Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (17 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

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Washington urged his countrymen “to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.”
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He consented reluctantly to the demobilization of the Continental Army, but warned that it remained to be seen whether the Revolution he had led to victory was “a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.” He called for “an indissoluble Union of the States under one Federal Head”; the honoring of public debt; the establishment of armed forces; and a spirit of cooperation and sacrifice among all the states. Washington took leave of his comrades at New York on December 4, 1783, in probably the most emotional public occasion of American history, and on December 23 handed over his sword to the president of the Continental Congress (Thomas Mifflin, whom he despised and had fired as quartermaster general of the army), taking “leave of all my employments of public life.” Mifflin replied with a majestic statement written by Jefferson, concluding somewhat ambiguously with “earnest prayers that a life so beloved may be fostered with all His care; that your days may be happy as they have been illustrious, and that He will finally give you that reward which this world will not give.” Washington was not quite prepared to sign off on the possibilities of the present world, though he returned to Mount Vernon on Christmas Eve, and wrote to friends and even casual correspondents of his relief at being able now to live quietly on his estates.
In fact, he put himself at the disposition of the public and in the reserve of the new nation, the chief facilitator of the American project, with a greater right than anyone to require that the supreme sacrifices of the 15,000 or so Americans who had died and the devastation that had laid waste much of the country and reduced the economic product by about 45 percent
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not have been in vain. He was charging the Congress with the task of justifying and completing the Revolution, knowing that the chances of it doing so were zero.
In Paris and Versailles, despite the abrasions of the peace process, Franklin was a national hero, even appointed by King Louis XVI to a scientific commission. He and Washington were almost universally admired, and Franklin was the lion of the salons of both London and Paris, in a manner probably never approached by anyone else. He became acquainted and often friendly with the leading
philosophes
, and counseled liberal reforms but warned against anything violent. As always, his advice was good, and as was often also true, it was not followed. He retired his commission in 1785, aged 79, and then stopped with friends in England, his immensely alluring personality and intelligence overcoming all the vexations of epochal disputes. He was reconciled with his son, the former governor of New Jersey, and returned to a hero’s welcome in Philadelphia.
The Congress and all the states were printing money and the Congress eventually devalued all currency by 97.5 percent. Washington’s brilliant but impulsive aide, Alexander Hamilton; Jefferson’s understudy, James Madison; and Robert Morris, the Philadelphia financier who financed much of the war, proposed a 5 percent import duty, but a number of the states refused to cooperate. To some extent the states reneged on their financial obligations generated by the Revolutionary War, just as they had refused to contribute to the British to help pay for the eviction of the French from Canada. It was the same stingy impulse, but they were now largely, themselves, the creditors of their own almost worthless war debts.
Poverty stalked the country except for parts of Pennsylvania and New York and New Jersey; debtors’ courts were busy, and reformers such as Jefferson, whose talents were much more evident in peacetime as he abolished primogeniture and proposed universal education, broadened the franchise to assure a voice to the less prosperous. It was clear by 1785 that the system was not working, as the British, in particular, had predicted.
A land dispute between Maryland and Virginia had been settled amicably under Washington’s auspices at Mount Vernon, and Washington asked the 34-year-old James Madison, a brilliant Virginian lawyer and legislator, to convene a meeting between representatives of the states to discuss interstate commerce. Five states were represented at Annapolis, Maryland, at the meeting in September 1786. Shays’ Rebellion in late 1786 and January 1787, an uprising of destitute Massachusetts farmers, was put down by swiftly recruited militia, but led to suspension of some taxes, and emphasized the absurdity and impotence of the political system. Congress was reduced to asking the states to grant it the power to impose certain taxes, and New York vetoed this.
Twelve states, all but Rhode Island, then called for a constitutional convention to meet at Philadelphia in May 1787. Enthusiasm for the idea of a federal constitution was sketchy in many state elites. In Virginia, Washington and most of the rest of the 40 families that owned the great plantations favored a strong federal government. Jefferson was absent as minister in Paris (where he succeeded Franklin in 1785), and Jefferson’s cousin, Edmund Randolph, was skeptical. Patrick Henry, the radical Virginian independence leader, disapproved the project and did not attend, though he was elected a delegate. John Adams was absent as minister in England (where he was graciously received by George III). Also absent were his anti-federalist cousin, Samuel Adams, and states’ rights advocate John Hancock. The autonomist governor of New York, General George Clinton, boycotted, and the New York delegation was effectively led by the young and brilliant, but none too democratic or representative, Alexander Hamilton. Benjamin Franklin and Robert Morris led the Pennsylvanians. Some delegations were chosen by state assemblies, but some were supplemented by invitations from the conveners.
Washington was in the background, but he and Franklin, who had been proposing federal arrangements since the Albany Congress of 1754, were the real champions of a strong federal state. Washington’s challenge to the state assemblies to justify the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the long and bloody war that followed it had, as he expected, not been met. He would not seize power as many had urged when his army was demobilized, but he was conspicuously available now, to be the legitimately chosen father of the nation in peace as he had been in war. At the instigation of the 81-year old Franklin, Washington was elected president of the Constitutional Convention, and as host, in his splendid role of president of Pennsylvania, Franklin was elected chairman, the two indispensable founders of the nation ensconced at the head of the unfolding process. Franklin, suffering from gout and gallstones, was conveyed by sedan chair to and from the proceedings, by inmates of the municipal prison (with whom he was courteous and jaunty). The two grand strategists and chief elders of America were ready for the supreme effort to complete their work: the replacement of the French threat to British America, and of the British overlordship of a post-French America, with a government that could lead independent America to greatness and fulfill the promise of Jefferson’s luxuriant Declaration of Independence.
9. THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
 
