Second, ratification became much more likely when the Confederation Congress silently accepted Article VII of the Constitution, which declared that the new government would go into effect after nine states had ratified. Technically, this was an illegal provision, since the procedural rules under the Articles required a unanimous vote for any amendments. The delegates in Philadelphia, many of them veteran observers of the gridlock in the Confederation Congress, most especially Rhode Island’s recalcitrance on the impost, realized a unanimous requirement for ratification would have been politically suicidal, since Rhode Island had already declared its intention to boycott the ratification process, just as it had boycotted the convention. They simply decided on their own that nine states constituted a sufficient consensus, probably drawing on the provision in the Articles requiring nine votes for all major legislation.7
There was a hidden as well as an obvious advantage to the nine-vote requirement, and Madison, ever the political operative, was the first to recognize it. “It is generally believed that nine States at least will embrace the plan,” he predicted, “consequently that the tardy remainder must be reduced to the dilemma of either shifting for themselves or coming in without any credit for it.” The chronological sequence of the state ratifying conventions only enhanced this momentum factor. Virginia and New York, two of the largest states where opposition was most formidable, came late in the schedule, so that political pressure to ratify would build in the spring and early summer of 1788 to recognize that opposition was a lost cause. Madison believed that political arguments would become irrelevant once nine states had ratified.8
Finally, before the debates began, the advocates for ratification won the rhetorical battle by claiming the title Federalists, which left their opponents with the limp label Antifederalists. This nomenclature was both inaccurate and grossly unfair to the “Antis.” Both sides were really federalists, the difference being how they wished to apportion authority between the federal government and the states. (A more accurate set of labels would have been nationalists versus confederationists.) In the predebate skirmishes, then, the maneuvering for both votes and vocabulary went to the pro-Constitution side. It also helped that only twelve of the ninety American newspapers and magazines gave equivalent space to the opponents of ratification. The press was decidedly pronationalist.9
From the beginning, then, the “Antis” were placed on the political defensive. As Madison kept mentioning, their cause was further burdened by the fact that they did not agree on what they wanted in lieu of the Constitution. Was it more modest reform of the Articles, amendments to the proposed Constitution, or a second Constitutional Convention that would take into account their grievances? They agreed on what they were against, but not on what they were for. In that sense, the term Antis was accurate.
On the other hand, the opponents of ratification enjoyed one enormous ideological advantage: namely, that the government proposed in the Constitution defied the principles of the American Revolution as understood in 1776. Given the size and scale of a nation-size American republic, the very definition of representation would have to change. How, for example, could a representative in the House really know the needs and interests of his thirty thousand constituents? How could Virginians agree to be taxed because voters in New England decided to do so? At a time when distance made a huge difference, how could a faraway federal government possibly fathom the thoughts and feelings of farmers on the frontier?
The proposed Constitution, therefore, required a fundamental political and psychological shift in the meaning of the American Revolution. With one crucial exception, all the arguments that American colonists had made against Parliament and the king in 1776 applied equally to the government created in the Constitution in 1787. The obvious difference was that the colonists had not been represented in Parliament, whereas they were represented in the House and the Senate under the Constitution. But were they? It came back to how you defined representation. Given the local orientation of the vast majority of Americans, the Constitution was proposing the creation of a strange new world that defied their limited horizons.
The enemies of ratification, then, were speaking for the original impulse of the American Revolution. By all rights, to the extent that the ratification process accurately reflected the will of the American citizenry, the opponents should have enjoyed a clear political advantage. But they did not, because the framework for the debate had been controlled by a small group of nationalists, who were overrepresented in most of the state ratifying conventions. As a result, on the eve of the ratification debates, the momentum belonged to the nationalists.10
Despite the political and tactical advantages they enjoyed, none of the chief instigators of the political process that produced the Constitution was fully satisfied with the result. Washington, like Madison, preferred a clearer delineation of federal over state sovereignty, but after witnessing the debates in Philadelphia, he realized that compromise on that crucial question was unavoidable. “I am fully persuaded it is the best that can be obtained at the present moment,” he explained to Benjamin Harrison, “under such diversity of ideas as prevail.”11
His posture of studied indifference was just that, a posture. (Conspicuous aloofness came so naturally to Washington that it is often difficult to know when he was acting and when he was just being himself.) Throughout the fall of 1787 he was clearly acting, since his private correspondence is dominated by letters to and from Hamilton, Madison, Knox, and Lafayette on the prospects of ratification, most especially in the key states of Virginia and New York, where the opposition was likely to include some powerful figures. He and Madison shared their disappointment in the defection of George Mason to the other side, which Madison found bizarre and Washington found unforgivable. Mason had been a close neighbor and long-standing friend, but all communication now ceased between Mount Vernon and Gunston Hall. Washington had purchased an English translation of Don Quixote before leaving Philadelphia, an odd choice for a man indisposed to tilt at windmills; it was more appropriate for Mason, who was now making himself the Don Quixote of the ratification process.12
