Chapter 4 - Land of Hope PDF

CHAPTER FOUR A WAR, A NATION, AND A WOUND DECLARING INDEPENDENCE WAS THE EASY PART. IT WAS NOT hard to produce a convincing manifesto and advance the glorious cause in elegant and ringing words. It was not hard to manage a few small and scattered military triumphs, even if they depended on the ele...

CHAPTER FOUR A WAR, A NATION, AND A WOUND DECLARING INDEPENDENCE WAS THE EASY PART. IT WAS NOT hard to produce a convincing manifesto and advance the glorious cause in elegant and ringing words. It was not hard to manage a few small and scattered military triumphs, even if they depended on the element of surprise and were little more than pinpricks that served to annoy the British and frustrate their intentions. But soon the immensity of the task ahead became clear and the warnings and admonitions of men like John Dickinson – a Patriot who had nevertheless opposed the Declaration, deriding it as a “skiff made of paper” – began to seem prophetic. How on earth did the American revolutionary leaders imagine that they could prevail against the greatest military power and most powerful empire in the world? They went into the struggle with huge disadvantages. To begin with, the country, which was hardly even a country yet, was not fully united in embracing the revolutionary cause. We often assume that everyone in the colonies was solidly on board for independence, but that was very far from being the case. It is hard to know for sure, but perhaps as many as one-third of Americans remained loyal to the Crown and opposed the Revolution; another third seemed to be indifferent as to the outcome. Even the remaining third who supported independence had divergent motives for doing so. And the emerging country did not yet have a coherent or effective national political organization; as we have already seen, the Declaration itself was carefully ambiguous as to exactly what kind of national union these “free and independent states” were going to form together. In addition, there could be no guarantee that such unity as could be summoned in the summer of 1776 would survive through the years of a rigorous, punishing war. The Americans could field only the most rudimentary, ill-trained, and poorly supplied army; they had no navy to speak of, little money, and no obvious means of raising funds to build and support these essential military components. The deck seemed to be stacked against them. On the very day in which independence was voted on by the Continental Congress, the British were easily able to land, facing no resistance, a large contingent of troops on Staten Island at the mouth of New York Harbor, the first installment in what would by August swell to a siege force of more than thirty thousand. They were not impressed by the Americans’ brave and high-flown words. An American victory under such circumstances seemed a pipe dream. But the Americans enjoyed certain very real advantages, and those would soon become clear. First, there was the fact that they were playing defense. They would not need to take the war across the ocean to the motherland of Britain to win. They needed only to hold on long enough at home to exhaust their opponent’s willingness to fight, to drag things out long enough to saddle the British with an economically draining, tactically difficult, and logistically challenging war, conducted half a world away. In such a conflict, with time on their side, the Americans could lose most of the battles but still win the war. Given the desire of other European powers – notably the French, who were still licking their wounds after their costly defeat in the French and Indian War fourteen years before – to see an ever more dominant Britain dealt a severe blow and put in its place, it was entirely possible that the colonies could find allies among Britain’s enemies. If France, Britain’s perpetual foe, could be persuaded to support the American cause, that could make all the difference and compensate for the inherent weaknesses of the American position. The Americans also had a second advantage. They were blessed with an exceptional leader in the person of George Washington, a man of such fine character that he automatically commanded the admiration and loyalty of nearly all Americans and thereby served as a unifying force. He was a proven Patriot, as he had from the beginning strongly opposed the various coercive acts of the British Parliament, and was thoroughly committed to the preservation of the colonists’ rights and freedoms. Moreover, he was willing to leave a pleasant and comfortable life at his Mount Vernon estate to lead the colonial opposition. When he showed up at the Second Continental Convention in Philadelphia, he was wearing his military uniform, signaling for all to see that he was ready to fight for the colonial cause. The Congress acted accordingly, making him commander in chief of the Continental Army in June 1775. He accepted the position, on condition that he receive no pay for it. His insistence upon that condition tells us a great deal about the man. Intrepid, courageous, charismatic, wise, tireless, and always learning, George Washington was the indispensable man to lead the war effort. He had extensive military experience and looked the part of a natural leader, impressively tall and muscular, with a dignified gravity in his bearing that led all to treat him with instinctive respect. But even more, he was known and admired as a man of exceptionally noble character who self-consciously modeled himself on the classical republican ideal of the unselfish, virtuous, and public-spirited leader, a man who disdained material rewards and consistently sought the public good over private interest. Like a great many other Americans of his day, Washington was deeply influenced by Joseph Addison’s 1713 play Cato, a Tragedy, a popular and powerful drama about the meaning of honor. The play depicts the virtuous life of its subject, the ancient Roman senator Cato the Younger, who sacrifices his life in opposing the incipient tyranny of Julius Caesar. It was an example Washington took to heart. He saw the play performed a great many times and frequently quoted or paraphrased it in his correspondence and had it performed in front of his soldiers. Cato’s lofty example was the example he wished to emulate; much of the American public shared his admiration and would respond well to the prospect of his leadership. The greatest immediate challenge facing Washington was to recruit and deploy a disciplined and effective American army. This was no easy task, and it would continue to be a problem through the entire conflict. Even at the very outset, Washington experienced a taste of what was to come, with the constantly fluctuating numbers of troops at his disposal. In August 1776, he had twenty-eight thousand men under his command; by December, that number had shrunk to a mere three thousand. What had happened? Washington’s troops had been driven from New York City by British regulars under the command of Major General William Howe and were forced to flee into New Jersey and, eventually, Pennsylvania. Along the way, a great many militiamen had simply deserted and gone home. The army’s morale and numbers were always unstable, hostage to successive emotional peaks and valleys of hope and despair, depending on how the war effort seemed to be going at any given time. Washington would need to keep a cool and determined head through these constant fluctuations and frustrations. The winter of 1776–77 that lay ahead would be an exceptionally harsh one, a gloomy valley of discouragement. But the