“The presumptive evidence is pretty strong with regard to New England,” he concluded, meaning he predicted a sweep of all the states with the exception of Rhode Island, “whose folly and fraud have not yet finished their career.” Reports from Pennsylvania suggested that it was not going to be a runaway victory, as he initially expected, but a clear victory nonetheless. New Jersey and Delaware could be safely counted in the win column, as could Maryland, unless Virginia faltered, which might then bring both Maryland and North Carolina in its train. Virginia looked likely to Madison but still problematic because of the opposition of Henry, Mason, and perhaps Randolph. New York would be very difficult because of Clinton’s control of the upstate counties. Given the obvious political significance of Virginia and New York, the strategy should be to achieve the nine-state goal before their conventions met and thereby present their delegates with a fait accompli.25
All in all, Madison calculated that “the present appearance is in favor of the new Constitution.” The momentum of the ratification process worked to the advantage of the “Pros” and the disadvantage of the “Antis,” because pressure would build as each early state ratified, and quite fortuitously, the most questionable states would come at the end of the ratification sequence. Also, the supporters of ratification were united, “while the adversaries differ as much in their opposition as they do from the thing itself.”26
At the same time that he was counting delegates in his obsessive Madisonian mode, his thought process, or perhaps his way of thinking about the ratification process, was beginning to change as he read the newspaper essays and editorials from multiple states. It gradually dawned on him that if he had gotten what he wanted at the Philadelphia convention, the prospects for ratification of the Constitution would have been remote in the extreme. In a long and quite extraordinary letter to Jefferson, the fullest and clearest exposition of what the Constitutional Convention had achieved that Madison ever wrote, he described the hybrid creature that the Constitution had created as part confederation and part nation. The delegates had, willy-nilly, managed “to draw a line of demarcation which would give to the General Government every power requisite for general purposes, and leave to the states every power which might be most beneficial to them.”27
Left unsaid was that no one knew where that line existed, or what “general purposes” meant. Although it would take Madison several months to develop the full implications of this evolving idea, its outlines were already clear in the letter to Jefferson in late October 1787. The key insight might be called the beauty of ambiguity. Madison had misguidedly, he now realized, pushed for an unambiguous resolution of the sovereignty question during the convention. Now it was becoming clear to him that the great achievement of the convention, and of the Constitution as well, was to embrace the inconvenient truth that there was no consensus on the sovereignty question, either in the convention or in the country itself. So what they had created, albeit out of necessity rather then choice, was a political framework that deliberately blurred the sovereignty question.
Most historians and constitutional scholars over the last fifty years have agreed that Madison’s preconvention preparations constituted an impressively creative moment that effectively set the agenda for the debate in Philadelphia that summer. Few have recognized that Madison’s postconvention thinking constituted a second creative moment of equivalent or greater historical significance. For it produced a political perspective that had short-term consequences for the all-important ratification process and long-term consequences for how the Constitution should be comprehended as the defining document of the new, and eventually not so new, American republic.
In the short run, it meant that the advocates of ratification were defending the blueprint not for a new, wholly consolidated national government but rather for a halfway house that was partially federal and partially confederal. The multiple compromises reached in the Constitutional Convention over where to locate sovereignty accurately reflected the deep divisions in the American populace at large. There was a strong consensus that the state-based system under the Articles had proven ineffectual, but an equally strong apprehension about the political danger posed by any national government that rode roughshod over local, state, and regional interests, which were the familiar spaces where the vast majority of American lived out their lives. As Madison now realized, the Constitution created a federal structure that moved the American republic toward nationhood while retaining an abiding place for local and state allegiances. In that sense, it was a second American Revolution that took the form of an American Evolution, which allowed the citizenry to adapt gradually to its national implications.
In the long run—and this was probably Madison’s most creative insight—the multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently “living” document. For it was designed not to offer clear answers to the sovereignty question (or, for that matter, to the scope of executive or judicial authority) but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberative fashion. The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of “originalism” or “original intent,” this should be a disarming insight, since it made the Constitution the foundation for an ever-shifting political dialogue that, like history itself, was an argument without end. Madison’s “original intention” was to make all “original intentions” infinitely negotiable in the future.28
The following chart provides a succinct summary, in chronological order, of the ratification process in all thirteen states:
STATE DATE YAY / NAY
Delaware December 7, 1787 30–0
Pennsylvania December 12, 1787 46–23
New Jersey December 18, 1787 38–0
Georgia December 31, 1787 26–0
Connecticut January 8, 1788 128–40
Massachusetts February 6, 1788 187–168
(with amendments)
Maryland April 26, 1788 63–11
South Carolina May 26, 1788 149–73
New Hampshire June 21, 1788 57–47
(with amendments)
Virginia June 29, 1788 89–79
(with amendments)
New York July 26, 1788 30–27
(with amendments)
North Carolina November 21, 1789 194–77
(with amendments)
Rhode Island May 29, 1790 34–32
(with amendments)
At first glance, this list suggests that ratification of the Constitution enjoyed widespread popular support. Participation was broad-gauged, involving 1,646 delegates from all the states. In the end, not a single state refused to ratify, and majorities in seven states were overwhelming. In that sense, the Great Debate produced a resounding vote for American nationhood that approximated the resounding vote for American independence in the summer of 1776.
