A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (28 page)

Following ratification, leaders of both factions agreed to draft amendments to the Constitution.
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Madison took charge of the project that started him on the path on which he soon transformed from a Federalist to an Anti-Federalist leader. Strong precedents existed for a bill of rights. The English Magna Charta, Petition of Right, and Bill of Rights enumerated, in various ways, protections against standing armies and confiscation of property, and guaranteed a number of legal rights that jointly are referred to as due process. These precedents had taken form in most of the Revolutionary state constitutions, most famously Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, penned by George Mason. Madison studied all of these documents carefully and conferred with Anti-Federalist leaders. He then forged twelve proposed constitutional amendments, which Congress sent to the states in 1789. The states ratified ten of them by 1791.

The First Amendment combined several rights—speech, press, petition, assembly, and religion—into one fundamental law guaranteeing freedom of expression. While obliquely related to religious speech, the clear intent was to protect political speech. This, after all, was what concerned the Anti-Federalists about the power of a national government—that it would suppress dissenting views. The amendment strongly implied, however, that even those incapable of oral speech were protected when they financially supported positions through advertising, political tracts, and broadsides. Or, put simply, money equals speech.

However, the Founders hardly ignored religion, nor did they embrace separation of church and state, a buzz phrase that never appears in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Madison had long been a champion of religious liberty. He attended the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), where he studied under the Reverend John Witherspoon. In May 1776, when Virginia lawmakers wrote the state’s new constitution, Madison changed George Mason’s phrase that “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration” of religion to “all men are entitled to the full and free
exercise
of religion” [emphasis ours].

Madison thus rejected the notion that the exercise of faith originated with government, while at the same time indicating that he expected a continual and ongoing practice of religious worship. He resisted attempts to insert the name Jesus Christ into the Virginia Bill for Religious Liberty, not because he was an unbeliever, but because he argued that “better proof of reverence for that holy name would be not to profane it by making it a topic of legislative discussion.” Late in his life Madison wrote, “Belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and the happiness of man, that arguments to enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.” Even at the time, though, he considered the widespread agreement within the Constitutional Convention “a miracle” and wrote, “It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in [the convention] a finger of that Almighty hand.”
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Religious, and especially Christian, influences in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were so predominant that as late as the mid-twentieth century, the chairman of the Sesquicentennial Commission on the Constitution answered negatively when asked if an atheist could become president: “I maintain that the spirit of the Constitution forbids it. The Constitution prescribes and oath of affirmation…[that] in its essence is a covenant with the people which the President pledges himself to keep with the help of Almighty God.”
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Modern interpretations of the Constitution that prohibit displays of crosses in the name of religious freedom would rightly have been shouted down by the Founders, who intended no such separation.

The Second Amendment addressed Whig fears of a professional standing army by guaranteeing the right of citizens to arm themselves and join militias. Over the years, the militia preface has become thoroughly (and often, deliberately) misinterpreted to imply that the framers intended citizens to be armed only in the context of an army under the authority of the state. In fact, militias were the exact opposite of a state-controlled army: the state militias taken together were expected to serve as a counterweight to the federal army, and the further implication was that citizens were to be as well armed as the government itself!
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The Third Amendment buttressed the right of civilians against the government military by forbidding the quartering (housing) of professional troops in private homes.

Amendments Four through Eight promised due process via reasonable bail, speedy trials (by a jury of peers if requested), and habeas corpus petitions. They forbade self-incrimination and arbitrary search and seizure, and proclaimed, once again, the fundamental nature of property rights. The Ninth Amendment, which has lain dormant for two hundred years, states that there might be
other
rights not listed in the amendments that are, nevertheless, guaranteed by the Constitution. But the most controversial amendment, the Tenth, echoes the second article of the Articles of Confederation in declaring that the states and people retain all rights and powers not expressly granted to the national government by the Constitution. It, too, has been relatively ignored.

These ten clear statements were intended by the framers as absolute limitations on the power of government, not on the rights of individuals. In retrospect, they more accurately should be known as the Bill of Limitations on government to avoid the perception that the rights were granted by government in the first place.
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Two streams of liberty flowed from 1776. First, the Federalists synthesized Whig opposition to centralized military, economic, political, and religious authority into a program built upon separation of power, checks and balances, and staggered terms of office, which simultaneously preserved many state and local prerogatives. Second, the Anti-Federalists completed the process with the Bill of Rights, which further reinforced laws that protected states, localities, and individuals from central government coercion. Both these streams flowed through an American Christianity that emphasized duty, civic morality, skeptical questioning of temporal authority, and economic success. In addition, both streams were fed by Enlightenment can-do doctrines tempered by the realization that men were fallible, leading to an emphasis on competition, political parties, and the marketplace of ideas.