Patriots’ morale would be lifted immensely by the timely intervention of another pamphlet from the pen of Thomas Paine, the first in a series of pamphlets called The American Crisis, tailor-made for the discontents of that moment. It began with his famous inspirational words: “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Yes, he conceded, the immediate future looked grim; but that was even more reason to hunker down and push ahead, because “the harder the conflict,” he insisted, “the more glorious the triumph.” Once again, Paine’s words worked their magic. Washington ordered that they be read aloud to the army encampments, and they had the desired effect in rousing once more the fighting spirit of his men. For a second time in one year, Paine had made an inestimable gift to the colonial cause. On Christmas night 1776, Washington struck back, leading a force through snow and sleet across the icy Delaware River and surprising at dawn a sleeping force of Hessians at Trenton, New Jersey. A week later, his forces enjoyed a similar triumph, repulsing a British force at Princeton. Two small victories, but one could hope that they were auguries of good things to come. They made it possible for the American soldiers to go into the winter months, which they spent at Morristown in the hills of New Jersey, with a sense of momentum and reason for hope. The American forces, it appeared, would not be defeated quickly, a fact that not only greatly encouraged the Patriots and aided their recruiting but discouraged their British and Loyalist foes. Despite a brutal, smallpox-ridden winter at Morristown, during which the army shrank to a mere thousand men, the coming of spring brought a flow of fresh recruits, lured by the promise of generous bounties, and Washington could resume the fight against Howe. As it turned out, the coming year of 1777 would be crucial in determining the outcome of the war. The British had formulated a complex plan that aimed at cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies, by launching three coordinated assaults on American positions. Had the plan succeeded, they might have ended the colonial insurrection then and there. But all three assaults failed miserably. The most important of them involved the colorful British General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, commanding the northern forces, who was to move his men down from Canada and across Lake Champlain toward Albany. He successfully traversed the lake and occupied the abandoned Fort Ticonderoga on the lake’s southern end. But when he tried to go further, the effort, slowed by an immense baggage train that included thirty carts carrying Burgoyne’s lavish wardrobe and his supplies of champagne, became bogged down in the dense woods north of Saratoga. The American forces swelled in numbers and enthusiasm as volunteers and militia flocked to the area, and eventually Burgoyne found himself hopelessly surrounded and forced to surrender on October 17. Some fifty-seven hundred British troops were taken prisoner. It was an enormous triumph for the Americans. The victory at Saratoga was the signal the French had been waiting for, a clear indication that the Americans were up to the fight, and that it might therefore be in the interest of the French to involve themselves on the side of the Americans and help them administer a bitter setback to their old enemies. After having lost their North American empire to the British just a few years before, now there was a chance of returning the favor, a sweet revenge that would deprive the British of their North American colonies and thereby greatly diminish their power in the world. Fearing this very prospect, Lord North made a desperate last- ditch offer to the colonies, offering to repeal all the offensive acts promulgated in the years before 1775 and promising never to tax the colonies. But it was too little too late, and the offer was flatly rejected. Instead, as a direct consequence of Saratoga, the French extended diplomatic recognition to the United States and concluded a commercial agreement and a treaty of alliance between the two countries that obligated both parties to see the war through, should France decide to enter it. The French had already been aiding the colonial cause with gunpowder and other supplies; in 1778, they would join the war effort on the American side, as would the Spanish and the Dutch. This support would mean not only additional trained troops but the assistance of the French Navy, which could make it possible to challenge British near-impregnable naval superiority. But that lay in the future, just over the horizon. In the meantime, the horrendous winter of 1777–78 represented a low point for Washington’s army, which found itself encamped at Valley Forge, eighteen miles outside Philadelphia, and beset by exposure, hunger, and disease. Conditions were horrifyingly difficult, and the army’s very existence hung by a thread. The Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat who had volunteered to fight with the Americans, observed that “the unfortunate soldiers … had neither coats, nor hats, nor shirts, nor shoes; their feet and legs froze till they grew black, and it was often necessary to amputate them.” More than twenty-five hundred soldiers had died by the end of February 1778, and another one thousand had deserted. Another seven thousand were too ill for duty. Faith in Washington’s leadership ability was put to a severe test. But after the arrival of General Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben on February 23 to begin training the army, things began to turn around, and the army miraculously regained its fighting spirit. Von Steuben was a pro; he had been a member of the Prussian Army, had served on the General Staff of Frederick the Great, and was a believer in the revolutionary cause. He immediately began to put the American troops through an intense regimen of drilling. By May, he had made them into a reasonably cohesive military force. Encouraged by news of the French military alliance, and by a promise of extra pay from the Congress, the Continental army was ready to move ahead. In summer 1778, Washington’s forces were strong enough to go after the withdrawing British forces across New Jersey. After an inconclusive engagement at Monmouth Court House, the middle region of the colonies settled into stalemate – and stalemate was nearly as good as victory, under the circumstances. In the meantime, there was good news on the western frontier. The daring young Virginia militiaman George Rogers Clark led 175 frontiersmen down the Ohio River in flatboats and, on July 4, surprised the British-held Kaskaskia and captured it without firing a shot; he then in short order took the garrison at Cahokia, both in present-day Illinois, and then occupied Vincennes in present-day Indiana. Washington enthusiastically hailed these victories, which offered further proof to the French of the fighting effectiveness of their new American allies and laid the groundwork for eventual American settlement of the Northwest Territory. But not everything went so well. In late 1780, the British turned their attention to the southern colonies (which were after all more important to them as sources of staples and raw materials) and captured Savannah and Charleston, the latter debacle representing the worst American defeat of the war. Then, seeking to secure the Carolinas further and cut them off from external sources of aid, British General Charles Cornwallis took his force of seventy-two hundred men northward, heading toward Virginia and ending up in Yorktown, a small port city strategically located near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. They would be safe and secure from siege there, he believed, since the Americans lacked a serious navy to challenge him by water and sufficient troops in the area to threaten him by land. Both those assumptions proved to be dead wrong, and the assistance of the French Navy was the main reason why. Cornwallis soon found himself trapped in the pincers of a combined operation, coming at him from both sea and land. First, French Admiral Comte de Grasse’s fleet came up from its Caribbean base to decisively defeat the British Navy in September 1781 in the Battle of the Chesapeake. De Grasse was then able to blockade the coast while in the meantime ferrying in troops to join those already in place outside the town. In time, the American and French troops gathered outside Yorktown numbered more than sixteen thousand, more the twice the size of Cornwallis’s army. He was trapped and hopelessly outmaneuvered, with no choice but to surrender.  