Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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.”21 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.
There was passionate disagreement over the nature of the executive. Alexander Hamilton, who was a native of the West Indies, never had bought all the way into republicanism and favored an elected monarchy for set terms. This was generally seen as the sighting shot in Washington’s claim to the headship of a new state, as long as it had a coherent federal framework. There were calls for an elected chief of state who would not be styled a king. Some thought Congress should elect the chief executive, some the people, and the populists and the large-state conservatives were on the same side of the argument again. Another, rather intricate compromise emerged: the president and the vice president (a nebulous position whose occupant had the right of succession between quadrennial elections and would preside over the Senate “like an unwanted poor relation in a wealthy family”),22 would be chosen by an Electoral College of state representatives, in which each state would have as many electors as it had members of the two houses of Congress combined. This again pleased the populists by getting the vote closer to the people, and the large state delegates for recognizing their influence. In the event of an absence of a majority in the Electoral College, the election would be decided by the House of Representatives, with each state delegation casting a single vote reflecting the wishes of the majority of its congressmen.
There was an effort by the conservatives to restrict the vote in the lower house to propertied elements, on the theory that large employers would buy or otherwise control the votes of their employees. Madison and Franklin debunked this as likely to lead to another revolution. It was agreed that Congress could impeach and remove the chief executive, though the process would be a great deal more complicated than a mere vote of no-confidence as in the British Parliament. Members of the House would be elected to two-year terms and of the Senate to six-year terms, a third to be up for reelection every two years. It was an admirable compromise, but far from the exercise in pure democracy that was necessary to be consistent with the superlatives of the Declaration of Independence, and with other incitements to war against a nation that essentially had as popularly based and accountable a government, albeit on the basis of a shifting mass of practices and precedents rather than a constitution. The compromise went to a drafting committee, called the Committee of Style, consisting of William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris, Madison, and Hamilton, on September 8, 1787. The committee reported in four days later, and the Constitution was adopted by the weary delegates, after a general refusal to continue the convention to discuss a bill of rights.
The ratification process precipitated another prolonged crisis of horse-trading,