Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (20 page)

Massachusetts passed a state constitution in 1780 that found few friends among the poor and middle class, many of them veterans of the Continental Army still waiting for promised bonuses. When they learned that they were now barred from voting and holding office, they must have wondered what they had been fighting for. As the economy worsened, many farms were seized to pay off debts. When the local sheriffs looked to the militia to defend the debt courts against angry crowds, the militia sided with the farmers.

In the summer of 1786, an army veteran named Daniel Shays emerged on the scene. With 700 farmers and working-class people, Shays marched on Springfield and paraded around town. Onetime radical Sam Adams, now part of the Boston establishment, drew up a Riot Act, allowing the authorities to jail anyone without a trial. Revolt against a monarch was one thing, said Adams, but against a republic it was a crime punishable by death.

Shays soon had a thousand men under arms and was marching on Boston, the seat of wealth and power. Then General Benjamin Lincoln, one of Washington’s war commanders, brought out an army paid for by Boston’s merchants. There was an exchange of artillery fire, leaving some casualties on both sides, and Shays’s army scattered. Lincoln’s army pursued the rebels, but refrained from attacking when the rout was assured. A harsh winter took its toll, and Shays’s amateur army disintegrated. Some of the rebels were caught, tried, and hanged. Others were pardoned. Shays, on the run in Vermont, was pardoned, but died in poverty in 1788.

Writing from the safe distance of Paris, Thomas Jefferson said of the uprising, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. . . . God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Lacking cohesion and stronger leadership, the Shaysites disintegrated. However, several of the reforms they had demanded were made, including the end of the state’s direct taxation, reduced court costs, and the exemption of workmen’s tools and household necessities from the debt process.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

G
EORGE
M
ASON,
delegate from Virginia, writing on the eve of the Constitutional Convention in May 1787:

I have reason to hope there will be greater unanimity and less opposition, except for the little States, than was at first apprehended. The most prevalent idea in the principal States seems to be a total alteration of the present federal system, and substituting a great national council or parliament, consisting of two branches of the legislature, founded upon the principles of equal proportionate representation, with full legislative powers upon all subjects of the Union; and an executive: and to make the latter a power of a negative upon all such laws as they shall judge contrary to the interest of the federal Union. It is easy to foresee that there will be much difficulty in organizing a government upon this great scale, and at the same time reserving to the State legislatures a sufficient portion of power for promoting and securing the prosperity and happiness of their respective citizens; yet with the proper degree of coolness, liberality and candor (very rare commodities by the by), I doubt not but it may be effected.

A Virginia statesman who wrote the first American bill of rights—the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776—George Mason (1725–92) is not usually mentioned in the same breath with the more familiar Founding Fathers. Though he held few public offices, he was one of the most significant and influential men of the day.

Before the Revolution, his most important contribution was the Virginia Declaration of Rights, from which Jefferson borrowed to craft the Declaration of Independence. Mason played an active role in creating the Constitution, but disagreed with parts of it and refused to sign the final draft of the United States Constitution.

Chief among his complaints was the lack of a bill of rights to protect personal liberties. Another of those slaveholding delegates who were uncomfortable with slavery, Mason also found fault with some of the compromises that would be made over slavery. Dissatisfied when these concerns were not addressed, he was one of the few delegates who refused to sign the Constitution. When the Constitution was submitted to the states for ratification, he opposed it, and made the absence of a bill of rights his main objection.

What was the Constitutional Convention?

While the Massachusetts uprising was a relatively minor affair that did not spread armed insurrection throughout the states, it sufficiently shook up America’s new ruling class. Something stronger than the Articles of Confederation was needed; the states had little ability to control local rebellion, let alone a foreign attack—a genuine threat as Spain and England both maintained troops in America. Equally pressing was the substantial danger posed by Indians on the western frontier who outnumbered the state militias. Nor could the states adequately handle the other two related crises facing America: the disruption of overseas trade and the postwar financial and currency collapse.

On May 25, 1787, after a delay of ten days because too few delegates had arrived, the convention to draw up a new plan of government gathered in Philadelphia. Every state but Rhode Island sent delegates, and George Washington was unanimously selected to preside over the convention. In the course of the next four months, they would create the Constitution. (While Washington presided at the convention and is recognized as the first president, there were actually several earlier presidents. Under the Articles of Confederation, John Hanson of Maryland had been elected “President of the United States in Congress Assembled.”)

At various times during the four months, fifty-five delegates were present at what is now called Independence Hall in Philadelphia, but rarely were they all there at the same time. Forty-five of them had served in Congress; thirty had served in the war. To delegates like Patrick Henry, it consisted of “the greatest, the best, and most enlightened of our citizens.” John Adams was not there. Nor was Thomas Jefferson, who from Paris called the convention “an assembly of demigods.” In his book
The Vineyard of Liberty
, James McGregor Burns neatly encapsulated this group as “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed,” and it applied to most of them, America’s new aristocracy. They included the likes of Pennsylvania’s Robert Morris, one of America’s wealthiest men, who had funded the Revolution. To other modern historians, they represented not the broad masses, but the wealthy merchants of the North and the wealthy, slaveholding plantation owners of the South.

