by Conrad Black
Twelve states, all but Rhode Island, then called for a constitutional convention to meet at Philadelphia in May 1787. Enthusiasm for the idea of a federal constitution was sketchy in many state elites. In Virginia, Washington and most of the rest of the 40 families that owned the great plantations favored a strong federal government. Jefferson was absent as minister in Paris (where he succeeded Franklin in 1785), and Jefferson’s cousin, Edmund Randolph, was skeptical. Patrick Henry, the radical Virginian independence leader, disapproved the project and did not attend, though he was elected a delegate. John Adams was absent as minister in England (where he was graciously received by George III). Also absent were his anti-federalist cousin, Samuel Adams, and states’ rights advocate John Hancock. The autonomist governor of New York, General George Clinton, boycotted, and the New York delegation was effectively led by the young and brilliant, but none too democratic or representative, Alexander Hamilton. Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris led the Pennsylvanians. Some delegations were chosen by state assemblies, but some were supplemented by invitations from the conveners.
Washington was in the background, but he and Franklin, who had been proposing federal arrangements since the Albany Congress of 1754, were the real champions of a strong federal state. Washington’s challenge to the state assemblies to justify the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the long and bloody war that followed it had, as he expected, not been met. He would not seize power as many had urged when his army was demobilized, but he was conspicuously available now, to be the legitimately chosen father of the nation in peace as he had been in war. At the instigation of the 81-year old Franklin, Washington was elected president of the Constitutional Convention, and as host, in his splendid role of president of Pennsylvania, Franklin was elected chairman, the two indispensable founders of the nation ensconced at the head of the unfolding process. Franklin, suffering from gout and gallstones, was conveyed by sedan chair to and from the proceedings, by inmates of the municipal prison (with whom he was courteous and jaunty). The two grand strategists and chief elders of America were ready for the supreme effort to complete their work: the replacement of the French threat to British America, and of the British overlordship of a post-French America, with a government that could lead independent America to greatness and fulfill the promise of Jefferson’s luxuriant Declaration of Independence.
9. THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were effectively self-chosen. It was assumed that state governors and some senior figures of the legislatures could come ex officio. The Virginians arrived first, led by their governor, Edmund Randolph (Washington being present in his national capacity by common wish, ratified by his election as president of the Convention). At first, the advocates of states’ rights and autonomy hung back, not wishing to be involved in a project whose aims they disapproved. As more states sent delegates and the sponsorship of Washington and Franklin lent it momentum and gravity, most decided that it could be contrary to their interests not to be present. By June, all the states except Rhode Island, which had been reduced almost to anarchy, and New Hampshire were present. There were 8 planters and farmers, 21 practicing lawyers and also some that were not active members of the profession, and 15 merchants. As in other parliaments and special conventions of the time, the working class and small farmers, not to mention the tenant farmers and indigent, were represented only in the altruistic afterthoughts of the more prosperous.
Washington stayed in Philadelphia with Robert Morris, the wealthy financier who had been the treasurer of the revolutionary government in fact, apart from what Franklin and Adams could raise overseas. Morris and the unrelated Gouverneur Morris were delegates, and among others who would be prominent were Rufus King of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, William Livingston and William Paterson of New Jersey, Jared Ingersoll, and Thomas Mifflin and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, John Dickinson of Delaware, Daniel Carroll of Maryland, John Blair of Virginia, William Blount of North Carolina, and Pierce Butler and cousins Charles and Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina, as well as Madison and Hamilton. The radical and populist elements were largely under-represented, though they certainly had their say when the time came to ratify the arrangements that emerged, in the legislatures of the several states. The discussions and side-arrangements of the Constitutional Convention are intricate and interesting, but are also not the subject of this book, which is rather concerned with the strategic direction and management of the United States, from its emergence as a concept to the time of writing. The governing arrangements of the country are immensely important to this narrative, but the precise interaction of men and events that produced them, beyond the designs of the country’s chief political architects, are not.
On May 29, Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan, drafted by Madison, approved by Washington, and based on Jefferson’s constitution of Virginia. Some of the states had lower houses broadly enfranchised, and upper houses elected by people who were larger taxpayers or property owners, who sometimes had life tenure. Some, like Pennsylvania, had a single house chosen by everyone who paid any tax, and there were various gradations in between. Jefferson was controversial, though a wealthy plantation and slave-owner, as he was a liberal who famously said: “My observations do not enable me to say I think integrity the characteristic of wealth.”46 The Virginia Plan had a two-house federal Congress—a popularly elected House of Representatives and a Senate chosen by the state legislatures. The Congress would choose the executive and judiciary and would have powers over all matters of interstate scale, reducing states to the level of local government. The smaller states objected that they would be swamped by the influence of the larger ones, and the populist elements saw this as a matrix for aristocratic and oligarchic rule, if not a centralized despotism scarcely less odious than the one from which they had all just successfully revolted. (There was some justice in both criticisms, which again highlights the fact that Britain was a relatively democratic country, and had become more so since the failure of the king’s American policy imposed on an unconvinced and ultimately rebellious Parliament.)
