The Glorious Cause, page 82
That freedom and order were tied to virtue had long appeared obvious to Americans. That virtue could not survive amidst anarchy was equally plain. The Constitution, its makers believed, would protect virtue. On the face of things, including the debates in the Convention, the idea that the Constitution expressed a moral view seems absurd. There were no genuine evangelicals in the Convention, and there were no heated declarations of Christian piety. Yet the Constitution managed to capture some of the morality long common in American life and clearly present in the first days of the Revolution.
For the Constitution confined power, power which had long been understood as threatening virtue as well as liberty. It aimed to thwart majoritarian tyranny, but it did not deny that sovereignty resided in the people. Government should serve the people, and in the Constitution the delegates sought to create a framework which would make such service effective, though not at the cost of the oppression of the minority. Hence the moderation of the Constitution, with its three balanced branches and its careful enumeration of powers. These restraints seemed promising to the founders for several reasons, not the least of which was that they would operate against corruption as well as majoritarian excess. Corruption sprang from an unbridled prerogative, irresponsible power which had in the colonial past sent hordes of placemen who sucked up American substance. In the Revolution the Americans drove out such creatures, and in the Constitution they sought through new means to achieve an old purpose, a virtuous public life. And that life could survive, Americans agreed, only if corruption in the broadest sense, as a general decay of society and morality, could be avoided. The restraints built into the Constitution might be depended upon to prevent corruption in the technical, or Whiggish, sense, the undue influence of the executive in the legislature and perhaps even in the newer form so graphically described by Madison, as majoritarian tyranny. But underlying any successful constitutionalism there had to be a virtuous people. The founders, especially Franklin, Madison, and Wilson, believed that the Convention must risk all, indeed risk the Revolution, by trusting the virtue of the American people.
Madison thought that the risk might be less in America than elsewhere because of the size of the country and the variety of its people. Spread over an enormous land, divided by state lines and by different interests, factions determined to dominate others would have difficulty concerting their actions. The history of the Revolution, which saw the people barely able to pull themselves together in the face of British oppression, verified this analysis. With peace they had in many states, however, formed irresponsible, even tyrannical majorities. But what could be done in a state might be impossible to duplicate in a nation composed of many varieties of factions and spread from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
Thus the delegates placed their trust in the people because they had no choice: a republic had to found itself on the people. Their suspicions of popular power led to a preoccupation with restraints and curbs on the undue exercise of power by heedless majorities. At the same time the delegates’ belief in majority rule, as an indispensable part of republican government, remained strong. Confining the majority—the source of power and therefore potentially of tyranny—had to be done. The limits protected the rights of the minority and of property, rights which had helped set the revolutionary process in motion in the 1760s.
But it was also necessary that the majority possess the freedom to exercise constitutional powers. The founders therefore concentrated on making the national legislature representative of the people. The great compromise removed the Senate from direct popular control, an arrangement Madison and Wilson had favored, but even so the Congress would be more democratic than it had been under the Articles of Confederation. The House of Representatives after all would be popularly elected. Thus the people would be both free and confined—the people whatever their rank, station, or number. Free, because a republic required a virtuous people; confined, because the people of all sorts had human frailties.
