Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 - Hardcover

Maier, Pauline

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684868547 ISBN 13: 9780684868547

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2010

Synopsis

From the distinguished historian of Revolutionary-era America and author of the acclaimed American Scripture comes this fresh and surprising account of a pivotal moment in American history—the ratification of the Constitution.

When the delegates left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in September 1787, the new Constitution they had written was no more than a proposal. Elected conventions in at least nine of the thirteen states would have to ratify it before it could take effect. There was reason to doubt whether that would happen. The document we revere today as the foundation of our country’s laws, the cornerstone of our legal system, was hotly disputed at the time. Some Americans denounced the Constitution for threatening the liberty that Americans had won at great cost in the Revolutionary War. One group of fiercely patriotic opponents even burned the document in a raucous public demonstration on the Fourth of July.

In this splendid new history, Pauline Maier tells the dramatic story of the yearlong battle over ratification that brought such famous founders as Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, and Henry together with less well-known Americans who sometimes eloquently and always passionately expressed their hopes and fears for their new country. Men argued in taverns and coffeehouses; women joined the debate in their parlors; broadsides and newspaper stories advocated various points of view and excoriated others. In small towns and counties across the country people read the document carefully and knew it well. Americans seized the opportunity to play a role in shaping the new nation. Then the ratifying conventions chosen by “We the People” scrutinized and debated the Constitution clause by clause.

Although many books have been written about the Constitutional Convention, this is the first major history of ratification. It draws on a vast new collection of documents and tells the story with masterful attention to detail in a dynamic narrative. Each state’s experience was different, and Maier gives each its due even as she focuses on the four critical states of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York, whose approval of the Constitution was crucial to its success.

The New Yorker Gilbert Livingston called his participation in the ratification convention the greatest transaction of his life. The hundreds of delegates to the ratifying conventions took their responsibility seriously, and their careful inspection of the Constitution can tell us much today about a document whose meaning continues to be subject to interpretation. Ratification is the story of the founding drama of our nation, superbly told in a history that transports readers back more than two centuries to reveal the convictions and aspirations on which our country was built.

About this title

About the Author:

Pauline Maier is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at M.I.T. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 1968. She is the author of several books and textbooks on American history, including From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams, and American Scripture, which was on the New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" list of the best 11 books of 1997 and a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Ratification PROLOGUE
 
The View from Mount Vernon

A few days before Christmas in 1786 George Washington received a gift he didn’t want. It was a letter from Virginia’s governor, Edmund Randolph, trying to pry him out of retirement.

The envelope included a copy of an act passed on December 4 by the Virginia general assembly appointing delegates to a convention in Philadelphia “for the purpose of revising the federal constitution” and the names of seven delegates the legislature had chosen. Washington’s name stood at the top of the list. Randolph explained that the assembly was alarmed by the “storms” that threatened to bring the American nation to a quick end, as its enemies had predicted. “To you I need not press our present dangers,” Randolph said. As commander of the army Washington had witnessed the inefficiency of the Continental Congress and could see the steadily “increasing langour of our associated republics.” Now only those “who began, carried on & consummated the revolution” could “rescue America from the impending ruin.” Randolph urged Washington to accept the legislature’s unanimous choice of him as a Virginia delegate to the Philadelphia convention.1

His appointment was not a complete surprise to Washington. He had tried to head it off in November, after James Madison, a leader of the assembly and former member of the Confederation Congress, warned him that the legislature was going to choose delegates to the convention and that Washington’s name would probably be first on the list. It was “out of his power” to accept such an appointment, Washington replied. A few weeks earlier—on October 31, 1786—he had notified state chapters of the Society of the Cincinnati that he would not stand for reelection as the society’s president and would not attend its second triennial meeting, which was scheduled to convene in Philadelphia on the first Monday in May—a week before the federal Convention would assemble in the same city. Washington gave the Cincinnati several compelling reasons for his decision: His private affairs had become seriously “deranged” by his long absence during the war, and they now needed his “entire & unremitting attention”; he was deeply and “unavoidably engaged” in a project to open navigation of the great rivers flowing through Virginia; and, after so many years of arduous service, he yearned for “retirement & relaxation from public cares.” Moreover, his health was not good: He had recently suffered a violent attack of “fever & ague, succeeded by rheumatick pains” such as he had never before experienced. How then could he pick up and go to the federal Convention without offending “a very respectable & deserving part of the Community—the late officers of the American Army,” who made up the Society of the Cincinnati?2