Most of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were effectively self-chosen. It was assumed that state governors and some senior figures of the legislatures could come ex officio. The Virginians arrived first, led by their governor, Edmund Randolph (Washington being present in his national capacity by common wish, ratified by his election as president of the Convention). At first, the advocates of states’ rights and autonomy hung back, not wishing to be involved in a project whose aims they disapproved. As more states sent delegates and the sponsorship of Washington and Franklin lent it momentum and gravity, most decided that it could be contrary to their interests not to be present. By June, all the states except Rhode Island, which had been reduced almost to anarchy, and New Hampshire were present. There were 8 planters and farmers, 21 practicing lawyers and also some that were not active members of the profession, and 15 merchants. As in other parliaments and special conventions of the time, the working class and small farmers, not to mention the tenant farmers and indigent, were represented only in the altruistic afterthoughts of the more prosperous.
Washington stayed in Philadelphia with Robert Morris, the wealthy financier who had been the treasurer of the revolutionary government in fact, apart from what Franklin and Adams could raise overseas. Morris and the unrelated Gouverneur Morris were delegates, and among others who would be prominent were Rufus King of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, William Livingston and William Paterson of New Jersey, Jared Ingersoll, and Thomas Mifflin and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, John Dickinson of Delaware, Daniel Carroll of Maryland, John Blair of Virginia, William Blount of North Carolina, and Pierce Butler and cousins Charles and Charles C. Pinckney of South Carolina, as well as Madison and Hamilton. The radical and populist elements were largely under-represented, though they certainly had their say when the time came to ratify the arrangements that emerged, in the legislatures of the several states. The discussions and side-arrangements of the Constitutional Convention are intricate and interesting, but are also not the subject of this book, which is rather concerned with the strategic direction and management of the United States, from its emergence as a concept to the time of writing. The governing arrangements of the country are immensely important to this narrative, but the precise interaction of men and events that produced them, beyond the designs of the country’s chief political architects, are not.
On May 29, Randolph introduced the Virginia Plan, drafted by Madison, approved by Washington, and based on Jefferson’s constitution of Virginia. Some of the states had lower houses broadly enfranchised, and upper houses elected by people who were larger taxpayers or property owners, who sometimes had life tenure. Some, like Pennsylvania, had a single house chosen by everyone who paid any tax, and there were various gradations in between. Jefferson was controversial, though a wealthy plantation and slave-owner, as he was a liberal who famously said: “My observations do not enable me to say I think integrity the characteristic of wealth.”
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The Virginia Plan had a two-house federal Congress—a popularly elected House of Representatives and a Senate chosen by the state legislatures. The Congress would choose the executive and judiciary and would have powers over all matters of interstate scale, reducing states to the level of local government. The smaller states objected that they would be swamped by the influence of the larger ones, and the populist elements saw this as a matrix for aristocratic and oligarchic rule, if not a centralized despotism scarcely less odious than the one from which they had all just successfully revolted. (There was some justice in both criticisms, which again highlights the fact that Britain was a relatively democratic country, and had become more so since the failure of the king’s American policy imposed on an unconvinced and ultimately rebellious Parliament.)
The under-represented masses, insofar as they existed in these colonies where the largest city had just breasted the 40,000 mark, were in the larger states, and so both their spokesmen and the conservatives were unimpressed with the argument for equality of small states, as states were imaginary or arbitrary creations in America, not distinct cultural and linguistic entities as in Europe. Some of the smaller states’ representatives, such as Gunning Bedford of Delaware, hinted that the aid of foreign allies of the small states might be solicited, to which Gouverneur Morris replied: “The country must be united. If persuasion does not unite it, the sword will. The gallows and halter will finish the work of the sword.” Threats of bayonet attacks and the attentions of the hangman are pretty robust debating gambits, especially between recent victorious comrades-in-arms, who had crusaded for universal human rights.
A triangular arrangement was agreed, in an impressive model of constructive compromise, where both Washington and Franklin, who were largely silent in the formal proceedings but convened delegates singly and in small groups privately, played a capital part. All of the states would have equal representation in the Senate, whose members would be chosen not by the lower house, as in the Virginia Plan, but by the legislatures of the country’s constituent states. The lower House of Representatives would be represented in proportion to its population, except the southern states took the position, en bloc, that they would not touch the notion of a federal state unless the slave population was factored into the weight given to the size of state delegations to the House of Representatives.
The compromise reached was that for purposes of calculating the representation of states in the House of Representatives, three-fifths of slaves would be counted. For these purposes, this effectively gave the slave states’ free citizens 1.5 to 1.6 times the voting power of each eligible voter in free states. Though covered over in verbose piffle about different economic criteria for voting in different states, this was an ugly arrangement certain to breed and amplify resentment. Many thoughtful southerners, including Jefferson, had moral reservations about slavery, “a fire bell in the night,” he later called it. Much more numerous were northerners, especially in the puritanical Northeast, who thought slavery an outright evil, shaming, blasphemous, and unchristian. Thus to adapt slavery to the comparative political advantage of the slaveholder was a bitter pill to swallow. The southerners even tried to exempt slavery from taxation in the Constitution but were unsuccessful, but did get a guarantee that slavery would be unchallenged for at least 30 years. Again, Franklin, who had become a quiet opponent of slavery and would become head of the Pennsylvania anti-slavery society, was instrumental in getting the compromise approved. He lobbied quietly with his usual argument that the triumph of American democracy was inevitable and that it would dwarf slave-holding cotton states as it would dwarf little Britain, and that what was needed was a long view.

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