THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
Mr. Madison is called "the Father of the Constitution." A paper written
by him was laid before his colleagues of Virginia, before the meeting of
the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, and was made the basis of
the "Virginia plan," as it was called, out of which the Constitution was
evolved. In another way his name is so identified with it that one
cannot be forgotten so long as the other is remembered. From that full
and faithful report of the proceedings of the convention, in which his
own part was so active and conspicuous, we know most that we do or ever
can know of the perplexities and trials, the concessions and triumphs,
the acts of wisdom and the acts of weakness, of that body of men whose
coming together time has shown to have been one of the important events
in the history of mankind.
Then it is also true that no man had worked harder, perhaps none had
worked so hard, to bring the public mind to a serious consideration of
affairs and a recognition of the necessity of reorganizing the
government, if the States were to be held together. Never, it seemed,
had men better reason to be satisfied with the result of their labors
when, a few months later, the new Constitution was accepted by all the
States. Yet the time was not far distant when even Madison would be in
doubt as to the character of this new bond of union, and as to what sort
of government had been secured by it. Nor till he had been dead near
thirty years was it to be determined what union under the Constitution
really meant; nor till three quarters of a century after the adoption of
that instrument was the more perfect union formed, justice established,
domestic tranquillity insured, the general welfare promoted, and the
blessings of liberty secured to all the people, which by that great
charter it was intended, in 1787, to ordain and establish. All the
difficulties, which they who framed it escaped by their work, were as
nothing to those which it entailed upon their descendants.
Two parties went into the convention. On one point, of course, they were
agreed, else they would never have come together at all,--that a united
government under the Articles of Confederation was a failure, and,
unless some remedy should be speedily devised, States with common local
interests would gravitate into separate and perhaps antagonistic
nationalities. But the differences between these two parties were
radical, and for a time seemed insurmountable. One proposed simply to
repair the Articles of Confederation as they might overhaul a machine
that was out of gear; the other proposed to form an altogether new
Constitution. One wanted a merely federal government; not, however,
meaning by that term what the other party--soon, nevertheless, to be
known as Federalists--were striving for, but a confederation of States,
each independent of all the rest and supreme in its own right, while
consenting to unite with the rest in a limited government for the
administration of certain common interests.[10]
This idea of the independence of the States was a survival of the old
colonial system, when each colony under its distinct relation to the
crown had attained a growth of its own with its separate interests. Each
of these colonies had become a State. The Revolution had secured to
each, it was maintained, a separate independence, achieved, it was true,
by united efforts, but not therefore binding them together as a single
nation. It was held as a legitimate result of that doctrine that each
State, not the people of the State, whether many or few, should be
represented by the same number of votes in a federal government as they
were under the Articles of Confederation, because such a government was
a union of States, not of a people.
All men, it was argued,--going back to a state of nature,--are equally
free and independent; and when a government is formed every man has an
equal share by natural right in its formation and in its subsequent
conduct. While numbers are few, every member of the State exercises his
individual right in person, and none can rightfully do more than this,
however wise, or powerful, or rich he may be. But when government by the
whole body of the people becomes cumbersome and inconvenient through
increase of numbers, the individual citizen loses none of his rights by
intrusting their exercise to representatives, in choosing and
instructing whom all have an equal voice. So when States are united in a
confederacy each State has the same relation to that government that
individuals have to each other in a single State. They are free and
equal, and none has a larger share of rights in the confederacy because
its people are more numerous, or because it is richer or more powerful,
than the rest. In such a confederacy it is not the individual citizen
who is to be represented, but the individual State. In such a
confederacy there would be the same representation for a State, say of
ten thousand inhabitants, as for one of fifty thousand. This, it was
maintained, preserved equality of suffrage in the equality of States;
while the representation of the individual citizens of the States would
be in reality inequality of suffrage, because the autonomy of the State
would be lost sight of. If in such a case it were asked what had become
of the rights which the majority of forty thousand had inherited from
nature, the answer was that those rights were preserved and represented
in the state government. The difficulty, nevertheless, remained: how to
reconcile in practice this doctrine of the equal rights of States, where
there might be a minority of persons, with the actual rights of the
whole people where, according to the underlying democratic doctrine, the
good of the whole must be decided by the larger number.
Those who proposed only to amend the old Articles of Confederation, and
opposed a new Constitution, objected that a government formed under such
a Constitution would be not a federal but a national government. Luther
Martin said, when he returned to Maryland, that the delegates "appeared
totally to have forgot the business for which we were sent.... We had
not been sent to form a government over the inhabitants of America
considered as individuals.... That the system of government we were
intrusted to prepare was a government over these thirteen States, but
that in our proceedings we adopted principles which would be right and
proper only on the supposition that there were no state governments at
all, but that all the inhabitants of this extensive continent were in
their individual capacity, without government, and in a state of
nature." He added that "in the whole system there was but one federal
feature, the appointment of the senators by the States in their
sovereign capacity, that is, by their legislatures, and the equality of
suffrage in that branch; but it was said that this feature was only
federal in appearance."
