American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The collapse of the Clintonians is still shrouded in some obscurity. Perhaps it was Hamilton’s seizure of the middle ground, or the renewed threat of secession by New York City, or some failure of nerve or will, or the realization, after Virginia, that New York without ratification would be economically and politically isolated in the new Union. The end came quietly, without histrionics or serious recriminations.

  If the Poughkeepsie convention ended calmly, it was the quiet of the eye of the storm. Elsewhere New Yorkers were aroused and pugnacious. An anti-Federalist parade in Albany on the Fourth of July had ended in a bloody, drunken brawl, with a dozen or so casualties. Later in the month a Federalist mob in New York City broke into a printer’s shop, spilled ink, and upset type cases, closing down an opposition newspaper. Next day a great Federalist parade made its way up Broadway. Carpenters and shipyard workers towed a magnificent miniature ship they had made, its full canvas rippling in the wind and brushing the buildings on both sides of the street. The ship was named Alexander Hamilton and a heroic effigy of the young leader stood in the prow. At some point, however, Hamilton’s arm was broken off—the arm that held aloft a copy of the Constitution. What kind of omen was this?

  VICE AND VIRTUE

  Mercy Otis Warren would have savored this omen, if she had heard of it. As a dramatist who had amused Bostonians with her satirical portraits of Massachusetts Tories, she would have delighted even more in caricaturing Hamilton—a true-blue native Tory, in her view—as a would-be dictator with an arm of straw. As a political writer, she welcomed the chance to inveigh against the foes of liberty.

  Of all the “women of the republic” who had a pervasive private role in public affairs, Mercy Warren was perhaps the most remarkable, save for her good friend Abigail Adams. Almost sixty at the time of the Philadelphia convention, she had grown up in a family deeply immersed in the revolutionary currents of the 1770s. Denied—as a female—a formal education, she sat in on her brother’s lessons, explored an uncle’s library, and took part in vigorous family debates. Her idolized older brother, James Otis, had helped tutor her in politics until he was set upon by British crown officers, sabered on the head, and left deranged. Married to James Warren—a Plymouth merchant and farmer—and the mother of five sons, she had somehow found time to write verse and a half-dozen dramas. Her stock characters probably never saw the stage, for Massachusetts forbade theatrical performances; it is believed that Mercy Warren the playwright never saw a play.

  Family duties and Boston blue laws, however, were not the main bar to her political expression; it was rather the solidly established idea that woman’s place was in the home. Few men in Massachusetts had a better right than Mercy Warren to serve in the state’s ratifying convention, but it was inconceivable that she or any other woman would attend that or any other convention, just as it was barely conceivable that women would help elect the male delegates who did attend. Mercy Warren did not challenge this masculinism. What she did was to explore the farther political reaches of the domain of the home.

  A woman could write there, and Mercy Warren composed copious letters to the statesmen of the day, as well as her political plays and tracts. She could educate her sons in republican ideas and virtue; she was lucky in that all five sons grew to adulthood, unlucky in that she and her husband survived all but two of them. Even more, she could begin to construct for less advantaged women, in Linda Kerber’s words, “a rationale that would permit women to attend to political matters without abandoning their domestic responsibilities, as men did.” During the Revolution and after, women had often used the right of petition—a right that implied the subordination of the petitioner. Mercy Warren attacked establishments also with the play, the broadside, and the pamphlet—and it was a pamphlet she employed against the proposed Constitution. Confiding her authorship to her good friend the British historian Catharine Macauley, she used the pseudonym “A Columbian Patriot.”

  She began with a dire prediction: someday, when Americans would be asked what had become “of the flower of their crop, and the rich produce of their farms,” they would answer as had the Man of La Mancha, “The Steward of my Lord has seized and sent it to Madrid,’ ” or more literally, tax collectors of the new national government had seized that produce and transmitted it to the “Federal City.” Columbian Patriot went on to a blistering attack on the “many-headed monster”—its centralizing tendencies, dangerous blending of legislative and executive functions, excessive judicial power, congressional control of elections, its provision for standing armies, “the nursery of vice and the bane of liberty.” She castigated the charter even more for its lacks—no provisions for rotation in office or for annual elections, and above all no bill of rights. Nor did she like the way the Constitution was drawn up in “secret conclave,” or the method of ratification.

  Over and over—at least a score of times—Mercy Warren portrayed the Constitution as a direct threat to liberty, freedom, personal rights. That the new government might protect individual rights appeared to carry no weight with her. The way to keep government safe was to tie it directly to the popular will, through frequent elections, rotation in office, and local and states’ rights. Anticipating Jefferson, she wrote that the “most indubitable enemy to the publick welfare” was not sedition but despotism.