The delegates phrased these assumptions in the language of republicanism. Though they did not resort to religion, they did indirectly invoke the old moral certainties familiar to the children of the twice-born. They did most clearly in the discussions in Philadelphia which considered the people’s selfishness, their passions, and their propensity to do evil. And the Constitution itself, by establishing a government which seemed capable of restraining some of the worst impulses of man, especially his instinct to dominate others, spoke to a persistent concern in Protestant culture.1
II
The concern over power appeared immediately in the discussions which greeted the publication of the Constitution. It soon became apparent that not everyone agreed that power had been sufficiently curbed, especially power exercised from afar. Some of those who raised questions about the Constitution in the early autumn of 1787 did so in a language that suggested that they thought they faced a revival of tyranny in America. Thus they spoke of a “despotic aristocracy” behind the Constitution, and sometimes of a “masked aristocracy,” masked presumably out of a desire to conceal authoritarian purposes. They also played on the words of the Constitution itself. The official who would head the executive branch was rendered as the “president-general” and sometimes as “our new king.”2
In his letter of September 17 transmitting the Constitution to Congress, George Washington, as president of the Convention, may have given critics an opening by referring to the “consolidation of our Union” as one of the purposes of the Convention. Whatever the source, “consolidation” became almost immediately one of the most highly charged words of the process of ratification. The critics argued that the Constitution would establish a “consolidated government” in which the national government would exercise all powers at the expense of the states.3
The critics failed, however, to appropriate the one word to describe themselves which might have strengthened their arguments. The word was “Federalist.” It was the supporters of the Constitution who began calling themselves Federalists as soon as the Convention closed, leaving their opponents to be almost inevitably branded as the Antifederalists, a much less useful name to a group which wished to identify state loyalties with themselves. The most important fact about Antifederalist thought was its opposition to the transfer of authority from the states to the national government. Perhaps most Antifederalists had approved the idea of amending the Articles of Confederation, at least to the extent of adding the authority to tax and to regulate commerce to Congress’s powers. But the Constitution surprised and dismayed them by the extent of the changes it made and by the complexity it introduced into the structure of government. They had believed that the Convention would propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation that would go into effect only after ratification by all thirteen states. Now in September 1787 they faced a proposal for an entirely new constitution which would establish an entirely new government. And the new constitution was to become effective when only nine of the thirteen states approved.
The opposition to the Constitution should not have surprised anyone. The Revolution after all had been fought over questions of governance and rights. A generation of Americans had come to maturity amidst discussions of the nature of representation, of legislative and executive authority, of constitutionalism itself, and the need to protect individual rights. Another generation had grown old in the defense of independence and the right to self-government. Confronted by a major change in governing arrangements, the revolutionaries would have betrayed themselves and their recent achievements had they not asked questions about the change.
Those who found unsatisfactory the answers given their questions opposed the Constitution. They voted for delegates who promised to vote against ratification; they published articles and tracts advocating rejection; they agitated and talked; they formed committees; and some served as delegates in the state conventions.
They did not arm themselves and secede from the Union. They did not make another revolution despite all their talk about the tyranny hovering in the wings. Nor did anyone imprison them. The ratification process, in short, remained peaceful, despite the wild rhetoric it generated. And when it was completed, there was no fresh exodus from the United States such as the loyalists had made.
In tone and substance, nothing marked ratification so much as the controversy between Federalists and Antifederalists in Pennsylvania. One of the two political parties in the state, the “Constitutionalists,” a name derived from their advocacy of the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, included within its number a strong contingent of democrats who detected a conspiracy against the people in the Constitutional Convention. For example, Samuel Bryan, the son of George Bryan, a draftsman of the constitution of 1776, published a series of newspaper essays which described the division over the federal Constitution as dividing the people from the “wealthy and ambitious, who in every community think they have a right to lord it over their fellow creatures.”4 Thereafter, until ratification was completed in America, an undercurrent of class antagonism ran through much of the debate. In Pennsylvania, this antagonism represented considerable popular feeling. Elsewhere the call to the people to beware of the rich and the well-born may have been little more than a political tactic.5
As an explanation of behavior, conspiracy gains in persuasiveness as it is personified. In Pennsylvania the conspirators at hand were well known to everyone. The rich and well-born were the Republicans who had opposed the Pennsylvania constitution and who now supported the federal; they included Robert Morris, who had attended the Convention. In “The Chronicle of Early Times,” Morris appeared as “Robert the Cofferer,” interested only in the fortunes of “the mill,” the Bank of North America. The Constitution erected a wall around the mill to protect it from the multitude: “And he reported to them faithfully all that had been done, and how the enemies of the mill had been put to flight.” Assisting Robert the Cofferer were James Wilson, tagged here as “James the Caledonian,” and Gouverneur Morris, who appeared as “Gouvero the cunning man.” These three, and their cohorts, plotted to make the mill their own, to keep it free of popular control, and to share among themselves the corn, i.e., the money, it produced.6
