The Life of John Marshall Volume I Part 39

[976] Jefferson to Meusnier, Jan. 24, 1786; _Works_: Ford, v, 8.

[977] Jefferson to Madison, Dec. 20, 1787; _ib._, 373-74. Jefferson concluded, prophetically, that when the people "get piled upon one another, in large cities, as in Europe, they will become as corrupt as Europe." (_Ib._)

[978] Jefferson to Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785; _ib._, iv, 469.

[979] Jefferson to Stuart, Jan. 25, 1786; _ib._, v, 74.

[980] See _infra_, chap. IX.

[981] For a careful study of this important but neglected subject see Professor Edward Payson Smith's paper in Jameson, 46-115.

CHAPTER IX

THE STRUGGLE FOR RATIFICATION

The plot thickens fast. A few short weeks will determine the political fate of America. (Was.h.i.+ngton.)

On Sunday, June 1, 1788, the dust lay deep in the streets of the little town of Richmond. Mult.i.tudes of horses were tethered here and there or stabled as best the Virginia Capital's meager accommodations permitted.

Cavalcades of mounted men could be seen from Shockoe Hill, wending their way over the imperfect earthen roads from every direction to the center of interest.[982] Some of these had come hundreds of miles and arrived in the garb of the frontier, pistol and hanger at belt.[983] Patrick Henry, prematurely old at fifty-two, came in a one-horse, uncovered gig; Pendleton, aged, infirm, and a cripple, arrived in a phaeton.[984]

As we have seen, it was very hard for members of Virginia's Legislature to get to the seat of the State Government even from counties not far distant; and a rainy season, or even one week's downpour during the latter part of May, would have kept large numbers of the members of the Virginia Convention from reaching their destination in time and perhaps have decided the impending struggle[985] before it began. The year's great social and sporting event added to the throng and colored the dark background of political anxiety and apprehension with a faint tinge of gayety.[986]

Although seven months had elapsed since the Federal Convention had finished its work, there was, nevertheless, practically no accurate knowledge among the people of the various parts of the "New Plan" of government. Even some members of the Virginia State Convention had never seen a copy of the Const.i.tution until they arrived in Richmond to deliberate upon it and decide its fate.[987] Some of the most inquiring men of this historic body had not read a serious or convincing argument for it or against it.[988] "The greater part of the members of the [Virginia] convention will go to the meeting without information on the subject," wrote Nicholas to Madison immediately after the election of delegates.[989]

One general idea, however, had percolated through the distances and difficulties of communication to the uninformed minds of the people--the idea that the new Const.i.tution would form a strong, consolidated National Government, superior to and dominant over the State Governments; a National Sovereignty overawing State Sovereignties, dangerous to if not entirely destructive of the latter; a general and powerful authority beyond the people's reach, which would enforce contracts, collect debts, impose taxes; above all, a bayonet-enforced rule from a distant point, that would imperil and perhaps abolish "liberty."[990]

So a decided majority of the people of Virginia were against the proposed fundamental law;[991] for, as in other parts of the country, few of Virginia's ma.s.ses wanted anything stronger than the weak and ineffective Government of the State and as little even of that as possible. Some were "opposed to any system, was it even sent from heaven, which tends to confirm the union of the States."[992] Madison's father reported the Baptists to be "generally opposed to it"; and the planters who went to Richmond to sell their tobacco had returned foes of the "new plan" and had spread the uprising against it among others "who are no better acquainted with the necessity of adopting it than they themselves."[993] At first the friends of the Const.i.tution deceived themselves into thinking that the work of the Philadelphia Convention met with approval in Virginia; but they soon found that "the tide next took a sudden and strong turn in the opposite direction."[994] Henry wrote to Lamb that "Four-fifths of our inhabitants are opposed to the new scheme of government"; and he added that south of the James River "I am confident nine-tenths are opposed to it."[995]

That keen and ever-watchful merchant, Minton Collins, thus reported to the head of his commercial house in Philadelphia: "The New Federal Const.i.tution will meet with much opposition in this State [Virginia] for many pretended patriots has taken a great deal of pains to poison the minds of the people against it.... There are two Cla.s.ses here who oppose it, the one is those who have power & are unwilling to part with an atom of it, & the others are the people who owe a great deal of money, and are very unwilling to pay, as they are afraid this Const.i.tution will make them _Honest Men_ in spite of their teeth."[996]

And now the hostile forces are to meet in final and decisive conflict.

Now, at last, the new Const.i.tution is to be really _debated_; and debated openly before the people and the world. For the first time, too, it is to be opposed in argument by men of the highest order in ability, character, and standing--men who cannot be hurried, or bullied, or shaken, or bought. The debates in the Virginia Convention of 1788 are the only masterful discussions on _both_ sides of the controversy that ever took place.

