America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback (27 page)

“Poor Pennsylvania has become the most miserable spot under the surface of the globe. Our streets have been stained already with fraternal blood—a sad prelude we fear of the future mischiefs our constitution will bring upon us,” worried the enlightened Philadelphia physician Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration. 12

The spilling of fraternal blood was assuredly not what James Wilson envisioned when he had signed the Declaration of Independence. Born in Carskerdy, Scotland, he sailed to America in 1765, where he became a tutor at the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania). Wilson then worked as a legal assistant in the office of John Dickinson, one of the wealthiest men in the colonies.

Dickinson won his greatest fame and patriot’s stripes when he penned the influential
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
. An argument for American liberty written in response to the Townshend Acts in 1767, this series of essays had appeared in a Pennsylvania journal, but the modest title somewhat belied Dickinson’s status as the largest slave-holder in Delaware, where his family had long owned a tobacco farm and other properties.

After training for the bar in Dickinson’s office, James Wilson became an attorney in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in an area largely settled by Ulster Scots like himself in the 1750s. Wilson had great success arranging land deals for his Scots-Irish clients. Although he was prospering, he also began to borrow funds with which to aggressively speculate on land.

Nearly from the time of his arrival in Pennsylvania, Wilson was | 223 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
involved in patriot politics, and he chaired the Carlisle Committee of Correspondence. In 1774, the erudite Wilson published a pamphlet called Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament. Actually written as early as 1768, the essay denied Parliament’s authority over the Colonies. In it, Wilson had written, “All men are by nature, equal and free. No one has a right to any authority over another without his consent. . . . The consequence is, that the happiness of the society is the first law of every government.”

Small wonder that Wilson was among the signers of the Declaration of Independence two years later. In fact, his vote had broken a deadlock within the Pennsylvania delegation, where the influential John Dickinson opposed the Declaration, preferring to reconcile with Great Britain by sending off the ill-fated Olive Branch Petition. When the hostilities broke out, Wilson was made colonel of a militia battalion and fought under Washington in the New Jersey campaign of 1776.

Once independence was achieved, Wilson, like many other Founders, aligned himself with more aristocratic and conservative views. His experience in the Fort Wilson Riot no doubt cemented those views.

And they were shared by more than a few of his fellow Founders, particularly in the aftermath of the Shays uprising in Massachusetts.

James Wilson, like Washington, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, all shuddered at the prospect of more unrest at the hands of a “mobocracy.” As Franklin biographer H. W. Brands once wrote, “From classical times the argument against republicanism was that it degenerated into democracy—government not simply in the name of the people but by the people themselves. And democracy degenerated into anarchy, because the people were not fit to govern themselves. In Massachusetts the name of anarchy was Daniel Shays, and the lesson | 224 \

Lafayette’s Sword
Shays taught was that if America’s republicanism did not take preventive measures soon, it might be lost.”13

The brief moment known as Shays’ Rebellion had tremendous repercussions for the young nation. In the big picture, it was a relatively minor incident in a far-flung corner of the New England frontier, quickly subdued as cooler heads—and better-armed militias— prevailed. But many people viewed the event as a dangerous storm warning.

Following the collapse of Shays’ Rebellion, which produced a series of minor tax and voting reforms in Massachusetts, there remained a sense that America under the Articles of Confederation was a dog without much bite. Undoubtedly, the uprising set the table for the constitutional convention that met in Philadelphia in the spring of that year. A movement to throw out the Articles of Confederation and start afresh had been gathering momentum. Shays’ Rebellion provided the added urgency that prompted Congress to call for the convention. As economic historian John Steel Gordon noted, “Referring to the changes in the debtors’ law brought about by Shays’ Rebellion, a Boston newspaper snootily noted in May 1787 that ‘sedition itself will sometimes make laws.’ In a very real sense, Shays’ Rebellion helped make a constitution.”14

z

wo r k i n g f r o m m ay 25, when a quorum was established, until September 17, 1787, when the convention voted to endorse the final form of the Constitution, the delegates gathered in the Pennsylvania state-house in Philadelphia were actually obligated only to revise or amend the Articles of Confederation. Under those articles, however, the government was plagued by weaknesses, such as its inability to raise rev-

| 225 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
enues to pay its foreign debts or maintain an army. From the outset, most of the convention’s organizers, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton chief among them, knew that splints and bandages wouldn’t do the trick. The government was broke—literally and figuratively— and they were going to fix it by inventing an entirely new one. James Madison had been studying more than two hundred books on constitutions and republican history sent to him by Thomas Jefferson in preparation for the convention. The moving force behind the convention, Madison came prepared with the outline of a new constitution.

A reluctant George Washington, whose name was placed at the head of list of Virginia’s delegates without his knowledge, was unquestionably spurred by the events in Massachusetts. Elected president of the convention, he wrote from Philadelphia in June to his close wartime confidant and ally, the Marquis de Lafayette, who had presented that now-infamous sword to Daniel Shays after Saratoga, ten years earlier: “I could not resist the call to a convention of the States which is to determine whether we are to have a government of respectability under which life, liberty, and property will be secured to us, or are to submit to one which may be the result of chance or the moment, springing perhaps from anarchy and Confusion, and dictated perhaps by some aspiring demagogue.”15

Washington rarely spoke at the convention, preferring as the presiding officer not to influence the debates. He conveyed his views in private, and others noted his occasional expressions of disgust or pleasure as the debate proceeded. The fifty-five delegates slowly trickled in from twelve states. With a legislature that didn’t want a central government to force it to pay its debts, Rhode Island sent no delegates, which George Washington deemed “scandalous” and inspired the name “Rogue Island.” Those present—in varying degrees of attendance— | 226 \

Lafayette’s Sword
included some of the most prominent men in America. Thomas Jefferson, ambassador to France, and John Adams, in London, were notably absent, but not by choice; Patrick Henry, on the other hand, declined and famously said he “smelt a rat in Philadelphia, tending toward monarchy.” But it was Washington’s presence, along with that of Benjamin Franklin, that was required to give the meeting its legitimacy in the public eye.

