The crucial vote came on July 16. Madison and Gouverneur Morris each delivered a passionate plea for proportional representation in both branches of Congress, Morris somewhat melodramatically predicting civil war if the new government did not accurately represent the will of all its citizens. The nationalists were destined to lose this debate because voting in the convention followed the state-based model under the Articles that they were rejecting for the new Constitution. The so-called Great Compromise, also called the Connecticut Compromise because its chief sponsor came from that state, was a classic split-the-difference solution, making representation proportional in the House and state-based in the Senate, with two representatives for each state.41
Both Madison and Washington interpreted the compromise as a devastating defeat, because the principle of state sovereignty had been qualified but not killed. Writing in code to Jefferson in Paris, Madison shared his deep disappointment at the outcome, which blasted his hopes for a fully empowered national government. “I hazard an opinion,” he lamented, “that the plan should it be adopted will neither effectively answer the national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which everywhere excite disgust agst the state governments.” The new political framework was going to be partly national and partly federal, thereby leaving the all-important sovereignty question inherently ambiguous. He had not been able to keep his promise to Washington that only a radical, wholly national solution would be acceptable.42
Washington was slightly more sanguine. In a letter to his beloved Lafayette, he viewed the hybrid character of the proposed constitution as an inherently equivocal document that almost invited contradictory interpretations: “It is now a child of fortune to be fostered by some and buffeted by others. What will be the General opinion on, or reception of it, is not for me to decide, nor shall I say anything for or against it.” Given the diversity of opinions at the convention, however, Washington believed that “it was probably the best that could be obtained at this time.”43
The optimistic way to see it was that a consolidated American nation was still very much a work in progress, and the willfully ambiguous political architecture that the delegates in Philadelphia had constructed reflected not just the voting blocs at the convention, but also the still-embryonic status of American nationalism. The vast bulk of the citizenry was not ready for a fully empowered federal government. What the delegates in Philadelphia were giving them was a halfway house on the road to the promised land.
For our purposes, looking back at the way in which the political campaign to create the Constitutional Convention proceeded, a small group of uncompromising believers in America’s national potential—Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay—had orchestrated the strategy that produced the convention. And then Madison, taking the lead, had set the agenda for the convention with the Virginia Plan and drawn other nationalists like Gouverneur Morris and Wilson into his camp.
But in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, Madison and his nationalist colleagues lost control of the debate. Their national aspirations had always been far ahead of popular opinion. They were forced to learn a political lesson that leaders in any truly representative government, itself a new thing under the sun, had to learn: namely, that leadership sometimes means slowing down to allow stragglers to catch up. (Hamilton regarded this lesson as cowardice.) A small elite of like-minded souls could and did force a political debate that would otherwise not have happened. But once that debate moved to a larger arena that contained actors who did not share their radical assumptions, the definition of leadership changed. Compromise, the old enemy, became the new friend.
Better a confederated nation than a mere confederation. Better still a constitution that created the framework in which the question of federal versus state sovereignty was left ambiguous and therefore provided the political arena for an ongoing argument that would get clarified incrementally over a comfortable stretch of time, though never completely resolved.
Madison is customarily recognized as “Father of the Constitution,” and there are sound reasons why he merits that recognition, the chief ones being that he set the political agenda for the convention with his Virginia Plan, and he performed his Madisonian magic in behind-the-scenes strategy sessions with his fellow nationalists. But as the convention concluded, Madison would most probably have regarded such recognition as excessive and perplexing. He had, after all, lost all the major battles. And there is good reason to believe that, when he unfurled his most original idea about the political chemistry in a large republic, most delegates did not know what he was talking about.
There are also sound reasons why Madison should share the title with Gouverneur Morris. He was the only delegate to speak more frequently than Madison, and because of his massive ego, flamboyant style, and utter disregard for giving offense to his political enemies, the most forceful advocate for the national vision. He also delivered some of the most eloquent harangues against slavery, a topic on which Madison was mostly mute.
More important, while the Constitution was clearly the creation of many hands, Morris was the man who actually wrote it. Both Hamilton and Madison served with him on the Committee on Style and Arrangement in mid-September, but Madison later testified that it was Morris who gave the final draft of the document its “finish,” adding that “a better choice could not have been made, as the performance of the task proves.”44
Morris took the earlier draft prepared by the Committee on Detail and compressed the twenty-three articles in that somewhat legalistic and tangled version to seven, giving the final draft of the Constitution a clarity and accessibility that it had not previously possessed. Morris’s Constitution does not quite sing like Jefferson’s Declaration, which had the rhetorical advantage of being about founding principles rather than about the political structure to implement those principles. But Morris’s language cast the Constitution into an elevated format that rose above the nettlesome details of its content.
