The glorious cause, p.83
The Glorious Cause, page 83
III
Article VII of the Constitution provided that the “Ratification of the Conventions of nine States” would put it into effect. By implication the four states remaining outside could go their separate ways when nine others approved—or, join the Union. This procedure of getting the new government under way ignored the Articles of Confederation, which had required that amendments receive unanimous approval. It also ignored the state legislatures except for one particular—by common understanding they would have to call for elections of the ratifying conventions. In transmitting the Constitution to the Congress, Washington expressed this understanding as “the Opinion of this Convention.”13
The Constitution, with Washington’s letter, reached the Congress on September 20. The Congress included among its number critics of the Constitution. One of them, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, suggested that Congress should first amend the Constitution and then send it to the states. The states, Lee’s argument ran, would then have a choice: either to ratify the original or to amend it and to send the revised version to a second constitutional convention. The Congress included more friends to the Constitution than enemies—eighteen members who had served as delegates returned to Congress, in late September—but they did not want to wound the critics. Therefore, though they refused Lee’s proposal, they refrained from forcing through an endorsement. Instead the Congress contented itself, after gentle prodding by the majority, with simply sending the Constitution to the states without a recommendation.14
When the message from Congress reached the state legislatures, they began to act. Delaware’s had met even before the Convention dissolved in order to listen to a report from Richard Bassett, a member who had sat as a delegate. Now, with the Constitution in hand, it called a special election. The ratifying convention, which met soon afterward, wasted no time and on December 7, 1787, gave the state’s approval unanimously.15
The reasons for Delaware’s eagerness are clear. Its people, most of whom were small farmers, felt vulnerable. Their economic dependence upon their larger neighbors may have been responsible for a part of this feeling—their profitable milling businesses imported wheat from Pennsylvania—but Delaware’s size and history probably were more important. Delaware was a dwarf beside Pennsylvania’s immense size and population, and even Maryland overshadowed it. Its history also worked to make its people think of union—until 1776, for example, it had always shared a governor with Pennsylvania.
In 1787 the state enjoyed a thriving economy. The millers grinding imported wheat flourished; trade had picked up after the war; and public indebtedness was light. The possibility of life alone, however, was difficult to conceive of. The ratifying convention brought together farmers who had the intelligence to see where political realism lay. The result was a rapid meeting and a vote of thirty in favor, none opposed.
Pennsylvania moved almost as swiftly. By some rough handling of reluctant legislators, the Federalists forced through a vote in the legislature authorizing the meeting of a ratifying convention. A few hours later the legislature dissolved in preparation for the election of a successor to itself; the action in favor of convening a body to consider ratification had been a near thing.
The arguments over the Constitution were amplified in Pennsylvania for several weeks before the election. Organization may have been even more important, and here the Federalists gained the advantage. The key to the election of the convention lay in Philadelphia and the surrounding countryside. Both the city and the farms around it fell to the Federalists—with artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers voting in favor of delegates pledged to ratification. If the Antifederalists had a chance in Pennsylvania, they had to capture the western sector and to play on suspicions of concentrated power. Federalist organization carried the struggle. Shortly after it was elected, Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention voted on December 12 two to one in favor of the Constitution.
Six days later New Jersey’s convention voted unanimously in favor of ratification, and on January 2, 1788, the twenty-six members of Georgia’s convention did the same. In a general way both states acted, as Delaware had before them, to escape the weakness of isolation. New Jersey could not survive alone, and the Constitution promised advantages to every major group in the state. Georgia’s weakness was more apparent than New Jersey’s. The Creek Indians threatened survival of the state, and a strong national government seemed to promise security. Local attachments, which persisted almost everywhere else in America, were weak in Georgia, which was populated by recent immigrants who had not yet rooted themselves deeply.
Connecticut had a different set of reasons for ratifying, but it too could not survive outside a union. It wanted to rid itself of economic bondage to New York, and the Constitution, by placing the regulation of foreign commerce with the new government, offered the means. A week after Georgia acted, Connecticut voted by better than three to one in favor of the Constitution.
Thus within a period of just over a month, five states had ratified the Constitution. One of them, Pennsylvania, would be essential to any union of the states. The other four, though small and relatively weak, had helped give force to the process of ratification, a process which would reach a completion of sorts with the adherence of four more states.
The first of the four, Massachusetts, approved early in February by a vote of 187 to 168. Opposition to the Constitution had formed in several parts of the state with the western area especially hostile. The bitterness of rebellion still lingered there. Small farmers, the victims of eastern power, were understandably suspicious of an even more remote authority. The Federalists, recognizing that the contest would be close, took pains to woo John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Both were popular men; both distrusted the transactions at Philadelphia. The road to Hancock’s sympathies lay in his vanity, which the Federalists carefully cultivated, even going so far as to suggest apparently that he might expect to become Vice President in the new government. Hancock took the bait like a hungry fish. Samuel Adams was vain in his own way. He could not bear to be separated from “the people,” and when Paul Revere and a group of artisans let him know that they fancied the Constitution, he joined the Federalists. Along with approval, the Massachusetts convention recommended amendments to the Constitution, proposals that guarantees of civil liberties be added.