A closer look, however, tends to undermine such a comfortable conclusion. The vote in three of the largest states—Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York—was extremely close. A clear majority actually opposed ratification in New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island, which grudgingly came along late in the game, after the nine-vote quota had been reached. The insistence on amendments in six of the states reflected a deep dissatisfaction with the all-or-nothing terms of the debate. The major achievement of the pro-ratification side was to insist that all amendments were only recommendations, that ratification could not be made contingent on their adoption. (Holding that line was Madison’s all-consuming political goal throughout the ratification process.) A near majority in Massachusetts and Virginia, and a large majority in New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island, preferred their amendments to be conditional, with ratification occurring only after a second convention took them into account.
To say, then, that ratification represented a clear statement about the will of the American people in 1787–88 would be grossly misleading. What ratification really represen
ted was the triumph of superior organization, more talented leadership, and a political process that had been designed from the start to define the options narrowly (i.e., up or down), and the successful outcome broadly (i.e., nine states). And despite their built-in advantages, it was still a close call. A shift of six votes in Virginia would have probably produced a shock wave that left four states—Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island—out of the union. And even though nine states had ratified, so that the Constitution was legally adopted, it is difficult to imagine an American nation surviving in such a geographically splintered condition.
The chart also obscures the fact that the ratification debate in each state was driven by local and state-based concerns rather than by the larger question of confederation or nation. It seems almost sacrilegious to think it, much more to say it, but in the Great Debate overarching political principles became a minor theme in large part because the vast majority of delegates did not know how to think nationally, since nothing in their experience had prepared them to do so. In that sense, they were more representative of the American populace than their predecessors in Philadelphia. The net result was a twelve-ring circus—Rhode Island remaining an outlier—in which each state convention became a separate arena filled with performers playing to local constituencies.
In Massachusetts, for example, the outcome was much closer than Madison or Washington had predicted, partly because some delegates from the Maine district believed that ratification would endanger their looming bid for statehood, partly because farmers from the western towns and counties, some of them former Shaysites, preferred the vastly inflated state currency to pay off their debts and instinctively opposed any political initiative coming from Boston. The narrow margin of victory was rendered possible when John Hancock proposed a procedure that was subsequently copied by five other states: namely, the delegates would vote on ratification, then vote on recommended amendments to the Constitution. This allowed delegates with doubts to endorse ratification while still expressing their state-based reservations. In the end, six states submitted 124 proposed amendments, most of which were intended to impose restrictions on federal authority.29
While all states were different, among the big states New York was the most different of all. Governor George Clinton, the most popular politician in the state, was an adamant opponent of ratification, with patronage powers in the upstate counties that ensured an overwhelming majority in the convention. New York’s economy was flourishing, in part because of a state tariff on imports that it did not wish to share, in part because of its policy of foreclosing on loyalist estates in violation of the Treaty of Paris. Ratification, therefore, would have undermined Clinton’s power base and restricted New York’s two major streams of revenue. Though both Jay and Hamilton were poised to deliver their eloquence to the New York ratification convention, Clinton’s followers were impervious to argument.
Again, the most salient point to notice is that the debate over American nationhood in the ratifying conventions was driven by state and local concerns that were maddeningly diverse, thoroughly provincial, and utterly oblivious to the larger issues at stake. (Virginia, as we shall see, was somewhat of an exception.) Only one modern historian, Pauline Maier, has been willing and able to master the twelve separate stories in their excruciating detail. But the fact that there are twelve distinct stories is, in truth, the most revealing story of all, for it exposes the elemental fact that the vast majority of Americans were not yet capable of a national conversation as a coherent collective. Local and state borders were as far as they could see and, for the opponents of ratification, as far as any meaningful version of representative government should reach.30
The same men who had instigated the calling of the Constitutional Convention, recruited Washington to the task, and imposed the national agenda in Philadelphia now took the lead in attempting to orchestrate the ratification process. Between November 1787 and March 1788, Hamilton (51), Madison (29), and Jay (5), wrote eighty-five essays under the common pseudonym Publius entitled the Federalist Papers. It was a project conceived by Hamilton, who recruited Jay and Madison to the task. Over the ensuing centuries the Federalist Papers have assumed the stature of an iconic text, the classic expression of the great deliberation about the viability of a nation-size republican government.
