Simultaneously, the new envoy was sailing toward another divide. France, the nation whose soldiers and warships and money had made a crucial difference in winning the struggle for independence, was almost as bankrupt as the United States. It was a condition that was hard for King Louis XVI in his splendid palace at Versailles and the noblemen in their sumptuous mansions in Paris to understand. But in the winding alleys and backstreets of Paris were people who would soon propose a future for France that would change the way Thomas Jefferson thought about politics forever.
CHAPTER 3
Should This Constitution Be Ratified?
IN PHILADELPHIA DURING THE summer of 1787, George Washington presided over a conclave that fiercely and sometimes frantically debated the new constitution that slowly emerged from James Madison’s Virginia plan. As the delegates edged toward agreement, Madison began to think there was only one way to describe the outcome of their hundreds of hours of often abrasive argument: a miracle. At the center of this unlikely outcome was a large fact that Madison also noted in his voluminous notes of the proceedings—that no one signed the Constitution with more enthusiasm than General Washington.1
After a farewell dinner with the delegates at the Rising Sun Tavern, Washington returned to Robert Morris’s house and wrote a letter to the Marquis de Lafayette about the success of their experiment. His motive was both personal and political. He wanted to get the news of the Constitution and its promise of American stability to their Revolutionary War ally as quickly as possible. At the same time, he was hoping the young man he sometimes called his “adopted son” could use their reconciliation of liberty and power to help him deal with political unrest in France, which showed signs of veering into violence. After describing the Constitution and its hoped-for good effects, he told Lafayette: “I do not believe that providence has done so much for nothing.”2
Although James Madison publicly praised the Constitution that emerged from the Philadelphia convention, privately, he was a disappointed man. Above all, he had wanted to give Congress the power to veto state legislation. Instead, he had to settle for a vaguely worded assertion that the Constitution was the “supreme law” of the nation. States were barred only from specific tasks, such as coining money.
Madison was even more unhappy with the compromise that gave each state two senators. He had wanted the House of Representatives to elect senators and give them the power to veto both state and federal legislation. Madison succeeded in giving the president enough veto power and authority to make him the guardian of federal unity. But he remained troubled by doubts that the Constitution would be adequate for the hopes of unifying federal power that he and George Washington had shared at Mount Vernon.
Madison’s doubts might have become demoralizing, if he had seen Thomas Jefferson’s reaction when the Constitution reached him in distant France. In the three years that had passed since Jefferson left America, he and Madison had remained in touch with a steady stream of letters. But it was hardly a normal correspondence. At least two months elapsed between mailing a letter and its delivery, and it often took another two months for the reply to reach the original sender. Events in both countries frequently intervened, prompting sharply different reactions from the two friends. It soon became apparent that they had begun to disagree about the kind of government the nation needed.
A prime example was Shays’ Rebellion. Influenced by ex-General Washington and the appalling weakness of Congress in the face of this upheaval, Madison called the Shaysites “a diseased part of the body politic,” and suspected that British influence may have been involved. Even after the rebels had been crushed, Madison reported to Jefferson that many of them “remained insolent,” and he worried that the new governor of Massachusetts, John Hancock, was “an idolater of popularity” who might be seduced into “dishonorable compliances” to their demands, which included a redistribution of property.3
Jefferson’s reaction to the Shaysites was almost totally opposite. He saw nothing wrong with “a little rebellion now and then” in a republic. It was a medicine “necessary for the sound health of government.” These were ironic opinions from a former governor who twice tried to resign when his state was confronted with armed men determined to kill or capture him and his supporters. Jefferson was even more tolerant in his comments to other correspondents, such as Colonel William Stephens Smith, John Adams’s son-in-law. “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”4
When Madison’s letter reached France, Jefferson made no attempt to reply to his younger friend’s tough-minded view of the Shaysites. The envoy’s experience in France undoubtedly had something to do with this silence. He was dismayed by the extreme poverty and powerlessness of the French peasantry compared to the largely untaxed wealth and authority of the king and his fellow aristocrats. Jefferson called it “a government of wolves over sheep.”5
Madison did not rush a copy of the new constitution to Jefferson. Instead, as the convention drew to a close, he sent him an outline of the document. Meanwhile, the envoy received a copy from John Adams, who was America’s minister to Britain. His Massachusetts friend, Elbridge Gerry, had sent it to him, after refusing to sign the document. Jefferson was not happy with what he read. “How do you like our new Constitution?” he asked Adams. “I must confess there are things in it which stagger all my dispositions to subscribe to what such an assembly has proposed.”
Jefferson had expected only three or four new enlargements to be added to “the good, old, and venerable fabrick” of the Articles of Confederation.” He added an even nastier line about the office Washington and Madison valued most. “Their president seems a bad edition of a Polish king.”6
In 1783–84, Congressman Jefferson had writhed for six months in the grip of the feckless legislature that the “venerable” Articles of Confederation had created. But his fear of power was so intense, he preferred this ordeal to a government designed to reach decisions and enforce them with the help of this new office, the presidency. Jefferson told Colonel William Stephens Smith he thought the new charter was an overreaction to Shays’ rebellion. The Constitutional Convention had “sent up a kite [a predatory bird] to keep the hen yard in order.”