Maryland, which ratified next, in April, considered amendments, but adopted none. Ratification was voted easily a week after the convention opened. The decision in South Carolina, a month after Maryland’s, came in a closer vote, 149 to 73, but probably was never in doubt. South Carolina had not yet recovered from the terrible damages of the war and had everything to gain in the Union. Its public debt was heavy, and assumption of it by the national government would be welcome. Union with other states also offered security, and in South Carolina public concern about defense remained strong.
With South Carolina’s vote, eight states were in the Union. Two powerful states remained uncommitted—Virginia and New York. North Carolina and Rhode Island had already expressed their distaste for the Constitution, and New Hampshire’s convention, which met first in February, refused to act. This refusal arose from an opposition which, though strong, was not prepared to burn all bridges. By June, public opinion had swung behind the Constitution, in part because of the ratification by other states—especially next-door Massachusetts. Still the vote was almost evenly divided, 57 to 47 in favor of ratification.
Would Virginia and New York come in? Delegates in both states twisted and turned before voting. The condition of Virginia’s economy may have persuaded some planters to look with favor on the Constitution. There was little money in the state, but much indebtedness. A strong stable government, some planters said, would make borrowing from abroad possible.
Patrick Henry led the Antifederalists in the convention. Much of his attack had a certain eloquence, but more was simply shapeless. Much of what Henry said was a play on this sentence (from his second long speech): “My great objection is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights, or of waging war against tyrants.” Edmund Pendleton, among others, cut through Henry’s oratory like a sharp knife. Whether Federalist arguments moved men or not, the Federalists gained an edge in the convention. Edmund Randolph’s decision to support the Constitution undoubtedly helped just as the immense prestige of George Washington must have. In any case the final vote, though not heavily on the side of the Constitution, was favorable. Virginia ratified in late June. A month later New York gave its approval in a tough fight which saw Hamilton lead the way. News from Virginia undoubtedly swayed delegates, and the threat of New York City to secede from the state if the Constitution were not approved forced some delegates to back the Constitution.
With New York in, only North Carolina and Rhode Island remained out. North Carolina delayed joining the Union until November 1789; Rhode Island held back until May of the following year. By the time it gave approval, the administration of President Washington had been in office for over a year.
IV
George Washington assumed the presidency in a simple, yet elegant and graceful, ceremony. His election, which was not officially a ceremony, had the feel of one, as everyone had understood beforehand that should the Constitution be ratified Washington would be called to the presidency.
There had been nothing elegant or ceremonial about the process of ratification. In fact, though the eight months that saw it done had been marked by a serious discussion of power, liberty, rights, and virtually all the important ideas common to the eighteenth century pertaining to republican government, ratification had been drenched in passion. Americans on both sides of the question shouted out their hatred of tyranny, their fear of conspiracy, and their love of liberty. So while ideas about governance received a review that exemplified the best of Enlightenment thought, there was much in the debate that seemed to suggest that there was something beneath the surface that threatened the future of American liberty.
The Antifederalists were largely responsible for such a tone. They accused their opponents of wishing to impose a tyranny on the country similar to the one that royal government had sought to force on America. Such a charge was more than a rhetorical tactic; it was deeply felt and though not ever fully spelled out, its meaning was clear. The advocates of the Constitution were, the Antifederalists insisted, enemies of the people and the champions of the aristocracy. Just who constituted the aristocracy was usually left unexplored, in part because Washington and Franklin had been members of the convention, and had signed the Constitution. They were the heroes of almost all Americans and explaining away their support of the Constitution proved to be an awkward, indeed an impossible, task. Some Antifederalists said that Franklin, now a very old man in his dotage, had exerted a misguided influence on his great colleague. Others simply denied that Washington really believed in the Constitution; his so-called support was not support at all, for as presiding officer of the Convention, he had merely signed the document, a pro-forma act that any official in such a position would have done. His signature attested to the Constitution as the official document of the Convention—nothing more and nothing less.
Most Antifederalists ignored the whole business in favor of explaining the dark threat to freedom that lay within the government proposed by the Constitution. The basic fact of the new political circumstances, they insisted, lay in the Federalists’ plot to abandon a revolution made in the name of the liberties of the people. Much in Antifederalist thought sounds as if it were imported from the years immediately preceding independence. The virtue of their thought, even in the face of their misreading of the Federalists, was its insistence that the Revolution had been made in the name of great principles. And in their objections to the transfer of power to a national government and to its structure and force, they summoned up over and over again the meaning of the years of crisis and war.