The under-represented masses, insofar as they existed in these colonies where the largest city had just breasted the 40,000 mark, were in the larger states, and so both their spokesmen and the conservatives were unimpressed with the argument for equality of small states, as states were imaginary or arbitrary creations in America, not distinct cultural and linguistic entities as in Europe. Some of the smaller states’ representatives, such as Gunning Bedford of Delaware, hinted that the aid of foreign allies of the small states might be solicited, to which Gouverneur Morris replied: “The country must be united. If persuasion does not unite it, the sword will. The gallows and halter will finish the work of the sword.” Threats of bayonet attacks and the attentions of the hangman are pretty robust debating gambits, especially between recent victorious comrades-in-arms, who had crusaded for universal human rights.
A triangular arrangement was agreed, in an impressive model of constructive compromise, where both Washington and Franklin, who were largely silent in the formal proceedings but convened delegates singly and in small groups privately, played a capital part. All of the states would have equal representation in the Senate, whose members would be chosen not by the lower house, as in the Virginia Plan, but by the legislatures of the country’s constituent states. The lower House of Representatives would be represented in proportion to its population, except the southern states took the position, en bloc, that they would not touch the notion of a federal state unless the slave population was factored into the weight given to the size of state delegations to the House of Representatives.
The compromise reached was that for purposes of calculating the representation of states in the House of Representatives, three-fifths of slaves would be counted. For these purposes, this effectively gave the slave states’ free citizens 1.5 to 1.6 times the voting power of each eligible voter in free states. T
hough covered over in verbose piffle about different economic criteria for voting in different states, this was an ugly arrangement certain to breed and amplify resentment. Many thoughtful southerners, including Jefferson, had moral reservations about slavery, “a fire bell in the night,” he later called it. Much more numerous were northerners, especially in the puritanical Northeast, who thought slavery an outright evil, shaming, blasphemous, and unchristian. Thus to adapt slavery to the comparative political advantage of the slaveholder was a bitter pill to swallow. The southerners even tried to exempt slavery from taxation in the Constitution but were unsuccessful, but did get a guarantee that slavery would be unchallenged for at least 30 years. Again, Franklin, who had become a quiet opponent of slavery and would become head of the Pennsylvania anti-slavery society, was instrumental in getting the compromise approved. He lobbied quietly with his usual argument that the triumph of American democracy was inevitable and that it would dwarf slave-holding cotton states as it would dwarf little Britain, and that what was needed was a long view.
There was passionate disagreement over the nature of the executive. Alexander Hamilton, who was a native of the West Indies, never had bought all the way into republicanism and favored an elected monarchy for set terms. This was generally seen as the sighting shot in Washington’s claim to the headship of a new state, as long as it had a coherent federal framework. There were calls for an elected chief of state who would not be styled a king. Some thought Congress should elect the chief executive, some the people, and the populists and the large-state conservatives were on the same side of the argument again. Another, rather intricate compromise emerged: the president and the vice president (a nebulous position whose occupant had the right of succession between quadrennial elections and would preside over the Senate “like an unwanted poor relation in a wealthy family”),47 would be chosen by an Electoral College of state representatives, in which each state would have as many electors as it had members of the two houses of Congress combined. This again pleased the populists by getting the vote closer to the people, and the large state delegates for recognizing their influence. In the event of an absence of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation casting a single vote reflecting the wishes of the majority of its congressmen.
There was an effort by the conservatives to restrict the vote in the lower house to propertied elements, on the theory that large employers would buy or otherwise control the votes of their employees. Madison and Franklin debunked this as likely to lead to another revolution. It was agreed that Congress could impeach and remove the chief executive, though the process would be a great deal more complicated than a mere vote of no-confidence as in the British Parliament. Members of the House would be elected to two-year terms and of the Senate to six-year terms, a third to be up for reelection every two years. It was an admirable compromise, but far from the exercise in pure democracy that was necessary to be consistent with the superlatives of the Declaration of Independence, and with other incitements to war against a nation that essentially had as popularly based and accountable a government, albeit on the basis of a shifting mass of practices and precedents rather than a constitution. The compromise went to a drafting committee, called the Committee of Style, consisting of William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris, Madison, and Hamilton, on September 8, 1787. The committee reported in four days later, and the Constitution was adopted by the weary delegates, after a general refusal to continue the convention to discuss a bill of rights.
