Lion of Liberty

by Harlow Giles Unger

  With the publication of his pamphlet, Randolph joined Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and the Antifederalists, who favored retention of a confederation made up of relatively small, independent republics, tied to each other only in the maintenance of a common defense. Hard off their experience with British rule, the majority of ordinary Americans harbored Antifederalist fears that a powerful national government would strip them of individual liberties. Arrayed against them however, were the enormously wealthy and influential Federalists, led by the redoubtable “Father of Our Country,” George Washington. Although Washington made a show of remaining aloof from the political fray, he made his views known through James Madison and other champions of a strong national government. Only such a government, they argued, could pay the nation’s debts and end the farmer tax riots raging across the nation. As Washington put it, “There is no alternative between the adoption of it [the Constitution] and anarchy. ...”15

  When Henry returned to the Virginia Assembly, he moved to block the call to a ratification convention. “No man is more federal than I,” he protested, hoping to seduce pro-constitution delegates into joining his camp. Like George Mason, he opposed calling a ratification convention until amendments were added to the document to guarantee individual and states’ rights. He warned that a ratification convention, as proposed, would have no power to amend—only to accept or reject—unless the Assembly gave it the power of proposing amendments. Mason seconded Henry’s proposal, but the Assembly voted them down. As in other states, voting restrictions based on property ownership prevented Virginia’s Antifederalists from converting their popular majority into a majority of Assembly delegates. Although Henry failed to block the call to convention, he had enough allies in the Assembly to delay elections to the convention until March and the actual convention until June 2, by which time, he hoped, other states might well have rejected the Constitution and rendered Virginia’s ratification vote moot.

  “The refusal of our governor and Colonel Mason to subscribe to the proceedings of the convention,” Washington warned, “will have a bad effect in this state.” Accusing them of “alarming” voters, he said that “some things are . . . addressed to the fears of the people and will no doubt have their effect.”16 Madison wrote to Jefferson in Paris and accused Henry of seeking “a partition of the Union into several confederacies.” He said he feared that Henry would convince the Virginia ratification convention to vote against ratification and for a second constitutional convention to limit the new government’s powers.

  In fact, the objections of Lee, Mason and Henry were already having their effects far beyond Virginia. “Beware! Beware!” warned the Massachusetts Centinel. “You are forging chains for yourself and your children—your liberties are at stake.”17 Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer predicted that the Constitution would create “a permanent ARISTOCRACY,”18 while the Freeman’s Journal, another Philadelphia newspaper, warned of congressional powers “to lay and collect taxes.”19

  The Antifederalist campaign gradually swayed public opinion against ratification of the Constitution, but Federalists controlled most state legislatures, and, one by one, they called ratification conventions. By February 6, 1788, conventions in six states had ratified the Constitution: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The three smallest states—Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut—had favored ratification because of the military protection offered by a continental army. Sparsely settled Georgia—beset by Indian raids from Spanish-held Florida—also needed help from a strong federal force. In Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, powerful trading interests in Philadelphia and Boston had controlled the majorities of convention delegates—despite popular opposition to the Constitution in both states. To eke out their victory, Massachusetts Federalists pledged to “recommend” a bill of rights to the First Congress, while Pennsylvania Federalists simply stole their victory. Benjamin Franklin, of all people, ignored all principles of self-government by leading the delegation out of the Constitutional Convention and marching into the Pennsylvania Assembly hall in the same building. Interrupting the Assembly’s proceedings, he all but promised that Philadelphia would be the new federal capital if Pennsylvania was first to ratify the Constitution. He urged state legislators to call a state ratification convention immediately, without debate. Like other major property owners in the city—along with merchants and business owners—Franklin stood to reap enormous profits if the new government established the capital in Philadelphia.

  Angry backcountry Antifederalists, however, refused to appear in the Assembly and left it two members short of a quorum. Speaker Thomas Mifflin, the wealthy Philadelphia merchant, ordered a sergeant at arms and a clerk to find at least two absent members and order them to the hall. A mob of Federalists followed the two to the boarding house where many Antifederalists lodged and physically dragged two assemblymen back to their seats in the State House, where, despite their shouts of protest, sentries physically restrained them while Federalists voted to hold the ratification convention on November 20. In the days and weeks that followed, Antifederalists in the backcountry protested the Assembly’s actions, attacking Federalists and burning effigies of Federalist leaders and copies of the Constitution.

  “The whole county is alive with wrath,” a reporter wrote from Cumberland County to Philadelphia’s Independent Gazetteer, “and it is spreading from one county to another so rapidly that it is impossible to say where it will end or how far it will reach.”20

  French chargé d’affaires Louis-Guillaume Otto was appalled, writing to his foreign minister in Versailles thatthe legislative Assembly of Pennsylvania imprudently . . . revived the jealousy and anxiety of democrats. In a blunder that is difficult to explain, Pennsylvania limited its delegation to the Constitutional Convention to Philadelphians; the other counties, whose interest have always been different from those of the capital, were hardly satisfied. . . . In forcing the minority to ratify the new government without debate, the legislature has acted so harshly and precipitously as to render any new government suspect. . . . It could strike a fatal blow . . . the alarm is sounded, the public is on guard and they are now examining in detail what they would have adopted almost blindly.21

  Henry was equally appalled, saying that Pennsylvania had been “tricked” into ratifying the Constitution. “Only ten thousand were represented in Pennsylvania,” he charged, “although seventy thousand had a right to be represented.”22

  Ironically, the Pennsylvania ratification convention did not meet until November 20, and, while it was still debating two and a half weeks later, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution—on December 7, 1787.