Finally, Morris revised the preamble of the previous draft in a fashion that has continued to echo through the ages. The Committee on Detail had written “We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island…” and then down the Atlantic coast on a state-by-state basis. Morris single-handedly chose to change that to “We the People of the United States.” This was not just a stylistic revision, for it imposed, at least verbally, a crucial and clear presumption that the rest of the document was designed to finesse: namely, that the newly created government operated directly on the whole American citizenry, not indirectly through the states. Just as Jefferson had smuggled an expansive liberal mandate into the Declaration, Morris smuggled the national agenda into the preamble of the Constitution. In retrospect, this was probably the most consequential editorial act in American history, the political equivalent at the end of the convention of Madison’s bold decision to impose a national agenda at the start.45
But the last word must go to the oldest and most venerable delegate at the convention, who captured with perfect pitch and homespun wisdom the mood of the moment. Benjamin Franklin was eighty-one, afflicted with kidney stones and gout, but he was one of the few delegates to attend every session, carried in on an elaborate sedan by four husky prisoners from the local jail. Most of his comments during the debates needed to be read by James Wilson, his Pennsylvania colleague, and they were often off-point or politically eccentric. He remained enamored, for example, with a single-house legislature in the mode of the Pennsylvania constitution, and he expressed his conviction that all government officials at the federal level should serve without pay. But his reputation as second only to Washington in stature meant that other delegates humored his suggestions, never questioned his judgment, and allowed his proposals to die respectfully and silently without a vote. There was an unspoken consensus that he was the wisest man in the room.
He lived up to that reputation on the last day of the convention with remarks, again delivered by Wilson, that were both elegantly pragmatic and poli
tically profound:
I confess that I do not entirely approve this Constitution at present, but Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For having lived long, I have experienced many Instances of being oblig’d, by better Information or fuller Consideration, to change opinions on important Subjects, which I once thought Right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow the more apt I am to doubt my own Judgment, and to pay more respect to the Judgment of others….
In these Sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its Faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us…. I doubt too whether any other Convention we can obtain, may be able to make a better Constitution…. It therefore astonishes me, Sir, to find this System approaching so near to Perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our Enemies, who are waiting with Confidence to hear that our Councils are Confounded, like those of the
Builders of Babel, and that our States are on the Point of Separation, only to meet, hereafter, for the Purpose of cutting one another’s throats. Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and I am not sure that it is not the best.46
Over two centuries later, we can safely say that the Constitution has stood the test of time and fulfilled Franklin’s fondest hopes. Almost inevitably, a mystic haze has formed around the document over the years, and words like miracle are used to describe its creation. No one present in Philadelphia at the time would have understood such a reverential gloss on the Constitution. Much later, several delegates recalled that “the hand of Providence” was at work. But Hamilton, Madison, and Washington all left town thinking they had failed to transform a confederation into a full-blooded nation.
Franklin’s eloquent elegy served to remind them that perfection was never in the cards, that they had, in fact, designed the framework for a government that assumed human imperfection, which turned out to be an elemental insight denied his French friends. Within that realistic context, they had done their best. The fact that they had been unable to resolve the question of federal versus state sovereignty, or even to face the moral implications of the slavery question, did not mean that they had failed but rather that, in the current political context, those issues were irresolvable. The Constitution had created a framework in which the argument could continue. For the present, that was the most that history allowed, even more than Franklin, with all his seasoned wisdom, had allowed himself to expect.
Chapter 6
THE GREAT DEBATE
When the transient circumstances and fugitive performances which attend this crisis shall have disappeared, that work [the Federalist Papers] will merit the notice of Posterity, [because it] identified the principles underlying our noble experiment in permanent and classical form.
George Washington to Alexander Hamilton
AUGUST 28, 1788
Up until the fall of 1787, the transition from a confederation of sovereign states to a nation-size republic had been instigated and managed by a quartet of prominent figures—Hamilton, Jay, Madison, and Washington. During the summer of that year, the list of leaders expanded, broadly speaking, to include all thirty-nine delegates who signed the Constitution. There were also several delegates who played a significant role in influencing the eventual shape of the final document, chiefly George Mason and Edmund Randolph, who harbored reservations that prevented them from signing, but the other key signers who most influenced the outcome were Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson, who might be regarded as significant supporting actors in the national story. Until September 1787, however, control over the debate about the future identity of the constellation of states called the United States had rested with a political elite, however broadly or narrowly defined, that had forced a conversation about the meaning of the American Revolution that otherwise would not have happened.
