Penguin History of the United States of America (38 page)

Three to go. Maryland ratified on 26 April, sixty-three to eleven: the anti-Federalists, led by Luther Martin, were repudiated largely because they were paper money men and the voters were tired of inflation. Two to go. On 12 May the South Carolina convention met, and once it was satisfied that the proposed Constitution was no threat to slavery, ratified by a crushing majority, one hundred and forty-nine to seventy-three. The minority, here as in several other states, was chiefly made up of men from the western areas. One to go: would it be New Hampshire or Virginia? In the event, it was nearly a tie: New Hampshire ratified on 21 June, Virginia on 25 June. That meant that ten states had agreed – one more than necessary to bring the Constitution into force. New York could no longer resist: she ratified on 26 July. Only North Carolina and Rhode Island held out – for the time being.’
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This smooth tale conceals the fact that it was occasionally a very near thing. In practice, the Constitution would not be able to work, or only with damaging difficulty, if either New York or Virginia stayed out, for without them the Union would be cut into segments. Yet it was touch-and-go in both places. Governor Clinton of New York was strongly anti-Federalist; fortunately he did not dare assume the responsibility of rejecting the Constitution and so, perhaps, breaking up the Union, of which he was a supporter. So he procrastinated, hoping that some other state – Virginia or Massachusetts – would do the work for him; and when that dodge failed, though he had a large majority in the state convention, he could not keep it. ‘Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,’ he let leadership fall into Hamilton’s hands. Never was that gentleman more charming, more eloquent, better-informed, more irresistibly logical. Single-handed, he kept the Federalist minority together, wore out some of the anti-Federalists and converted others. The news that Virginia had ratified was all he needed to secure final
victory. His great services were acknowledged by the New Yorkers: when they hauled a model ship of state through the city, in celebration of the great event, they named her the
Hamilton
. She was quite the most spectacular thing in a great parade, which also included a banner showing Adam and Eve naked, except for fig leaf aprons, and bearing the motto,
‘And they sewed fig leaves together.’

The drama in Virginia was even more tense – largely because the debate was at a loftier level. Except for the anti-Federalist in New York who objected to the proposed Presidency because General Washington would no doubt be succeeded by General Slushington, the anti-Federalist arguments in New York were neither very funny nor very good. But in Virginia the anti-Federalists on the whole had greater prestige than the Federalists: they even claimed Thomas Jefferson for their own, though Madison, correctly, denied it. Patrick Henry, who took the lead in opposing the Constitution, was not above mendacious assertions, for the benefit of Virginians west of the Appalachians, in what was soon to be Kentucky, that the new government would give away the Mississippi navigation to the Spanish (as if the old government had not actually done so). His speeches were incessant storms of eloquence that do not read very well now and were not apparently perfectly convincing even then. Still they had to be answered, and Madison, with his feeble voice, his ill-health, his colourless manner, scarcely seemed the right person to do it. But his lucidity, knowledge and patent sincerity prevailed in the end, aided by the popularity of Edmund Randolph (who, rather like Hancock, had decided to back the winning horse) and the intellectual force of John Marshall, the future Chief Justice of the United States, and as such the man who, next only to Madison himself, would have most influence on the Constitution’s development. Even the high character and good arguments of George Mason could not prevail. At last Madison let it be understood that when the new government met he would go to work to have a bill of rights passed as a Constitutional amendment. Such an amendment was in every state the honest anti-Federalists’ chief demand. The promise was enough: by a small margin Virginia voted to ratify (eighty-nine to seventy-nine) and America gave herself up to rejoicing.

For it had slowly sunk in that the new Constitution really would achieve its purpose and safeguard the gains of the Revolution. National independence first: with a well-organized executive and the power of direct taxation, the United States could raise an effective army and even, if it chose, a navy. It would soon be unnecessary to play the satellite to either France or Britain; soon Spain could be challenged for control of the West. Political stability: only George Mason could go on believing that the popular representation allowed for in the Constitution was a sham; the new public authorities would still be subject to the control of repeated elections, which would give them legitimacy; secure in that legitimacy, they would have more power with which to protect themselves and the people from their enemies than had ever been allowed to the old Congress. Prosperity: the credit of the new
government would underpin every agricultural, commercial or industrial enterprise. The pursuit of happiness: as Dr Benjamin Rush remarked, it would now be possible for those who, like himself, wished to be passengers on the ship of state to leave off the work of the sailors and get back to such equally valuable pursuits as science (or making money).

So everyone was pleased, and the anti-Federalists pledged themselves to do what they could to make the new frame of government a success. The dying Congress fixed the dates of the first elections; the electoral college, voting for the first time in February 1789, unanimously chose George Washington to be the first President; and on 30 April he took the oath of office in New York, after a journey from Mount Vernon which was turned by the enthusiastic citizens into one long carnival.

Nobody supposed that the Constitution was a perfect document; and nobody today, one Civil War and twenty-six amendments later, will argue that it was. But it has in practice worked exceedingly well. Some of the reasons have already been given, but the list must be completed; and the influence of the Constitution in shaping American history has been so profound that a plain statement of its structure and shaping principles is the very least that it deserves, even if it makes a long chapter longer. The degree of one’s understanding of the Constitution is to a large extent the degree of one’s understanding of the United States.