On October 19, he did so. It is said that, as his forces marched out, the British band struck up a familiar English ballad, “The World Turned Upside Down,” many of the words of which must have seemed hauntingly appropriate to Cornwallis and his men on the occasion: Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year: Since Herod, Cæsar, and many more, you never heard the like before. Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. Old Christmas is kickt out of Town. Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down. The world turned upside down. With Cornwallis’s surrender, the war was effectively over, and the impossible had happened: America had won. Peace talks would begin soon thereafter, eventuating in the Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, which granted and codified the American independence that had been declared in 1776 and that had been persistently and courageously sought, despite great odds, in the seven long and hard years thereafter. We don’t know for certain whether the band played “The World Turned Upside Down.” It might just be a well-established legend. But if it was, it was an exceptionally meaningful one. The words of the song not only served to haunt the defeated British. They also raised unsettling questions for the Americans about the revolutionary journey on which they found themselves embarked. What sort of effect was this war having on the social and political life of the colonies-becoming-a-nation? How was it changing things? If this was to be a revolution, how thoroughgoing a revolution was it to be? Was, in fact, the world being turned upside down – or merely right side up? The latter might have seemed more likely. As we’ve seen, the most influential justifications offered in favor of revolution invoked not radical change but rather restoration – restoring and protecting the colonists’ customary rights as Englishmen – as the pretext for revolution. But like any great historical event, the American Revolution was complicated, with many aspects. Even those fighting on the same side sometimes saw the cause differently. To a greater extent than many of us appreciate today, the Revolutionary War took on many of the aspects of a civil war, pitting Loyalists against Patriots; dividing families, towns, regions, and social classes; and producing fierce struggles over fundamental political and social values. Loyalty to the Crown had been the instinctive response of a sizable minority of Americans. But for some, the resonant words of the Declaration of Independence pointed toward a larger aspiration, something more than mere restoration. Such an interpretation pointed toward the emergence on the world stage of something genuinely new: a republican order built upon a principled commitment to both equality and liberty. Historians have been arguing for generations which of these different tendencies was dominant and hence which offers us the best way to think about the Revolution. Was the Revolution essentially conservative in its objectives, merely seeking to separate America from Britain to return the political order to what it had been before the disruptions caused by clumsy and wrongheaded British colonial policies? Or was it something radical, in the sense of wishing to shake things up, dramatically and fundamentally upending the entrenched inequalities and hierarchies in society, and not merely changing the names and faces of those at the top of the political structure? As the American historian Carl Becker, who strongly advocated for the latter view, put it memorably more than a hundred years ago, “the war was not about home rule, but about who would rule at home.” There is evidence for his claim. Certainly the war was not only about home rule, and certainly it reflected some radical democratizing currents that had been operating in the society for many decades. Just as the Great Awakening had in many places weakened the authority of established clergymen, while unleashing a sense of individualism and self-reliance and willingness to question authority, so the war against British colonial authority placed all forms of settled authority under suspicion, including the homegrown class distinctions that were a fairly settled part of colonial life. The Revolution was not just a matter of lawyers and patricians; it had drawn freely upon the enthusiasm and energy of laborers, farmers, mechanics, servants, and common people of every type to propel the public demonstrations, support the consumer boycotts, and fight the battles that ultimately made independence possible. Five thousand African Americans fought in the Revolution. Did not all of these groups deserve some share of the triumph? How could this great freeing-up of energy, buoyed by idealistic talk of liberty and equality, not have an effect upon the traditional political and social arrangements and call into question the right to rule of the wealthy and well-born? How could it not ultimately call into question the existence in the new nation of an institution that most glaringly stood in contradiction to both liberty and equality: the institution of chattel slavery? Such questions could not be easily set aside. But the immediate task at hand was how to devise institutions that could fulfill the republican aspirations that had inspired the revolutionary effort in the first place, while providing the unity needed to carry out the functions of a national government. The newly independent Americans were determined to get along without a monarch and to vindicate the possibility of republican self-rule. But how to do it? Those among the Founding generation who were conversant in the history of previous republics, especially those in classical antiquity, knew that the single most common characteristic of a republic was its fragility. Everything depended upon the virtuous character of the citizenry, on their willingness to live as George Washington had done and place the public’s well-being over and above their own personal interests. Such civic virtue was exceedingly rare and hard to sustain in a whole society. The size and scale of a republic also mattered. Philosophers such as Aristotle and Montesquieu had argued that a republic had to be relatively small if it were to maintain itself as a republic. Large nations tended either to fall apart into discord or to be transformed into empires under monarchical rule. The historical example of Rome haunted the early Americans for that very reason. The Roman Republic had become strong through the martial and civic virtues of its hardy