American Experiment Read online

  For a time the critics of the Constitution seemed thrown off balance by the Federalist momentum. But the anti-Federalists had a general strategy too. If the strength of the Federalists lay in their power to dominate the central and secret conclave in Philadelphia, that of their foes was to rally the opposition in the separate states. If the strength of the Federalists lay also in possessing a positive plan that would catalyze the amorphous political groupings in America, that of their foes was to unite the opponents of the Constitution, despite their own disagreements, in efforts to delay, amend, or repudiate the charter in the battle arenas of the states. The anti-Federalists were not overawed by the eminence of their leading opponents. One of them, annoyed by the incessant prating about the demigods of Philadelphia, remarked that he would not make invidious comments about their characters, “but I will venture to affirm, that twenty assemblies of equal number might be collected, equally respectable both in point of ability, integrity, and patriotism.” The foes of the Constitution could point to their own leadership in the convention—Mason, Gerry, and the others—and to their remarkable second team throughout the country, with state leaders such as Richard Henry Lee, Governor George Clinton of New York, Samuel Adams, and above all, the formidable Patrick Henry of Virginia.

  Among the Federalist leaders, none was more active than Alexander Hamilton, now barely thirty-two years old. During the summer of 1787, as Robert Yates and John Lansing returned from Philadelphia and spread rumors that a consolidated national government was being contrived, he fell into a row with Governor Clinton, who was already busy rallying the opposition in New York State. Hamilton was at his worst in this encounter. Choosing the dangerous pseudonym “Caesar,” indulging freely in personal attacks, he took such an elitist position in favor of a strong national government, in which popular passions would be curbed to defend the people’s own liberties, that he confirmed the anti-Federalists’ worst suspicions. So Hamilton turned to a mere cerebral approach—a collaborative series of reasoned and trenchant essays on the Constitution, to be published in New York newspapers, and he had the wit to involve in this enterprise James Madison and John Jay, both of whom were in New York City at this time. By late October, Hamilton had struck off the first number of the Federalist—written, it has been said, on a vessel proceeding up the Hudson—in which the author called for moderation and then went on to argue that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.” The vigor of government was essential, he argued, to the “security of liberty.”

  It was a remarkable collaboration. So agreed were the authors on their ends and their means, so similar was their background in ancient and contemporary classics, that readers could not recognize the particular author of a paper. Hamilton evidently had hoped that the three authors could meet regularly at his house at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street to unify the papers, but the trio were all too busy for this. He wisely chose Jay, still Secretary of Foreign Affairs, to write on foreign policy, Madison to philosophize on the shape and structure of the new government, and himself to demonstrate the inadequacies of the Confederation—a subject on which Hamilton viewed himself as an expert.

  The authors wrote in secrecy, using the benign pseudonym “Publius”; Washington was one of the few to know something about the authorship. Throughout the late fall and winter of 1787-88 the papers appeared in the New York Packet on Tuesdays and Fridays and in the Independent Journal Wednesdays and Saturdays. Another newspaper ran some of the essays, but dropped the series after anti-Federalists aroused pressure from subscribers. So avidly were the essays sought after by “politicians and persons of every description,” the publishers John and Archibald McLean reported, that they issued a collected edition in March 1788, long before the end of the struggle over ratification.

  Not even the enthusiastic McLeans could guess that a later publisher would be able to say with good reason that the Federalist was “America’s greatest contribution to political philosophy.” What attracted attention to the papers even at the time was the enlarged vision and the sophisticated analysis that the authors brought to their pitch for the new system. Although the essayists—especially Madison—drew heavily on their own earlier writings, they seemed to grow intellectually as they struck off the papers, sometimes as the printer waited impatiently.

  Madison obviously liked his own earlier comments about the human tendency of liberty toward factionalism; the need nonetheless to protect liberty and find some other way to curb faction, which was sown in the very nature of man; the many varieties of faction, including the frivolous but most of all the economic (“the various and unequal distribution of property”). He contended still that the causes of faction could not be removed, and hence the only remedy was to control its effects, and that this could be accomplished by submerging factions in a wider sphere—namely, under a new, strong, national government. These ideas appeared in the 10th paper.

  But Madison went far beyond his earlier writings intellectually in facing the supreme dilemma—the possibility that powerful factions, whether minority or majority, might capture the new national government just as they had come close to dominating state governments. No one has ever described the ultimate remedy—separation of House, Senate, executive, and judiciary, with each branch responsible to its own unique, competing constituency—as cogently and compellingly as Madison did in the 51st paper. “To what expedient then,” he asked after a long survey of the dilemma, “shall we finally resort for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” Each department must be as separate as possible, with a will of its own. Then came the imperishable words:

  “But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to controul the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place oblige it to controul itself. A dependence on the people, is no doubt, the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

  It was Madison’s capacity to combine deep political and psychological understanding—as in his summary statement of the strategy of “supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives”—that would justify his reputation as both the intellectual and political father of the Constitution.

  THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS

  The opponents of the Constitution still declined to yield to this Federalist display of political and intellectual power. They had their own strength to fall back on, their own networks of friendly preachers, politicians, and newspaper editors. The anti-Federalist leaders were far less celebrated nationally than Washington, Franklin et al., but Madison himself was struck by the large number of “respectable names” he found among his adversaries. They had their own ideological strategy—to charge the
framers of the Constitution with not only ignoring the needs of liberty but actively conspiring against it—and they polished their political tactics of dividing and eviscerating their adversaries as the struggle over the Constitution dissolved into numberless state and local encounters, so that the great national issue would be sucked into the whirlpools of local and state politics. Attacking parts of the Constitution rather than the whole charter, the anti-Federalists demanded not the repudiation of Philadelphia but the right of state conventions to pass amendments to the Constitution and in effect to gain a second convention. Nothing distressed the Framers more than this prospect. To return to Philadelphia for another session would throw them on the defensive, inundate them in a sea of incompatible amendments, and produce a far weaker national charter. The Federalists would accept recommendations for the new Congress under the Constitution to consider, but amendments to the existing draft—never!

  And so the issue was put to the American people in the late fall of 1787—put not to a great mass public, though large numbers of voters would turn out to elect state convention delegates, put not to small national or state elites, though established leaders would exercise heavy influence in many of the contests, but put to about 1,200 delegates who would be elected to the state conventions in hundreds of tiny contests across the thousand-mile length of the American states. A first cadre in Philadelphia had written a charter; a second cadre of state leadership was quick to join the battle; now the issue would depend on a third cadre, composed largely of local politicians from the American backlands—the western counties, the farm area, the piedmont, the mountain valleys—as well as from the urban and cosmopolitan areas. These men must analyze a complex document, follow the debates in press and pulpit and public house, and manage also to get elected as delegates. The future of the republic would turn on the perspicacity and vision of country politicians, circuit-riding lawyers, money-minded men of commerce, cracker-barrel philosophers—on a critical mass of men who would have to lift their sights above gables and chimney pots and see their way into the possibilities of nationhood.

  The Federalists exulted over smashing victories in several of the smaller states that acted early on ratification. The Delaware convention voted unanimously for the new charter on December 7, 1787, followed by similar votes in the New Jersey and Georgia delegations within a month. But Pennsylvania had acted in the meantime, and the fate of the Constitution in this big state, considered to be heavily pro-Federalist, warned the friends of the Constitution that trouble lay ahead. In no state had the charter been more intensely debated than in Pennsylvania, with its plethora of newspapers and of printers eager to publish pamphlets and broadsides. In no state was the press more one-sidedly pro-Federalist, nor were so many thousands of petitions submitted in behalf of the new plan of government. But the anti-Federalists were organized too, prepared to employ the tactics of dissection and delay, and they seized on a procedural incident to pose a moral argument against the Framers.

  The incident came the day after the Congress, still sitting in New York City, voted to transmit the Constitution to the states. An express rider galloped through the night to put the resolution into the hands of the Pennsylvania Assembly, with its impatient Federalist majority. The opponents of the Federalists were also prepared, armed with a provision of the Pennsylvania constitution that required two-thirds of the members, rather than the usual majority, to make up a quorum. When the Assembly met that morning the Federalists found the enemy absent—hence no quorum. Indignant, the majority ordered the sergeant at arms to “collect the absent members.” The sergeant and his minions proceeded to track down the errant assemblymen in the streets and boardinghouses of Philadelphia. Two men were finally cornered, hustled by the sergeant and some zealous citizens into the Assembly hall, and thrust into their seats. When one made a bolt for the door, his way was blocked by a mob. Armed now with their quorum, the Federalists pushed through a measure for the election of convention delegates within six weeks and the holding of the convention two weeks after that.

  It was a skirmish won by the Federalists, at the risk of losing the battle. Reading about the affair in the newspapers or in letters from Philadelphia, anti-Federalists charged that the Framers were trying to shove the new instrument through without adequate popular discussion. Why the rush? The Pennsylvania Federalists, sure of their majority, pressed ahead in the hope that Pennsylvania would be the first large state to ratify the Constitution. Obscured by the clamor was the fact that the Pennsylvanians were conducting an intensive and searching analysis of the charter throughout the fall, in the long process of calling the convention, choosing a new Assembly, electing convention delegates, and debating the Constitution in the convention. In mid-December the convention voted to ratify the Constitution, 46-23, but the Federalist cause was tarnished again when rioting broke out in Carlisle, where James Wilson was burned in effigy and hundreds of militiamen advanced on the town with a threat to liberate political prisoners.