In fact, Washington had another, more pressing reason for backing away from his association with the Cincinnati, which he explained in confidence to Madison. When he had first agreed to head the new society in 1783, he thought of it as a fraternal organization whose main purpose was to take care of officers’ widows and other dependents. Then, to his surprise, a pamphlet by South Carolina’s Aedanus Burke provoked an uproar against the Cincinnati and, above all, its plan to pass membership on to the eldest sons of Revolutionary War officers. Critics such as Burke said that practice would lead to the creation of an hereditary aristocracy, which was totally at odds with the republican system established by the Revolution.3

Washington accepted reelection as president at the Society’s first general meeting in 1784 after it proposed several changes in its rules, including the elimination of hereditary membership. But some state chapters refused to ratify the reforms, so by the fall of 1786, as the Society’s second general meeting approached, Washington found himself, as he told Madison, in a “delicate” position. He didn’t want to seem disloyal to his fellow officers, who included some of his dearest friends and confidants, nor did he want to support an institution “incompatible (some say) with republican principles.” Under the circumstances, he simply could not attend the federal Convention in Philadelphia while the Society of the Cincinnati was also meeting there. That was his excuse, deeply felt and, to Madison at least, clearly explained.4

Washington was more circumspect with Randolph. He was grateful for the honor conferred on him by the general assembly, he wrote the governor, and in general stood ready to obey the calls of his country. However, there were at the moment “circumstances” that “will render my acceptance of this fresh mark of confidence incompatible with other measures which I had previously adopted” and from which he had “little prospect of disengaging myself.” The legislature should replace him with someone “on whom greater reliance can be had,” since the likelihood of his nonattendance was too great.5

Randolph refused to take no for an answer. Neither he nor the members of Virginia’s council of state, to whom he showed Washington’s letter, saw any need for Washington to withdraw immediately. It would be as easy for Randolph to appoint another delegate in Washington’s place “sometime hence” as now. Perhaps the obstacles to Washington’s attendance would somehow disappear, or the national crisis would become so severe that it outweighed all other considerations. “I hope therefore,” Randolph wrote, “that you will excuse me for holding up your letter for the present.” James Madison also urged Washington to leave the door open for a later acceptance in case “the gathering clouds should become so dark and menacing as to supercede every consideration, but that of our national existence or safety.” Randolph and Madison played Washington like expert fishermen, and Washington, who no doubt understood full well what was going on, decided not to fight.6

As a result, when newspapers throughout the country announced Virginia’s election of a delegation to the proposed federal Convention, Washington’s name remained at the top of the list. No American commanded admiration and trust like Washington, which was precisely why Randolph and Madison were loath to let him resign. His appointment was “a mark of the earnestness of Virginia” and an invitation to other states to send their best men as delegates to the proposed convention. Indeed, by appointing a notably strong set of delegates—which included Washington, Randolph, Madison, the distinguished jurists George Wythe and John Blair, and also George Mason, who had drafted Virginia’s state constitution and its influential declaration of rights—the Virginia legislature meant to convey a sign of its zeal “and its opinion of the magnitude of the occasion.”7

The proposed convention needed all the support it could get. In late 1786, its chances of actually meeting, much less accomplishing anything, were remote at best. It looked like another in a long line of failed proposals to strengthen the Confederation. This time the call for a convention had come from a handful of state delegates who met from September 11 to 14, 1786, in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss giving Congress the power to regulate the trade and commerce of the United States. Only five of the nine state delegations showed up on time, though more were on the way. Rather than wait (as usual) for the laggards, the delegations already present called on all the states to send representatives to another meeting in Philadelphia on the second Monday of May, 1787, “to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” Then the meeting adjourned. The delegates had received no authority to call a convention from the state legislatures that appointed them. Moreover, Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation said that any alterations in the Articles had to be “agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the Legislatures of every State.”8 Did that mean Congress had to initiate or at least endorse any meeting called to propose changes to the Articles? If so, would the states elect delegates to a convention that was, in the language of the day, “irregular”—that is, called in a way that seemed to bypass the established procedures of the Confederation? Should they?

Virginia said they should. On November 23, 1786, the state’s general assembly adopted a beautifully crafted act that endorsed the call for a convention and authorized the election of delegates. The act, which Governor Randolph forwarded to the other states as well as to Washington, said the crisis had arrived when “the good people of America” had to decide whether they were to reap the fruits of independence and a union “cemented with so much of their common blood” or give way to “unmanly jealousies and prejudices, or to partial and transitory interests,” and “renounce the auspicious blessings prepared for them by the Revolution.” The assembly argued that the proposed convention would be a better place to discuss reforms of the federal system than the Confederation Congress, where those debates “might be too much interrupted by the ordinary business before them,” and where various highly capable individuals could not participate because they were disqualified by law or “restrained by peculiar circumstances.” It called for the appointment of seven “Commissioners,” by “joint ballot of both Houses of Assembly,” and authorized the governor to fill any vacancies if those elected declined to serve. On December 4, the legislature chose its delegates (or commissioners). Virginia, the largest and most populous state in the union, won considerable honor for its early support for the convention—although New Jersey had, in fact, chosen its delegates a week earlier.9

