Debate, Compromise : Writers of Constitution Set Example

Outside Philadelphia’s State House, clouds of biting flies swarmed in the oppressive heat and the smell of rotting garbage mingled with the shouted curses of men imprisoned in the Walnut Street jail.

Inside, 200 years ago today, the majestic plan to draft a blueprint for a new union of the states was on the verge of dissolving in failure. “The Gentlemen of the Grand Foederal Convention,” as they styled themselves, were all but worn out by an angry filibuster over an issue that now seems obscure: the relative voting power of large states and small in the proposed new government.

‘Assembly of Demigods’

From a diplomatic post in Paris that summer, Thomas Jefferson described the delegates who assembled in Philadelphia to draft what became the Constitution of the United States as an “assembly of demigods.” Certainly they were an accomplished group: builders of personal fortunes, many of them; leaders of their states; experienced men of affairs. And they were educated in the history and theory of government far beyond latter-day standards, men who not only knew what Aristotle had written about the constitution of Athens but could quote him extensively--in Greek.

Yet the delegates were not divinities, and the Constitution they wrote was not drafted in a detached paradise. It was, instead, cobbled together in a hot, uncomfortable city by intensely practical men. They referred proudly to each other as “politicians,” and in the summer of 1787 they not only established a government but employed a political decision-making process that the government would still be using two centuries later:

Hard-Nosed Bargaining

Long, sometimes angry debates. Bad-tempered threats. Righteous appeals to principle. Intransigence. Then, as the long process itself forced individuals to reconsider their views, a turn to hard-nosed bargaining. And ultimately, a willingness to compromise on theory or even self-interest to achieve a practical result that none might love but all could support.

As the convention progressed, initial proposals were “drastically modified through debate, compromise and ultimately concession,” Columbia University historian Richard B. Morris said.

It was--and remains today, both within Congress and in the struggles between Congress and the President--a tedious and frustrating process. Yet it is remarkably effective at reconciling opposing interests and maintaining at least functional unity in a vast and diverse nation.

“The direction of history has very nicely complemented the direction the framers took,” said University of Virginia government professor Larry J. Sabato. “It was a circumstance of history, an accident, but a fortunate accident. . . . They provided an example of compromise and pragmatism that has served the country well.”

In Philadelphia 200 years ago, Roger Sherman of Connecticut cut to the heart of matter. “Nobody,” he cautioned the fractious delegates, “meant that we should break up without doing something.”

Virginia, Pennsylvania and other large states argued for basing votes in Congress on population. The small states--fearing their interests would be ignored--insisted on equal representation for every state in both houses of Congress; they threatened to walk out unless their position was accepted. Luther Martin--the often quarrelsome, frequently drunken attorney general of Maryland--launched a filibuster that appeared to bring the convention to the brink of collapse.

In reality, it marked the beginning of progress.

Long before the convention began, James Madison had written in his notebook that “there is a Critical Minute in every thing . . . if it is miss’d chiefly in revolutions of State, ‘tis odds if it can be met with or perceived again.” Events for more than a generation had built toward this moment of the convention.

The delegates had thought deeply about the issues they faced, and they went to Philadelphia already sharing a broad consensus: The weak central government established during the Revolution had proven inadequate to the needs of the nation at peace, and a new government must be formed that would be truly national in scope. Although the exact shape of the new government would be debated at length, the true dispute was not over the new government’s powers but over who should control them.

Eligible Voters Limited

To most Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and Yankees of the day, the debate in Philadelphia was a distant abstraction. Depending on local laws, anywhere from half to a fifth of the adult white males in the nation were deemed too poor to vote. Blacks--roughly a sixth of the population--and women were nearly everywhere disenfranchised.

Even among those who could vote, most--then as now--chose not to, participating in politics as spectators only. When Massachusetts voted on its state constitution in 1778, only about 11,000 of the state’s roughly 90,000 adult white males voted. Some simply found politics uninteresting, siding with the popular English poet of the day who wrote: “For forms of government, let fools contest; What e’re is best administered is best.”

Others were preoccupied with making a living. Still more accepted the prevalent 18th-Century European notion that politics properly was the preserve of gentlemen, not “the common sort.”

But those notions of deference had begun to change. The towns and countryside of North America had known turbulent times. Since 1764, when His Britannic Majesty’s ministers had tried to tax the Colonies without their consent, revolution, invasion and civil war had required men and women of the “common sort” to make conscious political choices, to take sides.

A sharp economic depression after the Revolution had caused many to make a connection between “forms of government” and their private prosperity.

