"The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789"

[fiefoe]

Joseph J. Ellis deftly shows us how the sausage was made in a fortuitous moment in history.

• And once you started thinking along these lines, there were reasons as self-evident as Jefferson’s famous truths why no such thing as a coherent American nation could possibly have emerged after independence was won.
• And so creating a national government was the last thing on the minds of American revolutionaries, since such a distant source of political power embodied all the tyrannical tendencies that patriotic Americans believed they were rebelling against...
• The obvious alternative explanation is top-down. All democratic cultures find such explanations offensive because they violate the hallowed conviction that, at least in the long run, popular majorities can best decide the direction that history should take. However true that conviction might be over the full span of American history—and the claim is contestable—it does not work for the 1780s, which just might be the most conspicuous and consequential example of the way in which a small group of prominent leaders, in disregard of popular opinion, carried the American story in a new direction.
• The great conflict, as I see it, was not between “aristocracy” and “democracy,” whatever those elusive categories might mean, but rather between “nationalists” and “confederationists,” which is shorthand for those who believed that the principles of the American Revolution could flourish in a much larger political theater and those who did not.
• My argument is that four men made the transition from confederation to nation happen. They are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. If they are the stars of the story, the supporting cast consists of Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris (no relation), and Thomas Jefferson... diagnosed the systemic dysfunctions under the Articles, manipulated the political process to force a calling of the Constitutional Convention, collaborated to set the agenda in Philadelphia, attempted somewhat successfully to orchestrate the debates in the state ratifying conventions, then drafted the Bill of Rights as an insurance policy to ensure state compliance with the constitutional settlement. If I am right, this was arguably the most creative and consequential act of political leadership in American history.
• Or even more succinctly, the first phase of the American Revolution was about the rejection of political power; the second phase was about controlling it. More practically, the United States could not become the dominant model for the liberal state in the modern world until the second American Revolution of 1787
• There are two especially salient danger zones where our modern presumptions can most easily lead us astray. The first is our creedal conviction that democracy is the political gold standard against which all responsible governments must be measured. The second is our political certainty, in truth recently arrived at, that racial equality is morally superior to any race-based alternative. Neither of those modern assumptions would have been either comprehensible or credible to the founding generation.
• Although most of the prominent founders, and all the men featured here, fully recognized that slavery was incompatible with the values of the American Revolution, they consciously subordinated the moral to the political agenda, permitting the continuance and expansion of slavery as the price to pay for nationhood... the only question we can ask is whether it was a Greek tragedy, meaning inevitable and unavoidable, or a Shakespearean tragedy, meaning that it could have gone the other way, and the failure was a function of the racial prejudices the founders harbored in their heads and hearts.
• By rejecting proportional representation, the architects of the Articles (of Confederation) were making a clear statement that they did not intend the Confederation Congress to function as a national government once the war was won. The closest approximation in our own time is the European Union.
• The debate exposed three fundamental disagreements: first, a sectional split between northern and southern states over slavery; second, a division between large and small states over representation; and third, a more general argument between proponents for a confederation of sovereign states and
• it is difficult to recover the combination of abuse and neglect directed at the Continental Army by most of the American citizenry at the time.
• we would say that the ideological and emotional hostility to any conspicuous and centralized expression of political authority rendered a viable American nation inherently incompatible with the goals of the American Revolution.
• But the unspoken and unattractive truth was that the marginal status of the Continental Army was reassuring for the vast majority of Americans, since a robust and professional army on the British model contradicted the very values it was supposedly fighting for. It had to be just strong enough to win the war, or perhaps more accurately not lose it, but not so strong as to threaten the republican goals the war was ultimately about.
• Eventually he realized that a defensive strategy, called a war of posts, was the preferred course, even though it defied every fiber of his being. His seminal strategic insight, which seems obvious in retrospect, was that he did not need to win the war. The British needed to win. He would win by not losing, which in practice meant keeping the Continental Army intact as the institutional embodiment of American independence.
• Washington came to regard the ongoing conversations as a running joke: “The Army, as usual, is without pay; and a great part of the Soldiery without Shirts, and if one was to hazard for them [Congress] an opinion, it would be that the Army had contracted such a habit of encountering distress and difficulties, and of living without money, that it would be impolitic and injurious to introduce other customs to it.”
• the American Revolution had happened at a truly providential moment. It occurred when a treasure trove of human knowledge about society and government had replaced the medieval assumptions—that “gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition”—and thereby provided Americans with an unprecedented opportunity to construct a society according to political principles that maximized the prospects for personal freedom and happiness more fully than ever before.
• And at least as Washington saw it, those western horizons fundamentally changed the chemistry of the political conversation by rendering the local and state perspectives of the current confederation pathetically provincial.
• what will hold the states together once the war ends? Washington believed the answer was the western domain. Morris believed the answer was debt.