The Antifederalists in Pennsylvania also made charges of substance against the Constitution which echoed through the arguments in every state. Two issues seemed important almost everywhere. The first concerned a lack of a bill of rights: protections of speech, religion, trial by jury, all the traditional rights free Englishmen had long enjoyed. To the claim that the Constitution failed to afford such protection there was no answer, though the Federalists in Pennsylvania gave one. Under the Constitution, James Wilson said in a widely reported speech, the national government would exercise only those powers given it; all others were reserved to the states. Since no powers were given Congress to “shackle or destroy” the free press, or—by implication—other traditional rights, no bill of rights was necessary (”it would have been superfluous and absurd to have stipulated with a federal body of our own creation, that we should enjoy those privileges, of which we are not divested either by the intention or the act, that has brought that body into existence”).7
The second question raised by the Antifederalists, in Pennsylvania, widely repeated elsewhere, concerned the nature of representation in a republic. Everyone agreed that the great authority on republics was Montesquieu. The Antifederalists claimed in his name that a republic could not survive in a nation which covered a large territory and must in time yield to despotism. “Centinel” may have been the first in Pennsylvania to point to the problem a national government would face in attending “to various local concerns and wants.” Size alone would render satisfaction of local desires difficult. The number of representatives allotted to the new government simply increased the difficulty. Fifty-five men in the House of Representatives must attend to the interests of a country which extended over hundreds of thousands of square miles. This number invited “corruption and undue influence”; presumably only a very large number could stave off attempts at bribery. And if the representatives managed to avoid being corrupted, they would lose their sense of “accountability” through their long tenure in office—a term was two years, twice as long as the usual state term. Indeed the probability was that no number, however large, could adequately represent the people of a large nation. Adequate representation in Antifederalist minds implied the existence of representatives who shared fully their constituents’ interests, passions, and opinions. The representative in an ideal situation would relay the desires of local interests. He would not reason or act independently; his commission simply called for him to register the judgment of the people.8
James Madison had anticipated these charges in the Convention. Far from being unsuited to the republican form, Madison argued, a large nation offered ideal circumstances for its successful application. For the weakness of a republic lay in its tendency toward instability and tyranny, a tendency which would be effectively controlled in a large nation containing a variety of interests. Madison’s reasoning rested on several suppositions. First, he assumed that instability inhered in a republic because by definition a republic contained within its assemblies a democratic element. And democracy lent itself to flux through its direct expression of the passions of the people. Democracy was the people governing themselves without the benefit of confining, or limiting, institutions.9
Madison’s assumption about democracy was based on still another about human beings: man, by nature, preferred to follow his passions rather than his reason; he invariably chose short-term over long-term interests. Creatures of passion, of selfishness, and sometimes of wickedness, men in political society would always have difficulty in accepting responsibility for the public interest and they would succumb rather easily to opportunities to deprive others of their rights, if by doing so, they seemed to serve themselves.10
Thus, in a republic covering a large nation, bringing together men of various interests—factions in Madison’s parlance—forming a majority capable of repressing a minority would always be difficult. Their large number and their variety would in effect lead them to block one another out. Madison’s mature statement of his theory of factions appeared in the Federalist No. 10:
The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other.11
Wilson’s restatement of Madison’s theory was less powerful but clear enough to be picked up in the debates that followed those in Pennsylvania. Once, of course, the Federalist began appearing in late October 1787, the Federalists came into possession of the most powerful body of political thought ever produced in America. These essays, by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, offered much more than a theory of representation. They dissected the circumstances under which power was exercised in America in the 1780s; they provided a critique of the Articles of Confederation; and they explained how the new government under the Constitution would work. Most important, they reassured Americans concerned about reconciling power and liberty.12
We cannot know exactly how discussions of constitutional issues affected delegates to the state ratifying conventions. But they must have moved some of the delegates; several of the arguments in print were repeated, with variations, in these conventions, and very little of substance appeared outside that did not receive a hearing within. On the other hand, the process of ratification, state by state, may have served to diminish the power of political ideas to persuade. And it may have increased the importance of strictly local interests. Ratification was a series of state actions, and each state convention had almost of necessity to consider the Constitution in the light of its state’s interests. That these interests included a perception that political freedom was essential to all aspects of a state’s well-being was tacitly acknowledged by all. Still, we do not know how in a delegate’s mind a definition of his state’s well-being incorporated a particular notion of representation, or a theory of the structure of government, or a particular sense of individual rights.
What is clear is that state interests were discussed in ratifying conventions as well as principles of governance. It is also clear that there was a “logic” to ratification, with individual states responding to the actions of others. To say that there was “momentum” in ratification oversimplifies a complex process. But states were influenced by their neighbors, and the rapid approval by three states in December, followed by two others in January, helped get ratification off to a good start.