Washington was outraged when his remarks on the Constitution—namely, that he was “fully persuaded that it is the best that can be obtained at this time, and that it or disunion is before us”—were leaked to the press by Charles Carter, a correspondent he customarily consulted on agricultural matters. He chastised Carter for the indiscretion, claiming that he had played his last public role at the Constitutional Convention and now wished to return to his Cincinnatus mode. While utterly sincere, he was obviously not a disinterested spectator, since nothing less than the meaning of his revolutionary legacy was at stake.13
Hamilton, so unlike Washington in his preference for conspicuous engagement, had already gone on the offensive in New York. On the last day of the Constitutional Convention he had made a plea for a unanimous vote from his fellow delegates. “No man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his were known to be,” Madison recorded in his notes, “but [Hamilton asked] is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and Convulsion on the one side, and the change of good to be expected on the other?” Hamilton realized that his preference for a more energetic and fully empowered federal government, with unlimited terms for the president and senators, was beyond the pale of political possibility. But even though he had once been the most outspoken critic of the lingering ambiguities about federal versus state sovereignty enshrined in the Constitution, he now pivoted in the face of political reality to make himself their most ardent defender.14
In a series of essays in The New York Daily Advertiser, he focused his fire on George Clinton, the most powerful politician in New York, whose network of political operatives upstate gave him nearly complete control of delegate selection to the ratifying convention. In a series of blistering polemics, Hamilton accused Clinton of preferring the preservation of his own power base in New York to the larger interests of American nationhood. “Such conduct in a man
high in office,” he accused, “argues greater attachment to his own power than to the public good.” Clinton’s desire to maintain his own political bailiwick led him, wrote Hamilton, to the preposterous conclusion that “the current confederation is equal to the purpose of the union.” It was clear to Hamilton that New York’s size and commercial advantage should make it a major player in the newly configured American republic. But Clinton and his minions were committed to a more provincial agenda, rooted in their own local and state-based interests. The future beckoned, Hamilton lamented, but Clinton insisted upon living in the past.15
Hamilton loved a fight, but even he was surprised at the ad hominem character of the response from Clinton’s devoted disciples. A pair of newspaper articles with the byline “Inspector” portrayed Hamilton as “Tom Shit,” a bastard of mixed racial origins, and referred to Washington as his “immaculate daddy,” both total fabrications that haunted Hamilton’s reputation for the rest of his life and beyond. Critics also accused him of being an arrogant blowhard whose reputation depended entirely on his association with Washington, who had eventually recognized that he was a pompous charlatan and removed him as aide-de-camp. This was a willful distortion—Washington’s trust in Hamilton was nearly bottomless, and he had released him from his duties as aide at Hamilton’s request, in order to assume a combat command at Yorktown. “They say that I palmed myself upon you and you dismissed me from your family,” Hamilton wrote somewhat plaintively to Washington. “This I confess hurt my feelings, and if it obtains credit, will require a contradiction.”
Washington responded immediately with a letter that Hamilton quickly shared with the New York press: “I do therefore, explicitly declare that both charges are entirely unfounded.” This should have sufficed to squash the blatant innuendo against Hamilton, but most newspaper editors in the state, who were in Clinton’s pocket, refused to publish it. New York was clearly going to be a nasty political arena during the ratification debates, in which the power of the Clinton political machine made it the most challenging opponent to ratification, a place where argument was irrelevant because Clinton’s supporters enjoyed more than a two-to-one majority and therefore felt no need to listen or compromise.16
Nothing in Hamilton’s life had prepared him to accept defeat, so he remained convinced that New York would be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the new national order once nine states ratified. He summarized his thoughts in a diary-like essay entitled “Conjectures About the New Constitution.” Ratification was likely, he surmised, since the alternatives were civil war or dissolution into several regional confederacies. Hamilton’s thought process was inherently and instinctively futuristic, meaning that it depended on realistic calculations about where history was headed and then aligned itself with those prevailing currents. In this case, it meant that ratification was a foregone conclusion, as was Washington’s election as the first president. After that, the picture blurred, but Hamilton speculated that the large states would be broken up, and all the states reduced to merely administrative agencies without any political power. If that did not occur, there would probably be a civil war based on sectional differences over slavery. His political instincts were characteristically bold and prescient.17
Because his selection as a delegate had been blocked by the Clinton partisans, Jay had not experienced the nerve-racking intensity of the debates in Philadelphia, so he reviewed the results of the convention from his perch in New York, where his major task was to provide a single voice for foreign policy amid a hapless Confederation Congress that was essentially living in limbo while it waited to learn whether it had been declared defunct. A letter to John Adams conveyed Jay’s almost mystical conviction that the outcome of the looming debate was foreordained, much like the war for independence, and once you knew that, you could afford to be patient about the bumps in the road to the ultimate destination and be graceful in your attitude toward the beleaguered and misguided opposition.