Starting in the fall of 1787 and continuing until the summer of 1788, this ongoing story entered a new chapter. Madison himself subsequently declared that it was the most important chapter of all:
Whatever veneration might be entertained for the body of men who formed our constitution, the sense of that body could never be regarded as an oracular guide in…expanding the constitution. As the instrument came from them, it was nothing more than the draught of a plan, nothing but a dead letter until life and validity were breathed into it, by the voice of the people, speaking through the several state conventions. If we were to look therefore, for the meaning of the instrument, we must look for it not in the general conventions, which proposed, but in the state conventions.1
In an elemental sense, Madison was surely right. For while the vast majority of American political leaders harbored a profound skepticism about the virtues of unbridled democracy, they all recognized that any erstwhile American republic must be based on a popular foundation. There were seminal moments, then, when prominent leaders needed to step aside and let “the people” decide. (Awkward aside: Madison was on the record as not believing that such a thing as “the people” existed.) And this was one such moment, when ordinary citizens assumed control of the debate, selecting delegates to state ratifying conventions for what would be a national referendum on the proposed Constitution.2
Such a vibrantly democratic moment had happened once before, in the summer of 1776. In response to a resolution of the Continental Congress requesting each colony to revise its colonial charter into a state constitution, the colonial legislatures had forwarded the request to all the counties within their jurisdictions. This became a de facto referendum on independence throughout all the towns, villages, and hamlets up and down the Atlantic coast. In a sense, this was the first and most palpably popular declaration of independence, for the referendum produced a landslide verdict for secession from the British Empire.3
The political context in the fall of 1787 required a second democratic moment, when the core issue at stake was presented to the full citizenry for their approval or rejection. In 1776 the issue had been independence. In 1787–88 it was nationhood. And partly because the process was drawn out for eight months, and partly because the American electorate was more divided on nationhood than it was on independence, the arguments that ensued in the ratifying conventions and in town meetings and family parlors from Maine to Georgia were spirited, indeed ferocious affairs. Without much doubt, one can sensibly say that this was the greatest political debate in American history, because nothing less than a viable American nation-state was at issue.4
And because the vast majority of the American populace had been wholly oblivious to the secret conversations occurring in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787, the publication of the Constitution was a dramatic and traumatic event for which they were unprepared. They now needed to be folded into a conversation from which they had previously been excluded. Who knew that a few men would propose not a mere revision, but a complete overhaul of the current political arrangement under the Articles?
It needs to be noticed, though, in this democratic chapter that the range of options was severely circumscribed, just as it had been in 1776. Then the up-or-down issue was the Declaration of Independence. Now it was the recently drafted Constitution. It is quite likely that a majority of the American citizenry would have preferred a revision of the Articles, but that option was not available. The choice was between sticking with the Articles in their current moribund condition or going with the Constitution in its present form. It was, in effect, a take-it-or-leave-it decision.
And so while the democratic phase of the story was impressively open-ended and wide-ranging, the parameters of the possible had already been established by those favored few in Philadelphia, and before them by an even smaller cohort of nationalists who had worked behind the scenes to make the Constitutional Convention happen. The inevitable cacophony of that democratic process had to fit itself into one of two preordained categories: confederation or nation. “The people,” to be sure, must have their say, but their vote must be either aye or nay.
Th
e diverse histories of the ratifying conventions had one thing in common: namely, an effort by opponents of ratification to create a middle course that defied that up-or-down option. That strategy first became clear in late October, when the Virginia legislature was drafting its charge to the state convention. Patrick Henry, who was expected to lead the opposition, argued that the delegates be urged “to adopt—reject—or amend the proposed Constitution.” A spirited debate then followed in which advocates of the Constitution successfully insisted on removal of the word amend. Although there were obviously huge political issues at stake in the ratification debates, tactical issues in the contested states determined the outcome, and the chief tactical goal of the nationalists was the refusal to permit critics of the Constitution to make ratification conditional upon amendments. As long as it remained a clear choice between the Articles and the Constitution, the nationalists enjoyed a distinct advantage.5
Three additional advantages also came their way, even before the ratification debates began. The Confederation Congress forwarded the Constitution to the state governments as requested and, after some confusion, did so unanimously. Many observers misinterpreted the unanimity of the vote as an endorsement of the Constitution itself rather than of the ratification process. “The appearance of unanimity will have its effects,” Washington commented to Madison, knowing that the true intentions of the Confederation Congress were being misconstrued: “Not every one has opportunities to peep behind the curtain, and as the multitude often judge by externals, the appearance of unanimity in that body, on this occasion, will be of great importance.”6
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 Page 16