citizenry; the Roman Empire had fallen into dissolution from the decadence and corruption of its spoiled and self-interested inhabitants. Many Americans feared that Great Britain in the age of George III was following that same downward path, and they wanted above all else to spare themselves that fate. Hence the emphasis in American constitution making, starting in 1776, would be on the state level. Most everyone agreed that the states should continue to be the principal sources of political power and authority, guarantors of individual rights and exemplars of the principles of separation of powers, which they employed to protect against abuses of power by any particular individuals or groups. Generally this meant limiting the power of governors in preference to legislatures, and it most certainly meant reserving for the national government only the most essential elements of power. The state governments would serve as laboratories of experimentation, whose experiences and findings would profitably inform the eventual shape of the U.S. Constitution. There hadn’t even been a national constitution properly in place during most of the war years. The Articles of Confederation had been drafted in 1777 but had not been ratified by all the states until 1781. It mattered very little; the Continental Congress had already been operating as if the Articles were in place anyway, so that their formal adoption didn’t change much. An examination of the Articles sheds considerable light on what kind of union these newly “free and independent states” had in mind. The Articles conceived of the combination of states as a “league of friendship” rather than a national union. The primacy of the states was spelled out in Article II, which specified, “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” Each state, irrespective of its size, would have a single vote in Congress, and for the passage of the most important measures (currency, tariffs, military matters), either a unanimous vote or a supermajority was required. And the national government was not to be given any coercive tools – no courts, no executive power, no power of taxation – that would allow it to act independently or to force the individual states to do anything they didn’t want to do.  In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the Articles’ approach was unlikely to succeed in providing a stable and unified political order. But it also is important to try to understand why the revolutionary generation overwhelmingly favored it at first. For one thing, the war itself was still under way in the 1770s and early 1780s, and there was simply no time to engage in laborious and possibly bitter debate about a dramatic change in the form of government. But there was a far deeper reason. These historical actors had an intense but understandable preoccupation with their immediate history. No one wanted to replicate the same horrors of overcentralized government that they had just overthrown. That outcome was to be avoided at all costs. But this preoccupation blinded the Framers of the Articles to the larger range of issues that a new government would have to confront, if it were to be effective. They overreacted, going too far in the opposite direction and creating for themselves an impossibly weak and unworkable central government: one that eschewed centralization, yes, but did so to such an extent that it could neither conduct foreign policy nor regulate interstate trade nor defend the nation’s borders nor put the nation’s economic and financial house in order. Before taking note of these failings, though, we must take note of one major exception, a singularly impressive and enduring accomplishment of the Congress under the Articles. That was the establishment of wise and farsighted policies for the development of western lands, formulated in a series of land ordinances culminating with the great Northwest Ordinance of 1787. These ordinances laid down the procedures by which the inestimable treasure of the western territories, which had been acquired by Britain in the French and Indian War and was awarded to the Americans through the Revolution, could be settled and organized and incorporated into the nation, in a way that not only extended fundamental American principles and promoted stability but also generated precious revenue for the national treasury. The Northwest Ordinance provided a clearly defined process by which the western lands would, in several stages, eventually be “formed into distinct republican States.” The historian Daniel Boorstin called it “the add-a-state plan.” It ensured that the western lands would not be held as permanent colonial dependencies but would gradually enter the Union on terms exactly equal to those the already existing states enjoyed. The result would be a steadily growing country, not an empire, and a union that grew more and more imbued with a spirit of national unity. And that was not all. The ordinance contained language prohibiting the introduction of slavery or involuntary servitude into the territory and took a strong stand favoring the creation of public educational institutions. “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind,” it stated, “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” But in most other respects, the nation’s interests were poorly served by the Articles. In the western frontier areas, the British refused to withdraw from the several military posts they had established, even though the terms of the Treaty of Paris had required it. Who was going to force them? In the southwest, the Spanish similarly refused to yield their control over the Mississippi River, the commercial lifeline to the country’s midsection. Such actions were a blatant thumb in the eye of the Americans, who simply lacked the means to respond effectively to them. But that was not all. The British succeeded in badly damaging American economic interests by severely restricting American imports and flooding American markets with their own low-priced manufactured goods. This wave of British hypermercantilism came as the United States was already reeling from a postwar economic depression and struggling to recover from wild alternations of inflation and deflation that had thoroughly debased the currency and badly distorted prices and wages. The sharp deflation in commodity prices meant that debtors, especially farmers, suddenly found themselves with insufficient income to meet their fixed obligations, including the mortgages on their property. Foreclosures on mortgaged property became more and more common. Debtors pleaded for relief in the form of credit extension and currency inflation – which meant printing more and more paper money, exactly what the bankers and politicians felt they could not do, as they tried to pay down debts and stabilize the currency. Conditions were ripe for an eruption. In several places, desperate mobs attempted to stem the tide of foreclosures by force, blocking courts from meeting and preventing them from doing their business. Such conflicts escalated to an alarming level of raw class conflict between debtors and creditors, between haves and have-nots. The state governments were levying ever higher taxes, trying their best to pay off the massive debts they had accumulated in the conduct of the war. Many of the holders of that debt were wealthy creditors comfortably ensconced in places like Boston. Many of the debtors were struggling farmers who had fought in the war and who returned to find their livelihoods and their homes in peril. One particularly notable uprising took place in western Massachusetts