While the defense of the Const.i.tution had been very able in Pennsylvania and Ma.s.sachusetts (and later in New York was to be most brilliant), the attack upon it in the Virginia Convention was nowhere equaled or approached in power, learning, and dignity. Extravagant as the a.s.sertion appears, it nevertheless is true that the Virginia contest was the only real _debate_ over the whole Const.i.tution. It far surpa.s.sed, especially in presenting the reasons against the Const.i.tution, the discussion in the Federal Convention itself, in weight of argument and attractiveness of presentation, as well as in the ability and distinction of the debaters.

The general Federal Convention that framed the Const.i.tution at Philadelphia was a secret body; and the greatest pains were taken that no part of its proceedings should get to the public until the Const.i.tution itself was reported to Congress. The Journals were confided to the care of Was.h.i.+ngton and were not made public until many years after our present Government was established. The framers of the Const.i.tution ignored the purposes for which they were delegated; they acted without any authority whatever; and the doc.u.ment, which the warring factions finally evolved from their quarrels and dissensions, was revolutionary.[997] This capital fact requires iteration, for it is essential to an understanding of the desperate struggle to secure the ratification of that then unpopular instrument.

"Not one legislature in the United States had the most distant idea when they first appointed members for a [Federal] convention, entirely commercial ... that they would without any warrant from their const.i.tuents, presume on so bold and daring a stride," truthfully writes the excitable Gerry of Ma.s.sachusetts in his bombastic denunciation of "the fraudulent usurpation at Philadelphia."[998] The more reliable Melancton Smith of New York testifies that "previous to the meeting of the Convention the subject of a new form of government had been little thought of and scarcely written upon at all.... The idea of a government similar to" the Const.i.tution "never entered the minds of the legislatures who appointed the Convention and of but very few of the members who composed it, until they had a.s.sembled and heard it proposed in that body."[999]

"Had the idea of a total change [from the Confederation] been started,"

a.s.serts the trustworthy Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, "probably no state would have appointed members to the Convention.... Probably not one man in ten thousand in the United States ... had an idea that the old s.h.i.+p [Confederation] was to be destroyed. Pennsylvania appointed princ.i.p.ally those men who are esteemed aristocratical.... Other States ... chose men princ.i.p.ally connected with commerce and the judicial department." Even so, says Lee, "the non-attendance of eight or nine men" made the Const.i.tution possible. "We must recollect, how disproportionately the democratic and aristocratic parts of the community were represented" in this body.[1000]

This "child of fortune,"[1001] as Was.h.i.+ngton called the Const.i.tution, had been ratified with haste and little or no discussion by Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Georgia. The princ.i.p.al men in the first three Commonwealths felt that the Const.i.tution gave those States large commercial advantages and even greater political consequence;[1002] and Georgia, with so small a population as to be almost negligible, felt the need of some strong Government to defend her settlers against the Indians. It is doubtful whether many of the people of these four States had read the Const.i.tution or had heard much about it, except that, in a general way, they were to be better off under the new than under the old arrangement. Their ratification carried no weight other than to make up four of the nine States necessary to set the new system in motion.

In other States its friends had whipped up all possible speed. Not a week had pa.s.sed after the Federal Convention had laid the proposed Const.i.tution before Congress when a resolution was introduced in the Legislature of Pennsylvania for the election, within five weeks,[1003]

of delegates to a State Convention to ratify the "New Plan." When its opponents, failing in every other device to delay or defeat it, refused to attend the sessions, thus breaking a quorum, a band of Const.i.tutionalists "broke into their lodgings, seized them, dragged them though the streets to the State House and thrust them into the a.s.sembly room with clothes torn and faces white with rage." And there the objecting members were forcibly kept until the vote was taken. Thus was the quorum made and the majority of the Legislature enabled to "pa.s.s"

the ordinance for calling the Pennsylvania State Convention to ratify the National Const.i.tution.[1004] And this action was taken before the Legislature had even received from Congress a copy of that doc.u.ment.

The enemies in Pennsylvania of the proposed National Government were very bitter. They said that the Legislature had been under the yoke of Philadelphia--a charge which, indeed, appears to be true. Loud were the protests of the minority against the feverish haste. When the members of the Pennsylvania Convention, thus called, had been chosen and had finished their work, the Anti-Const.i.tutionalists a.s.serted that no fair election had really taken place because it "was held at so early a period and want of information was so great" that the people did not know that such an election was to be held; and they proved this to their own satisfaction by showing that, although seventy thousand Pennsylvanians were ent.i.tled to vote, only thirteen thousand of them really had voted and that the forty-six members of the Pennsylvania Convention who ratified the Const.i.tution had been chosen by only sixty-eight hundred voters. Thus, they pointed out, when the State Convention was over, that the Federal Const.i.tution had been ratified in Pennsylvania by men who represented less than one tenth of the voting population of the State.[1005]