  Although elections to the Virginia ratification convention were not to be held until April, Henry began campaigning in February. By April he had written to leaders in Kentucky and other parts of western Virginia and spoken to crowds outside every courthouse he visited on his legal rounds. “Mr. Henry is supposed to aim at disunion,” Madison wrote to Jefferson. “Colonel Mason is growing every day more bitter, and outrageous in his effort to carry his point, and will probably in the end be thrown by the violence of his passions into the politics of Mr. Henry. . . . I think the Constitution and the Union will both be endangered.”23

  A few weeks later, Jefferson received a letter from his friend Edward Carrington: “Mr. H. does not openly declare for a dismemberment of the Union, but his arguments in support of his opposition to the Constitution go directly to that issue. He says that three confederacies would be practicable and better suited to the good of commerce than one.”24

  By the time Virginians elected delegates to their state ratification convention, Maryland had ratified, and with the Federalist-dominated convention in South Carolina preparing to ratify in May, only one more state—either Virginia, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, or Rhode Island— would have to ratify to implement the new government. Rhode Island, however, had refused even to consider t
he Constitution. Convinced that the state’s minuscule proportions would leave it impotent in the new union, its legislature refused to call a convention, and the people confirmed their legislature’s decision in a popular referendum in March 1788. Although New Hampshire’s legislature had called a ratification convention in February, the convention was so divided about ratification that it adjourned without a decision and agreed to reconvene in June. North Carolina’s ratification convention would not meet until July, leaving Virginia, New Hampshire, and New York as the only candidates to become the ninth and definitive member of the new nation.

  New York’s Governor George Clinton, however, seemed prepared to secede rather than allow his state to ratify the Constitution and cede its sovereignty to a national government. He believed he would find an ally in Patrick Henry. A commander of the New York militia during the Revolution, Clinton won Washington’s friendship by sending supplies to Valley Forge and inviting him to participate in a successful land investment in upstate New York. Indeed, Clinton rode in his full brigadier general’s regalia alongside Washington to take command of New York City on “Evacuation Day,” when the British quit the city after Britain recognized U.S. independence. Elected governor and lieutenant governor, he won the unfailing support of state farmers by reducing property taxes. He added to that support by transferring the state capital from New York City to Poughkeepsie for half the year—to make it easier for farmers to influence legislative and judicial matters. Eighty-five miles up the Hudson River north of New York, the little rural town lay in the heart of the richest agricultural area of the Northeast, stretching from the Berkshire hills on the Massachusetts border, westward to the Pennsylvania border on the Delaware River. A farmer himself, Clinton lived just across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie and, like Patrick Henry, he espoused individual liberty—including the liberty to own eight slaves to harvest his wealth.

  When the British left New York, the state began earning as much as $250,000 a year (about $5 million in today’s dollars) from port duties—about half the state’s annual income and enough to keep property taxes low enough to ensure Clinton’s reelection every year. Embraced by farmers and other property owners, Clinton had more power in his state than any other governor in America. The state constitution vested him with “supreme executive power and authority,” including the powers of former royal governors to call the legislature into special session or to prorogue it for as long as sixty days. It gave him the longest term in office—three years—and set no limit on the number of consecutive terms he could remain in his chair. Far more powerful in New York than Henry was in Virginia, Clinton dispensed hundreds of jobs and local judgeships across the farm belt and built America’s first great political machine. He became America’s wealthiest governor after seizing his share of about $4 million in confiscated Tory properties. Faced with a federal constitution that would cost the state control of international trade and the flow of import duties into the state treasury, Clinton joined Antifederalists as a bitter foe of ratification.

  Washington’s friend Gouverneur Morris, who had written the final draft of the Constitution and its Preamble, condemned Clinton as part of a “wicked industry of those who have long habituated themselves to live on the public and cannot bear the idea of being removed from power and profit of state government, which has been and still is the means of supporting themselves, their families, and dependents.”25

  When Congress sent the Constitution to the states in the fall of 1787, the New York State legislature was not in session and not scheduled to reconvene until the new year. Like Patrick Henry, Clinton planned to block the call for a ratification convention as long as he could, but, when that became impossible, his Antifederalist allies in the New York Senate set about undermining the convention by requiring all state officeholders to take an oath “never to consent to any act or thing which has a tendency to destroy or alter the present constitution of the state.”26 The oath did not preclude calling a ratification convention—or attending it. It simply made it illegal to vote for ratification. The concept of the oath, however, so violated the principles of antifederalism and individual liberty that even Clinton’s staunchest allies voted against it. They nonetheless agreed to postpone elections for the ratification convention until April 29, a month after the Virginia convention elections.