In several senses, this reputation is both unwarranted and misleading. The Federalist Papers were, in fact, perhaps the supreme example of improvisational journalism, composed against tight deadlines without much time for deliberation at all. Madison later claimed that he was making changes as the printer set the type. And Hamilton, whose phenomenal output in such a brief time almost defies credibility, began the series writing on scrap paper atop a wooden box while traveling on a sloop between New York City and Albany.31
Even our modern inclination to see the Federalist Papers as the seminal statement of “the original intentions” of the framers is historically incorrect, since Publius represented only one side of the ratification debate—the winning side, to be sure, but a wholly partisan perspective. Finally, the Federalist Papers were aimed not at posterity but at a limited audience of the moment. As Madison later explained, Publius was intended “to promote the ratification of the new Constitution by the State of N. York, where it was powerfully opposed, and where success was deemed of critical importance.” Scholarly studies of its distribution beyond New York suggest a very limited influence. It is highly likely the Federalist Papers have exercised a larger effect on our later perceptions of the debate over ratification than they did over the debate itself.32
All that said, the Federalist Papers remain an American masterpiece—mostly Hamilton’s masterpiece—the classical statement for the viability of a nation-size republic. Washington was remarkably prescient on this score. When Hamilton presented him with a two-volume edition in August 1788, Washington offered the following opinion:
I have read every performance which has been printed on one side and the other on the question lately agitated and regarded the Production of your Triumvirate as best by far…. When the transient circumstances and fugitive performances which attend this crisis shall have disappeared, that work will merit the notice of Posterity, [because it] identified the principles underlying our noble experiment in permanent and classical form.33
Posterity has tended to confirm Washington’s prediction, though it required more than a century for it to come true. In the twentieth century Madison’s Federalist 10 became the most analyzed political essay in American history, so convincing in its argument for the viability of a large-scale republic that one is left to wonder why Montesquieu’s argument on the other side was ever taken seriously. Or consider these words from Federalist 51, also an obligatory entry in any modern textbook on the origins of American government:
But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the greatest difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is no doubt the primary control on government, but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.34
Parsing those last two words, “auxiliary precautions,” might require a semester-long course in American political science. Madison was rather elliptically attempting to distinguish between a democracy and a republic, suggesting that the structure of the government proposed in the Constitution was designed to sift popular opinion through multiple layers of deliberation in order to distill the long-term interest of the American republic.
While how we read Publius today is not irrelevant, for historical purposes it is more relevant to recognize, as Washington suggested, that it was a distinctive voice in the ratification debates. No coordinated effort appeared on the oth
er side. There was no such thing as the Antifederalist Papers. Even more relevant and revealing, almost all opponents of ratification wrote from a state-based perspective, and the vast majority of delegates in the ratifying conventions, including those who voted for ratification, did so for state-based reasons. Only Publius spoke from a national perspective.
One partial exception to the rule on the “Anti” side was Centinel, an otherwise obscure Philadelphia writer named Samuel Bryan. Centinel attacked a core assumption of Publius’s, made most forcefully by Hamilton in Federalist 1, that the current government was about to dissolve into a series of regional confederacies: “This hobgoblin appears to have sprung from the deranged brain of Publius, a New York writer who, mistaking sound for argument, has with Herculean labour accumulated myriads of unmeaning sentences and mechanically endeavored to enforce conviction by a torrent of misplaced words…. The writer has devoted much time in combating chimeras of his own creation.”35
Even Centinel, however, delivered his criticism from a Pennsylvania perspective. As far as he could tell, most of the citizens of his state were perfectly content with the current arrangement under the Articles. This did not meet the crux of Hamilton’s argument about the growing national debt and the currently moribund condition of the Confederation Congress, because Centinel was essentially arguing that most Pennsylvanians did not care about such things. By insisting that the central issue required a national vision that transcended state and local mentalities, Publius was assuming that the Constitutional Convention had created a new political context within which local and state opinions needed to be subordinated. The new Constitution, then, was like a new ship of state prepared to carry most Americans to a more expansive definition of their identity, whether they wanted to go there or not.
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 Page 18