Half Under 40

New institutions and ideas had matured along with the men who attended the convention. Despite the presence of 81-year-old Benjamin Franklin, the 55 delegates who eventually showed up in Philadelphia were a young group, befitting a country whose rapidly growing population was half under 16. Roughly 50% of the delegates were under 40--including 32-year-old Alexander Hamilton, 36-year-old James Madison and Edmund Randolph, the 33-year-old governor of Virginia.

In their teen-age years these men had joined in movements to protest Colonial officials’ encroachments on “the Rights of Englishmen.” In their 20s they had participated as the Continental Congresses set up revolutionary alternatives to Colonial governments. After 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, many had served in the army or the wartime legislatures, knowing that traitors’ nooses awaited them in England should their cause fail.

“We must all hang together,” Franklin had reminded them when the Declaration was signed, “or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

In their 30s, the members of the revolutionary generation watched nationalism spread from politics to private life. In many places, much of the Colonial elite had remained loyal to the crown. Nearly 100,000 Tories--4% of the prewar population--had fled the country and few had returned. New social structures rose to fill the gaps. Churches cut ties to European governing bodies, establishing new ecclesiastical hierarchies in North America.

American artists painted canvases on the virtues of a republic and the heroes of the Revolution. Noah Webster began his life’s work of standardizing a distinctly American language.

Call Themselves Americans

Increasingly the Virginians, the Pennsylvanians, the Yankees and the rest had begun calling themselves by a new name--Americans.

“Among the first sentiments expressed in the first Congress, one was that Virginia is no more, that Massachusetts is no more, that Pennsylvania is no more, etc.,” delegate James Wilson of Pennsylvania recalled during the convention. “We are now a nation of brethren. We must bury all local interests and distinctions.”

But, Wilson knew, the spread of nationalism had a counterpoint. “No sooner were the state governments formed than their jealousy and ambition began to display themselves. Each endeavored to cut a slice from the common loaf, to add to its own morsel.”

Jealousy had a long history. From a vantage point of 200 years, the Revolution and constitutional convention often appear as the beginning. In fact, however, 1787, stands at the midpoint of English-speaking settlement in America. Beginning in 1587, with the unsuccessful attempt to found a colony called Roanoke in what would become North Carolina, the settlers had spent nearly two centuries establishing in each colony distinctive social and political institutions and forms of government.

Few common bonds tied Yankee to Southerner, coastal merchant to back-country farmer. The very vastness of the land and sparseness of the population conspired against unity.

Small Population

Scattered from Maine to Georgia and west to Kentucky and Tennessee, the American population at the time of the convention, excluding Indian tribes, numbered less than 4 million--only about one-third of the number who live in the Los Angeles-Orange County region today.

Philadelphia, the largest city, boasted 42,000 inhabitants, and only recently a stagecoach company had announced the beginning of one-day service between that city and New York. So arduous was the trip that horses died trying to keep the pace. When George Washington set out from Mount Vernon to take up his post as presiding officer of the Philadelphia convention, swollen streams and muddy roads so slowed his carriage that the trip--today a three-hour drive on the interstate--took five days.

Moreover, while the Revolution drew people together in a common struggle, the fight against the strong central government of king and Parliament discredited the idea of a strong central government at home.

Through the late 1770s and early 1780s, nationalism and regionalism tottered in an uneasy balance. In the mid-1780s, economic depression played a key role in tipping the scales; a stronger central government, it seemed, was indispensable to protect and promote individual opportunity.

War had blocked America’s ports, devastated its countryside and severed its trade links with the British empire. In Newburyport, Mass., 90 ships a year had been built before the Revolution; in 1788, only three. Farmers taking rice to market in Charleston, S.C., could sell a hundredweight for 15 pounds, 4 shillings in 1784 but only 10 shillings by decade’s end. A French traveler wrote in 1787 of towns “in ruins, women and children in rags.”

Many Go Into Debt

Debt spread rapidly, and everywhere men were in jail for inability to pay their bills. Prosecutions for debt in Massachusetts’ Hampshire County were 262% higher in the years just before the convention than they had been before the Revolution.

Depression bred rebellion in the fall of 1786. Mobs closed courthouses in York, Pa., and Charles County, Md. In western Massachusetts, farmers under the command of one Daniel Shays, a war veteran who had fought at Bunker Hill, began a revolt that winter of 1786-87 that brought about 9,000 men to arms.

“I am mortified beyond expression,” wrote Washington upon hearing the news. “What a triumph for the advocates of despotism, to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves.”

No government could have prevented the depression, but the weak central government established by the Articles of Confederation took much of the blame. Lacking the power to tax, the Confederation Congress could not pay an army. Lacking the power to regulate trade between the states, it could not stop states with good harbors from beggaring their neighbors. Lacking the power to regulate the currency, it was powerless to stabilize prices.