Indeed, a supporter of the Const.i.tution admitted that only a small fraction of the people did vote for members of the Pennsylvania State Convention; but he excused this on the ground that Pennsylvanians seldom voted in great numbers except in contested elections; and he pointed out that in the election of the Convention which framed the State's Const.i.tution itself, only about six thousand had exercised their right of suffrage and that only a little more than fifteen hundred votes had been cast in the whole Commonwealth to elect Pennsylvania's first Legislature.[1006]

The enemies of the proposed plan for a National Government took the ground that it was being rushed through by the "aristocrats"; and the "Independent Gazetteer" published "The humble address of the _low born_ of the United States of America, to their fellow slaves scattered throughout the world," which sarcastically pledged that "we, the _low born_, that is, all the people of the United States, except 600 or thereabouts, _well born_," would "allow and admit the said 600 _well born_ immediately to establish and confirm this most n.o.ble, most excellent, and truly divine const.i.tution."[1007]

James Wilson, they said, had been all but mobbed by the patriots during the Revolution; he never had been for the people, but always "strongly tainted with the spirit of _high aristocracy_."[1008] Yet such a man, they declared, was the ablest and best person the Const.i.tutionalists could secure to defend "that political monster, the proposed Const.i.tution"; "a monster" which had emerged from "the thick veil of secrecy."[1009]

When the Pennsylvania State Convention had a.s.sembled, the opponents of the Const.i.tution at once charged that the whole business was being speeded by a "system of precipitancy."[1010] They rang the changes on the secret gestation and birth of the Nation's proposed fundamental law, which, said Mr. Whitehill, "originates in mystery and must terminate in despotism," and, in the end, surely would annihilate the States.[1011]

Hardly a day pa.s.sed that the minority did not protest against the forcing tactics of the majority.[1012] While much ability was displayed on both sides, yet the debate lacked dignity, courtesy, judgment, and even information. So scholarly a man as Wilson said that "Virginia has no bill of rights";[1013] and Chief Justice McKean, supported by Wilson, actually declared that none but English-speaking peoples ever had known trial by jury.[1014]

"Lack of veracity," "indecent," "trifling," "contempt for arguments and person," were a few of the more moderate, polite, and soothing epithets that filled Pennsylvania's Convention hall throughout this so-called debate. More than once the members almost came to blows.[1015] The galleries, filled with city people, were hot for the Const.i.tution and heartened its defenders with cheers. "This is not the voice of the people of Pennsylvania," shouted Smilie, denouncing the partisan spectators. The enemies of the Const.i.tution would not be "intimidated,"

he dramatically exclaimed, "were the galleries filled with bayonets."[1016] The sarcastic McKean observed in reply that Smilie seemed "mighty angry, merely because somebody was pleased."[1017]

Persons not members of the Convention managed to get on the floor and laughed at the arguments of those who were against the Const.i.tution.

Findley was outraged at this "want of sense of decency and order."[1018]

Justice McKean treated the minority with contempt and their arguments with derision. "_If the sky falls, we shall catch larks; if the rivers run dry, we shall catch eels_," was all, said this conciliatory advocate of the Const.i.tution, that its enemies' arguments amounted to; they made nothing more than a sound "like _the working of small beer_."[1019]

The language, manners, and methods of the supporters of the Const.i.tution in the Pennsylvania Convention were resented outside the hall. "If anything could induce me to oppose the New Const.i.tution," wrote a citizen signing himself "Federalist," "it would be the indecent, supercilious carriage of its advocates towards its opponents."[1020]

While the Pennsylvania State Convention was sitting, the Philadelphia papers were full of attacks and counter-attacks by the partisans of either side, some of them moderate and reasonable, but most of them irritating, inflammatory, and absurd. A well-written pet.i.tion of citizens was sent to the Convention begging it to adjourn until April or May, so that the people might have time to inform themselves on the subject: "The people of Pennsylvania have not yet had sufficient time and opportunity afforded them for this purpose. The great bulk of the people, from the want of leisure from other avocations; their remoteness from information, their scattered situation, and the consequent difficulty of conferring with each other" did not understand the Const.i.tution, declared this memorial.

"The unaccountable zeal and precipitation used to hurry the people into premature decision" had excited and alarmed the ma.s.ses, "and the election of delegates was rushed into before the greater part of the people ... knew what part to take in it." So ran the cleverly drawn indictment of the methods of those who were striving for ratification in Pennsylvania.[1021] In the State Convention, the foes of the Const.i.tution scathingly denounced to the very last the jamming-through conduct of its friends; and just before the final vote, Smilie dared them to adjourn that the sense of the people might be taken.[1022]

Even such of the people as could be reached by the newspapers were not permitted to be enlightened by the Convention "debates"; for reports of them were suppressed.[1023] Only the speeches of James Wilson and Chief Justice McKean, both ardent advocates of the Const.i.tution, were allowed to be published.[1024]

But although outnumbered two to one, cuffed and buffeted without mercy in debate, scoffed at and jeered at by the people of the Quaker City, the minority was stiff-necked and defiant. Their heads were "b.l.o.o.d.y but unbowed." Three days after the vote for ratification, forty-six "ayes"

to twenty-three "nays," had been taken, the minority issued an address to their const.i.tuents.[1025] It relates the causes which led to the Federal Convention, describes its members, sets forth its usurpation of power, details the efforts to get popular support for the Const.i.tution even "whilst the gilded chains were forging in the secret conclave."

