The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (142 page)

American society had not been transformed by the war, but the basis for change had been laid. War had trained up a body of men accustomed to think in national terms and to work in large organizations. The war indeed had brought something approaching the beginnings of an organizational revolution to America. The nation was the greatest example of this change and the inspiration for all the lesser organizations. It had not replaced the states of course, but it provided a very different arena for the economy and for public policy. During the war, men in and out of the army had sought to serve their nation, and themselves, in raising military forces and in providing food, weapons, ammunition, and the other supplies required to maintain an institution of many men on a demanding mission. Although the army virtually disbanded in 1783, the experience of the previous eight years could not be dispensed with. Nor did anyone wish to turn the clock back -- acquisitive appetites remained powerful in America and grew with the means of satisfying them. The war had reinforced them and, unconfined but disciplined and managed by men with a new sense of the fruitfulness of largescale operations, they would make America a thriving nation. In the Constitution the delegates had created a framework through which the economy could find itself. The Constitution after all stopped state regulation of interstate commerce, it stopped wild schemes in public finance, and it virtually guaranteed an environment congenial to business. American business needed freedom and it needed order. The Constitution promised to provide both.

That freedom and order were tied to virtue had long appeared obvious to Americans. That virtue could not survive amidst anarchy was equally plain. The Constitution, its makers believed, would protect virtue. On the face of things, including the debates in the Convention, the idea that the Constitution expressed a moral view seems absurd. There were no genuine evangelicals in the Convention, and there were no heated declarations of Christian piety. Yet the Constitution managed to capture some of the morality long common in American life and clearly present in the first days of the Revolution.

For the Constitution confined power, power which had long been understood as threatening virtue as well as liberty. It aimed to thwart majoritarian tyranny, but it did not deny that sovereignty resided in the people. Government should serve the people, and in the Constitution the delegates sought to create a framework which would make such service effective, though not at the cost of the oppression of the minority. Hence the moderation of the Constitution, with its three balanced branches and its careful enumeration of powers. These restraints seemed promising to the founders for several reasons, not the least of which was that they would operate against corruption as well as majoritarian excess. Corruption sprang from an unbridled prerogative, irresponsible power which had in the colonial past sent hordes of placemen who sucked up American substance. In the Revolution the Americans drove out such creatures, and in the Constitution they sought through new means to achieve an old purpose, a virtuous public life. And that life could survive, Americans agreed, only if corruption in the broadest sense, as a general decay of society and morality, could be avoided. The restraints built into the Constitution might be depended upon to prevent corruption in the technical, or Whiggish, sense, the undue influence of the executive in the legislature and perhaps even in the newer form so graphically described by Madison, as majoritarian tyranny. But underlying any successful constitutionalism there had to be a virtuous people. The founders, especially Franklin, Madison, and Wilson, believed that the Convention must risk all, indeed risk the Revolution, by trusting the virtue of the American people.

Madison thought that the risk might be less in America than elsewhere because of the size of the country and the variety of its people. Spread over an enormous land, divided by state lines and by different interests, factions determined to dominate others would have difficulty concerting their actions. The history of the Revolution, which saw the people barely able to pull themselves together in the face of British oppression, verified this analysis. With peace they had in many states, however, formed irresponsible, even tyrannical majorities. But what could be done in a state might be impossible to duplicate in a nation composed of many varieties of factions and spread from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

Thus the delegates placed their trust in the people because they had no choice: a republic had to found itself on the people. Their suspicions of popular power led to a preoccupation with restraints and curbs on the undue exercise of power by heedless majorities. At the same time the delegates' belief in majority rule, as an indispensable part of republican government, remained strong. Confining the majority -- the source of power and therefore potentially of tyranny -- had to be done. The limits protected the rights of the minority and of property, rights which had helped set the revolutionary process in motion in the 1760s.

But it was also necessary that the majority possess the freedom to exercise constitutional powers. The founders therefore concentrated on making the national legislature representative of the people. The great compromise removed the Senate from direct popular control, an arrangement Madison and Wilson had favored, but even so the Congress would be more democratic than it had been under the Articles of Confederation.

The House of Representatives after all would be popularly elected. Thus the people would be both free and confined -- the people whatever their rank, station, or number. Free, because a republic required a virtuous people; confined, because the people of all sorts had human frailties.