Washington’s name added to the impact of Virginia’s action. Suddenly the convention began to look like an event worth taking seriously. The Pennsylvania assembly specifically cited the Virginia precedent on December 30, when it became the third state to elect delegates to the convention. By mid-February, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Georgia had joined the list. That made seven of the thirteen states, which was not enough to assure that the convention would meet, especially since some of them made their appointments contingent on Congress’s giving the convention its approval. That so many states were willing to participate was nonetheless remarkable considering how unlikely it seemed at first that anything would come of the proposal.10
TO GO OR NOT TO GO

Letting his name remain on the list of Virginia delegates was one thing; going to Philadelphia was another. Washington had questions to ask, and only a few good ways of getting answers while he remained at Mount Vernon. He scanned newspapers for information, and he picked up more news from a stream of visitors so steady that at times his home seemed like a tavern (though one where the proprietor always picked up the tab). Above all, however, Washington relied on his correspondents, many of whom were old officers of the Continental Army. Over the next four months a surge of letters between them and Washington laid out the problems that made the nation’s situation critical, discussed what constitutional changes were needed to remedy those problems, and evaluated the likelihood that the Philadelphia convention would do what had to be done.

Soon after receiving Randolph’s letter, Washington asked General Henry Knox what the “prevailing sentiments” on the convention were and how well attended it was likely to be. Knox’s friendship with Washington went back to 1775, when Washington took command of the Continental Army camped in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. It was Knox, a portly onetime Boston bookseller, who had led the expedition that dragged cannon from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain to Dorchester Heights, where that artillery helped convince the British to evacuate Boston on March 17, 1776. He was with Washington through the rest of the war, during the devastating campaign in New York and Washington’s critical victories at Trenton and Princeton, through the miserable winters at Morristown and Valley Forge, and on to the trenches at Yorktown in 1781. Knox was a leading organizer of the Society of the Cincinnati in 1783. Two years later he became the country’s secretary of war. Situated as he was in New York and in close contact with members of Congress, he soon became a major source of information on national affairs for a network of correspondents.11

Washington also wrote to Connecticut’s Colonel David Humphreys, who had been an aide-de-camp during the final years of the revolutionary war and became a particularly trusted and beloved member of the commander’s military family. Like Knox, Humphreys had served with Washington from the battles of Long Island and Harlem—which Humphreys described in his Essay on the Life of the Honorable Major-General Israel Putnam (1788)—through to Yorktown. Washington gave Humphreys the honor of delivering to Congress the flags of the defeated British and German troops, along with his official report on the British capitulation of October 1781. Humphreys was with Washington when he surrendered his commission to Congress on December 23, 1783, then accompanied him back to Mount Vernon, where Humphreys joined the joyful celebrations of the commander’s homecoming on Christmas Eve. A member of the Cincinnati, a poet, and a diplomat, Humphreys corresponded regularly with Washington between 1784 and 1786, when he served as secretary to the American commission negotiating commercial treaties in Europe. After he returned to America in 1786, Humphreys stayed at Mount Vernon for six weeks, working on a projected biography of Washington, before returning to Connecticut, where his home town promptly elected him to the state legislature.12

Washington considered Humphreys a reliable source of information on the attitudes of the Cincinnati, “the temper of the people, and the state of Politics at large,” particularly in the northeastern part of the country. He told Humphreys about his exchange of letters with Madison and Randolph, then asked the question that troubled him. If the issue of his attending the convention “should be further prest (which I hope it will not, as I have no inclination to go),” Washington asked, “what had I best do?”13

“No inclination” was an understatement. During his eight years away from home while commanding the Continental Army, thoughts of Mount Vernon had been Washington’s greatest solace. He tried to write his plantation manager (and distant cousin), Lund Washington, on a regular basis and to direct from afar major renovations of his house, taking respite from war with thoughts of plaster, paint, and newly planted groves of trees. He complained when letters from Virginia failed to arrive since that denied him “the consolation of hearing from home, on domestic matters,” and he dreamed of the day when he could join those who, in the words of the prophet Micah, had beaten their “swords into plowshares” and he too could sit at peace “under his vine and under his fig tree” with no one to make him afraid.14 Once, in 1781, as the army marched toward Yorktown, Washington rode his horse a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0684868547
• ISBN 13: 9780684868547
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 608