in summer 1786, when Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays led a march on Springfield to shut down the state supreme court and then attack the Springfield arsenal. Although the incident died down quickly and had little lasting effect in Massachusetts, it was widely noticed by some of the nation’s leaders, who saw it as an alarming indication that the liberatory energies released by the war were starting to run riot. Liberty was turning to license; “we are,” worried George Washington, in a letter to James Madison, “fast verging to anarchy and confusion!” (Jefferson, in Paris at the time, disagreed. “[A] little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he declared to Madison, “as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”) States and territories of the United States in 1790, including the Northwest Territory. The deficiencies of the Articles had long been apparent; the importance of Shays’ Rebellion was in clarifying that perception and imparting a sense of urgency to the task of institutional reform. As Washington wrote to John Jay of New York on August 1, 1786, Your sentiments, that our affairs are drawing rapidly to a crisis, accord with my own. What the event will be, is also beyond the reach of my foresight. We have errors to correct; we have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation. Experience has taught us, that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good, without the intervention of a coercive power. I do not conceive we can exist long as a nation without having lodged some where a power, which will pervade the whole Union in as energetic a manner, as the authority of the State Governments extends over the several States.  Even as Washington wrote, plans were afoot, spurred by Washington’s brilliant young aide Alexander Hamilton, to gather “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. That convention would finally gather in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787. Nearly four months later, on September 17, it would emerge having produced an entirely new Constitution for the United States. The high intellectual and moral caliber of the fifty-five men who represented the respective states at the Constitutional Convention is staggering, particularly given how young they were, with an average age of forty-two. There were some older men present – George Washington himself was elected to preside over the convention; Roger Sherman of Connecticut played a major role in the debates; and Benjamin Franklin, then in his eighties, worked mainly behind the scenes – but most of the work was done by a handful of delegates under the age of fifty, men such as James Wilson of Pennsylvania (age forty-two), Gouverneur Morris of New York (age thirty-five), and, perhaps most important of all, James Madison of Virginia (age thirty- six), who was a driving force at the convention and the principal architect of the Constitution itself. Unlike the physically imposing Washington, James Madison did not look the heroic part he was given by history to play. His nickname was “Little Jemmy,” because he was such a tiny, frail man, a mere five feet tall, with a squeaky voice and a reticent, bookish manner. But no one doubted his high intelligence, his encyclopedic knowledge of political history, and his eloquence and persuasiveness in debate. His intelligence was of the rarest sort, combining the shrewdness of an effective practical politician with the reflectiveness of a philosopher. His knowledge of the past gave him a particularly keen appreciation of the possibilities inherent in the moment in which America found itself, and he intended to make the most of those possibilities. Getting the Constitution right would be a high-stakes affair. America, he asserted, would “decide for ever the fate of republican government.” Such weighty words reflected the Framers’ remarkable combination of soaring ambition and practical humility. They were excited by the possibilities that lay before them and felt a determination to lay hold of them. As John Adams exulted, they were living in a time in which “the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live,” with a chance to establish “the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive.” Hence they were emboldened to expand their mission beyond the narrow one of merely correcting the Articles and instead to create something far better, something that could be an example to the world. But their ambition was always tempered by prudence and sobriety. They were exceedingly careful, always mindful of the ominous example of Rome, always suspicious of the utopian turn of mind, and always intent upon keeping the frailty and imperfection of human nature in mind. They understood politics as the art of the possible and the best constitution as one built with the crooked timber of selfish humanity in mind – one that took to heart Washington’s warning not to have “too good an opinion of human nature.” The debates that emerged at the Philadelphia convention would often revolve around the divergent interests of the various states. But there also was a great deal of consensus about certain fundamental points of political philosophy. There was agreement that the new government should continue to be republican, meaning that it would rule out the possibility of any kind of monarch or monarchical office. They agreed on the basic principle, worked out in the political turmoil of seventeenth-century England, that power, being prone to corrupting and misleading its fallible possessors, should never be concentrated in any one person or office but should be divided and distributed as widely as possible: in a parliament, in state and local governments, in common law and tradition, and in the conviction that every person possessed certain fundamental liberties and rights that no government could legitimately suppress or violate. The chief challenge of constitution making was to ensure that these different sources of power be so arranged that they could check and balance one another, ensuring that even with a more powerful national government, no one branch or faction or region would dominate over all the others. The delegates favored a federal system that would maintain a large measure of autonomy for the states, while turning over to a national government only those things that had to be undertaken in common. Ideally, this federal system would reconcile opposites, combining the advantages of self-rule with the advantages of union, the cohesiveness and diversity of smaller-scale local organization with the greater resources and power of a unified national state. It would be a difficult balance to strike, though, and even more difficult to hold. In a sense, the history of the British Empire to date had already demonstrated how difficult such a federal reconciliation would be, particularly in the absence of a written constitution to spell out how power was to be distributed through the imperial system. Consider, for example, the bitterly divisive question of taxation for the colonies, which would always remain insoluble so long as there was no shared overarching vision of how the pieces of the empire would be related to one another as parts in a whole, even as they retained much of their individual autonomy, their own capacity for self-rule. Might a more creative brand of leadership in Great Britain and America have devised such a vision, a federal understanding of the British Empire that could have kept the empire intact? It seems highly unlikely, but who knows? In any event, the Philadelphia convention would have to