The story of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Those involved in revolutions usually agree that their current ruling class needs to be replaced. Where disagreement often occurs is what to do after achieving that goal. History is full of examples of civil wars and violence erupting in a society after a hated ruler is no longer in power. The French Revolution in the eighteenth century and the Russian Revolution in the twentieth century are two such examples. Each is marked by revenge, fighting, terror, and a lot of bloodshed.
But as is often the case in history, America is the exception. After the Continental Army defeated the British in the Revolutionary War, the American colonies could have very quickly descended into chaos. Thirteen colonies loosely aligned to defeat the British could have gone their own ways and begun to fight one another. There could have been large groups of American Patriots who sought out and killed British Loyalists. However, neither one of these events occurred in any meaningful way.
Instead, the road to a stable governing system that ultimately led to the ratification of the United States Constitution took a deliberate and contemplated path. It was the product of wise men finding common ground to produce a government system that they felt best protected the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Mainly, the idea that government needed to be limited, that power never found itself all in one place, and that the liberty of the people needed to be preserved above all else.
The Road to the Constitutional Convention
Starting in 1774 with the meeting of the First Continental Congress, a national congress met to discuss the interests of the states and the American people. Through 1781, the primary focus of Congress was defeating the British in the Revolutionary War. After the Patriot victory at Yorktown in October 1781, the national discussion turned towards how to best govern the new country moving forward. The states often disagreed with one another over an array of issues.
On March 1, 1781, in an attempt to establish some cohesion between the loose confederation of the thirteen states and to establish laws to govern the interchange among them, Maryland became the last of the states to ratify the Articles of Confederation. There were some positives to the Articles, but there were also problems with the structure right from the start.
On the positive side, the Articles officially named the new nation “The United States of America,” a name first used by Stephen Moylan, a secretary to General George Washington, in January 1776. A central government was established that could make treaties and negotiate with foreign powers. To help alleviate financial instability caused by different currencies in every state, the central government now had the ability to coin money. The Articles also allowed the central government to raise an army and navy.
However, all of these decisions rested in one unicameral body, the Continental Congress, and each state, regardless of size or population, got one vote. Because any amendment to the Articles needed to be unanimous among the states, this meant that any state could veto proposed changes to the Articles based on any pretext. Some issues, such as declaring war and entering treaties, required nine out of thirteen votes, while others required a simple majority of seven votes. Congress could not regulate commerce among the states, and all revenue to the central government came from the states based on the value of privately owned land within each state’s borders. Although the country was functioning, the states remained loosely aligned and some problems only grew worse.
After the Revolutionary War, debt that was due to merchants in both Europe and America became due. Because post-war America was suffering from both periods of inflation and deflation, creditors wanted payment in hard currency with often short payment schedules. During a deflationary period, there was limited cash in circulation. Farmers, often Revolutionary War veterans who struggled after not receiving payments for their military service, began to have their property foreclosed upon. Tensions began to rise across the states.
In January 1787, Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army and a farmer who had lost his land, led about 1,500 men towards a federal armory in Springfield, Massachusetts, in opposition to farmers and other veterans losing their land. The governor of Massachusetts, James Bowdoin, assembled about 1,200 militia to oppose them. Warning shots were fired, and eventually, so was an artillery round. Four of Shays’ men were killed and about twenty were wounded. Shays’ remaining men scattered and most were eventually captured. Although most of Shays’ men, as well as Shays himself, were eventually pardoned, the entire incident was very troublesome for the country’s leaders. In a letter to fellow Virginian James Madison, George Washington worried that the country was “fast verging on anarchy and confusion!”
Shays’ Rebellion, as it became known, helped spark calls for reforms. Many, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton of New York, could see that changes had to be made to ensure a more centralized government that could unify the states’ common interests and help ensure stability throughout the country. Even before Shays’ Rebellion reached its conclusion, George Washington wrote in a letter to John Jay in August 1786 that the country needed “the intervention of a coercive power” that “will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner, as the authority of the state governments extends over the several states.”
So led primarily by Madison and Hamilton and with the support of the leading American of the time, George Washington, calls were made for a convention of delegates of the states to address problems with the Articles of Confederation. As Hamilton wrote at the time, “a Convention of Deputies from the different States, for the special and sole purpose of [devising] a plan for supplying such defects as may be discovered to exist” in the Articles of Confederation.
Inside Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
The Constitutional Convention Begins
On May 25, 1787, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the same room that the Declaration of Independence was adopted just eleven years earlier, delegates who would eventually number fifty-five gathered from every state, except Rhode Island, to begin discussion of the best ways to establish a functioning and cohesive government that Madison hoped would “last for ages.” The next four months were some of the most consequential in American and world history.