  In essence, Mercy Warren was a majoritarian who would depend on the wisdom and virtue of the electorate. That such an electorate would not include a single woman did not seem to disturb her. Far more significant was her faith in popular government at a time when she had to recognize, as a daughter of Puritans and Calvinists, that vice was deeply seated in the “breasts of Americans.” She quoted with approval the Abbé de Mably’s observation that “the virtues and vices of a people when a revolution happens in their government, are the measure of the liberty or slavery they ought to expect—An heroic love for the publick good, a profound reverence for the laws, a contempt of riches, and a noble haughtiness of soul, are the only foundations of a free government.” But all around her Mercy Warren saw sycophancy, intrigue, preferment, corruption, insolence of office, and other weaknesses of character.

  “Liberty delights the ear and tickles the fond pride of man,” she wrote Catharine Macaulay about this time, “but it is a jewel much oftener the plaything of his imagination than a possession of real stability.” A person acquiring it today “probably will barter it the next hour as a useless bauble to the first officious master that will take the burthen from his shoulders.” Mercy Warren saw tendencies toward vice mainly in the people who were coming to be known as Federalists. But what if the populace as a whole, on which she depended for majority rule and representative government, should also develop tendencies toward selfishness, obsequiousness, expensive pleasures, and the like? A republic was critically dependent on virtue in the great populace that had power under the republic. It was this question that Madison and the others confronted so brilliantly in their “Federalist papers”—and that Mercy Warren failed to deal with in her “anti-Federalist” paper.

  The Framers had to play on a far more complex constitutional chessboard than did Mercy Warren. She—and most of the anti-Federalists—wanted to protect and nurture liberty and equality mainly by keeping government relatively weak, small, open, and close to the people. The Framers calculated in terms of a multi-dimensional set of ends and means. They too wanted to safeguard liberty and equality—but not an unbridled liberty or a leveling equality. They wanted to create also a governmental structure that would prevent tyranny from developing within it and hence would provide no moral justification for the Shayses of the land to mount a rebellion against it. They wanted a system of representation that would respond to the legitimate needs of the people but curb their passions and their greed. They wanted to gain safety for their fledgling republic and security for its people by creating a broader union, strengthening the federal government, and charging it with the duties of maintaining external defense and internal harmony. They wanted to comb
at vice and encourage virtue among both leaders and followers.

  In planning against tyranny the Framers had to recognize that it took many forms—tyranny of opinion, governmental tyranny, tyranny by a popular majority. They could thwart the first of these by opposing an established church or any other monopolistic fount of opinion, by safeguarding religious and political liberty in the state bills of rights and in the national bill of rights that would be added to the Constitution—in short, by safeguarding political and social pluralism. They could thwart the second kind of tyranny through ensuring the right to vote, frequent elections, and specific procedures such as impeachment and judicial appeal. But the third kind of tyranny—majority tyranny—was far harder to guard against, because of the Framer’s fundamental commitment to rule by popular majorities. How could a constitution thwart an oppressive majority bent on taking control of government? The solution was several-fold: a federal system, so that such a threatening majority would have to seize control of both the federal government and a host of state governments—a daunting prospect to any demagogue; staggered elections for President, House, and Senate, so that a majority could not seize control all in one swoop; an elaborate separation of powers, so that a majority winning one office, such as the presidency, would face a Senate or House in hostile hands. Thus conflict was built into a fragmented government to prevent majority tyranny.

  Still, representation posed the most challenging intellectual problem for the Framers. They wanted to achieve a balance of interests in government without risking disruption or oppression by excessive factionalism. How achieve this in a republic representing the public? They could not rely on the balance of orders and classes that was understood to protect liberty in Britain and elsewhere. As Charles Pinckney reminded his fellow delegates at Philadelphia, the new republic would “contain but one order…the order of Commons.” They could not depend on the wisdom and prudence of the people as a whole, because they saw popular majorities as well as elites all too prone toward selfishness, rashness, aggrandizement, and hostility to other people’s liberties. The basic solution was to pass the expressed interests and passions of the voting populace through a filter of overlapping and mutually checking representative processes and bodies—again, staggered elections, separation of powers, accountability of rulers to fragmented, conflicting, competing, and overlapping voting constituencies, and all the rest of the formidably intricate system of eviscerated powers and checks and balances. In order to govern, representatives would have to bargain with one another ceaselessly in a vast system of brokerage and accommodation that would give something to everybody—liberty to the individual, desired laws or appropriations to groups, and governmental balance and stability to the whole.