But it was a close-run thing. As Adams recalled, “All the great critical questions about men and measures from 1774 to 1778” were “decided by the vote of a single state, and that vote was often decided by a single individual.”
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It was by no means inevitable. Nevertheless, the fountain of hope had turned to a river of liberty, nourishing the new nation as it grew and prospered.

G
eorge Washington’s famed 1796 Farewell Address contains one plea that, in retrospect, seems remarkably futile: the president expressed frustration over the ongoing political strife and the rise of permanent political parties. It was an odd statement, considering that if anyone created parties (or factions, as James Madison had termed them), it was Washington, along with his brilliant aide Alexander Hamilton, through his domestic program and foreign policy. They had assistance from the
Federalist Papers
coauthor Madison, who relished divisions among political groups as a means to balance power. Washington’s warnings reflected his sorrow over the bitter debates that characterized politics throughout his two administrations, more so because the debates had made enemies of former colleagues Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Adams. By 1796 most of those men could not stand each other: only Jefferson and Madison still got along, and Washington, before his death, ceased corresponding with his fellow Virginian, Jefferson. Other Founders chose sides among these powerhouses.

Washington thought good men could disagree without the venom of politics overriding all other interests. He hoped that a band of American Revolutionaries could achieve consensus over what their Revolution was all about. In fact, Washington might well have voiced as much pride as regret over the unfolding events of the 1790s because he and his generation shaped an American political party system that endures, in recognizable form, to this day, and because the emergence of those factions, of which he so strongly disapproved, in large part guaranteed the success and moderation of that system.

From 1789 to 1815, clashes between Federalists and Anti-Federalists translated into a continuing and often venomous debate over the new nation’s domestic and foreign policies. Political parties first appeared in this era, characterized by organized congressional leadership, party newspapers whose editorials established party platforms and attacked the opposition, and the nomination of partisan national presidential candidates. Washington’s cabinet itself contained the seeds of this partisanship. Secretary of State Jefferson rallied the old Anti-Federalists under the banner of limited government and a new Jeffersonian Republican Party. Meanwhile, Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton, chief author of the
Federalist Papers
with Madison (who himself would make the transition to Republican), set the agenda for the Federalists. Both sides battled over Hamilton’s economic plan—his reports on debt, banking, and manufactures—while Madison, often the voice of conciliation and compromise, quietly supported the Federalist position. They simultaneously fought over whether American foreign policy would favor France or Britain in the European struggle for power. In every case the debates came down to a single issue: given that the people retained all powers but those most necessary to the functioning of the Republic, what powers did the government absolutely need? Thus, from the moment the ink dried on the Constitution, an important development had taken place in American government whereby the debate increasingly focused on the size of government rather than its virtue.

Following the ratification of the Constitution, the Federalists continued their momentum under Washington, and they deserve credit for implementing a sound program during the general’s two terms. Washington’s exit in 1796 constituted no small event: although the election of his vice president, the famed Revolutionary organizer and diplomat John Adams, essentially maintained Federalist power, a popular and respected leader had stepped down voluntarily. Relinquishing the “crown” under such circumstances was unheard of in Europe, much less in the rest of the world, where monarchs clung to their thrones even if it required the assassination of family members. It is not an overstatement to say that Adams’s election in 1796 was one of the most significant points in the evolution of the Republic, and although not on the momentous scale of the complete upheaval four years later, it nevertheless marked a bloodless change in leadership seldom seen in human history.

When the Federalist dynasty evaporated in the span of Adams’s administration, and the Jeffersonian Republicans took over the ship of state in 1800, this, too, contained elements of continuity as well as the obvious components of change. For one thing, Jefferson propagated the “Virginia dynasty,” which began with Washington, then Jefferson, followed later by Madison and, still later, James Monroe. Never in the nation’s history would it again be dominated by so many from one state in such a brief span of time (although Texas, in the late twentieth century, has come close, electing three presidents in thirty-five years).

Movers and Shakers

In New York City in April of 1789, George Washington and John Adams took the oaths of office to become the first president and vice president of the United States of America.
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Both had stood unopposed in the country’s first presidential election five months earlier, and Washington bungled his words, appearing more “agitated and embarrassed…than he ever was by the leveled Cannon or pointed musket.”
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If ceremony threw the general off, neither the responsibility nor the power of the position unnerved him. After all, few knew what the office of the presidency was—indeed, it would have been little without a man such as Washington moving its levers—and someone who had commanded an army that defeated the British was unlikely to be reluctant to exercise power. Washington, as always, disliked public speaking, and although he delivered his addresses to Congress in person, he found pomp and circumstance distasteful. He was, after all, a farmer and a soldier.