The form of the proposed government may have been different, they implied, but whatever the disguises given it by the Constitution, it was the old tyranny dressed in new clothing. Thus in pamphlets, newspaper essays, and speeches in ratifying conventions they used the language of accusation—”consolidated government,” aristocracy, conspiracy, plots, parasitic officials—to express the dark fears felt in the past. In doing so they also invoked the great standards of the Glorious Cause.
The Federalists proved more than willing to meet them on this ground, and in the debates in the press and the ratifying conventions, they insisted that the Constitution remained faithful to the Revolution. Thus both sides faced the great issues first confronted by the revolutionaries in the 1760s and 1770s in a discussion that proved enlightening and, on the whole, enlightened. In it the limits of the new government emerged from the confusion of rhetoric and analysis, and the passion expended did not obscure the real issues, but rather sharpened perceptions and alerted Americans to the dangers as well as the prospects of the new political order. In the end the Federalists carried the day. The reasons for their success owed something to the experience of thrusting out the forces of the British Empire. One other quality that had formed in America also contributed enormously to the adoption of the Constitution—the spirit of a people who had endured and who felt that much that was promising lay ahead.
Epilogue
Whatever revolutions are, they often make clear what no one has noticed before. They usually appear as either inevitable or as surprises. The American Revolution, surely one of the most peculiar revolutions since the seventeenth-century Civil War in England, falls into a special category. It surprised men and women on both sides of the Atlantic when it began and yet has ever since seemed inevitable.
Both reactions are understandable. The surprise in both England and America in 1775 when war began at Lexington was genuine, and the next year when the Americans proclaimed their independence, their action stunned many on both sides of the Atlantic. Well it should have: war, independence, and the establishment of a republic constituted an improbable set of events when the mood and reality of colonial life were considered. To be sure, the ten years preceding the war gave warning of ominous occurrences ahead, but despite riots, boycotts, and argument, faith persisted among many that tranquil relations would eventually be restored and that the Empire would hold together triumphantly. For even as disaffection made its way into imperial life, the Americans professed their attachment to Britain and insisted that they wanted nothing so much as to remain British subjects, secure within, as Benjamin Franklin called the British Empire, “that fine and noble China vase.”
In 1776, all such illusions vanished, and the Americans set about smashing their part of the Empire. British policies and actions triggered the American response, and the struggle they set off soon transcended anything Americans might have imagined. In the years following independence, the Revolution released—or inspired—an enormous display of creative imagination. The Constitution was its finest expression, a profoundly original creation that took daring even as it drew upon the American and, let it be clearly recognized, the British past. It represented for its makers the ultimate defense of liberty.
The men and women who made the Revolution were not fully aware of the implications of their actions when the crisis began in the 1760s. How could they be? But as the crisis grew, so also did they. At its ending, an ending that opened up so much of the American life that followed, they recognized how important the course they had set for their country really was. Alexander Hamilton put it most compellingly in a sentence in the first of the Federalist essays: “It has been frequently remarked, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” The Americans’ answer was the political order and the political understanding established in the years of the Revolution. This answer has posed a challenge for Americans ever since—to act in ways that capture the wisdom of their revolutionary past.
Abbreviated Titles
Bibliographical Note
More than any work that I have written, this one draws on the studies of other historians. I have used with great profit books and essays by Bernard Bailyn, Julian P. Boyd, Irving Brant, E. James Ferguson, Douglas Southall Freeman, Lawrence Henry Gipson, Ira D. Gruber, Merrill Jensen, Forrest McDonald, Piers Mackesy, Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan, Lewis Namier, J. H. Plumb, John Shy, Christopher Ward, Franklin B. and Mary Wickwire, and William B. Willcox, and a great many others. In mentioning these scholars, I do not mean to imply that I agree with all that they have written; nor would they agree with everything in this book.
On most of the important problems discussed in this book, I have read some of the eighteenth-century sources. I cite them in the footnotes but not in this bibliographical note. I have, of course, read only a small sample.
In the note that follows, I have not repeated all the citations appearing in the footnotes nor have I listed all the studies that I have consulted. Rather, I have indicated some of the major studies that I believe will be helpful to anyone wishing to pursue further investigation of the Revolution. There is no full or satisfactory bibliography of the American Revolution, and there probably cannot be. Most of the studies cited in the footnotes and this note contain bibliographies on their subjects. The literature on the Revolution is enormous, of course, and it is growing.
W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977) is a fine starting point for study of the English background. Besides the works cited in my footnotes, see also H. J. Habakkuk, “England,” in A. Goodwin, ed., The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1967), and J. D. Chambers, Population, Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial England (Oxford, 1972). English crowds are studied most helpfully in E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971). For the Anglican Church, see Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1934). On financial change, P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution (Oxford, 1967) is outstanding; R. Davis, A Commercial Revolution: English Overseas Trade in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1967) is short, but helpful. See also J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1780 (London, 1966) and Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965).