With windows closed and guards posted to preserve secrecy, the delegates hammered out the details of the future American government in excruciating debates that carried through Philadelphia’s summer heat and humidity. The broad outlines of the debates and positions have been well documented. There were disagreements between large states and small over representation in the legislature. There was tremendous disagreement over the role, title, duties, and selection of the executive, finally called the president. Eventually, two main plans emerged. Largely James Madison’s work, the Virginia Plan proposed a bicameral legislature, an executive, a judiciary, and proportional representation, and became the unofficial agenda for the convention. Fearful of large-state power and overly strong central government that would overwhelm smaller states, the second plan was offered by William Patterson and became known as the New Jersey plan. Among its chief differences was a single legislative chamber.

New York’s brilliant and ambitious Alexander Hamilton presented his own plan. Best known as Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolution, Hamilton was the illegitimate son of a Scotsman and a woman from the tiny West Indies island of Nevis, and had become a successful and influential New York attorney, connected by marriage to one of the state’s most powerful families. Hamilton’s proposal, modeled on Rome’s republic, outlined a presidency and senate elected | 227 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
for life—continuing to serve on condition of “good behavior”—and a lower house elected for shorter terms. To many of the delegates, the plan reeked of monarchy and was not seriously considered.

Another plan that has generated considerable historical controversy was proposed by South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney, a rather colorful character who lied about his age so he could present himself as the youngest delegate (in fact, Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey was). According to scholarly accounts of papers not discovered until the twentieth century, Pinckney suggested more than thirty of the provisions that ended up in the Constitution. Madison apparently loathed him, and as the unofficial note taker of the Convention, the future fourth president later diminished Pinckney’s role. (Madison’s notes were published in 1840 and are widely viewed as highly definitive but not entirely objective.) In their book on the constitutional convention,
Decision in Philadelphia,
Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier give the flamboyant, womanizing Pinckney his due, while serving up a reminder that the “demigods” gathered in Philadelphia were still flesh-and-blood people with ample humanity: “Whatever character flaws he may have had—the egotism, the political instincts that so many of the other gentlemen around him abhorred—he was an intelligent, experienced, and clear-sighted man whose ideas and opinions should not be discounted. The Father of the Constitution he was not; but he must be seen as one of the group whose influence was significant.”16

James Wilson’s name is not usually mentioned in the same breath with some of the more “marbleized” of the Constitution’s Framers. But the six-foot-tall, bespectacled Scotsman ranks only behind Madison, and perhaps Hamilton, in his contribution to its creation. Certainly one of the most learned lawyers at the meeting, he spoke more than anyone else, including Madison. Wilson also read aloud the written | 228 \

Lafayette’s Sword
statements of eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, too gout-ridden to stand. Franklin was carried to the sessions on a sedan chair conveyed by prisoners from a nearby jail.

As a member of the Committee of Detail, Wilson has been credited by some as the man behind the document’s opening words—“We the People”—which became a source of consternation, because some delegates argued that the nation was the creation of the states. Although more closely linked to the new American aristocracy, Wilson was a champion of democracy, not a popular notion among men who viewed an excess of democracy as one short step removed from rebellion by men like Daniel Shays. Another signer of the Declaration, Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry, told the convention he had been “too republican hereto-fore: he was still however republican, but had been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.”17 Wilson preferred popular election of the president and senators, and was crucial in crafting the compromise that called for “electors,” in essence inventing the electoral college, a term that does not appear in the Constitution but emerged in the nineteenth century before officially entering the United States Code.

It was also James Wilson who proposed the compromise that untied the most difficult of the convention’s knots—the question of slavery and how slaves would be counted in the new nation. “James Wilson of Pennsylvania proposed that the new constitution adopt the expedient devised by the Confederation Congress in 1783, when the legislature allowed the states to count three-fifths of the total number of their slaves,” according to Franklin’s biographer, H. W. Brands. “This compromise made no one happy but none so upset as to bolt the convention, and it was accepted.”18

Support for the Constitution was not unanimous, however. Several delegates left before signing, and others, most notably Virginia’s George | 229 \

America’s Hidden Hi
Ç
ory
Mason, refused to sign the finished document. In Mason’s case, it was over the absence of a Bill of Rights. Another Virginian, Edmund Randolph, also balked. Calling for state conventions to propose amendments and a second national convention, Randolph believed failing to do so would “produce anarchy and civil convulsions which were apprehended from the refusal of individuals to sign it.” (He later rallied behind ratification and became the nation’s first attorney general.) Washington signed the parchment copy first, as president of the convention. He was followed by the remaining delegates from the states in geographical order, from north to south, beginning with New Hampshire. When the last of the signatures was added—that of Abraham Baldwin of Georgia—Benjamin Franklin gazed at Washington’s chair, on which was painted a bright yellow sun, then spoke.

As James Madison recorded it: “I have . . . often in the course of a session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell if it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

In another, perhaps more apocryphal tale, Franklin left the building and was confronted by a lady who asked, “Well, Doctor, do we have a monarchy or a republic?”