The metaphor is revealing. Apparently, Jefferson regarded the people in the yard (the nation) as amiable as clucking hens. Shays’ Rebellion was anything but a chorus of innocent fowls. Jefferson also blamed the British for exaggerating American instability in their newspapers. London had repeated this slander for so long, the envoy was convinced that even the Americans had come to believe it—and had constructed a much too powerful response to the problem.
In 1786, Jefferson had visited John Adams in London. His friend had taken him to the royal palace and introduced him to George III. The king had been more than cordial to Adams when he presented himself as the American ambassador. But His Majesty pointedly turned his back on the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, which was filled with insults to his royal person. The thin-skinned Jefferson was deeply offended. A year later he was telling people that the English would have to be “kicked into common good manners.”7
Not until October 24, 1787, five weeks after the Philadelphia convention adjourned, did Madison send Jefferson a copy of the Constitution. It was accompanied by an extraordinary seventeen-page letter. In this virtual treatise, Madison simultaneously confessed his disappointment with the new charter’s shortcomings and defended its value as a practical replacement for the unworkable Articles of Confederation. The delay suggests Madison feared Jefferson would not agree with the outcome of the Philadelphia convention. In particular, the younger man was eager to refute the widely held belief—which Jefferson subscribed to - that only small nations could or would support a republic. Larger countries naturally gravitated to rule by kings or emperors.
In this long letter, Jefferson became the first man to read Madison’s breakthrough argument that a large republic would be
less likely to degenerate into tyranny. Why? A large republic contained so many varied groups, each pursuing their own interests, they would be unlikely to blend into a majority that would engage in “unjust pursuits,” such as violating property rights or individual liberties. This was especially true of a republic divided into large states, most of them geographically distant from each other.
Events also played a part in Madison’s delay. The campaign to win ratification for the Constitution had begun almost the day the convention adjourned. Madison had hurried to New York to take his seat in the old Congress, where he worked hard to persuade the members to pass the document on to the state legislatures without any negative comments. This was not an easy task. From September 17 to September 28, a heated debate about what to do with the new charter raged virtually nonstop. Virginians such as Richard Henry Lee, one of the earliest supporters of the Revolution, voiced severe criticisms. Soon there was an alarming number of congressmen who wanted to reject the Constitution on the spot. They had authorized the convention only to revise the Articles of Confederation. Instead, the Philadelphia conclave had produced an entirely new government. This was disobedience, and deserved to be punished.
Madison led the fight for a compromise, repeatedly telling people how General Washington had signed the new Constitution with great “cordiality.” With both sides weighing each word, the compromise was hammered out. Congress sent the Constitution to the states by a unanimous vote, with neither criticism nor praise. Madison immediately informed General Washington, who replied with evident pleasure—and political sophistication: “This apparent unanimity will have its effect.”
The effect was slow to appear. Madison soon discovered considerable opposition outside Congress. Essays written by New Yorkers under pseudonyms such as Cato began appearing in the city’s papers, deploring the Constitution as an assault on the nation’s peace and prosperity, and a threat to everyone’s civil liberties. New York’s Governor George Clinton remained hostile to the change in government. He liked the way the Articles of Confederation had allowed him to become a virtual dictator of the so-called “Empire State.”
Thomas Jefferson did not even mention the durability of a large republic in his reply to Madison’s long letter. Instead, the envoy told the Congressman what he liked and did not like about the new constitution. He liked the way it sidetracked the state legislatures. He also liked Congress’s power to levy taxes and the organization of the government into three branches. He especially liked the compromise between the large and small states, which gave every state two senators and based membership in the House of Representatives on a state’s population.8
Then the envoy told Madison what “I do not like.” First and most troubling was the omission of a bill of rights, which would guarantee freedom of religion, habeas corpus, trial by juries, freedom of the press and protection against standing armies. “The people are entitled to a bill of rights against every government on earth,” Jefferson insisted.
At the Philadelphia convention, Madison had argued that he thought a bill of rights was superfluous. But he was not opposed to the idea in principle. He had already led an historic struggle in Virginia to pass Jefferson’s proposal to discard the Episcopal Church as the state’s established religion, and make religious freedom the prevailing policy.
The second feature Jefferson disliked was the abandonment of rotation in office—especially in the case of the president. He was sure that a “first magistrate” would always be reelected if he were permitted to succeed himself. This meant he would become president for life. “The power of removing him every fourth year by a vote of the people is a power that will not be exercised,” Jefferson predicted.9
Then came words that would echo through the rest of Jefferson’s life: “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive…I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries, as long as they remain chiefly agricultural, and this will be as long as there are vacant lands in America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become as corrupt as in Europe.”10
There was nothing new about most of Jefferson’s ideas. They were standard Whig (the eighteenth century word for liberal) doctrine. Central to them was the conviction that power was a threat to liberty. Washington and Madison, on the other hand, had moved beyond this fear to the belief that power could be used positively to control—and even to enlarge—individual liberty. This was one of the central ideas in a series of essays that Madison began writing, in partnership with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, defending the Constitution against its critics. They kept their identities secret by writing under the pen name Publius, in honor of one of the founders of the Roman Republic, Publius Valerius Publicola.