  It was no surprise that Wilson—the only delegate to the national constitutional convention who took part in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention—should have exhibited his brilliance as he marshaled support for the charter. The test was whether the “average” person could adequately cope with a document of such complexity. Robert Whitehill was typical of the plain-spoken, clear-minded men from all parts of the country who stood up and debated with the more celebrated. The new Constitution, he told his fellow delegates, would lead to a consolidated government dangerous to the people’s liberties. The words “We the people of the United States,” he said, proved that “the old foundation of the Union is destroyed, the principle of confederation excluded, and a new unwieldy system of consolidated empire is set up upon the ruins of the present compact between the states…It is declared that the agreement of nine states shall be sufficient to carry the new system into operation, and, consequently, to abrogate the old one. Then, Mr. President, four of the present confederated states may not be comprehended in the compact; shall we, sir, force these dissenting states into the measure?” Wilson and the other Pennsylvania delegates had been authorized to strengthen the Confederation Congress but “they have overthrown that government which they were called upon to amend.” So forcefully did Whitehill—long viewed as a run-of-the-mill politician—pose the issue of liberty under the new Constitution that Wilson, in answering him, argued on Whitehill’s ground.

  With the ratifications by four middle and southern states, the epicenter of the struggle moved north as New England states prepared to hold conventions. Delegates gathered in the imposing Hartford State House during the first week of January for a session that the ruling Federalists planned to convert into a demonstration of strong leadership, as a model for the Yankees farther north. A demonstration it was, as the friends of the Constitution massed their strength in the convention, 128-40, while the anti-Federalists complained that they had been “brow beaten by many of those Cicero’es as they think themselves & others of Superior rank” who had indulged in “Shuffleing & Stamping of feet, caughing Halking Spitting & Whispering.”

  Massachusetts would be a different story. In no state save Virginia did the two sides seem so well matched at every level of leadership: A solid phalanx of Federalists—former Governor Bowdoin, Theodore Sedgwick of Stockbridge fame, Fisher Ames, Francis Dana, and three delegates fresh from Philadelphia—confronted a locally prestigious cohort of anti-Federalists such as Elbridge Gerry, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives James Warren, and, it was expected, the renowned Samuel Adams with his riding friend Governor John Hancock.

  Gerry especially was to be feared: he had served in the constitutional convention, he had heard all the arguments, he had rejected the charter. Adams was an enigma. A Harvard graduate, an organizer of the Sons of Liberty, agitator for independence, longtime politician, he was both ideologue and wire puller, both a government man and an agitator for the cause of liberty against government. Hancock was a trimmer. The first del
egate to sign the Declaration of Independence, the first governor of the state of Massachusetts, he had become immensely popular in Boston, where he was probably the richest man of his generation, and in the hinterland, on which he had bestowed free Bibles in abundance. Arrayed behind the noted leaders of both sides was the “third cadre” of county and local politicians, lawyers, judges, convention delegates, and others who had sharpened their political rhetoric and perceptions in twenty years of almost continuous disputes over issues of revolution, independence, Regulation, state constitution making, and now constitution ratifying for the nation.

  Gerry opened with a letter to the Massachusetts legislature that intoned the familiar litany of the dangerous blending of executive, legislative, and judicial power, lack of provision for rotation of office, senators virtually appointed for life—but returned again and again to charges of lack of protection for rights of conscience, liberty of the press, trial by jury—in short, the lack of a bill of rights. Gerry’s style was “too sublime and florid” for certain of the “common people,” some Albany Federalists said. But his attack on the alleged chicanery, intrigue, duplicity, and imbecility of the framers of the Constitution opened the Massachusetts struggle on a note of rancor.

  Boston—commercial, cosmopolitan, seafaring, internationalist Boston—was a hotbed of Federalist agitation. Most of its eight newspapers steadily praised the new Constitution, ranging from sober analysis of its provisions to castigations of its opponents as ignorant, shortsighted, weak-headed, bad-hearted, wicked. It was an age of invective, and few paid particular attention when a Federalist denounced opponents as “blind, positive, conceited sons of bitches” who deserved roasting in hell. When the American Herald broke the press phalanx and attacked the Constitution, Federalist merchants pulled out their advertising and Federalist readers canceled their subscriptions. Why should we finance attacks on our own opinions? one of them asked.