The Senate, the second house as it was called in the convention, was in
part created, it is needless to say, to meet, or rather in obedience to,
reasoning like this. There was almost nobody who would have been willing
to abandon the state governments, as there was next to nobody who wanted
a monarchy. "We were eternally troubled," Martin said, "with arguments
and precedents from the British government." He could not get beyond the
fixed notion that those whom he opposed were determined to establish
"one general government over this extensive continent, of a monarchical
nature." If he, and those who agreed with him, sincerely believed this
to be true, it was natural enough that the frequent allusions to British
precedents, as wise rules for American guidance in constructing a
government, should be looked upon as an unmistakable hankering after
lost flesh-pots. Should the state governments be swept away, it might be
that, in time of danger from without or of peril from internal
dissensions, the country, under "a government of a monarchical nature,"
might drift back to its old allegiance. If those who feared, or said
they feared, this were not quite sincere, the temptation was almost
irresistible to use such arguments to arouse popular prejudice against
political opponents. It is curious that Madison seemed quite unconscious
of how much the frequent allusions in his articles in "The Federalist"
to the British Constitution might strengthen these accusations of the
opposition; while he half believed that the same thing in others showed
in them a leaning toward England, from which he knew that he himself was
quite free.
The Luther Martin protestants were too radical to remain in the
convention to the end, when they saw that such a confederacy as they
wanted was impossible. But there were not many who went the length they
did in believing that a strong central government was necessarily the
destruction of the state governments. Still fewer were those who would
have brought this about if they could. That the rights of the States
must be preserved was the general opinion and determination, and it was
not difficult to do this by limiting the powers of the higher
government, or federal as it soon came to be called, and by the
organization of the second house, the Senate, in which all the States
had an equal representation. The smaller States were satisfied with this
concession, and the larger were willing to make it, not only for the
sake of the Union, but because of the just estimate in which they held
the rights belonging to all the States alike. The real difficulty, as
Madison said in the debate on that question, and as he repeated again
and again after that question was settled, was not between the larger
and smaller States, but between the North and the South; between those
States that held slaves and those that had none.
Slavery in the Constitution, which has given so much trouble to the
Abolitionists of this century, and indeed to everybody else, gave quite
as much in the last century to those who put it there. Many of the
wisest and best men of the time, Southerners as well as Northerners, and
among them Madison, were opposed to slavery. They could see little good
in it, hardly even any compensation for the existence of a system so
full of evil. There was hardly a State in the Union at that time that
had not its emancipation society; and there was hardly a man of any
eminence in the country who was not an officer, or at least a member, of
such a society. Everywhere north of South Carolina, slavery was looked
upon as a misfortune which it was exceedingly desirable to be free from
at the earliest possible moment; everywhere north of Mason and Dixon's
line, measures had already been taken, or were certain soon to be taken,
to put an end to it; and by the ordinance for the government of all the
territory north of the Ohio River it was absolutely prohibited by
Congress in the same year in which the Constitutional Congress met.
But it was, nevertheless, a thing to the continued existence of which
the anti-slavery people of that time could consent without any violation
of conscience. Bad as it was, unwise, wasteful, cruel, a mockery of
every pretense of respect for the rights of man, they did not believe it
to be absolutely wicked. If they had so believed, let us hope they would
have washed their hands of it. As it was, it was only a question of
expediency whether, for the sake of the Union, they should protect the
system of slavery, and give to the slaveholders, as slaveholders, a
certain degree of political power. To refuse to admit a slaveholding
State into the Union did not occur, probably, to the most earnest
opponent of the system; for that would have been simply to say that
there should be no Union. That was what Madison meant in saying so
repeatedly that the real difficulty in the way was, not the difference
between the large and the small States, but the difference between the
slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States. If there could be no
conciliation on that point there could be no Union.
Some hoped, perhaps, rather than believed, that slavery was likely to
disappear ere long at the South as it was disappearing at the North. It
is an impeachment of their intelligence, however, to suppose that they
relied much upon any such hope. The simple truth is that slavery was
then, as it continued to be for three quarters of a century longer, the
paramount interest of the South. To withstand or disregard it was not
merely difficult, but was to brave immediate possible dangers and
sufferings, which are never voluntarily encountered except in obedience
to the highest sense of duty; or to meet a necessity, from which there
was no manly way of escape. The sense of absolute duty was wanting; the
necessity, it was hoped, might be avoided by concessions. It can only be
said for those who made them that they did not see what fruitful seeds
of future trouble they were sowing in the Constitution.
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 10: Those who were zealous for state rights, and opposed to a
central government, called the system they wished to reestablish a
Federal System,--a confederacy of States. It was too convenient and
probably too popular a term to be lost, and the other party adopted it
when the new Constitution was formed. _The Federalist_ was the name
chosen for the volume in which were collected the papers, written first
under the signature of "A Citizen of New York," but afterward changed to
"Publius," in support of the new Constitution, by Hamilton, Madison, and
Jay. In one of the earlier papers Mr. Hamilton refers to the Articles of
Confederation, which were to be superseded, as the Federal Constitution;
but in the later papers Madison is careful to refer to the proposed form
of government as the Federal Constitution, and Federal soon came to be
the distinguishing name of the party which first came into power under
the new Constitution. Whatever may be said of Madison's other title, his
right to that of father of the Federal party can hardly be disputed.]