The address recounts the violence by which the State Convention was called, "not many hours" after the "New Plan" had "issued forth from the womb of suspicious secrecy"; and reaffirms the people's ignorance of the Const.i.tution, the trifling vote, the indecorous, hasty, "insulting"

debate. It gives the amendments asked for by the minority, and finally presents most if not all the arguments which before had been or since have been advanced against the Const.i.tution, and especially the National principle which pervades it.

The powers given Congress would produce "one consolidated government, which, from the nature of things, will be an _iron handed despotism_"; the State Governments would be annihilated; the general welfare clause would justify anything which "_the will and pleasure_ of congress"

dictated; that National body, "with complete and unlimited power over the _purse_ and the _sword_," could[1026] by taxation "command the whole or any part of the property of the people"--imposts, land taxes, poll taxes, excises, duties--every kind of tax on every possible species of property and written instrument could be laid by the "monster" of National power. By the Judiciary provided in the Const.i.tution "the rich and wealthy suitors would eagerly lay hold of the infinite mazes, perplexities and delays ... and the poor man being plunged in the bottomless pit of legal discussion" could not get justice.[1027]

Two coordinate "sovereignties," State and National, "would be contrary to the nature of things"; the Const.i.tution without a bill of rights "would of itself necessarily produce a despotism"; a standing army might be used to collect the most burdensome taxes and with it "an ambitious man ... may step up into the throne and seize upon absolute power"[1028]--such are the broad outlines of the doc.u.ment with which the undismayed enemies of the Const.i.tution began their campaign against it among the people of Pennsylvania after the Convention had ratified it.

The wrath of the Pennsylvania foes of the Const.i.tution fed and grew upon its own extravagance. The friends of the "New Plan" tried to hold a meeting in Carlisle to rejoice over its ratification; but the crowd broke up their meeting, wrecked their cannon, and burned the Const.i.tution in the very bonfire which the Const.i.tutionalists had prepared to celebrate its victory. Blows were struck and violence done.[1029] For almost a year, an Anti-Const.i.tutionalist paper in Philadelphia kept up the bombardment of the Const.i.tution and its advocates, its gunner being a writer signing himself "Centinel."[1030]

His ammunition was a mixture of argument, statement, charge, and abuse, wrapped up in cartridge paper of blistering rhetoric. The Const.i.tution was, wrote "Centinel," a "spurious brat"; "the evil genius of darkness presided at its birth" and "it came forth under the veil of mystery."[1031]

Should the small fraction of the people who had voted for the members of the Pennsylvania State Convention bind the overwhelming majority who had not voted, asked "Centinel." No, indeed! The people, wrote he with pen of gall, had nothing but contempt for the "solemn mummery" that had been acted in their name.[1032] As to the citizens of Philadelphia, everybody understood, a.s.serted "Centinel," that the "spirit of independency" was dead within _their_ b.r.e.a.s.t.s; Philadelphia merchants, as was well known, were mere va.s.sals to a commercial "colossus" (Robert Morris) who held the city in "thraldom."[1033]

"Mankind in the darkest ages, have never been so insulted," cried "Centinel," as the men of Pennsylvania had been by this "flagrant ...

audacious ... conspiracy [the Const.i.tution] against the liberties of a free people."[1034] The whole thing, he declared, was a dastardly plot.

The conspirators had disarmed the militia, kept out of the mails such newspapers as had dared to voice the "people's rights";[1035] and "all intercourse between the patriots of America is as far as possible cut off; whilst on the other hand the conspirators have the most exact information, a common concert is everywhere evident; they move in unison."[1036]

The Const.i.tutionalists were not content with their vile work in thrusting upon Pennsylvania "the empire of delusion," charged "Centinel,"[1037] but their agents were off for Virginia to do the like there.[1038] The whole world knew, said he, that the Const.i.tutionalists had rushed the Const.i.tution through in Pennsylvania;[1039] and that the "immaculate convention [that framed the Const.i.tution] ... contained a number of the princ.i.p.al public defaulters,"[1040] chief of whom was Robert Morris, who, though a bankrupt in the beginning of the Revolution, had, by "peculation and embezzlement of the public property," acc.u.mulated "the immense wealth he has dazzled the world with since."[1041]