The Federal Convention

Nobody went into the “Constitutional Convention” calling it the “Constitutional Convention”. For the most part (except for maybe Madison, Hamilton, and Washington who pretty much wanted to create a strong “energetic” national government from the getgo) they were all there to battle over the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. They were all big on “sovereignty” – that word comes up a lot. Each state being “sovereign” – blah blah. A strong government was a dirty word (small wonder – look at the system they had all just fought to escape). Here is a really interesting excerpt from Miracle at Philadelphia about what made the Convention in 1787 different from the Convention in 1776 when they decided to declare their independence. I mean, the difference is obvious in the externals, but Catherine Drinker-Bowen (the author) describes a philosophical differnce:

Characteristically, the Convention never stayed long upon theory. Its business was not to defend “freedom” or to vindicate a revolution. That had been done long ago, in July of 1776 and later, when colony after colony created its state constitution, flinging out its particular preamble of political and religious freedom. The Convention of 1787 would debate the rights of states, not the rights of man in general. The records show nothing grandly declaratory or defiant, as in the French constituent assembly of 1789. America had passed that phase; had anyone challenged members, they would have said such declarations are already cemented with their blood. In 1787 the states sat not to justify the term United States but to institute a working government for those United States. One finds no quotations from Rousseau, John Locke, Burlamaqui or the French philosophes, and if Montesquieu is invoked it is deffend the practical organization of a tripartite government. When the Federal Convention discussed political power, governmental authority, they discussed it in terms of what was likely to happen to Delaware or Pennsylvania , New Jersey or Georgia.

Most members of the Philadelphia Convention, in short, were old hands, politicians to the bone. That some of them happened also to be men of vision, educated in law and the science of government, did not distract them from the matters impending. There was a minimum of oratory or showing off. Each time a member seemed about to soar into the empyrean of social theory — the eighteenth century called it “reason” — somebody brought him round, and shortly. “Experience must be our only guide,” said John Dickinson of Delaware. “Reason may mislead us.”

The practical matter of how the national legislature should be elected was to take up half the summer. Roger Sherman of Connecticut, on May thirty-first, declared the people “should have as little to do as may be about the government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled.” Elbridge Gerry, man of business affairs and money, agreed. “The evils we experience,” he said, “flow from the excess of democrazy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” There is small doubt that Gerry’s mind turned as he said it to Captain Shays and his band of debt-ridden farmers, breaking up the meetings of county law courts and demanding “reforms” in the legislature. That the farmers had been badly treated did not enter into Gerry’s philosophy. To this Boston merchant a mob was a mob. And were men of this stamp to be permitted authority in government?

Elbridge Gerry, friend of Samuel Adams, was one of the”old patriots”; he had signed the Declaration of Independence. Yet to the members of the Federal Convention the word democracy carried another meaning than it does today. Democrazy signified anarchy; demos was not the people but the mob. When Paterson of New Jersey said “the democratic spirit beats high,” it was meant in derogation, not in praise. Again and again we meet these phrases: if aristocracy was “baleful” and “baneful,” unchecked democracy was equally to be shunned. Edmund Randolph desired, he said, “to restrain the fury of democracy,” and spoke also of “the democratic licentiousness of the State legislatures.”

Gerry went on with his speech. “I am still republican,” he said. “But I have been taught by experience the danger of the levelling spirit.”

Drinker-Bowen’s comment that there was “little oratory or showing off” reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from John Adams. He wrote home to his wife, Abigail, during the first Continental Congress, in 1774, and here is what he had to say:

This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man — an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, his political abilities. The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.

ha ha ha