address itself to remarkably similar questions and incorporate its answers into the document they were drafting. After electing George Washington to preside over the convention, and voting to close the proceedings and meet in secret, the delegates faced two fundamental decisions: How much power needed to be given to an expanded national government? And how could they ensure that this empowered national government would itself be fully accountable, and would not become too powerful? Thanks to Madison’s copious notes on the proceedings, we know a great deal about how the convention proceeded, despite the veil of secrecy under which it met. Early on, the delegates agreed that the Articles had to be scrapped and a new, more truly national arrangement substituted for it. They also agreed readily on most of the new powers that would be granted to the national government: the right to levy taxes, regulate interstate and foreign commerce, raise and maintain the army and navy, call up the state militias, regulate currency, negotiate treaties, assess tariffs, and supersede the states’ claims to do these things. In light of the distrust of executive power that had manifested itself in the Revolution, the powerful new office of the presidency has to be accounted as the most striking departure of all from the decentralized Articles. One may well wonder whether the delegates would ever have been willing to take a chance on such a dramatically expanded office had they not been able to rely on the availability of George Washington to fill the position and establish precedents that would make the position both effective and deserving of the nation’s trust. Once again, Washington showed himself to be the indispensable man. Even so, the leap of faith being made, and asked for, was considerable. The president would have responsibility for executing the laws and directing the diplomatic apparatus of the nation. He would serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. He would appoint federal judges and secretaries of executive branch agencies. He would have the power to veto congressional legislation, and his veto could only be overridden by a supermajority of two-thirds. There was no precedent for this in the colonial experience – aside, that is, from the figure of the King. But debates emerged over other issues, particularly the question of how representation in Congress would be determined. There were two competing approaches under consideration. Madison’s initial plan, which came to be called the Virginia Plan, called for representation by population. The smaller states, which rightly feared this arrangement would render them second-class citizens under the new Constitution, fought back and, under the leadership of William Paterson, proposed what came to be called the New Jersey Plan, which would maintain the Articles’ pattern of representation by states. This clash was a question not only of contending powers but of competing principles. Representation by state, in which each state had equal representation, seemed to violate the very principle of democracy itself, rendering the votes of those in the populous states less valuable than those in the small states. Why should tiny Rhode Island have the same legislative power as large and populous Virginia? But representation by population had its problems, too, for it violated the principle that the country was, as its name implies, a union of states, in which the states remained the fundamental unit upon which the national polity was built. The Convention settled on a compromise between these two positions. This Great Compromise, engineered by Roger Sherman, was, like all such compromises, a political deal. But it ended up being something much more than that. Instead of favoring one principle over another, it acknowledged the legitimate aspects of both principles, giving both their due, and putting them into fruitful tension with one another. The key was the use of a bicameral or two-house structure, patterned after the British division of Parliament into a House of Commons and an aristocratic House of Lords. In the American version, the more populous states would be accorded representation by population in the House of Representatives, the lower house in the new Congress; the smaller states would retain their equal footing in the Senate, the upper house, where each state would be accorded two representatives, no more and no less, irrespective of its size or population. Legislation would have to clear both of these very different houses, with their different principles of representation, and be signed by the president to be enacted into law. The interests of varied and conflicting groups could thereby all have a role in determining the fate of important legislation. The lower house would be closer to the great mass of ordinary citizens, with its members apportioned by population and chosen by popular vote for short, two-year terms. The upper house was designed to be more aristocratic and somewhat shielded from the winds of popular will, with its members standing for staggered six-year terms and elected by the state legislatures rather than by the people at large. The lower house would be a “commons,” more responsive and more democratic, while the upper house would be, if not quite a chamber of “lords,” a more aloof, more deliberative, and more rarified body, with built-in insulation from passing enthusiasms and passions. The lower house would be entrusted with the sole power of introducing revenue bills; the upper house would be entrusted with foreign relations, the ratification of treaties, and confirmation of executive branch appointments.  The result of this compromise was a structure that was arguably better than either of the alternatives it attempted to reconcile. It quickly took its place as one of the chief elements in the Constitution’s famously intricate network of checks and balances, a system by means of which each power granted to one unit of government is kept within safe limits by countervailing powers vested in some other unit. This pattern played out on multiple levels. The newly established national government would have unprecedented powers. But its powers would be enumerated, spelled out, and thereby limited by the Constitution itself, and the state governments would remain strong, serving as an additional check on the national government. The national government was further checked by being subdivided into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, each of which was in competition with the others, and each of which had some ways of thwarting the other branches in cases of injudiciousness or overreach. The president could reject a bill of Congress with a veto. Congress could override that veto by repassing the bill with a two-thirds majority. Congress could remove the president and members of the executive branch through impeachment. The Senate could reject executive branch appointments. The president could command the armed forces and negotiate treaties, but only Congress could declare war, and only the Senate could ratify treaties. And so on. Behind all these particulars was a powerful idea. Conflict is part of the human condition and can never be eliminated. Neither can the desire for power and the tendency to abuse it. Therefore a workable constitution has to provide a structure within which conflict can be tamed, institutionalized, and thereby made productive, while the search for power can be kept within bounds. Like an internal combustion engine, such a constitution should be designed to redirect the energies released by the explosions