New York’s somewhat mischievous intentions were fully exposed in a circular letter sent by Governor Clinton to all the states, arguing that there needed to be a second convention if the multiple amendments recommended by six of the states were not acted on promptly by the newly elected government. There was also a veiled threat that New York intended to secede from the union if its recommended amendments were ignored. Ever the aggressor, Hamilton then proceeded to issue his own not-so-veiled threat that if New York seceded from the union, the New York City region would secede from New York.54
Both Washington and Madison regarded New York’s circular letter as a last-ditch attempt to subvert ratification of the Constitution. Washington thought the letter would have “an insidious tendency…to serve as a standard to which the disaffected might resort.” As he put it to Madison, “to be shipwrecked in sight of the Port would be the severest of all aggravations.” Madison concurred, describing New York’s circular letter as an “act of desperation with a most pestilent tendency.”55
Somewhat strangely, Jay endorsed the circular letter and even had a major hand in its drafting. He had made a career out of being his own man, and in this instance, much as in his handling of the Mississippi Question, he concluded that a temporary concession would do no harm, especially if you knew that your cause would triumph in the end. “I think we should not have much danger to apprehend of it,” he apprised Washington, “especially if the new Government should in the mean Time recommend itself to the People by the wisdom of its Proceedings, which I flatter myself will be the Case.”56
Jay apparently believed that New York was engaging in a political tantrum, an exercise in bravado in response to the unacceptable fact of its political irrelevance in the ratification process. Since they had provided no deadline for acceptance of their amendments, Jay observed, the Clintonites were clearly bluffing. Best to humor them, harmlessly endorse their sense of significance, then fold them into the union with their honor intact.
Although Madison, who for good reasons regarded himself as the chief conductor of the ratification symphony, spent most of August and September 1788 worrying that New York’s desperate gambit might transform the music of ratification into a cacophony, events proved Jay’s judgment correct. New York had no desire to become a larger version of Rhode Island.
Once ratification was assured, Washington tried to explain how a political movement for a national government, which only two years earlier had appeared hopeless, had somehow managed to overcome the odds and triumph. “A multiplicity of circumstances…appear to have cooperated in bringing about the happy resolution,” he observed, citing Shays’ Rebellion as a near calamity that prompted the calling of the Constitutional Convention, “which then ushered us to permanent national felicity.” In the same ironic vein, he thought that the very hopelessness of the task, and the strength of the opposition, “had called forth abilities which would otherwise not perhaps been exerted that have thrown new lights on the science of Government [i.e., the Federalist Papers], that have given the rights of man a full and fair discussion.”57
Washington had developed a flair for providential interpretations during the war, when he had firsthand experience with the way American independence, what he called “The Cause,” had experienced multiple moments when everything was at stake, and providence—the fates, pure luck, whatever one wished to call it—had come to the rescue just when all seemed lost. He was now bringing that same providential perspective to the ratification of the Constitution. In both instances, as he saw it, America seemed to be destiny’s child.
A more secular and less spiritual interpretation would emphasize the role of what historians, somewhat awkwardly, call human agency. In Washington’s version of how history happened, the gods were always in control. And perhaps they were. But on this earth, rather than in the heavens, four men made history happen in a series of political decisions and actions that, in terms of their consequences, have no equal in American history. And they were not quite through.
Chapter 7
FINAL PIECES
You will permit me to say that it is indispensible you should lend yourself to its [the government’s] first operation. It is of little use to have introduced a system if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment, in the outset.
Alexander Hamilton to George Washington
AUGUST 13, 1788
Hamilton took the lead during the final phase of the story, which was all about ensuring that the new federal government was administered by men of talent who were committed to making the experiment with a large-scale republican government work. Down in Virginia, Patrick Henry was already moving to avenge his defeat in Richmond by pressuring the legislature to select for the Senate men who had opposed ratification, thereby blocking Madison’s election, though he could not prevent Madison’s election to the House. Up in New York, George Clinton was pursuing the same strategy, designed to make the New York delegation a Trojan horse within the new federal fortress, all the while pressing for a second convention as described in his “circulatory letter,” which was obviously a recipe for reversing the verdict recently reached in the ratification process.1
Hamilton again focused most of his fire on New York, launching a campaign to oppose Clinton’s candidates for the Senate and the Electoral College. He also published fourteen essays in the Daily Advertiser under the pseudonym “H.R.,” attacking Clinton’s character, his obstructionist political motives, and his corrupt system of patronage. Beyond much doubt, Hamilton was the most skilled political polemicist in America, and he brought the same incredible energy he had displayed as Publius to the task at hand. The Constitution, he believed, was only words on parchment, outlining the framework for a new kind of American republic. Unless those words and framework were implemented by representatives devoted to its success, not men seeking to sabotage its very survival, all the work of the past two years would be for naught.2
There was one person who was utterly indispensable, the only man in America capable of transcending the local, state, and regional divisions, the “singular figure” whom every American could agree embodied the American Revolution in all its multiple manifestations. Like everyone else, Hamilton assumed that George Washington would become the first president of the United States, and a number of delegates to the Constitutional Convention and state ratifying conventions had voted to endorse the Constitution primarily on the presumption that Washington would head the new federal government.
