The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

by Joseph J. Ellis

My sense is that the most prominent leaders of this founding elite were driven by motives that were more political than economic, chiefly the desire to expand the meaning of the American Revolution so that it could function on a larger, indeed national, scale.

My argument is that four men made the transition from confederation to nation happen. They are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. If they are the stars of the story, the supporting cast consists of Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris (no relation), and Thomas Jefferson. Readers can and should decide for themselves, but my contention is that this political quartet diagnosed the systemic dysfunctions under the Articles, manipulated the political process to force a calling of the Constitutional Convention, collaborated to set the agenda in Philadelphia, attempted somewhat successfully to orchestrate the debates in the state ratifying conventions, then drafted the Bill of Rights as an insurance policy to ensure state compliance with the constitutional settlement.

the first phase of the American Revolution was about the rejection of political power; the second phase was about controlling it. More practically, the United States could not become the dominant model for the liberal state in the modern world until the second American Revolution of 1787–88.

There are two especially salient danger zones where our modern presumptions can most easily lead us astray. The first is our creedal conviction that democracy is the political gold standard against which all responsible governments must be measured. The second is our political certainty, in truth recently arrived at, that racial equality is morally superior to any race-based alternative. Neither of those modern assumptions would have been either comprehensible or credible to the founding generation.

The democratic society that Alexis de Tocqueville described in the 1830s was still aborning in the 1780s. The operative word for the revolutionary generation was republic rather than democracy. And therefore we should expect to see them searching for a way to harness the primal energies of popular opinion within a multitiered political architecture that filtered the swoonish swings “of the people” through layers of deliberation controlled by what Jefferson called “the natural aristocracy.” That filtration process was what the Constitution was all about, which does not make that seminal document antidemocratic so much as predemocratic.

Although most of the prominent founders, and all the men featured here, fully recognized that slavery was incompatible with the values of the American Revolution, they consciously subordinated the moral to the political agenda, permitting the continuance and expansion of slavery as the price to pay for nationhood.

The founders were truly remarkable for their ability to imagine a nation-size republic and a political framework that insisted on the separation of church and state, both of which were unprecedented social experiments that succeeded. But neither they nor the vast majority of white Americans were capable of imagining a biracial society.

The debate exposed three fundamental disagreements: first, a sectional split between northern and southern states over slavery; second, a division between large and small states over representation; and third, a more general argument between proponents for a confederation of sovereign states and advocates for a more consolidated national union.

His seminal strategic insight, which seems obvious in retrospect, was that he did not need to win the war. The British needed to win. He would win by not losing, which in practice meant keeping the Continental Army intact as the institutional embodiment of American independence.

But the most serious problems facing the not-so-united states, more ominous than all the others put together, was the ballooning debt. Under the Continental Congress the main source of revenue was the printing press, meaning that Congress mass-produced paper money in the form of dollars, called continentals. It also issued what it called certificates, which were promissory notes given to merchants and farmers as payment for food and clothing needed by the Continental Army. In short, apart from French loans, the entire fiscal policy of the Continental Congress was based on a massive hoax, which resembled what today would be called a Ponzi scheme.

One of the reasons Hamilton found the word democracy so offensive was because he realized that the vast majority of American citizens had not the dimmest understanding of what he was talking about.

Left unsaid was the intractable fact that the majority of state legislators opposed any effort at political reform, not because they believed it would fail but because they feared it might succeed. Any energetic projection of power at the federal level defied their understanding of revolutionary principles, making the very weakness of the Confederation Congress its most attractive feature.

Washington strongly supported Madison’s radical strategy; indeed, his reluctant decision to attend the convention was prompted by Madison’s assurance that halfway measures would not be attempted because they were not worth the effort and therefore not worth his presence.

All efforts to impose a monolithic set of motives on the assembled delegates at Philadelphia, whether economic or ideological, have been discredited. And the very effort to do so misses the most salient point, which is that the vast majority of delegates came as representatives of their respective states, so that no single interpretive category could do justice to their bafflingly complex angles of vision. What needs to be remembered and recovered is that no collective sense of an American identity yet existed in the populace at large.

Looked upon as a collective, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention were surprisingly young—average age forty-four—and disproportionately well educated. Twenty-nine had college degrees, and the same number had studied law. Their educational backgrounds were more conspicuous than their wealth, making them more an intellectual than an economic elite. Thirty-five had served as officers in the Continental Army, and forty-two had served in the Continental or Confederation Congress.

The debate over the executive took up more time and energy than any other issue at the convention, largely because the delegates could not agree on how much authority to place in the office; whether it should be a single person or a troika representing the northern, middle, and southern states; how long he should serve (a woman was unimaginable); and how he should be elected and impeached.

The crucial compromise was an agreement to avoid any direct discussion of the divisive issue and to use euphemisms like “that species of property” when the forbidden topic forced itself onto the agenda. The two most explicit decisions implicitly endorsing slavery were the agreement to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House and a prohibition against ending the slave trade for twenty years, concessions to the Deep South, especially South Carolina, that appear horrific to our eyes but without which the Constitution almost certainly could never have come into existence.

By transforming slavery from a moral to a political problem, the delegates made it susceptible to compromise, but this achievement came at a cost.

In the long run—and this was probably Madison’s most creative insight—the multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently “living” document. For it was designed not to offer clear answers to the sovereignty question (or, for that matter, to the scope of executive or judicial authority) but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberative fashion. The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of “originalism” or “original intent,” this should be a disarming insight, since it made the Constitution the foundation for an ever-shifting political dialogue that, like history itself, was an argument without end. Madison’s “original intention” was to make all “original intentions” infinitely negotiable in the future.

As Jefferson put it to Madison, there seemed no way to deal with Henry “except to ardently pray for his imminent death.”

As Marshall so nicely put it, “Mr. Henry had without doubt the greatest power to persuade, [but] Mr. Madison had the greatest power to convince.”

Madison then unfurled his familiar argument against the systemic weakness of the German, Swiss, and Dutch confederacies: “Does not the history of these confederacies coincide with the lessons drawn from our own experience?” He went on to answer his own rhetorical question: “A Government that relies on thirteen independent sovereignties for the means of its existence is a solecism in theory, and a mere nullity in practice.”45 These were not arguments familiar to Henry, nor arguments often heard within the precincts of Virginia, which were the only precincts Henry cared about. He was an ardent confederationist who presumed that Virginia would remain the dominant nation-state and that both his own political power base and, as he saw it, the majority of Virginians had more to lose than gain by joining a larger union. In a very real sense, Henry and Madison were talking past each other, for they harbored fundamentally different views of America’s future. The great virtue of the Henry-Madison debate was to make that fundamental difference abundantly clear.

It has endured not because it embodies timeless truths that the founders fathomed as tongues of fire danced over their heads, but because it manages to combine the two time-bound truths of its own time: namely, that any legitimate government must rest on a popular foundation, and that popular majorities cannot be trusted to act responsibly, a paradox that has aged remarkably well.