The ratification process precipitated another prolonged crisis of horse-trading, threats, sulks, and blandishments. In Massachusetts, the two recalcitrants, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, relented in their hostility to the Constitution. Hancock presided over the state constitutional convention and it was suggested that he might be a fine candidate for vice president of the new republic. Samuel Adams, an almost deranged Anglophobe and relentless critic of any authority, even a presumptive one like Washington, agreed to support ratification in exchange for a bill of rights of individuals. This would take the form of a list of amendments to be recommended to the first Congress. On this basis, the new Constitution was adopted by a narrow margin, by 187 to 168 in Massachusetts, and by only 10 votes in New Hampshire and Virginia, despite the support of Washington, the absent Jefferson, the chief framer Madison, the rising James Monroe, and even Patrick Henry. And in New York, prodigies of persuasion by Alexander Hamilton notwithstanding, the Constitution was adopted by three votes in the legislature, over the objections of the four-term governor, General George Clinton (who served five more terms). North Carolina only ratified in 1789 and balky little Rhode Island in 1790, though there was by then no doubt that failure to ratify would have resulted in that little state’s being subsumed into Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Bill of Rights was eventually agreed in 1791, and was adopted in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.
By a hair’s breadth, the new nation had endowed itself with a Constitution that would serve it well and become one of the most renowned and respected texts in human history. No famous law-giver since Moses (who was, after all, a messenger), from Hammurabi to Justinian to Napoleon, remotely approached the triumph of, principally, James Madison, who devised the system of checks and balances between three co-equal branches of government. So great was Madison’s prestige, he wrote important messages for Washington, and on occasion, when the message was addressed to the House of Representatives, wrote the reply as well. Hamilton opposed a Bill of Rights, on the spurious grounds that it was unnecessary because the Constitution did not authorize the government to violate anyone’s rights, betraying a faith in the benignity of official executive authority that makes it clear that Hamilton had no interest at all in individual rights. Madison himself was lukewarm initially, until Jefferson remonstrated with him and he saw that nothing less would get the Constitution ratified and adopted. Madison’s achievement in producing a Constitution that secured federal authority, balanced the branches of a stable government, and assured individual rights, established him in the front rank of the nation’s founders, and was another immense and fortuitous strategic milestone for the emerging country.
That it was adopted was a felicitous stroke for America, a happy launch that enabled the new nation to assure itself and offer to immigrants a regime of ordered liberty and a society of laws that was slightly less girt about by impediments of tradition and antique formalism than Britain’s. Jefferson’s genius at the propagation of the new American era electrified the world. The words of Gouverneur Morris’s splendid preamble became and remained familiar to virtually every informed person in the world: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Those chiefly responsible for creating the circumstances that permitted, and generated the necessary support for, the promulgation of this document—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, John Jay, and John Adams—did not doubt that it would guide the new country to glory and preeminence among nations, and that their work would long be discernible among men.
There was never much suspense about who would get the call as the first president; for the last time in the history of the country, someone would truly accept a draft to that office. Washington received the blandishments of Hamilton rather neutrally and expressed no interest in the presidency to anyone, saying only that he would accept it if to decline it would hurt the country. It is believable that he did not especially wish to be president, but not that he did not expect to be president. He was encouraged that supporters of the Constitution, called Federalists, won the congressional elections, and when the Electoral College gave all 69 votes to Washington voluntarily, without his ever having expressed ev
en a private word of desire for the office, he had no choice but to accept, as he had accepted the command of the Continental Army. In what has proved an enduring tradition of using the vice presidency to provide regional balance, it was contested between John Adams and John Hancock. Washington made it known that he would be happy with Adams, a more staunch Federalist than Hancock and a personal loyalist, and Adams was narrowly chosen. George Washington, who in 1785 had described the notion of American unity as “a farce,” was inaugurated the first president of the United States, eight weeks late, on April 30, 1789.48 In the 35 years since the Seven Years’ War effectively began in the backwoods of America (partly because of Washington’s actions)—a war that established Prussia as a Great Power, delivered all of India to Britain, and expelled France from North America—the American colonists had developed a burning, independent patriotism and brilliant national leadership, had outmaneuvered the greatest nations in Europe, had electrified the world, had restored serious republican government to the world after an absence of 17 centuries, had politically formalized the Enlightenment by endowing themselves with novel but instantly respected political institutions, and had set forth in the world, as their greatest subsequent leader famously said, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” An epochal political and national experiment had been prepared by a brilliant sequence of strategic triumphs.