  If the separation of powers among and within the three federal branches was the most exacting intellectual problem for the Framers, the new division of powers between the federal and state governments was the toughest political one. Too many people made the simple equation—the more centralized a government, the greater its threat to liberty. Too many shared Mercy Warren’s fear of the “hydra-headed monster” in “federal city” sinking its fangs into the states. For their part the Framers feared that the states might be taken over by local demagogues or overzealous majorities. They could not forget Shays and his threat to Massachusetts. The Framers’ most telling argument was that all Americans would gain far more safety and security from foreign threats—from the great powers lodged on their frontiers—under a stronger national government. The basic issue was settled by compromise—in 1787 and for centuries thereafter.

  The more the two sides argued over process and power in these grand debates, the more they appealed to purpose and principle. To what ends were all these means directed? Both sides invoked the Declaration of Independence and its call for the supreme values of liberty and equality. But what kind of liberty and equality? Equal political liberty? Individual economic opportunity? These were considered necessary but far from adequate. Government must be strong enough to protect individual liberty but not strong enough to suppress it—but what kind of government was that? In ancient times liberty had meant the right to participate in government; now it meant freedom from government—was that progress? The grand debates did little to clarify these grand issues. And the issue that would become the grandest question of them all—the extent to which government should interfere with some persons’ liberties in order to grant them and other persons more liberty and equality—this issue lay beyond the intellectual horizons of virtually all the debaters of the time.

  If the questions were not settled, the battle was—the “Feds” had won at Philadelphia. In winning they had imposed on themselves and others an enormously heavy burden of leadership. Under the new system, men must become expert brokers and dexterous improvisers so that they could operate successfully across the many vertical and horizontal boundaries separating governments. They must be masterly transactional leaders. But at times when people felt that they had lost their way, or needed new goals, leaders would have to transcend brokerage and provide a sense of unity and direction. And in times of real crisis, when people’s fundamental wants and needs, aspirations and expectations, were unmet, and when people hungered for action—any action—the system would depend on men who could reshape the political and intellectual environment; in short, the new Constitution must not altogether inhibit masterful transforming leadership.

  But the Framers wanted even more than this—they wanted virtue in both leaders and citizens. By virtue they meant at the least good character and civic concern; at the most—with Abbé de Mably—a heroic love for the public good, a devotion to justice, a willingness to sacrifice comfort and riches for the public weal, an elevation of the soul. One reason the Framers believed in representation was that it would refine leadership, acting as a kind of sieve that would separate and elevate the more virtuous elements. Others—most notably Jefferson—believed that virtue must be nurtured at the bottom, among the “little republics” of the states, where, as he wrote later, “every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; where there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.” Thus Jefferson proposed local public forums where the “views of the people,” in Jean Yarbrough’s words, “could be refined through deliberation before they were made known to their representatives.” The people, in short, would refine and elevate themselves; it was on the civic virtue of this cadre that the moral leadership of higher cadres would be founded.

  In late 1788, however, it was the top cadre—the fifty or so national leaders and nationally known state leaders who had written or indirectly shaped the Constitution—who had the power and responsibility of leadership. Now that they had won a constitution, they must win a government. This meant organizing elections and choosing leaders at the same time that they were creating the offices the winners would occupy. If the federal leadership seemed undaunted by their tasks, it was in part because they had agreed so closely, planned so creatively, built so carefully. It was even more because they were not proclaiming a thousand-year Reich but rather inaugurating an experiment and expecting a period of trial and testing. They were undertaking a set of experiments in majority rule, minority rights, balanced representation, separation of powers, checks and balances. They were beginning the profoundest experiment of all—that of forming a “more perfect Union,” in order to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” to themselves and their posterity.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Experiment Begins

  AROUND TEN O’CLOCK ON the morning of April 16, 1789, George Washington and two companions climbed up i
nto a carriage standing outside the great hall at Mount Vernon. One of these fellow travelers was his aide David Humphreys, the other Charles Thomson, longtime secretary of the Congress then meeting in New York City. Two days earlier Thomson had ridden into Mount Vernon to inform Washington of his election as President of the United States.

  “I have now, sir, to inform you,” Thomson had said at the climax of his short announcement, “that the proofs you have given of your patriotism and of your readiness to sacrifice domestic separation and private enjoyments to preserve the liberty and promote the happiness of your country did not permit the two Houses to harbour a doubt of your undertaking this great, this important office to which you are called not only by the unanimous vote of the electors, but by the voice of America.…”

  Now the President-elect was leaving Mount Vernon with little ceremony. Indeed, he wrote in his diary, he was departing with “a mind oppressed with more painful and anxious sensations” than he could express, but ready to answer his country’s call. Evidently few witnessed the leave-taking. Since Washington’s carriage had to cut north through Muddy Hole Farm before turning northeastward toward Alexandria, and since he had only recently instructed his plantation manager that all able-bodied laborers, male or female, were to work diligently from dawn to dark, slaves working in the tobacco fields must have looked up, comprehending or not, as the carriage sped by.