Of them, the oldest was also perhaps the most famous, eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin; Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey was youngest at twenty-seven. Their median age was forty-three. A little more than half (thirty-one) were college-educated, the same number as were lawyers. Seventeen of the delegates who were present to “establish justice . . . and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” (in the words of the preamble) owned several thousand black slaves; John Rutledge (South Carolina), George Mason (Virginia), and George Washington (Virginia) were among the largest slaveholders in the country.

After two hundred years of rule under the Constitution, we have come to think of it as a perfect ideological and idealistic document created by a gathering of legislative geniuses. It has often been said that no new nation before or since has enjoyed a more politically experienced group than the men who wrote the Constitution. It might be useful to think of them as a collection of, in a modern phrase, special interest groups and regionally minded legislators, almost all of them admittedly brilliant politicians. And in politics, then as now, the art of compromise is the secret of success.

The Constitution was no different; it was a political creation, hammered together in a series of artfully negotiated compromises, balancing political idealism with political expediency. There were conflicts everywhere: between small states and large states, North and South, slave states and abolitionist states.

While there was near unanimity that a federal government was necessary, there was less agreement about the structure of such a government. The first broad scheme for the Constitution came from the Virginians, young James Madison chief among them, and came to be known as the Virginia Plan. Its key points were a bicameral (two-chamber) legislature, an executive chosen by the legislature, and a judiciary also named by the legislature. An alternative, known as the New Jersey Plan, was favored by smaller states. Through the heat of summer, debate dragged on, the convention facing a deadlock essentially over two key questions.

The first was representation. Should representation in Congress be based on population, with larger states getting proportionately more votes, or should each state receive equal representation?

The second question was that of slavery. The southern states wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. Faced with growing abolitionist sentiments, the southern delegates would not bend on questions affecting slavery, nor would they grant freed blacks the vote. On the other hand, they wanted slaves counted for the purpose of determining representation in Congress. In other words, it was “Now you see ’em, now you don’t.”

With an impasse near, Roger Sherman proposed what is called the Connecticut Compromise, or Great Compromise. Seen in retrospect, it seems an obvious solution to the representation issue, providing for equal representation in the upper house of Congress (the Senate) and proportional representation in the lower house (the House of Representatives).

Two more compromises “solved” the issue of slavery and slaves, words that appear nowhere in the Constitution. Instead, flowery euphemisms like “no person held in service,” and “all other persons” were coined in accordance with the Constitution’s flowing legal prose. Under these bargains, Congress was prohibited from taking any action to control slavery for a period of twenty years (until 1808), although the gentlemen did agree that the slave trade could be taxed. (Apparently the antislave forces thought, “We may not like it, but at least let’s make some money out of it.”) And for the purposes of determining representation, slaves (“all other persons”) would be counted as three-fifths of their total population. In hindsight, it was a small step forward for blacks. At least they had gone from being ignored to being three-fifths human. If they could hold out for another seventy years, they would be free! In turn, the southern states agreed to allow a maximum of three new future states that would ban slavery.

One of the last of the central debates regarded the executive and the role of the president. The delegates were men who feared too much power in the hands of a single man—they had just fought a long war to do away with one monarch. The Virginia Plan called for a chief executive to be elected by Congress. Virginia’s George Mason proposed three presidents. Elbridge Gerry, a leading opponent of a strong federal government, wanted the president elected by the state governors. Alexander Hamilton, a proponent of a strong federal government, wanted the president to serve for life. Another proposal was to bar anyone from the presidency who was not worth at least $100,000 (the equivalent of a multimillionaire). The solution came from New York’s Gouverneur Morris, who at the time was living in the same house as George Washington. Morris proposed an executive elected by the people. Morris also proposed that he be commander-in-chief of the armed forces as well. As Thomas Fleming points out in
Liberty
, “One suspects that when Gouverneur Morris spoke, they were hearing advice from George Washington. Also, as Pierce Butler of South Carolina pointed out, there sat Washington, the man who was certain to be the first President. There was no need to fear that he would become a tyrant.”

And in the ultimate exercise of compromise, the men who put the Constitution together recognized that it might have to be changed, so they built in an acceptable form of amending their work. Change would not be easy, but it was possible.

As is true of other moments in American history, cynicism born of perfect hindsight is easy. On the other hand, credit should be given where it is due. The Framers were intelligent, even brilliant men; they knew their history and their law. The Constitution they forged was then the pinnacle of thousands of years of political development. They were familiar with, and could draw on, such sources and models as the Greek philosophers, the Roman republic, and the evolution of the English democratic tradition running from the Magna Carta through Parliament and the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Above all, in the Constitution—and earlier, in the Declaration—they embodied the triumph of the Enlightenment, that glorious flowering of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that elevated the powers of human reason and strove for new forms of government, free of tyranny. The philosophies they were striving to fulfill had been expressed by such giants of the age as Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Kant. They were all familiar to the Framers, and these ideas contributed to the heady debate, a debate that centered on the ongoing struggle between liberty and democracy, two ideas that often clash.

As for debate, there was plenty. Even with the broad outlines agreed upon, major differences cropped up at every turn. It took nearly six hundred separate votes to settle them all. These were not small matters of detail, either, but large questions that might have altered the course of the nation. For instance, New York’s Alexander Hamilton, one of the staunchest advocates of powerful central government and the chief representative of northern commercial interests—he was one of the founders of the Bank of New York—wanted the president and the Senate appointed for life. He also argued for giving the “first class,” the wealthy men of America, among whom he could certainly be counted, “a distinct permanent share of the government.”