• The key concept in this emerging mentality was credit, a word derived from the Latin credere, meaning “to believe... For Morris’s way of thinking was terra incognita for most southern delegates in Congress, especially the Virginians, who still regarded land, not money, as the ultimate measure of wealth, and for whom the manipulation of numbers on a balance sheet came across as some sinister form of magic, eerily similar to the calculations their English and Scottish creditors were employing to drive them into bankruptcy.
• Rhode Island had a long-standing tradition of independence that sometimes verged on eccentricity.
• “What I had afloat has all been lost,” he explained to a friend requesting a loan, then adding with a touch of the Morris wit that “the amount of that loss I will forebear to mention as there might be in it an appearance of ostentation.
• In some respects (Madison) remained a loyal Virginian—for instance, voting against the Bank of the United States, since Virginia regarded all banks as mysterious places where you sent your money to disappear.
• He followed up the following year with two essays, A Full Vindication and The Farmer Refuted, both of which were bravura performances demonstrating what became the trademark Hamilton style: an assurance bordering on arrogance; a slashing mode of attack that would one day make him the most feared polemicist in America; the capacity to control and incisively convey a large body of information; and a keen sense of where history was headed,
• "And let me conjure you, in the name of our Common Country, as you value your own sacred honor—and as you regard the Military and National Character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the Man who wishes, under any pretences, to overturn the liberties of our Country, and who wickedly attempts to open the flood Gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising Empire in Blood."... All prospects for a military coup died at that moment.
• In order to underline the presumption that the core principles of the American Revolution would prevail in the steady march across the continent, Jefferson insisted that all hereditary titles and privileges would be repudiated and that slavery would end no later than 1800. Though it is mere speculation, the entire course of American history might have been different if the stipulation on slavery had won acceptance by the Congress, but it lost by one vote.
• The vastly preferable alternative was called “compact” or “progressive seating,” meaning a more managed and monitored approach to westward migration that ensured a steadier and more staged march of more densely populated settlements across the continent... By controlling the demographic flow of western migration and ensuring its density, the Ordinance of 1785 minimized the likelihood of Indian wars,
• Empire was in a state of steady and irreversible decline, so that despite the presumptive posture of the courtiers in Madrid, Spain was the ideal European power to claim control over the vast region west of the Mississippi. In effect, Spain was like a cowbird that occupied the nest until the American eagle, in the form of a relentless demographic wave of settlers, arrived to replace her as the dominant power on the North American continent.
• With (Jay's) preternatural sense of where history was headed, he observed that demography would trump diplomacy. The delegates in Philadelphia were merely quibbling over problems that would be settled by those families streaming over the Alleghenies by the thousands: “Once the white population becomes sufficient in western lands, there is no power that can deprive them of the use of the Mississippi.
• the fate of the Confederation Congress, which he now regarded as a political arena in which the states came together to display their mutual jealousies, almost a laboratory for the triumph of parochialism and provincialism.
• To vest legislative, judicial, and executive Powers in one and the same Body of Men, and that too in a Body daily changing its members, can never be wise. In my opinion these three great Departments of Sovereignty should be forever separated, and so distributed as to serve as checks on each other. But these are Subjects that have long been familiar to you and on which you are so well informed to anticipate every thing that I might say on them.47 Jay was referring to Adams’s Thoughts on Government
• convention called to address the modest matter of commercial reform had just failed to attract even a quorum, and now Hamilton was using this grim occasion to announce the date for another convention that would tackle all the problems affecting the confederation at once. It was as if a prizefighter, having just been knocked out by a journeyman boxer, declared his intention to challenge the heavyweight champion of the world.
• Even more significant, most of the opponents of reform had decided to boycott the convention, thereby confining the debate to advocates of moderate and radical reform.
• which was to abandon the belief that it must be singular and indivisible: “I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities when they can be subordinately useful... Madison was inventing what came to be called “federalism,” a government in which sovereignty was a matter of ongoing negotiations between the state and federal governments on a case-by-case basis.
• As a result, a Madisonian argument lacked all the emotional affectations but struck with the force of pure thought, embedded in often overwhelming amounts of evidence. As one commentator put it later, “Never have I seen so much mind in so little matter.
• This was backroom politics in the nose-counting tradition that most Virginian gentlemen would have found distasteful and slightly offensive. But it came to Madison naturally, and he was very good at it. Like a poker player counting cards, he was deciding how to play his hand in Philadelphia.
• All the stories were boringly similar, tales of temporary stability, usually based on a political alliance against a common enemy that eventually dissolved into civil war, anarchy, and political oblivion. But the boringly similar pattern was actually Madison’s main point. The kind of confederation the Americans had created in the Articles was an inherently transitory political configuration destined to self-destruct because there was no overarching source of sovereignty larger than the narrow interests of the states.
• He harbored an eighteenth-century sense that unbridled democracy was incompatible with the political health of a republic.
