Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (18 page)

Read Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership Online

Authors: Conrad Black

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”),
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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, threats, sulks, and blandishments. In Massachusetts, the two recalcitrants, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, relented in their hostility to the Constitution. Hancock presided over the state constitutional convention and it was suggested that he might be a fine candidate for vice president of the new republic. Samuel Adams, an almost deranged Anglophobe and relentless critic of any authority, even a presumptive one like Washington, agreed to support ratification in exchange for a bill of rights of individuals. This would take the form of a list of amendments to be recommended to the first Congress. On this basis, the new Constitution was adopted by a narrow margin, by 187 to 168 in Massachusetts, and by only 10 votes in New Hampshire and Virginia, despite the support of Washington, the absent Jefferson, the chief framer Madison, the rising James Monroe, and even Patrick Henry. And in New York, prodigies of persuasion by Alexander Hamilton notwithstanding, the Constitution was adopted by three votes in the legislature, over the objections of the four-term governor, General George Clinton (who served five more terms). North Carolina only ratified in 1789 and balky little Rhode Island in 1790, though there was by then no doubt that failure to ratify would have resulted in that little state’s being subsumed into Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Bill of Rights was eventually agreed in 1791, and was adopted in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.
By a hair’s breadth, the new nation had endowed itself with a Constitution that would serve it well and become one of the most renowned and respected texts in human history. No famous law-giver since Moses (who was, after all, a messenger), from Hammurabi to Justinian to Napoleon, remotely approached the triumph of, principally, James Madison, who devised the system of checks and balances between three co-equal branches of government. So great was Madison’s prestige, he wrote important messages for Washington, and on occasion, when the message was addressed to the House of Representatives, wrote the reply as well. Hamilton opposed a Bill of Rights, on the spurious grounds that it was unnecessary because the Constitution did not authorize the government to violate anyone’s rights, betraying a faith in the benignity of official executive authority that makes it clear that Hamilton had no interest at all in individual rights. Madison himself was lukewarm initially, until Jefferson remonstrated with him and he saw that nothing less would get the Constitution ratified and adopted. Madison’s achievement in producing a Constitution that secured federal authority, balanced the branches of a stable government, and assured individual rights, established him in the front rank of the nation’s founders, and was another immense and fortuitous strategic milestone for the emerging country.
That it was adopted was a felicitous stroke for America, a happy launch that enabled the new nation to assure itself and offer to immigrants a regime of ordered liberty and a society of laws that was slightly less girt about by impediments of tradition and antique formalism than Britain’s. Jefferson’s genius at the propagation of the new American era electrified the world. The words of Gouverneur Morris’s splendid preamble became and remained familiar to virtually every informed person in the world: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Those chiefly responsible for creating the circumstances that permitted, and generated the necessary support for, the promulgation of this document—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, John Jay, and John Adams—did not doubt that it would guide the new country to glory and preeminence among nations, and that their work would long be discernible among men.
There was never much suspense about who would get the call as the first president; for the last time in the history of the country, someone would truly accept a draft to that office. Washington received the blandishments of Hamilton rather neutrally and expressed no interest in the presidency to anyone, saying only that he would accept it if to decline it would hurt the country. It is believable that he did not especially wish to be president, but not that he did not expect to be president. He was encouraged that supporters of the Constitution, called Federalists, won the congressional elections, and when the Electoral College gave all 69 votes to Washington voluntarily, without his ever having expressed even a private word of desire for the office, he had no choice but to accept, as he had accepted the command of the Continental Army. In what has proved an enduring tradition of using the vice presidency to provide regional balance, it was contested between John Adams and John Hancock. Washington made it known that he would be happy with Adams, a more staunch Federalist than Hancock and a personal loyalist, and Adams was narrowly chosen. George Washington, who in 1785 had described the notion of American unity as “a farce,” was inaugurated the first president of the United States, eight weeks late, on April 30, 1789.
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In the 35 years since the Seven Years’ War effectively began in the backwoods of America (partly because of Washington’s actions)—a war that established Prussia as a Great Power, delivered all of India to Britain, and expelled France from North America—the American colonists had developed a burning, independent patriotism and brilliant national leadership, had outmaneuvered the greatest nations in Europe, had electrified the world, had restored serious republican government to the world after an absence of 17 centuries, had politically formalized the Enlightenment by endowing themselves with novel but instantly respected political institutions, and had set forth in the world, as their greatest subsequent leader famously said, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” An epochal political and national experiment had been prepared by a brilliant sequence of strategic triumphs.
CHAPTER THREE
 
Creating a New Republic
and Launching It in the
World, 1789–1809
 
1. THE WASHINGTON PRESINDENCY
 
There was no precedent for Washington. It had been centuries since there had been even a marginally serious republic and there had never been a constitutional one. The whole notion of constitutional government was fragmentary. In Britain, some of the Swiss cantons, parts of the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and a few of the German and Italian jurisdictions there were some institutional restraints on executive authority and some rights vested in individual citizens. But the Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, insurance against capricious prosecution, just compensation for seized property, the presumption of innocence for accused, access to counsel, prompt justice, reasonable bail (almost all of which have become pretty moth-eaten in practice at time of writing)
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and the attribution of unallocated powers to the states or the people themselves showed at least a conceptual respect for individual liberties that was unique in the world and was widely acclaimed as such.
There was no assumption in the late eighteenth century that government had any purpose except defending the country, maintaining internal order, overseeing a currency of integrity, and generally administering laws and facilitating lawful and useful activities as defined from time to time. Washington had challenged the Continental Congress, when he took leave of his demobilized army in 1783, to maintain adequate armed forces, honor the Revolution’s debts with a reliable currency, maintain an indissoluble union, and promote a spirit of sacrifice and cooperation among all the states. The Congress and the states had completely failed to do any of that, and he intended to provide them himself. He saw himself, with perfect justice, as the emblem and symbol of the nation, not only for having led the armies of the Revolution to victory and presided over the assembly that wrote the Constitution, but as the man summoned by popular and general demand, and without opposition, to take the headship of the new nation and, by his conduct, define its presidency. In his inaugural address, he spoke of an “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.” This was a rather unspecific message of exhortations and velleities, more remarkable in its serenity by the fact that Washington had lost a lot of money during the Revolution and had to borrow $100 at 6 percent interest just to attend his own inauguration.
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Washington toured most of the country in stages, reassuring people with his majestic presence, and promised in famous letters to the Newport synagogue and to the Roman Catholics of America (through the bishop of Baltimore) that their congregants and co-religionists would not be discriminated against in the new nation as they probably had been in the countries they or their forebears had departed. To the Jews, he wrote: “The Government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.... May the children of the Stock of Abraham who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” To the Roman Catholics he wrote: “May the members of your society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free government, enjoy every spiritual and temporal felicity.” He had not been as loquacious as Franklin in expressing confidence that the United States would relatively quickly become the premier nation of the world. But the whole ambiance of the new nation, the tenor of the wording of its earliest and most basic state papers, exuded confidence in the exalted and exceptional destiny of America, and of its unique and evangelical status as a light unto the whole world, showing the way forward for the rights of man and the organization of government. Implicit in this was America’s predestined and natural right to expand across America and become a country on a grander scale than any European nation.

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