that take place within its chambers, using those energies to drive the work of American governance and enterprise. It should be designed to work with the grain of human nature, not against it; but in doing so, it should also counteract the worst tendencies of human nature rather than encourage them. For that very reason, it is not conducive to easygoing peaceableness. The only thing all contending parties need to agree on is the authority of the Constitution itself and the rules of engagement it sets forth. So this was the document that the delegates agreed on in Philadelphia and signed on September 17, 1787. Let us pause here for a moment to step back and reflect on the larger picture. Constitution Day, which we observe every September 17, is a singularly American holiday, even more unique than the Fourth of July. After all, many nations have their great leaders and laborers, their war heroes, their monuments, and their days of independence. But there is only one nation on earth that can point with pride to a written Constitution that is more than 230 years old, a continuously authoritative expression of fundamental law that stands at the very center of our national life. As such, the U.S. Constitution is not merely our most weighty legal document; it is also an expression of who and what we are. Other countries, such as France, have lived under many different constitutions and kinds of government over the centuries, so that for them, the French nation is something separable from the form of government that happens to be in power at any given time. No so for Americans, who have lived since the 1780s under one regime, a remarkable fact whose significance nevertheless seems to escape us. Yes, we do revere our Constitution, but we do so blandly and automatically, without troubling ourselves to know very much about it, and without reflecting much on what our Constitution says about our national identity. That identity is a complicated one, and there are elements of it about which we all will probably never agree. Ties of blood and religion and race and soil are not sufficient to hold us together as Americans, and they never have been. We think of “diversity” as something new in American history, but in fact the conduct of American life has always involved the negotiation of profound differences among us. We are forever about the business of making a workable unity out of our unruly plurality, and our Constitution accepted the inevitability of our diversity in such things, and the inevitability of conflicts arising out of our differences. In addition, it recognized the fact that ambitious, covetous, and power-hungry individuals are always going to be plentifully in evidence among us and that the energies of such potentially dangerous people need to be contained and tamed, diverted into activities that are consonant with the public good. Hence we have a Constitution that is not, for the most part, a document filled with soaring rhetoric and lists of high-sounding principles. Instead it is a somewhat dry and functional document laying out a complex system of markers, boundaries, and rules of engagement, careful divisions of function and power that provide the means by which conflicts that are endemic and inevitable to us, and to all human societies, can be both expressed and contained; tamed; rendered harmless, even beneficial. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s spirit is undeclared, unspoken; it would be revealed not through words but through actions, through processes, and through events that would express the unfolding demands of history. That history has been largely successful – yet not entirely so. The Constitution the Framers wrote fell short, and grievously so, in one important respect: in its failure to address satisfactorily the growing national stain of slavery. As we will see, there were understandable reasons for that failure. But the trajectory of history that was coming would not forget it, and would not forgive it. Slavery is as old as human history. It has existed on all habitable continents, and all the world’s great religions have given it, at one time or another, authoritative approval. In the New World, its introduction was pioneered by the Portuguese and Spanish, beginning in the sixteenth century, and only later picked up by the English (as well as the Dutch and French). It was not a part of any larger plan for English colonization, and it did not take root immediately in colonial English America, although the forced labor system known as indentured servitude was common in the colonies from the start and it could be said to resemble slavery in its coerciveness and harshness. In fact, indentured servitude was so common that some historians have estimated more than half of the white immigrants to the American colonies up to the time of the Revolution had come to the New World under indentures, and even the first black Africans to appear in North America, dropped off at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 by a Dutch ship, may well have been indentured servants rather than slaves. Although often a brutal institution, indentured servitude served a real purpose. The colonies were desperately in need of a steady supply of immigrant labor, especially in the agricultural areas near the Chesapeake and in the low country of South Carolina, which suffered from a high mortality rate due to disease, food shortages, and constant Indian conflicts. But a great many desperately poor Europeans who were otherwise willing to emigrate to America and endure such harsh conditions lacked the means to pay for their own voyage. Indentured servitude allowed them to solve that problem, temporarily trading their freedom for the cost of their passage, signing contracts of indenture lasting from four to seven years with masters or landowners who would pay for their transportation and upkeep in exchange for their work, usually on a farm. At the termination of their contracts, they would be free to go their own way, working for wages or acquiring their own land. The first Africans experienced conditions similar to those of indentured whites, and the African population in the Chesapeake grew slowly, to about four hundred laborers by 1650. But as it grew, so too did the practice of discrimination against Africans because of their race, and by the 1660s, such practices had hardened into laws or slave codes enacted by colonial assemblies, which dictated that Africans and their offspring be kept in permanent bondage. In other words, the Africans were being made into chattel, the legal property of their owners. The interest in using slaves began to grow as the agricultural economy grew and as the improving British economy meant that fewer white indentured servants were available, and those who were available were more expensive. Little by little, the cheaper labor supplied by slavery became an essential part of the agricultural economy in states like Virginia and South Carolina. By 1750, half the population of Virginia and two-thirds of South Carolina were enslaved. Yet it should be remembered that slavery was not exclusively a southern phenomenon; at the time of the Revolution, every state in the union permitted it.  