The public mind is much occupied by the Plan of federal Govt. recommended by the late Convention…. The majority seems at present to be in its Favor. For my part I think it much better than the one we have, and therefore that we will be Gainers in the Exchange, especially as there is Reason to hope that experience and the good Sense of the People will correct what may prove to be inexpedient in it. A compact like this, which is the result of accommodation and compromise, cannot be supposed to be perfectly consonant to the wishes of any of the Parties.18
Like Hamilton, Madison, and Washington, Jay preferred a stronger statement of federal sovereignty, but that had proved politically impossible. So be it. Unlike Madison, who loved to linger in the details, Jay tended to focus on the broad outlines of the outcome, which moved the United States from a powerless confederation of sovereign states to a more coherent and energetic federal government whose range of power would be determined in the future. Accusations by the opposition about the tyrannical tendencies of a consolidated national government could best be handled pragmatically, on a case-by-case basis, where they were likely to be exposed as paranoid delusions.
Jay knew that he was likely to be elected as a delegate to the New York ratifying convention, and in the end he received more votes than any other nominee. Not a man to harbor illusions, he also realized from the start that, because of Clinton’s dominant role in New York politics, the nationalists were likely to be outgunned and outvoted in the New York convention. But he had a panoramic perspective on the ratification process. “I am inclined to think that the Constitution will be adopted in this State,” he wrote Washington, “especially if our eastern Neighbours should generally come into the Measure.” In other words, ratification in New York would depend on what happened elsewhere, creating irresistible pressure to join the union once nine states ratified. His mind began with the assumption that ratification was inevitable, then plotted the only course for it to happen in New York. Events proved him right on both counts, and no one was prepared to be more gracious in victory than Jay.19
Unlike Jay, who had been watching from afar, Madison had spent the entire summer deeply engaged in the endless debates in Philadelphia, and he returned to his seat in the Confederation Congress both exhausted and deeply disappointed. Unlike Hamilton, who immediately shifted gears despite his personal reservations and moved into advocacy mode, Madison was temporarily paralyzed, blaming himself for the failure of the Constitution to resolve forever the sovereignty question. The opportunity to create a fully empowered national government, he wrote in code to Jefferson, had come and gone.20
Jefferson was somewhat mystified by Madison’s message, in part because, even more than Jay, he enjoyed the luxury of distance from the debates in Philadelphia, and in part because he did not share Madison’s robust national agenda. He confided to Madison that a federal veto of state laws struck him as unnecessarily excessive, “like mending a small hole by covering the whole garment.” Jefferson always made it a practice to listen to the political advice of his younger protégé, so it is an intriguing but unanswerable question what side he would have taken if present in Philadelphia. His deepest convictions clearly lay on the confederation side of the political equation. Madison was Jefferson’s most trusted political disciple, but for the moment they were not properly aligned.21
As he struggled to recover his political balance, Madison wrote to William Short, Jefferson’s secretary in Paris, to ask what the European savants thought of the new Constitution:
I shall learn with much solicitude the comments of the philosophical statesmen of Europe on this new fabric of American policy. Unless however their future criticisms should evince a more thorough knowledge of our situation than many of their past, my curiosity will not be rewarded with much instruction.22
Madison knew full well that most European observers—with a few French exceptions—expected and wanted the American experiment with a large-scale republic to fail. And again for the moment, he was worried that their hopes would be fulfilled because of his own fail
ure to win the big battles in Philadelphia. He was living alone in bachelor quarters in New York City, waiting for the Confederation Congress, which was barely on life support, to gather a quorum. He was in a funk.
What pulled him out of his sour mood was news from the field that the “Great Debate” had begun in the newspapers, and the states were beginning to select delegates for their conventions. “The newspapers in the middle & Northern States begin to teem with controversial publications,” Madison reported to Edmund Randolph, adding that the major criticism seemed to be that the Constitution lacked a bill of rights. (One could invent many elaborate reasons for the absence of a bill of rights, and Madison proceeded to do just that, but the real reason was that the delegates in Philadelphia were thoroughly exhausted after a summer of intense debates, and by September they wanted to go home.) Madison entered his lawyerlike mode again, just as he had before the Constitutional Convention, preparing rebuttals of the arguments beginning to emerge from the opposition. His very real reservations about that document now needed to be suppressed and concealed, lest they contaminate his case and endanger the verdict.23
In the end, Madison believed that the verdict would be decided not by arguments but by the makeup of the state ratifying conventions, where the vast majority of delegates would vote their interests, which could not be changed by the eloquence of one side or the other. So he put on his other hat as backroom politician and began to assemble a state-by-state assessment of the likely voting blocs. Again, this was the kind of nitty-gritty politics that a Virginia statesman was supposed to regard as an affront to his dignity, but Madison found it invigorating.24
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 Page 17