The delegates phrased these assumptions in the language of republicanism. Though they did not resort to religion, they did indirectly invoke the old moral certainties familiar to the children of the twice-born. They did most clearly in the discussions in Philadelphia which considered the people's selfishness, their passions, and their propensity to do evil. And the Constitution itself, by establishing a government which seemed capable of restraining some of the worst impulses of man, especially his instinct to dominate others, spoke to a persistent concern in Protestant culture.
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The concern over power appeared immediately in the discussions which greeted the publication of the Constitution. It soon became apparent that not everyone agreed that power had been sufficiently curbed, especially power exercised from afar. Some of those who raised questions about the Constitution in the early autumn of 1787 did so in a language that suggested that they thought they faced a revival of tyranny in America. Thus they spoke of a "despotic aristocracy" behind the Constitution, and sometimes of a "masked aristocracy," masked presumably out of a desire to conceal authoritarian purposes. They also played on the words of the Constitution itself. The official who would head the executive branch was rendered as the "president-general" and sometimes as "our new king."
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In his letter of September 17 transmitting the Constitution to Congress, George Washington, as president of the Convention, may have given critics an opening by referring to the "consolidation of our Union" as one of the purposes of the Convention. Whatever the source, "consolidation" became almost immediately one of the most highly charged words of the process of ratification.
The critics argued that the Constitu-

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tion would establish a "consolidated government" in which the national government would exercise all powers at the expense of the states.
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The critics failed, however, to appropriate the one word to describe themselves which might have strengthened their arguments. The word was "Federalist." It was the supporters of the Constitution who began calling themselves Federalists as soon as the Convention closed, leaving their opponents to be almost inevitably branded as the Antifederalists, a much less useful name to a group which wished to identify state loyalties with, themselves. The most important fact about Antifederalist thought was its opposition to the transfer of authority from the states to the national government. Perhaps most Antifederalists had approved the idea of amending the Articles of Confederation, at least to the extent of adding the authority to tax and to regulate commerce to Congress's powers. But the Constitution surprised and dismayed them by the extent of the changes it made and by the complexity it introduced into the structure of government. They had believed that the Convention would propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation that would go into effect only after ratification by all thirteen states. Now in September 1787 they faced a proposal for an entirely new constitution which would establish an entirely new government. And the new constitution was to become effective when only nine of the thirteen states approved.

The opposition to the Constitution should not have surprised anyone. The Revolution after all had been fought over questions of governance and rights. A generation of Americans had come to maturity amidst discussions of the nature of representation, of legislative and executive authority, of constitutionalism itself, and the need to protect individual rights. Another generation had grown old in the defense of independence and the right to self-government. Confronted by a major change in governing arrangements, the revolutionaries would have betrayed themselves and their recent achievements had they not asked questions about the change.

Those who found unsatisfactory the answers given to their questions opposed the Constitution. They voted for delegates who promised to vote against ratification; they published articles and tracts advocating rejection; they agitated and talked; they formed committees; and some served as delegates in the state conventions.

They did not arm themselves and secede from the Union. They did not make another revolution despite all their talk about the tyranny

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hovering in the wings. Nor did anyone imprison them. The ratification process, in short, remained peaceful, despite the wild rhetoric it generated. And when it was completed, there was no fresh exodus from the United States such as the loyalists had made.

In tone and substance, nothing marked ratification so much as the controversy between Federalists and Antifederalists in Pennsylvania. One of the two political parties in the state, the "Constitutionalists," a name derived from their advocacy of the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, included within its number a strong contingent of democrats who detected a conspiracy against the people in the Constitutional Convention. For example, Samuel Bryan, the son of George Bryan, a draftsman of the constitution of 1776, published a series of newspaper essays which described the division over the federal Constitution as dividing the people from the "wealthy and ambitious, who in every community think they have a right to lord it over their fellow creatures."
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Thereafter, until ratification was completed in America, an undercurrent of class antagonism ran through much of the debate. In Pennsylvania, this antagonism represented considerable popular feeling. Elsewhere the call to the people to beware of the rich and the well-born. may have been little more than a political tactic.
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As an explanation of behavior, conspiracy gains in persuasiveness as it is personified. In Pennsylvania the conspirators at hand were well known to everyone. The rich and well-born were the Republicans who had opposed the Pennsylvania constitution and who now supported the federal; they included Robert Morris, who had attended the Convention. In "The Chronicle of Early Times," Morris appeared as "Robert the Cofferer," interested only in the fortunes of "the mill," the Bank of North America. The Constitution erected a wall around the mill to protect it from the multitude: "And he reported to them faithfully all that had been done, and how the enemies of the mill had been put to flight." Assisting Robert the Cofferer were James Wilson, tagged here as "James the Caledonian," and Gouverneur Morris, who appeared as "Gouvero the cunning man." These three, and their cohorts, plotted to make the mill their own, to keep it free of popular control, and to share among themselves the corn, i.e., the money, it produced.
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