• Madison realized that he was asking his fellow Americans to abandon their local and state-based orientation, to regard themselves as fellow citizens in a much larger enterprise, and to modify their view of government as an alien force. The federal government must become “us” rather than “them.” One might credibly call this change a second American Revolution.
• How could a republic bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty be structured in such a way to manage the inevitable excesses of democracy and best serve the long-term public interest? Madison’s one-word answer was “filtration.”
• Given our sense that this was almost assuredly the most consequential conclave in American history, it strains credibility to realize that the Constitutional Convention was an ever-shifting, highly transitory body of men with different degrees of commitment to the enterprise.
• Ironically, to the extent that the delegates at Philadelphia succeeded, their success was dependent on violating all of our contemporary convictions about transparency and diversity, which is one reason why their success could never be duplicated in our time.
• The only moment of utter clarity came on June 18, when Hamilton rose to deliver a six-hour speech that his best biographer has called “brilliant, courageous, and completely daft.” In it he used the dreaded word, calling for “an elected monarch” who would serve for life.
• namely, that leadership sometimes means slowing down to allow stragglers to catch up. (Hamilton regarded this lesson as cowardice.) A small elite of like-minded souls could and did force a political debate that would otherwise not have happened. But once that debate moved to a larger arena that contained actors who did not share their radical assumptions, the definition of leadership changed.
• Morris smuggled the national agenda into the preamble of the Constitution. In retrospect, this was probably the most consequential editorial act in American history, the political equivalent at the end of the convention of Madison’s bold decision to impose a national agenda at the start.
• "Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and I am not sure that it is not the best"... The Constitution had created a framework in which the argument could continue. For the present, that was the most that history allowed, even more than Franklin, with all his seasoned wisdom, had allowed himself to expect.
• Madison, ever the political operative, was the first to recognize it. “It is generally believed that nine States at least will embrace the plan,” he predicted, “consequently that the tardy remainder must be reduced to the dilemma of either shifting for themselves or coming in without any credit for it.” The
• began, the advocates for ratification won the rhetorical battle by claiming the title Federalists, which left their opponents with the limp label Antifederalists. This nomenclature was both inaccurate and grossly unfair to the “Antis.”
• The key insight might be called the beauty of ambiguity. Madison had misguidedly, he now realized, pushed for an unambiguous resolution of the sovereignty question during the convention. Now it was becoming clear to him that the great achievement of the convention, and of the Constitution as well, was to embrace the inconvenient truth that there was no consensus on the sovereignty question, either in the convention or in the country itself. So what they had created, albeit out of necessity rather then choice, was a political framework that deliberately blurred the sovereignty question.
• In the long run—and this was probably Madison’s most creative insight—the multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently “living” document. For it was designed not to offer clear answers to the sovereignty question (or, for that matter, to the scope of executive or judicial authority) but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberative fashion. The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of “originalism” or “original intent,” this should be a disarming insight.
• Again, the most salient point to notice is that the debate over American nationhood in the ratifying conventions was driven by state and local concerns that were maddeningly diverse, thoroughly provincial, and utterly oblivious to the larger issues at stake. (Virginia, as we shall see, was somewhat of an exception.) Only one modern historian, Pauline Maier, has been willing and able to master the twelve separate stories in their excruciating detail. But the fact that there are twelve distinct stories is, in truth, the most revealing story of all,
• Between November 1787 and March 1788, Hamilton (51), Madison (29), and Jay (5), wrote eighty-five essays under the common pseudonym Publius entitled the Federalist Papers.
• Madison’s Federalist 10 became the most analyzed political essay in American history, so convincing in its argument for the viability of a large-scale republic that one is left to wonder why Montesquieu’s argument on the other side was ever taken seriously.
• In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the greatest difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
• While we tend to regard (and capitalize) the Bill of Rights as a secular version of the Ten Commandments handed down by God to Moses, Madison saw it as a weapon to be wielded against opponents of the Constitution, like Henry and Clinton, who were pushing the second convention proposal, which Madison regarded as a thinly veiled attempt to undo all that he and his fellow collaborators had accomplished.
• bill of rights was so important to Jefferson because its essential function was to define what government could not do,
• Jefferson’s problem, as Madison saw it, was that he believed that the primary threat to personal rights came from government. That might be true in Europe, “but in our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the community.” So the real threat came “from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.” As a result, Madison concluded that a bill of rights, “however strongly marked on paper, will never be regarded when opposed to the decided sense of the public.”
• In short, he viewed the movement for a bill of rights not as an opportunity to glimpse the abiding truths, but as the final step in the ratification process.
• Soon after his inauguration, Washington had asked him to draft a letter to the members of Congress, expressing his desire to work closely with them. The members of Congress, not knowing of Madison’s involvement, asked him to draft their reply to Washington. It was Madison writing to Madison. He had become the second most prominent figure in the new government.