whig ideology at its center, had been prone, at least early in the Revolution, to idolize the people. This older version of Whig thought had conceived of the problem of politics as the opposition of the ruler to the ruled. How, this politics asked, was the ruler to be controlled, for if he were not controlled he would become a tyrant. Now in the 1780s, and most clearly in the Constitutional Convention, a new source of tyranny was identified—the people themselves.
Along with the new realism about politics went a new realism about society. The older Whig theory had assumed that because the people were one, all their interests were the same. From this assumption came all the facile talk about the public good, as if the people had only one thing on their minds. During the war political thought began to accommodate itself to the existence of interest groups, factions in eighteenth-century parlance, and thereby gained an unusual accuracy. At the Convention, James Madison spelled out the sources of faction and argued that in a large and complicated nation factionalism could be made to protect private rights. Madison’s brilliant insight anticipated the course of two hundred years of American political life. He attained this prophetic accuracy at least in part because he saw deeply into the nature of the society that had emerged from the Revolutionary War.
American society had not been transformed by the war, but the basis for change had been laid. War had trained up a body of men accustomed to think in national terms and to work in large organizations. The war indeed had brought something approaching the beginnings of an organizational revolution to America. The nation was the greatest example of this change and the inspiration for all the lesser organizations. It had not replaced the states of course, but it provided a very different arena for the economy and for public policy. During the war, men in and out of the army had sought to serve their nation, and themselves, in raising military forces and in providing food, weapons, ammunition, and the other supplies required to maintain an institution of many men on a demanding mission. Although the army virtually disbanded in 1783, the experience of the previous eight years could not be dispensed with. Nor did anyone wish to turn the clock back—acquisitive appetites remained powerful in America and grew with the means of satisfying them. The war had reinforced them and, unconfined but disciplined and managed by men with a new sense of the fruitfulness of large-scale operations, they would make America a thriving nation. In the Constitution the delegates had created a framework through which the economy could find itself. The Constitution after all stopped state regulation of interstate commerce, it stopped wild schemes in public finance, and it virtually guaranteed an environment congenial to business. American business needed freedom and it needed order. The Constitution promised to provide both.