Virginia’s Randolph railed against “the imbecility of the current Confederacy.” Washington predicted “the worst consequences from a half-starved, limping government, always moving on crutches and tottering at every step.” As news of Shays’ rebellion spread in the early spring of 1787, states that had hesitated to send delegates to Philadelphia quickened their selection.

Favor Central Government

Whether nationalism was yet the majority sentiment among Americans, it clearly commanded the loyalties of most of the delegates who straggled into Philadelphia during the third and fourth weeks of May. Those who opposed the idea of a stronger central government--such as Virginia’s Patrick Henry, who said he “smelt a rat”--mostly stayed away.

The convention, meeting behind closed doors and locked windows, moved rapidly at the outset, approving a series of resolutions by Randolph and Madison--the “Virginia plan”--for a “national” government with a “supreme legislature, executive and judiciary.”

Otherwise-controversial ideas--that the powers of government should be divided among separate branches, that the central government should have direct power to tax, that the new House of Representatives should be elected directly by the people, that the national government should have the power to override state laws and sole power to regulate interstate and foreign trade--met with little opposition.

The real controversy--who should control this powerful new government--arose on the convention’s very first day, only to be shunted aside. As the delegates presented their credentials to Washington, each state’s instructions were read aloud. Those of the Delaware delegation stood out: Its Legislature had ordered it to walk out if any move was made to deprive each state of an equal vote in Congress.

Madison and Randolph had proposed to base a state’s votes in Congress on population. The one-state, one-vote rule followed since the First Continental Congress in 1774 and under the Articles of Confederation was simply unfair, they argued. Implicit in their argument was fear that a majority of smaller, poorer states might put burdensome taxes on their larger, richer neighbors.

Pitfalls of Plan

But anyone who could add knew that under this plan, Congress would be controlled by the three most populous states: Virginia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.

The small states, Madison argued, had nothing to fear from such an arrangement. The very size of the new American nation would prevent any group or any state from dominating, he reasoned.

“All civilized societies (are) . . . divided into different sects, factions and interests,” he explained to his fellow delegates. “In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.

“The only remedy,” he explained, “is to enlarge the sphere and thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests and parties that . . . a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have a common interest separate from that of the whole . . . and in the second place, that in case they should have such an interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it.”

Madison’s arguments--and calculations of self-interest on the part of the large-state delegates--commanded the majority as the convention began. But the delegates from small states remained unswayed. “We would sooner submit to a foreign power than submit to be deprived of an equality of suffrage . . . and thereby be thrown under the domination of the large states,” John Dickinson of Delaware told Madison.

Deadlock Worsens

By June 13, the issue of representation rights had come to dominate the convention, and as the month drew on, the deadlock grew worse. Martin’s two-day filibuster, “delivered with much diffuseness & considerable vehemence,” Madison wrote in his notes, underlined the futility of proceeding further without an agreement.

Connecticut’s Oliver Ellsworth and Roger Sherman had proposed such a compromise--equal votes in the Senate, proportional representation in the House--early in the convention. While the convention made steady progress, Madison and his allies had seen no reason to mar the theoretical purity of their scheme. But as the convention moved toward an Independence Day recess, the possibility of deadlock and failure began to change other minds.

Franklin summed up the dilemma on June 30. “If a proportional representation takes place, the small states contend that their liberties will be in danger,” he said. “If an equality of votes is to be put in its place, the large states say their money will be in danger. When a broad table is to be made, and the edges of planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both, and makes a good joint. In like manner here, both sides must part with some of their demands.”

On July 2, Sherman recommended that the issue be referred to a committee, one from each state. Madison, sensing, perhaps, the erosion of his position, objected strongly. He had “rarely seen any other effect than delay from such committees,” he said. But for the first time on a major issue at the convention, he lost.

On July 5, the committee reported that it had accepted the Connecticut compromise. A small added provision requiring the House to initiate tax bills provided a cover to allow delegates who had voted against the compromise before to change their minds.

Progress Threatened

Two more weeks would be spent considering other issues and debating sidelights before the final vote. Last-minute explosions of temper threatened to destroy the progress that had been made.

Afterward, additional issues, most importantly the election and powers of the President and the moral quandary of slavery, remained to be resolved before the Constitution could be completed.

But the process--debate, deliberation and compromise, the consideration and reconsideration of each issue until an imperfect but acceptable consensus could be reached--had worked.

And the best indicator was the behavior of the two delegates who were the convention’s only truly irreconcilable opponents of a strengthened central government. Days after the committee reported its results, New York’s John Lansing Jr. and Robert Yates gave up their fight to block a new constitution and went home, never to return.