Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
(Simon & Schuster, 589 pages, $30)
This solid and splendidly organized and written block of a book,
carved largely from the wealth of material collected in The
Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution,
published since 1976 by the Wisconsin Historical Society, tells the
story of the public debate that raged between Federalists and their
opponents after the Constitutional Convention adjourned in
September 1787, with the Constitution just a set of proposals,
until July 1788, when New York became the 11th state to ratify the
document. In September of that year Congress declared the
Constitution ratified, and laid down the rules for the first
presidential election, to be conducted in 1789.
Pauline Maier, a professor of American history at MIT who once
heard Barbara Tuchman talk and took it to heart, writes with a
narrative flair and the conviction that history must be written to
be read beyond the classroom. She succeeds admirably, opening with
a ploy that draws us into a lengthy prologue set at Mount Vernon,
where we join George Washington, “the American Cincinnatus, a man
who left the plow to save his country, then took it up again when
the danger had passed.” With his love for his lands and his
fascination with practical matters, it’s a role he cherishes, and
the prospect of heading up the Virginia delegation to the
ratification convention gives him no pleasure.
“Above all,” Maier writes, “Washington wanted to stay home.” And
if there’s a flaw here, it’s that Maier’s portrait of Washington at
this moment in his life is so compelling that he very nearly
hijacks her work, and at least one reader would almost prefer that
he stay home, let Maier write more about life at Mount Vernon, stay
with him there, and forget the whole noisy political business that
lies ahead — a sentiment one suspects he shared.
But as the first American scholar to write comprehensively on
these ratification debates, Maier has her duty to do. And so when
“On May 8, Washington finally set out for Philadelphia,” she takes
her narrative with him, then leaves him to assume her place among
members of the state conventions charged by the Constitutional
Convention with determining the document’s fate — and in the
process, determining the shape and form of our national
government.
It was at this ratification convention that our first national
political argument would take place, centering on many of the same
issues that animate the political arguments of today. “No taxation
without representation,” a major issue at the heart of the American
Revolution, clashed with proposals to give Congress the power to
levy direct taxes. Opponents were deeply suspicious of
congressional power to set arrangements for congressional elections
and of the proposed federal court system. In these and other areas,
the seeds were planted for ongoing debates over states’ rights
versus federal control, and the proper division of power between
federal and state governments.
There were also debates about religion and slavery, although
Maier shows that despite current preoccupations, the latter wasn’t
a central issue. Some opponents wanted religious tests included
that would disqualify “Popish priests,” Deists, and other pagans
from holding office. Others spoke for abolition.
But the prevailing attitude seemed best summed up by Isaac
Backus, a Baptist minister from Massachusetts:
Both reason and the Bible showed that religion was always a
matter between God and the individual, he said. As a result, no man
or men could impose religious tests without invading “the essential
prerogatives of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Moreover, all history
showed that religious tests were “the greatest engine of tyranny in
the world.”
As for slavery, he too hated it, but he noted that the
Constitution had opened a door for the future abolition of the
slave trade that was absent under the Articles of Confederation and
affirmed an earlier prediction by [Thomas] Dawes that slavery
itself was fated to die out.
MOST READERS, if not well informed about the details of
ratification — understandably, since this is the first coherent
account — are familiar with the leading actors, among them George
Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Patrick Henry,
Gouverneur Morris, who wrote a fine satirical poem on the
proceedings, too long to reproduce here. Others are less familiar,
or forgotten — Rufus King, Edmund Randolph, Edmund Pendleton,
Melancton Smith, James Iredell, William Findley.
Some of the best anecdotes in Maier’s narrative involve such
men. William Findley from Pennsylvania, a self-educated Irish
immigrant who had fought in the Revolutionary War, farmed land
still claimed by Indians, and opposed the Constitution, asserted at
his state’s convention that the document was flawed because it
failed to secure trial by jury in civil cases. “The future of
freedom was at stake, Findley claimed: When Sweden abandoned jury
trials, ‘the commons of that nation lost their freedom’ and a
‘tyrannical aristocracy’ took over.”