There was, however, one man in America who did not share that presumption, and it happened to be Washington himself. Ever since the spring of 1788, when the prospects for ratification began to look likely, Washington had seen fit to apprise all who inquired that he was permanently embedded beneath his vines and fig tree at Mount Vernon and had no desire or intention to budge. “I am so wedded to a state of retirement,” he explained, “and find the occupations of a rural life so congenial with my feelings, that to be drawn into public life at this advanced age would be a sacrifice that could afford no compensation.”3
Eloquent testimonials in the Ciceronian style to the bucolic pleasures of retirement were a familiar refrain within the planter class of Virginia. But Washington was not just posing within that rhetorical tradition. “As the great searcher of human hearts is my witness,” he insisted, “I have no wish which aspires beyond the humble and happy lot of living and dying a private citizen on my own farm.”4
It fell to Hamilton to apprise his old commander that, whether he knew it or not, he really had no choice:
I take it for granted, Sir, you have concluded to comply with what will no doubt be the general call of your country in relation to the new government. You will permit me to say that it is indispensible you should lend yourself to its first operation. It is of little use to have introduced a system if the weightiest influence is not given to its firm establishment, in the outset.5
In effect, once he stepped back onto the public stage in Philadelphia, he
had committed himself to the success of the nation-size republican experiment, and there was now no way he could avoid leading the launch.
Washington thanked his old aide-de-camp for this “manly advice” but confessed that it left him feeling deeply depressed, overwhelmed by “a kind of gloom,” and he wanted Hamilton to know that acceptance of the presidency “would be attended with more diffidence and reluctance than ever I experienced before in my life.”6
Hamilton knew Washington well enough to realize that he was not being coy. So he made another kind of argument designed to appeal to his historical aspirations. If the new federal government should fail, he observed, “the framers of it will have to encounter the disrepute of having brought about a revolution in government…that was not worth the effort. They pulled down one Utopia, it will be said, to build another.” If that should happen, Hamilton warned, Washington’s place in history would be compromised, an outcome that “will suggest to your mind greater hazard to that fame which must be and ought to be dear to you.” But in the end, Hamilton concluded, all of Washington’s anguish was irrelevant, because “the crisis which brought you again into public view has left you no alternative but to comply.”7
No president in American history wanted to be president less than Washington. And yet, as Hamilton made clear to him, no man in America was so essential to enhance the prospects for success of the emerging nation. As Henry Lee, Washington’s old cavalry commander, put it, “It is a sacrifice on your part, unjustifiable from any personal point of view. But on the other hand, no alternative seems to be presented.”8
Washington attempted to find an escape route by declaring that any announcement of his candidacy would be regarded as a conspicuous expression of his ambition, which in his political universe was dishonorable behavior that essentially disqualified him from office. He liked to refer to the fable about the fox “who inveighed against the sourness of grapes, because he could not reach them.”9
This was a desperate gambit on his part, an effort to dodge the inevitable, but also utterly irrelevant because there was no need for him to stand for office or declare his candidacy. There were, as yet, no political primaries or nominating conventions. The electors in each state were free to select anyone they wished. The winner became the president, and the runner-up became the vice president. The only way that Washington could have avoided election was by refusing to serve if chosen. And Hamilton had already told him why he could not do that. Washington did confide to Knox that “my movement to the Chair of Government will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.” But it was a virtual certainty that he would be elected in a landslide.10
Virtual certainty, however, was not enough for Hamilton. From Hamilton’s perspective, Washington’s election was utterly essential if the American experiment was to succeed. He began to conjure up a nightmare scenario in which, as he put it, “the defect in the Constitution which renders it possible that the man intended for Vice President may in fact turn up President.” This was an extremely far-fetched fear, and events eventually proved it utterly illusory. But it was a measure of Hamilton’s obsession with ensuring Washington’s election that he decided to take no chances. So he moved behind the scenes to rig the election.11
Political polls, of course, did not exist, but there was an informed consensus that John Adams was likely to finish second and become vice president, probably with unanimous support in New England and most of the northern states. Hamilton lobbied friends in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to throw away their electoral votes for Adams in favor of lesser candidates, in order to prevent an accidental Adams presidency. Hamilton claimed that he had nothing against Adams, indeed would welcome him as the first vice president. But Adams was not Washington—no one was—and even the slightest risk that Adams might sneak in ahead of Washington was a risk not worth running.
