James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (16 page)

The next day Madison circled back to the legislative veto. He had made alliance with Charles Pinckney, a handsome twenty-nine-year-old from South Carolina, who stood on June 8 to urge that the veto be absolute, as Madison had originally wanted. Without it, the states would intrude on national powers, “however extensive they might be on paper,” said Pinckney. Madison seconded Pinckney’s motion and used his own Newtonian metaphor, calling the absolute veto essential for keeping the proper balance between the center and the satellites: “This prerogative of the general government is the great pervading principle that must control the centrifugal tendency of the states; which, without it, will continually fly out of their proper orbits and destroy the order and harmony of the political system.”
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John Dickinson, having beaten Madison soundly the day before, now took the floor to agree that without proper control the states posed a threat to the general government. His declaration brought Gunning Bedford Jr., the firebrand of the Delaware delegation, out of his chair. He was “very corpulent,” according to William Pierce of Georgia, and smart as well. But, to use Pierce’s words, he was also “warm and impetuous in his temper, and precipitate in his judgment.” The large states, empowered by proportional representation, would use the absolute veto to “crush the small ones whenever they stand in the way of their ambitions or interested views,” Bedford insisted. He charged Pennsylvania and Virginia with wishing “to provide a system in which they would have an enormous and monstrous influence.”
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Madison, who had known Bedford at Princeton, responded with a temperate tone but a sharply pointed question. “What would be the consequence to the small states of a dissolution of the Union?” he asked. That would happen, he was suggesting, if the small states did not yield. But as Madison watched, the universal veto went down by 7 to 3, with one state divided. Virginia voted for the absolute veto, but as Madison noted, both Mr. Randolph and Mr. Mason voted no.
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His plans for bringing state governments under control were encountering stiff resistance even within his own delegation.

On June 9, a fair and warm Saturday, another small state made its
opposition known. William Paterson of New Jersey, a short, unassuming man, asked that the act authorizing delegates from Massachusetts to the convention be read. Like the commissions from several states, it echoed the congressional resolution that the convention meet “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation,” and Paterson used the authorization to make the case that delegates were exceeding their authority. “We ought to keep within [the congressional resolution’s] limits or we should be charged by our constituents with usurpation,” he said, and he went on to rail against the idea of proportional representation. “New Jersey will never confederate on the plan before the committee,” he said. “She would be swallowed up.” He would “rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate.”
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On the following Monday, June 11, as a hot spell settled in, Roger Sherman of Connecticut formally proposed that representation be according to population in the first branch and that equality of states be the rule in the second. But Madison and his allies were not interested in compromise, and they had the votes to prevail. Sherman’s motion failed 6 to 5. A subsequent motion by James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton for proportional representation in the Senate passed 6 to 5.

The small states, getting organized now, found the narrow margins heartening, as was the support they were receiving from states not so small. The newly arrived Luther Martin of Maryland, a confirmed antinationalist, took up their cause. Robert Yates and John Lansing Jr. of New York, who did not want their state under any sort of national control, supported the small states. These delegates joined in producing what history has come to call the New Jersey Plan, and Paterson presented it to the convention on June 15. Hewing closely to the words of the congressional charter, Paterson proposed a series of amendments to the Articles of Confederation that enhanced the powers of Congress and left the one-state-one-vote provision unaltered.
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Now there was an alternative to the Virginia Plan, and John Dickinson of Delaware told Madison that his stubborn refusal to compromise was to blame. Some might have taken Madison’s generally low-key behavior as a sign that he was naturally conciliatory, but Dickinson had
witnessed how firmly fixed he could become. He told him he was at risk of losing small-state support for a strong national government by refusing to meet the small states halfway: “We would sooner submit to a foreign power than submit to be deprived of an equality of suffrage in both branches of the legislature and thereby be thrown under the domination of the large states.”
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The next day, Saturday, Madison was silent, taking notes, while James Wilson challenged the idea that the Virginia Plan violated the congressional mandate. “With regard to the power of the convention,” Wilson said, “he conceived himself authorized to
conclude nothing,
but to be at liberty to
propose anything
.” Edmund Randolph agreed, saying that “when the salvation of the Republic was at stake, it would be treason to our trust not to propose what we found necessary.” Randolph also reminded the delegates of the perilous state of the nation. “He painted in strong colors,” Madison recorded, “the imbecility of the existing confederacy and the danger of delaying a substantial reform.”
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Madison probably spent Sunday preparing his own critique of New Jersey’s proposal, but the following Monday, Alexander Hamilton dominated the proceedings with a six-hour speech. New Jersey’s proposal would lead to a government “weak and distracted,” said Hamilton, and Randolph’s proposals were not much better. “What even is the Virginia Plan but
pork still, with a little change of the sauce
?” he famously asked. The mistake of both plans was their reliance on democracy: “The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.” What was needed was a government similar to Britain’s, with an executive and a senate that served for life. Giving permanent place to “the rich and well-born” would protect the public good from the “uncontrolling disposition” of the masses.
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Hamilton made a few practical suggestions, such as providing for executive succession. Should a vacancy occur, the president of the Senate would step in until a new “governor” was determined. But his plan was in general so far from what the convention was likely to accept—and the weather so miserably hot and muggy—that delegates did not bother to refute him. In later years, when he became very powerful, his
opponents would recall his speech, however, and hold it up as effective evidence of his monarchical leanings.
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On June 19, Madison made his case. While the New Jersey Plan aimed at strengthening the Congress of the Confederation, Madison said, there were a multitude of ways in which it left the central government too weak. The states would still encroach on the general government and “bring confusion and ruin on the whole.” The states would still trespass on one another, threatening “the tranquility of the Union.” Nor could the small states be sure of their “internal tranquility,” he said. Paterson’s plan would do nothing to help them deal with insurrections, such as the recent uprising in Massachusetts. Madison warned the small states “to consider the situation in which they would remain in case their pertinacious adherence to an inadmissible plan should prevent the adoption of any plan.” If the Union dissolved, they would be far less secure than “under a general government pervading with equal energy every part of the empire and having an equal interest in protecting every part against every other part.”
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When Madison finished, Rufus King of Massachusetts posed a choice for the delegates: “whether Mr. Randolph’s [propositions] should be adhered to as preferable to those of Mr. Paterson.” The Virginia Plan won the day, 7 to 3, with one state divided, ending any hope the small states had of the New Jersey Plan being accepted—or of a future government resembling the one created by the Articles of Confederation.
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But the small states hadn’t given up on having an equal voice for each state in the Senate. Their chance came in late June, when rules for representation came up for formal consideration by the convention. On June 27, Luther Martin of Maryland took the floor. He offered a theoretical basis for the small-state view, arguing that since states, like individuals, enjoyed natural equality, equal voting for states “was founded in justice and freedom, not merely in policy.” But any summary of his speech misses the effect it had, because it went on for two days, exhausting him and everyone who listened. Some historians have suspected he was drinking, and he did have a reputation for consuming large amounts of alcohol, but either he didn’t drink when it counted or what he did
drink didn’t generally affect his performance. He had a thriving law practice and would achieve historic acquittals, an unlikely outcome if he were given to drunken ramblings in the courtroom.
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Martin’s speech, which Madison said “was delivered with much diffuseness,” was probably a filibuster, a rhetorical form given to wandering diversions. He could well have been trying to hold off a vote on representation until a time advantageous to the small states. He had been a good friend of William Paterson since they had attended Princeton together in the mid-1760s, and Paterson might well have alerted him to absences in the New Jersey delegation that would keep that state from being able to vote.
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The small states were also hoping that delegates from New Hampshire would appear and strengthen their numbers.