  Calling themselves “Federal Republicans,” Clinton and his Antifederalist allies in New York’s farm belt set out to defeat ratification in the remaining states and provoke rescindment in Pennsylvania, where controversy continued raging over the elections to the ratification convention. Rumors swirled that he was attempting to form a “middle confederacy” tying New York and Virginia and the states in between them—Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey—in an economic union that would isolate New England from the deep South.

  Henry responded enthusiastically. “It is a matter of great consolation to find that the sentiments of a vast majority of Virginians are in unison with those of our northern friends,” Henry wrote from Richmond.

  I am satisfied that four-fifths of our inhabitants are opposed to the new scheme of government. Indeed, in the part of this country lying south of the James River, I am confidant that nine-tenths are opposed to it. . . . I can assure you that North Carolina is more decidedly opposed to the new government than Virginia. The people there seem rife for hazarding all before they submit. Perhaps the organization of our system may be so contrived as to include lesser associations throughout the state.27

  Henry conceded that “the numbers” at the Virginia ratification convention were “equal on both sides” and that “the majority, which way so-ever it goes, will be small. . . . Colonel George Mason has agreed to act as chairman of our republican society . . . and we have concluded to send you . . . a copy of the Bill of Rights and of the particular amendments we intend to propose. ...”28

  Henry arrived in Richmond brimming with confidence, certain that his four overriding objections to the Constitution would defeat its ratification. First and foremost was the lack of a bill of rights. His second objection was the unlimited power of the new national government to tax the people without the consent of their state legislatures—one of the issues that provoked the Revolutionary War. A third objection was the federal government’s power over the military and the right to send it into any state to enforce federal laws—-again, an issue that provoked the Revolutionary War. His fourth major objection—and he was adamant on this point—was the right of the smallest possible majority in Congress to legislate against the interests of Virginia (or any other state, for that matter)—as it almost did with the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations to cede Mississippi River navigation rights of western farmers to Spain.

  Henry went to Richmond with a tactical advantage: The state legislature was to reconvene in only four weeks, on June 30. Most of the delegates at the convention were also members of the legislature and would, by law, have to leave the convention to take their seats as lawmakers. The Federalists led by the diminutive James Madison would have but four weeks to win ratification in the face of Henry’s oratorical blasts and the arguments of his formidable allies: the sitting governor Edmund Randolph, former governor Benjamin Harrison, and both of Virginia’s popular delegates to Congress, James Monroe and William Grayson, who had helped put an end to the Jay-Gardoqui negotiations with Spain. Henry hoped that among the five of them—and planter George Mason—they could talk the convention to death. Indeed, Henry would come close to doing the job by himself, speaking on seventeen of the convention’s twenty-two days, often three times a day and five times on one day. On another, he was the only speaker, standing seven hours to deliver his address.

  After a day devoted to organization, the convention opened, with Henry, of course, shooting to his feet. Well-wishers had surrounded his gig when he rode into town, and wherever he went, they surrounded him, walked with him, joked with him, even sang with him—always addressing him with adoring familiarity. Kentucky’s fourteen delegates and their foll
owers let loose a chorus of raucous whoops when they came to town and hailed their hero. Nearly half the 100,000 settlers in Kentucky were Virginia transplants who relied on Henry to protect their interests. In tasseled buckskins, buck-tailed hats, rifles slung over their shoulders, and knives in their belts, they drew nervous stares from Tidewater aristocrats in powdered wigs, velvet jackets, ruffled silk shirts, knee breeches, silk hose, and buckle-top shoes.

  Fifty-two-year-old Henry stood apart from both the eastern dandies and rough-hewn frontiersmen. Still frail from his recurring illnesses, his coarse black homespun, white neck wrap, and sunken cheeks gave him a Christ-like look to some—although other, less charitable onlookers compared him to “a scarecrow with a wig.” It was no surprise that he was first to rise after the convention had fixed the rules of order and heard the contents of the Constitution.29

  “Mr. Chairman,” he began,I consider myself as the servant of the people of this commonwealth, as a sentinel over their rights, liberty, and happiness. I represent their feelings when I say that they are exceedingly uneasy . . . Before the meeting of the late Federal Convention at Philadelphia, a general peace and a universal tranquility prevailed in this country. But since that period . . . I conceive the republic to be in extreme danger. . . . Whence has arisen this fearful jeopardy? It arises from this fatal system—it arises from a proposal to change our government. A proposal that goes to the utter annihilation of the most solemn engagement of the states. . . . That this is a consolidated government . . . instead of a confederation . . . is demonstrably clear, and the danger of such a government is, to my mind very striking.30

  Henry went on to accuse the authors of the Constitution of having usurped powers and staged a coup d’état by violating the mandate of Congress. Congress had called the Constitutional Convention, he reminded Virginians, “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein.” Instead, he charged, they effectively set out to overthrow the Confederation and replace it with a national government.