Washington knew, however, that in this grand new experiment, the president was in a sense more powerful than any king. A political priest, he governed by virtue of the power of the people, making him in a sense beyond reproach. Certainly Washington had his critics—his enemies pummeled him mercilessly. Philip Freneu’s
National Journal
attacked Washington so viciously that the general referred to the editor as “that rascal”—damning words from Washington!
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Radical Tom Paine went even further. In a letter to the
Aurora,
Payne “celebrated Washington’s [ultimate] departure, actually prayed for his imminent death,” and contemptuously concluded that the world would have to decide “whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles or whether you ever had any.”
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Washington endured it with class. Paine’s reputation, already questionable, never recovered from his ill-chosen words regarding “the man who unites all hearts.”
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If Washington was “the American Zeus, Moses, and Cincinnatus all rolled into one,” he was not without faults.
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His rather nebulous personal religion left him exposed and isolated. Many of his biographers trumpeted Washington’s faith, and a famous painting captures the colonial general praying in a snowy wood, but if Washington had any personal belief in Jesus Christ, he kept it well hidden. Like Franklin, Washington tended toward Deism, a general belief in a detached and impersonal God who plays no role in human affairs. At any rate, Washington approached his new duties with a sense that although he appealed frequently to the Almighty for help, he was going it alone, and for better or worse, the new government rested on his large shoulders.
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The president’s personality has proven elusive to every generation of American historians, none more so than modern writers who, unsatisfied with what people wrote or said, seek to reach the emotions of the popular figures. At this, Washington would have scoffed. The son of a prosperous Virginia planter, Washington married well and rose to high economic, military, and political power, becoming undisputed leader of the American Revolution. Yet the qualities that brought him this power and respect—self-control, solid intellect, hard work, tenacity, and respectability—also shielded the life of the inner man. No one, not even his wife and closest family, really knew the intensely private George Washington.

Washington was, reportedly, unhappy at home. Economics had weighed heavily in his choice of a wife—supposedly, he deeply loved another woman—and his relationship with his own mother was strained. His goal of becoming a British army officer, a task for which he was particularly well suited, evaporated with the Revolution. Although he assumed the duties of commander in chief, it was a position the Virginian reluctantly took out of love of country rather than for personal fulfillment. Solace in religion or the church also evaded him, although he fully accepted man’s sinful nature and his own shortcomings. Stiff and cold, the general nevertheless wept at the farewell to his officers. Never flamboyant and often boring, Washington eludes modern writers dazzled by the cult of celebrity. Once, on a bet, a colleague approached Washington warmly and greeted him by patting him firmly on his back; the individual won his bet, but for the rest of his life shivered at the memory of the look of reproach on Washington’s face!

A top-down centralist and consolidator by the nature of his military experiences, much like another general/president, Dwight D. Eisenhower some two hundred years later, Washington compromised and negotiated when it seemed the right strategy.
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As a result, it is not surprising that he thoroughly endorsed, and spent the next eight years implementing, the centralist economic and military policies of his most important aide, Alexander Hamilton. To ignore Washington’s great vision and innovations in government, however, or dismiss them as Hamilton’s, would shortchange him. He virtually invented out of whole cloth the extraconstitutional notion of a cabinet. At every step he carefully weighed not only the needs of the moment, but also the precedents he set for all future leaders of the nation. For a man to refuse a crown from his adoring nation may have been good sense in light of the fate of Louis XVI a few years later; to refuse a third term marked exceptional character.

That character also revealed itself in those with whom he kept counsel—his associates and political appointees, most of whom had great virtues but also suffered from fatal flaws. Vice President John Adams, for example, possessed the genius, personal morality, and expertise to elevate him to the presidency. But he antagonized people, often needlessly, and lacked the political savvy and social skills necessary to retain the office. Short and stocky (his enemies disparagingly called Adams His Rotundity), Adams rose from a humble Massachusetts farming family to attend Harvard College and help lead the American Revolution.
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A brilliant attorney, patriot organizer, and Revolutionary diplomat, Adams exuded all the doctrinal religion missing in Washington, to the point of being pious to a fault. Other men at the Continental Congress simply could not stand him, and many a good measure failed only because Adams supported it. (His unpopularity at the Continental Congress required that a declaration of independence be introduced by someone else, even though he was the idea’s chief supporter.) On the other hand, Adams brought a sense of the sacred to government that Washington lacked, placing before the nation an unwavering moral compass that refused compromise. By setting such an unbending personal standard, he embarrassed lesser men who wanted to sin, and sin greatly, without consequence.