The leading men of the age gathered in Philadelphia. Some names are familiar to most Americans, especially Benjamin Franklin, by far the oldest delegate at age eighty-one, Madison, Hamilton, and of course, George Washington. But men such as James Wilson, George Mason, and Roger Sherman, among many others, played instrumental roles in the final version of the Constitution. About three-quarters of the delegates had served in the Continental Congress, eight men had signed the Declaration of Independence, seven had been former state governors, many had helped write their state constitutions, and twenty-one were veterans of the Revolutionary War. Their average age was forty-two. Thomas Jefferson, who, along with John Adams, was in Paris as an American ambassador to France, called the group “an assembly of demi-gods.” These demi-gods would become known as the “Constitutional Framers.”
Philadelphia was experiencing a heatwave during the summer of 1787 and because the delegates wanted to keep their discussions private to encourage an open and honest dialogue, as well as to limit outside influences, the windows and doors were kept closed at the Pennsylvania State House (later renamed Independence Hall). This only made tensions within the room worse. George Washington was elected president of the Convention and sat at the front of the convention hall. His principal role was to keep the proceedings civil. Benjamin Franklin was well respected by all the other delegates at the Convention and worked mainly behind the scenes due to his age and ill health.
Thankfully, the man who history calls the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, kept a record of the proceedings. The thirty-six-year-old Madison came prepared with a plan. Madison was only about five feet tall with a low, squeaky voice. He had difficulty commanding a room. But Madison was a highly intelligent man trying to accomplish a task that had never been accomplished successfully in human history: to create the world’s first-ever written constitution that protected the individual rights of its citizens.
As a guide, Madison and the other Framers studied history from ancient Rome to ancient Greece and the Italian city-states of the late Middle Ages to determine why they had failed in attempts to establish the form of government the Framers believed best – a republican form of government. By republican, the Framers meant that power comes from the consent of the people, who elect representatives to speak on their behalf within a government of limited powers. There would be no monarch, emperor, or oligarch who could simply impose edicts upon the people.
The Framers were also greatly influenced by the eighteenth-century French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, whom historians smartly refer to as simply Montesquieu. It was specifically his writing in The Spirit of the Laws, first published in 1748, that was closely studied. It’s in this work that an important concept was discussed. The idea that power needed to be divided among distinct branches of government.
The delegates quickly agreed that they needed to go beyond simply reforming the Articles of Confederation and write a whole new Constitution. Guiding the Framers through this important endeavor were two very important concepts. Firstly, the idea that government had to be organized to limit the worst aspects of human nature. Mainly, the desire to rule over others and human selfishness and ambition. Secondly, was knowing that absolute power corrupts. In fact, Madison said that the very definition of tyranny “is when all powers are gathered under one place.”
The model that the Framers embraced moved away from a “national” government and towards a “federal” government. This is an important distinction. In a national government, a central power rules directly over the people. This is basically how all human civilizations had been organized up to this point in history.
In the federal government developed by the Framers, specific enumerated powers are granted by the people to the federal government, with a further division of power at the state and local levels. The federal government is organized so that power is divided among three branches: the legislative, executive, and judicial. Each branch has its enumerated responsibilities that act as checks and balances against each other so that no single branch can dominate another.
The Framers believed that this system would protect the people from what they called the “tyranny of the majority.” They believed this form of tyranny to be the problem with direct democracy, such as had existed in ancient Greece. Fifty percent plus one of the people could put their own self-interest above the interests of the rest and deprive a minority of their God-given rights. The Constitution’s construction is meant to prevent this with a structure that limits, in writing, the power of government over the people.
On September 17, 1787, after four months of committees, discussions, debates, and votes, thirty-nine delegates signed the final version of the Constitution, a 4,543-word world-changing document. Nine other delegates who supported the final version were absent that day or had already left Philadelphia. Eldridge Gerry, Robert Yates, John Lansing, Edmund Rudolph, Luther Martin, and George Mason opposed the final version for two principle reasons. First, they believed the proposed federal government was too powerful, and second, they felt it lacked a bill of rights to further protect the liberty of the people. This last point was especially true for Mason, who was an active participant throughout the Convention.
Writing after the Convention’s conclusion to the Marquis de Lafayette in February of 1788, George Washington characterized the final result of the Constitutional Convention as “little short of a miracle.” In writing to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison also used the term “miracle.” While the delegates agreed on the basic principles of limited government and individual liberty, it was so difficult at times to get agreement on the specifics of how best to protect these principles that reaching a final version of the Constitution seemed hopeless. However, the men in Philadelphia kept working through their differences and ultimately created the document that has been the foundation for all law in the United States ever since.
The three branches of government developed in the Constitution, as well as other important provisions contained within it, deserve further discussion. As does the story of its ratification, as many who read “the plan,” as it was called at the time, had reservations about whether it would adequately protect the liberties of “We the People.”
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