The trio produced three or four essays a week, which were published in three New York newspapers. Madison wrote twenty-six and Hamilton fifty-one; Jay contributed only six before an attack of rheumatism laid him low. Early in 1788, the essays were collected into a book, The Federalist, that became a powerful weapon in the ongoing debate about whether the Constitution should become the law of the land.
George Washington was an enthusiastic admirer of The Federalist. He called it one of the most important discussions of government ever written. “When the transient circumstances and fugitive performances which have attended the crisis will have disappeared, this work will have merited the notice of posterity,” he told Alexander Hamilton. For a man whose education had ended in the fourth grade, this comment revealed remarkably good judgment. The Federalist remains an admired document to this day.11
Washington made it clear that this praise was not mere flattery. “I have read every performance which has been printed on one side or another of the great question,” he told his ex-aide. None could have more impact on an unbiased mind “as the production of your triumvirate.” The ex-general asked Madison to send him a “neatly bound” copy for his library.12
Washington’s remark about reading every pamphlet or news story written about the Constitution is a glimpse of how intensely he was involved in the fight for ratification. At one point, his secretary at Mount Vernon, his former military aide-de-camp, Colonel David Humphreys, called him “the focus of political intelligence for the New World.” The ex-general repeatedly urged the friends of the Constitution to take up their pens to answer the critics.
Speaking as one Virginian to another, Madison remarked that their home state needed these essays as much as New York did. Some of the leaders of the Revolution in the Old Dominion had become strident opponents of the new Constitution—most notably, Patrick Henry. The orator had been joined by another prominent political leader, George Mason, who had published an angry essay condemning the document. Madison suggested that Washington might put the Federalist essays “into the hands of some of your confidential correspondents in Richmond who would have them reprinted there.”13
Washington sent the essays to Dr. David Stuart, who represented Fairfax County in the state legislature. Stuart had married the widow of Martha Washington’s son, John Parke Custis, and was a trusted friend. Washington urged him to find a Richmond printer who would give the essays “a place in his paper.” He was not at liberty to disclose the names of the writers, and he was even more emphatic about keeping his role in forwarding the essays a total secret. This powerful political medicine was soon appearing weekly in the Virginia Independent Chronicle.
Washington had decided his influence would be strongest if he maintained a detached image. But he remained at the white hot center of the contest. Madison all but deluged him with letters from New York, reporting on the ratification contest in various states, and its prospects of success. By early 1788, Washington knew that Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut had approved the new government by comfortable margins. But Massachusetts was a large and ominous worry.
Elbridge Gerry, a close friend of John Adams, had been attacking the charter since he returned from the C
onstitutional Convention. He had aroused serious doubts in Samuel Adams and Governor John Hancock, whose friendship went back to the heady days of 1776. Neither man had any great affection for George Washington, who had outshone the wildly ambitious Hancock during the Revolution, and worsted Adams in contests over control of the Continental Army. Hancock had become governor by placating the Shaysites and their sympathizers with promises of tax relief. He reportedly controlled fifty votes in the Massachusetts ratifying convention.
The federalists, as the proponents of the Constitution began to call themselves, had learned from the earlier contests. In Pennsylvania, they had pushed for immediate ratification. Though they had won a majority, their haste left the anti-federalists infuriated, and the antis took to the newspapers, hurling nasty accusations and dark predictions that soon circulated around the nation. Taking a different tack in Massachusetts, the federalists let the antis talk for weeks and tried to be agreeable. Nor did they object when Samuel Adams and his followers asked if they could recommend amendments, especially a bill of rights.
An anxious Madison, in close touch with the debate, urged Washington to send a Bay State friend “an explicit communication of your good wishes” for the Constitution. The general wrote a strong letter to former Major General Benjamin Lincoln, the man who had crushed Shays’ Rebellion. By the time it arrived, Massachusetts had voted to ratify. But Washington’s warm words may have helped prevent second thoughts and angry counterattacks a la Pennsylvania from the Adams-Hancock faction.
The delegates that Virginia’s voters sent to the ratifying convention had a worrisome tilt toward the constitution’s chief opponents, Patrick Henry and George Mason. Now it was Washington’s turn to give some crucial advice to James Madison. The Congressman was reluctant to appear in public as the document’s defender. Perhaps his early doubts about its defects resurfaced when he pictured himself in that role. More probably, Madison knew his limitations as a speaker and hesitated to take on Patrick Henry, an acknowledged champion in that department. Washington banished Madison’s hesitation with no-nonsense bluntness. “Explanations will be wanting” at the convention, and “none can give them with more precision and accuracy than yourself.”14
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