His remarks threw the Federalists into a fury, especially Thomas
McKean, Pennsylvania’s chief justice, and James Wilson, later an
associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, who belittled Findley
for his ignorance and presumption to learning, and declared that
Sweden had never had trial by jury.
When the delegates reassembled, Findley produced his evidence,
the third volume of William Blackstone’s Commentaries, in
which Blackstone wrote that when the Swedish jury system collapsed,
the country had become an aristocratic tyranny. Said Findley: “If
his son had been studying law for six months and remained
unacquainted with the passage in Blackstone ‘I should be justified
in whipping him.’”
Of the ordinary citizens who wholeheartedly joined in the
debate, Maier writes:
They refused to be told that the issues of the day were beyond
their competence. They put their minds to complicated problems,
tried to reconcile the ideals of the Revolution with the needs of
the nation, and considered the impact of contemporary decisions not
just on their own lives but for the future — for “millions yet
unborn,” as one person after another put it. They were engaged,
often remarkably well informed given the primitive communications
of the day, and… honored majority rule, even when it went against
them.
Maier is scrupulously fair to the Anti-Federalists, and refuses
to call them that. Because of objections from men like William
Findley, who called it “a name of reproach,” she “preferred to type
out ‘critics of the Constitution’ and its synonyms over and over.”
Moreover, she believes, the Federalists enjoy an advantage
routinely denied to their opponents by historians:
Let me be clear on this: I have no doubt that we need to
understand the Federalists’ understanding of the Constitution… they
provided the intellectual foundations of American government. For
that we tend to believe everything they said.… The Federalists were
intelligent and articulate, the kind of people with whom historians
tend to identify, and so to trust.… What they said seems wise and
persuasive, which is to say true.
From a certain perspective they won, and winners generally tell
the stories.
And they had the means to help shape those stories:
[T]he Federalists also controlled the documents on which
historians depend. They owned most of the newspapers. They
sometimes paid those who took notes on the convention debates or
subsidized the publication of their transcripts. In some places…
Federalists forcibly blocked the circulation of literature critical
of the Constitution.
However, she writes:
They were not trying to distort history. They were struggling to
win a very tough fight on behalf of what they understood as the
nation’s welfare in a world where the rules of the political game
were different from those of today.
And in fact, Maier believes, casting the fight for ratification
in terms of a struggle between proponents and opponents of strong
central government, as conventional history would have it, is
misleading. Nearly everyone, she maintains, was for a federal
government stronger than the one provided for by the Articles of
Confederation. But the reluctance of the Federalists to allow
amendments before ratification aroused opposition among those who
saw in it a threat to the rights won during the Revolution.
In the end, the Federalists won. But Maier believes their
opponents also won a good deal more than historians acknowledge or
perhaps realize. Congress met many of their concerns by expanding
the House of Representatives, approving the Judiciary Act of 1789,
modifying the plan to levy direct taxes except in times of war, and
proposing a series of amendments.
“Without their determined opposition,” Maier writes,
the first ten amendments would not have become a part of the
Constitution for later generations to transform into a powerful
instrument for the defense of American freedom. “We the People” of
1787 and 1788 inaugurated a dialogue between power and liberty that
has continued, reminding us regularly of the principles of 1776
upon which the United States was founded and that has given us
direction and national identity. Their example might well be their
greatest gift to posterity.
In her concluding section, Maier gives the last word to William
Findley, who in 1796 recorded how his thinking had changed.
In the end, like so many onetime critics of the Constitution,
William Findley “embraced the government as my own and my
children’s inheritance.” He knew that the Constitution had
defectS.… In his mature judgment, the Constitution was, however,
not just good or maybe good enough.
Findley came to believe that it was “capable of being well
administered, and on the whole, the best government in the
world.”
