Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
override the political power of the agrarians, therefore, became the
practical problem of the money-economy. The fear aroused by Shays’s
Rebellion provided the strategic opportunity, and the best brains of
the country suggested the method. The struggle had begun which was to
provide a new fundamental law for the United States.
Footnotes
[292] _Second Treatise on Civil Government_, Chapter IX.
[293] _Ibid._, Chapter XI.
[294] Burnaby, _Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America
in the Years 1759 and 1760_.
[295] Beard, _The Supreme Court and the Constitution_.
[296] Austin, _Life of Elbridge Gerry_, Vol. II, pp. 66-67.
[297] Brooks, _Henry Knox_, pp. 194-195.
Chapter II • The Great Debate
When one considers the bulk of commentary that has grown up about
the Constitution, it is surprising how little abstract political
speculation accompanied its making and adoption. It was the first
response to the current liberal demand for written constitutions as a
safeguard against tyranny, but it was aimed at the encroachments of
agrarian majorities rather than at Tory minorities. It was the work
of able lawyers and men of affairs confronting a definite situation,
rather than of political philosophers; and it was accompanied
by none of that searching examination of fundamental rights and
principles which made the earlier Puritan and later French debate
over constitutional principles so rich in creative speculation. Not a
single political thinker comparable to the great English and French
philosophers emerged from the struggle. The debate drew freely upon the
materials supplied by those thinkers, but it added little that was new.
The Constitution was a venture in republicanism, on a scale and under
conditions without historical precedent. It was inevitable, therefore,
that the debate should concern itself greatly with the nature of
republicanism and its adaptability to American conditions. As the
argument developed, two major questions assumed critical importance:
the question of the powers of the Federal state, and the question of
the sovereign rights of the majority; and in dealing with both the
debaters were on ground inadequately surveyed. Of definite republican
theory little was available except the writings of a small group of
seventeenth-century republicans. Of democratic theory, on the other
hand, even less was available. American democratic aspiration had
far outrun old-world liberalism, and had produced no independent
speculation of its own. French democratic theory still awaited the rise
of Jacobinism to clarify its principles. The party of Commonwealth
Levelers, to be sure, with their doctrines of a “paramount law,”
manhood suffrage, and annual parliaments, offered much that might have
proved suggestive; but the literature of the Levelers was buried too
deep under Tory obloquy to be resurrected, and nowhere else was to be
found any considerable body of democratic theory. It was inevitable,
therefore, that the debaters should go back to the English liberals of
the preceding century.
Consider for a moment the authorities bandied to and fro in the great
debate. With such exceptions as Machiavelli, Vattel, Pufendorf,
Montesquieu, they were the well-known English theorists, Hobbes,
Harrington, Milton, Sidney, Halifax, Hume, and Blackstone. Unhappily
for the democrats every one of these great names counted against
their aspirations. Hobbes was a state absolutist whose _Leviathan_
provided sharp weapons for those who wished to tone the government
high; Hume was a Tory who accepted the traditional interpretation of
human nature in the light of which democracy was the open door to
anarchy; Blackstone was a Tory lawyer, who interpreted the British
constitution by a narrow legalism that was obsolete before the
_Commentaries_ came from the press. Harrington, Milton, and perhaps
Sidney, were republicans of strong aristocratic bias, and Halifax
and Locke--the latter by much the most influential of all--were
constitutional monarchists.[298] Every one of these great authorities
either distrusted or violently condemned democracy, yet they provided
the major body of theory made use of by the Federalists.
On the other hand, the slowly accumulating democratic theory was
unknown to the members of the convention. In 1761 Robert Wallace
had advanced an Owenite theory of property, attacking the principle
of economic individualism as responsible for the current evils of
government by landed property; but his book, _Various Prospects_, made
no ripple on the placid waters of English liberalism.[299] In 1768
Joseph Priestley, a thinker who later was to exercise great influence
in America, who lived here for a number of years and was intimate with
Jefferson, published his essay. _First Principles of Government_, a
work embodying the first English interpretation of the perfectibility
of man, the rule of reason, the theory of the diminished state, and the
Benthamite principle of utilitarianism or expediency in statecraft,
which struck at the principle of coercive sovereignty. But the ideas
of Priestley were probably little known in America in 1787, and his
influence was undermined further by a theological attack which sought
to fasten upon him the stigma of atheism. In short, in this war of
ideas the democrats were provided with little ammunition and fought at
a great disadvantage. If the debate had taken place five years later,
after the French Revolution had provided new democratic theory, the
disparity of intellectual equipment would have been far less marked.