If Martin’s purpose was to delay, he succeeded magnificently. He inspired Madison to give a long speech using reason and history to refute his ideas, and he so angered other delegates that they began quarreling. James Wilson rose to compare the small states to England’s rotten boroughs. Roger Sherman countered by describing the Virginia Plan as giving four states the power to govern nine. “As they will have the purse,” he declared, “they may raise troops and can also make a king when they please.”
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The wrangling, in turn, led Benjamin Franklin to address the delegates. Heretofore he had asked others to read his speeches, but now he delivered his words himself. Speaking directly to Washington, who was seated in the president’s chair, Franklin noted the “small progress” the delegates had made despite their “continual reasonings” with one another:

In this situation of this assembly, groping as it were in the dark to find political truth and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? . . . I have lived, sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—
that God governs in
the affairs of men
. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?

Franklin wanted the delegates to step back from their quarrels, consider their larger purpose, and adopt an accommodating spirit. But the next morning, when Connecticut’s William Johnson renewed the idea that there be proportional representation in the first branch of the legislature and equality in the second, Madison made clear that he had no interest in compromise. He urged the small states “to renounce a principle which was confessedly unjust, which could never be admitted, and if admitted must infuse mortality into a constitution which we wished to last forever.”
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But the small states would not give up. On the next day, Saturday, Oliver Ellsworth, a tall, distinguished-looking delegate from Connecticut, said that equal representation in the Senate was necessary in order to protect the small states from large ones, and he appealed to the commitment states had made under the Articles of Confederation to give each an equal right of suffrage. Madison, clearly exasperated, fired back by holding Connecticut up as an example of what was wrong. It was the last state that ought to be calling for “an adherence to a common engagement,” he said. That state’s legislature “had by a pretty recent vote
positively refused
to pass a law” complying with federal requisitions and followed up by cheekily sending notice of the vote to Congress. And if the issue was protecting the interests of a group of states, what about those that arose from climate and from “having or not having slaves”? In his frustration Madison told a truth that the convention generally avoided. “The great division of interests in the United States . . . did not lie between the large and small states,” he said. “It lay between the northern and southern.” Therefore, he proposed sarcastically, in one branch of the legislature, representation would be determined by the number of free inhabitants plus the number of slaves. In the other, only free inhabitants would be counted. Thus, “the southern scale would have the advantage in one house and the northern in the other.”
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Franklin, alarmed at the hostile turn, again urged compromise, this time by evoking an artisan who, finding that two planks do not fit, “takes a little from both and makes a good joint.” But his words were followed shortly by the most inflammatory speech of the convention. The volatile Gunning Bedford proclaimed that for all their high-flown words, the big states were seeking dominion over the small ones. “
I do not, gentlemen, trust you,
” he declared. “Sooner than be ruined, there are foreign powers who will take us by the hand.” Rufus King of Massachusetts shot back: “Whatever may be my distress, I never will court a foreign power to assist in relieving myself from it.”
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And on that harsh note, the Saturday session ended.

Sunday was a day of respite from the quarreling but not from worry about the convention’s fate. George Washington and Robert Morris were “much dejected,” a visitor to the Morris home reported. “Debates had run high, conflicting opinions were obstinately adhered to, animosities were kindling, some of the members were threatening to go home, and, at this alarming crisis, a dissolution of the convention was hourly to be apprehended.”
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