In the end, it made no difference. When the electoral votes were counted, all sixty-nine electors voted for Washington, making him the unanimous choice. Adams finished second with thirty-four electoral votes, probably five or ten votes less than he would have received without Hamilton’s machinations.
Hamilton had unnecessarily given credence to the view that the transition from confederation to nation was an inherently corrupt conspiracy. Neither Washington, nor Madison, nor Jay would have countenanced what he did. Indeed, Washington would have been outraged that Hamilton had placed a dishonorable stain on his presidency. But at the time Hamilton cared not a whit about such hostile accusations. The only relevant fact was that Washington would be at the helm of the American ship of state when she sailed.
There was one final ingredient that needed to be added to the institutional equation in order to ensure the prospects for success. Over the course of the ratification debate, it had become abundantly clear that the biggest mistake made by the delegates at the Constitutional Convention had been to omit a bill of rights from the final draft of the document. As mentioned earlier, the underlying reasons for this failure were more prosaic than profound: basically, the delegates were exhausted after a summer of intense work and wanted to go home.
During the ratification debates, both Madison and James Wilson developed elaborate political arguments to justify the absence of a bill of rights, essentially insisting that there was no need for such a thing because the Constitution gave only enumerated powers to the new federal government, making explicit guarantees of personal rights (i.e., the right to a jury trial, freedom of the press, freedom of speech) unnecessary since they were already embedded in the state constitutions. Madison added the somewhat strained argument that assembling such a list of rights was actually dangerous, because one could never know if the list would be sufficiently comprehensive and complete.
But as the debates in the state ratifying conventions demonstrated, many reluctant delegates did not buy that argument, and the major reason given by those opposing ratification was the absence of a bill of rights that would provide a clear zone of immunity from federal intrusion into their private lives and into the more proximate authority of their local and state governments. Of the 124 different amendments proposed by six states, the vast majority focused on fears of federal power, which a bill of rights would have considerably mollified.12
If Hamilton took the lead in ensuring that Washington would be the first president, Madison took the lead in correcting the mistake that he and the other delegates in Philadelphia had made by failing to provide a bill of rights. His motives were almost entirely political. While we tend to regard (and capitalize) the Bill of Rights as a secular version of the Ten Commandments handed down by God to Moses, Madison saw it as a weapon to be wielded against opponents of the Constitution, like Henry and Clinton, who were pushing the second convention proposal, which Madison regarded as a thinly veiled attempt to undo all that he and his fellow collaborators had accomplished.13
There would be no need for a second convention if the first Congress passed a bill of rights that addressed the legitimate concerns of those who had opposed ratification. He announced a shift in his position in January 1789. “Whatever opinion may be entertained at this point,” he wrote, “it is evident that the change of situation produced by the establishment of the Constitution, leaves me in common with the other friends of the Constitution, free, and consistent in espousing such a revisal of it, as will either make it better in itself, or without making it worse, will make it appear better to those who now dislike it.” The first Congress, not a second convention, was the proper place to amend the Constitution, and he vowed to lead that effort: “It is, accordingly, my sincere opinion, and wish, that in order to effect these purposes, the Congress, which is to meet in March, should undertake the salutary work.” By having the revisions to the Constitution occur in the first Congress, the authority of the new federal government would actually be enhanced, whereas the unspoken agenda of second convention advocates was to undermine that authority. Madison’s chief goal wa
s to disarm the outright opponents of the Constitution and to demonstrate his good faith with those reluctant ratifiers who had recommended all those amendments, thereby drawing them into the fold just as Jay had envisioned.14
While Madison’s motives for switching his position were thoroughly political, his thinking about the role of a bill of rights in the Constitution was intellectually complicated. His experience with the state governments under the Articles led him to the conclusion that the major threat to individual liberty and the rights of minorities came from below rather than above—that is, from popular majorities rather than from government. And he did not think that a bill of rights could do much to prevent those abuses. This put him at odds with his avowed mentor in Paris, whose experience in France had led him to the opposite conclusion. The Jefferson-Madison correspondence in late 1788 and early 1789 provides a convenient window through which to view two dramatically different ways of thinking about what became the Bill of Rights.15
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 Page 20