One other fact must be kept in mind, namely, that the great debate was
in reality two debates, one carried on in the quiet of the convention
hall, the other in the open. Each interprets the other, and taken
together they reveal the conflict of forces and ideas that determined
the form of the Constitution. In the privacy of the convention the
speakers were free to express their views frankly, and in consequence a
loose rein was given to the play of ideas; fundamental principles were
examined critically and economic motives and class interests openly
acknowledged. But in arguing the case before the generality of voters
without doors a more cautious approach was necessary; arguments must
be tempered to well-known prejudices, and circumspection must take the
place of frankness. In the earlier debate, among innumerable lesser
problems, two main questions dominated the argument: the question of
the form of the centralized state--whether it should be aristocratic or
republican; and if republican--as was inevitable--the question of what
should be done about the majority will--how representation should be so
refined as to guarantee stability to the government and security to the
minority. In the second debate the appeal was to expediency rather than
to principles, and turned on three chief points: the need of adoption
in view of the desperate condition of the country; the adaptation
of the proposed republican form to the vast extent of territory and
diversity of interests; and the necessity of providing checks upon
political parties if anarchy were to be avoided.
In the convention the need of a strong state, with powers beyond
local legislatures, was not so much debated as assumed. By common
consent it was agreed that the present lack of a centralized, coercive
sovereignty, was the source of all current evils. How many members
preferred monarchy to republicanism, in principle, it is impossible to
determine; but they all realized the inexpediency of attempting to set
it up; even Hamilton yielded to the logic of Colonel Mason’s argument:
“Notwithstanding the oppression and injustice experienced among us
from democracy, the genius of the people is in favor of it, and the
genius of the people must be consulted.” Accepting then the principle
of republicanism as a compromise between the extremes of monarchy
and democracy, the practical problem remained of erecting a system
that should secure the minority against the aggressions of political
faction. If the danger lay in an uncontrolled majority will, the way
of safety lay in imposing restraints upon that will. In elaborating
a system of checks and balances the members of the convention were
influenced by the practical considerations of economic determinism more
than by the theories of Montesquieu. They were realists who followed
the teachings of the greatest political thinkers from Aristotle to
Locke in asserting that the problem of government lay in arranging a
stable balance between the economic interests of the major classes. The
revolutionary conception of equalitarianism, that asserted the rights
of man apart from property and superior to property, did not enter into
their thinking as a workable hypothesis. The very conditions of the
unsettled times were an argument against it. Property, they argued,
is the stabilizing force in society; it is conservative and cautious;
having everything to lose by social upheavals, it is a restraining
force upon factional unrest. The propertyless, on the other hand,
having nothing to lose, easily become the victims of demagogues and
embroil society with foolish experiments. The republican experiment
might work in America because property was widely distributed, but in
the course of time a propertyless majority would arise, whose fickle
and subversive will must be held in check. The problem, therefore, was
to provide in time against such an eventuality. Certain members of the
convention did not go so far in their fear of the propertyless, but
relied upon the ability of property to protect itself by extra-legal
means. “Give the votes to people who have no property,” argued
Gouverneur Morris, “and they will sell them to the rich, who will be
able to buy them.”[300] But the more general view was expressed by
Madison:
The landed interest, at present, is prevalent, but in process of
time ... when the number of landholders shall be comparatively
small ... will not the landed interests be overbalanced in future
elections? and, unless wisely provided against, what will become of
our government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to
all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be
insecure. An agrarian law would take place. If these observations
be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of
the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share
in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to
balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to
protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.[301]
This conception of the natural sovereignty of the landed interest with
its stake-in-society theory of political rights, America inherited
from England; and although the new Constitution professed to rest
on the sovereignty of the people, the men who framed it refused to
interpret the term, sovereignty of the people, in an equalitarian
sense. They did not profess to be, in the words of John Quincy Adams,
“slavish adorers of our sovereign lords the people.” Every principle
of their social and political philosophy taught them the desirability
of limiting the majority will in order that the wiser minority will
might rule. Paul Leicester Ford has asserted that “the Federal compact
was the first deliberate attempt and assent of a majority to tie
its own hands; to give to the minority guarantees of fair and equal
treatment, without which democratic government is well-nigh impossible,
save when developed along the lines of socialism.”[302] Such partisan
misinterpretation of plain historical fact is characteristic of our
Federalist historians. If the hands of the disfranchised majority