It is a nationalistic document. As such it was far in advance of its time, which explains why Patrick Henry and many others were so alarmed. The idea of a national government meant to them simply alien, selfish and oppressive power. After all, the last authority to insist on the Americans’ nationality had been George III, whose ministers had tried to make them live up to their responsibilities as citizens of the British Empire. The anti-Federalists need not have worried: American nationality was no imperial fiction; but it is not surprising that they should have done so. For, until the American Revolution, the nation-state was a very uncommon thing, only fully achieved, perhaps, in England. Otherwise the Atlantic world was made up of dynastic states and ramshackle republics like Holland or Poland: all were polities held together partly by the pressures of the international power competition, partly by custom, partly by an intricate and fragile net of religion, privilege, dialect and so on. Yet nationalities existed: France, Spain, Italy and Germany were more than mere geographical expressions. America was newer than they, that was all. She too was defined by her borders, her language, her religion, her customs and her enemies. The easy way in which, for instance, the boy Franklin left Boston to live in Philadelphia, or Madison left Virginia to go to college at Princeton, New Jersey, shows how spontaneously Americans regarded themselves as part of each other. Their great achievement was the realization that they had a chance to avoid the fate of France, Germany or Spain: to avoid the chaos of a weak confederation on the one hand or the tyranny of a traditional monarchy on the other. The
will to find a middle way drove forward the Founding Fathers (as they came to be known) to devise a national government for a new nation; and in so doing they opened the door of modernity.

The constitutional provision, then, by which the new government was to act directly on the individual instead of mediately, through the states, was absolutely crucial to its success. Experience had shown that there was no way to coerce a state short of civil war;
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but individuals might be controlled through the normal mechanism of the courts. The states therefore had to sacrifice their claim to the undivided allegiance of their citizens. They might have avoided this loss of power if they had shown themselves willing to treat the requisitions of the Confederated Congress as binding laws; but they never did, and they would never have done so. And they had to make other sacrifices. They had had to give up their claims to the West to get the Articles of Confederation; the Constitution exacted even more fundamental sacrifices, and directly impaired state sovereignty. From now on the states, and state identity, would be secondary to the nation, to national identity. The idea, then, that a state might secede from the Union, as if it was a mere expedient alliance, was absurd, and was not contemplated in the terms of the Constitution; indeed the very quantity of states’ rights built into the Constitution made little sense – spelling them out was unnecessary – if the states retained the sovereign remedy and could break up the machine at will by secession. It was only as the sectional quarrel developed over slavery that the South committed itself to a different view. To be sure, even if that had not occurred, there would still have been some reaction against the nationalism of the Founding Fathers: state identities were for long far too strong to be ignored, and too many politicians would find it convenient from time to time to exploit them (Madison himself was to do so in the 1790s). But the fact remains that the Constitution was and is a nationalistic document and a nationalist programme, and attempts to make it anything else have never been successful and have usually been dishonest, for they fly in the face of social reality.

The central government could not be conceded the right to make laws and policy without being given the means to enforce them. This implied courts, soldiers, sailors, diplomatic officers, ministers to supervise them and a dependable source of revenue to pay for such an establishment. That in turn implied taxation and tax-collectors – the very things which the thirteen colonies had resisted in 1765 – and, money being such a sensitive subject and the Anglo-Saxon tradition being what it was, it also implied a national assembly to make the laws, vote the taxes and oversee the executive. The main points of the Constitution can already be seen emerging from this list of requirements.

However, they are also the main points of the Articles of Confederation, at least as that instrument had evolved in practice by 1787. It could be

argued that all that was necessary to make the Confederation an effective modern government was to give it an effective taxation power. The Secretary of Congress saw to the correspondence with the states and to the coordination and continuity of administration. There was also the nucleus of a cabinet: the Board of Treasury, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the Secretary of War, the Postmaster-General. Congressional decisions could be enforced by the state courts. Replace the system of requisitions, which was patently not working, and all that was necessary had been achieved. (Patrick Henry was even prepared to rhapsodize on the requisition system – ‘I will never give up that
darling
word, requisitions’ – but Patrick Henry, sweeping away on the wings of his oratory, could say anything.)

The nationalists, or Federalists, replied that because of the unanimity rule, the Articles could not be amended on the point of taxation: efforts had been made to incorporate a rational finance system, and failed. This answer would be more convincing if the course the Federalists actually took had not been so revolutionary: sweeping the old system aside altogether and substituting a completely new one. It is hard (I find it impossible) to believe that if as much energy, devotion and ability had been put into a mere amendment of the Articles, it would not have passed into law. The unanimity rule need have been no obstacle. After all, support for the new Constitution was by no means unanimous; and yet North Carolina and Rhode Island soon came to terms. The same could have happened in the other case.

So it seems that the real issues lay rather deeper; nor can there be much doubt what they were. The anti-Federalists essentially wanted a Burkean, one might almost say an English, future: let American institutions evolve as necessity dictated; meantime, let there be as little government as possible, and let what there was be as close to the people as possible. This, to their mind, was what American freedom was all about; and it cannot be denied that their suspicion of government, the distrust some of them expressed for the well-off and well-educated, or the dread that others among them felt that, without a religious test, papists might come to rule America – heavens, the Pope might be elected President – were also in the authentic American strain.

But so were the Federalists. Hamilton saw, with brilliant clarity, better than anyone else, how enormous were the opportunities opening before the American people, with an untouched continent waiting to their west; he spoke for the pioneer impulse, and was determined to give the country a government which could make sure that the opportunity would not be wasted. Washington and Madison certainly shared this vision to a degree (both were speculators in Western lands); but the deepest thought lying behind the new Constitution was expressed by James Wilson. No one could pretend that this canny Scottish lawyer, whose unsuccessful land speculations were eventually to bankrupt him, wreck his judicial career and cause him to die in poverty-stricken exile from his home state, was a radical.

He was palpably the spokesman of the commercial classes of Philadelphia and eastern Pennsylvania. His support of majority rule was not even wholly sincere, for he came from one of the largest states, where the suffrage was unjustly weighted in favour of the region he represented – the East. Yet when all is allowed for, no one at the federal convention, or in the state conventions afterwards, put the case for American democracy better. The business of the convention, he said, was to frame a government