Hence, by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the institution of race-based slavery was deeply enmeshed in one segment of the national economy, despite all the ways that its very existence seemed to stand in glaring contradiction to the national commitment to liberty, equality, and self-rule. There was real bite to the mocking question fired at the Americans in 1775 by the British writer Samuel Johnson: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” It was an excellent question, particularly if one kept in mind how many of the most prominent Founders, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, were themselves owners of slaves. Indeed, more than thirty of the fifty-five Framers of the Constitution owned slaves. How, we wonder today, could such otherwise enlightened and exemplary individuals have been so blind to the fundamental humanity of those they confined? How could they have made their peace with practices so utterly contradictory to all they stood for? There is no easy answer to such questions. But surely a part of the answer is that each of us is born into a world that we did not make, and it is only with the greatest effort, and often at very great cost, that we are ever able to change that world for the better. Moral sensibilities are not static; they develop and deepen over time, and general moral progress is very slow. Part of the study of history involves a training of the imagination, learning to see historical actors as speaking and acting in their own times rather than ours and learning to see even our heroes as an all-too-human mixture of admirable and unadmirable qualities, people like us who may, like us, be constrained by circumstances beyond their control. What made the American situation especially intolerable was not the wrongs these earliest Americans perpetrated but the high and noble ideals they professed, which served to contradict and condemn those very practices. They were living an inconsistency, and they could not be at ease about it. Washington freed his own slaves upon his death. Jefferson did not, but he agonized over his complicity with slavery and later in life foresaw slavery as an offense against God and a possible source of national dissolution. What these two examples tell us is that the seeds of a more capacious ideal of liberty were already planted and had begun to take root but still were far from being ready to blossom. It is also true that a considerable number of the Framers sincerely believed that slavery was already on the wane, that it had been on the wane since the Revolution, and that it would eventually disappear of its own accord. They therefore were willing to accept the compromises in the Constitution for the sake of a brighter future of whose coming they were very confident. Roger Sherman observed “that the abolition of slavery seemed to be going on in the United States, and that the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees complete it.” Similarly, his fellow Connecticut delegate Oliver Ellsworth predicted that “Slavery, in time, will not be a speck in our Country.” The results of the Convention reflected this mixed and ambivalent condition. Sadly, there was little serious consideration given to the idea of abolishing slavery at the time. Indeed, some delegates were too bound by their states’ economic interests to oppose any measure that would even inhibit slavery; one delegate from South Carolina threatened that his delegation and the Georgia delegation would never agree to a Constitution that failed to protect slavery. In other words, the price of pursuing abolition of slavery at that time would almost certainly have been the dissolution of the American nation, which would probably have rendered the resulting nation-fragments highly unstable and unable to defend their interests. Would that have been worth the price? This is a far different question for us to ask today than it was for them to answer at the time. In any event, the defenders of slavery got a concession, through an idea carried over from a proposed amendment to the Articles, that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for representation and taxation purposes, even though slaves had none of the rights of citizens. (Northern delegates had wanted slaves to be counted at 100 percent for taxation purposes but at zero for representation purposes; they were forced to compromise.) They also got a concession allowing the transatlantic slave trade to continue until 1808 and installed a fugitive slave clause, which required that a “person held to service or labour” (a term that could include indentured servants) who escapes to another state must be “delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.” So slavery would be protected. But the Constitution was otherwise notably reticent on the subject. Note, for example, the unwillingness, in the Fugitive Slave Clause, to use the words owner or master. The words slave and slavery never appear in its text, whether out of delicacy or diffidence; either way, the Framers showed by their silence that they were not at ease with slavery and preferred euphemisms such as “persons held to Service or labour.” And it is also indicative that the final document did open the way to an ending of the transatlantic slave trade after the year 1808, a move inspired by a resounding speech from George Mason of Virginia, himself a slaveholder but also a Christian who labeled the trade an “infernal traffic.” Mason feared the corrupting spread of slavery through the entire nation, which would bring “the judgment of Heaven” down severely upon any country in which bondage was widespread and blandly accepted. His own state of Virginia had been one of the first jurisdictions in the world to stop the importation of slaves for sale, doing so in 1778 under the leadership of its governor, Thomas Jefferson. These things speak volumes about the Framers’ conflicted consciences. The legal importation of African slaves into the United States did end in 1808, but slavery itself persisted and grew in the American South, since the conditions of life in the United States would prove highly favorable to a steady natural increase in the slave population, in comparison to the harsher conditions in Brazil or in the sugar- producing islands of the West Indies. In fact, slaves in the antebellum South would have the highest rate of natural increase of any slave society in history. Ironically, that more favorable environment meant that the institution would prove difficult to eliminate, contrary to the confident hopes of men like Sherman and Ellsworth. The ambivalences regarding slavery that had been built into the structure of the Constitution were almost certainly unavoidable in the short term in order to achieve an effective political union of the nation. What we need to understand is how the original compromise no longer became acceptable to increasing numbers of Americans, especially in one part of the Union, and why slavery, a ubiquitous institution in human history, came to be seen not merely as an unfortunate evil but as a sinful impediment to human progress, a stain upon a whole nation. We live today on the other side of a great transformation in moral sensibility, a transformation that was taking place, but was not yet completed, in the very years that the United States was being formed. Hence it would be profoundly wrong to contend, as some do, that the United States was “founded on” slavery. No, it was founded on other principles entirely, on principles of liberty and self-rule that had been discovered and defined and refined and enshrined through the tempering effects of several turbulent centuries of European and British and American history. Those foundational principles would win out in the end, though not without much struggle and striving, and eventual bloodshed. The United States enjoyed a miraculous birth, but it was not the product of an unstained conception and an untroubled delivery. Few things are.