More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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. This decision meant that tragedy was also built into the American founding, and the only question we can ask is whether it was a Greek tragedy, meaning inevitable and unavoidable, or a Shakespearean tragedy, meaning that it could have gone the other way, and the failure was a
...more
We need to remind ourselves that racial integration in the United States was a mid-twentieth-century idea that few if any of the founders could have comprehended. Imposing our racial agenda on them is politically correct but historically irresponsible.
During his presidency of the Congress, he had the audacity to apprise the unofficial Spanish minister, Don Juan de Miralles, that he regarded Spain as a hollowed-out European power destined to be overwhelmed demographically by the wave of American settlers sweeping across the North American continent.
In 1779, four years before Washington declared his vision of a continental American empire, Jay had a vision of his own: “Extensive wildernesses, now scarcely known or exposed, remain yet to be cultivated, and vast lakes and rivers, whose waters have for ages rolled in silence and obscurity to the ocean, are yet to hear the din of industry, become subservient to commerce, and boast villas, gilded spires, and spacious cities rising on their banks.”
Although Jay had earned his diplomatic reputation in Europe, he shared Washington’s belief that the western lands acquired in the Treaty of Paris made Europe a sideshow.
More dispiriting than any clash of opinions was the pervasive indifference that rendered argument itself impossible. There was not even a quorum available to ratify the definitive version of the Treaty of Paris or to accept Washington’s highly symbolic resignation as commander in chief at Annapolis.
But there was some reason to believe that the Jay appointment would not meet the same fate, for while the states could and did remain sovereign when it came to taxes, they could not plausibly claim to exercise the same control over foreign policy, which almost by definition needed to speak with one voice. (Abigail Adams, writing from London, somewhat caustically observed that British diplomats loved to ridicule her husband for allegedly representing a government that in fact did not exist.) Jay was being asked to convert the American cacophony on foreign policy into a chorus.
In terms of maps, Jefferson was the reigning expert on all the land east of the Mississippi.17
There would always be free spirits—Washington usually described them as “banditti”—who refused to comply and were prepared to take their chances with the Indians. But the westward flow of population should assume the shape of a concentrated wave rather than a free-floating gush.
The real weapons of mass destruction in the eighteenth century were viruses, and the major reason the Native American population would recede upon contact with the front edge of white settlements was that they were defenseless against such biological weapons.
Washington’s great fear was that North America would become a version of Europe, a collection of coexistent sovereignties rather than a coherent nation of its own. All the evidence seemed to support the conclusion that the very term United States was becoming a preposterous illusion.25
Both the optimists and the pessimists were just guessing, but the increasingly dysfunctional character of the Confederation Congress seemed to tilt the argument toward the pessimists, since the emergence of a gigantic American nation required the existence of a national government that did not exist. Washington regarded this as a failure of will, a fundamental misreading of what the American Revolution intended, and perhaps the greatest lost opportunity in recorded history. In 1785 Washington’s nightmare scenario grew even darker as a sectional split emerged within Congress over what came to
...more
In a lengthy report to Congress, Jay argued that all treaties were laws of the land, an early anticipation of what became the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, meaning that the states were legally obliged to comply with all provisions of the Treaty of Paris. The Virginians would have to pay their back debts, and New Yorkers would have to stop confiscating loyalist estates.35
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.
It was an eighteenth-century version of Catch-22. The moribund character of the Confederation Congress required reform by a separate and independent body, but such an effort could not muster support within the Congress unless or until it was reformed.3
This was Hamilton’s out-front brand of leadership in its most flamboyant form. A convention called to address the modest matter of commercial reform had just failed to attract even a quorum, and now Hamilton was using this grim occasion to announce the date for another convention that would tackle all the problems affecting the confederation at once. It was as if a prizefighter, having just been knocked out by a journeyman boxer, declared his intention to challenge the heavyweight champion of the world.
Madison’s frenzied response to Shays’ Rebellion, however misguided, was apparently authentic, meaning that he truly believed this minor incident was in fact a major threat to the survival of the American republic. So, for that matter, did Washington, whose stolid serenity customarily made him immune to such wild overreactions: The accounts which are published, of the commotions…in the Eastern States, are equally to be lamented and deprecated. They exhibit a melancholy proof of what our trans Atlantic foes have predicted; and of another thing perhaps, which is still more to be regretted, and is
...more
Madison was inventing what came to be called “federalism,” a government in which sovereignty was a matter of ongoing negotiations between the state and federal governments on a case-by-case basis. The genius of Madison’s formulation was that it imposed a national grid in lieu of the state-based Articles but left room for local, state, and regional loyalties to remain relevant.
Though he served briefly in the Virginia militia, the very idea of Madison as a soldier was ridiculous. His natural environment was the political rather than the military battlefield, and his version of leadership, so different from Hamilton’s, was very much a product of his experience in the Virginia legislature, which put a premium on building consensus rather than dashing out in front of the troops in a headlong charge.
Madison stressed the horrific consequences that would ensue if and when the confederation imploded. “The question whether it is possible and worthwhile [to preserve] the union of the States must be speedily decided some way or other,” he wrote to Monroe. “Those who are indifferent to the preservation would do well to look forward to the consequences of its extinction.”35
After some last-minute second thoughts about the wisdom of it all, Washington rode out of Mount Vernon in early May. His very presence certified the significance of the occasion, as did his willingness to risk his reputation in order to rescue the American Revolution from its own excesses. As for what he referred to as a “remedy,” that was Madison’s department. And one would be hard pressed to find anyone else on the planet with his unique combination of political savvy, psychological intensity, and cerebral power. This would be his finest hour.37
Madison had a bimodal mind that was capable of functioning with great agility in a complicated political context, then ascending above the fray to a higher level of political theory, the latter a talent that has earned him a reputation as one of America’s preeminent political philosophers.
There needed to be a second founding in which the “spirit of ’87” replaced the “spirit of ’76,” establishing and institutionalizing a national political framework capable of functioning on a much larger scale, yet doing so without threatening the hard-won liberties of the first founding. Madison realized that he was asking his fellow Americans to abandon their local and state-based orientation, to regard themselves as fellow citizens in a much larger enterprise, and to modify their view of government as an alien force. The federal government must become “us” rather than “them.”
Once they had rejected the authority of George III, so the story went, sovereignty had shifted from a monarchy claiming to derive its authority from God to a legislature claiming to derive its authority from “the people.” Political power flowed not downward from the heavens but upward from the citizenry. Indeed, this was the fundamental change that had made the war for independence a revolution.
But experience during and after the war had demonstrated beyond any doubt that romantic descriptions of “the people” were delusional fabrications, just as far-fetched as the divine right of kings.
The state governments created during and after the war for independence were the closest thing to laboratories for democracy ever established beyond the local level in recorded history. And there was little doubt in his mind that these political experiments, Virginia’s included, were demonstrable failures, clear examples of how easily demagogues could manipulate popular opinion and provincial prejudices, thereby rendering any considerations of the larger public interest impossible.
And so while we are only guessing, it seems quite possible that the Virginia delegation eventually endorsed Madison’s radical strategy, not so much because of his argumentative skills as because Washington made his continued presence in Philadelphia contingent upon its adoption. And without Washington the entire enterprise was almost surely doomed.20
For that matter, there was never a moment during the entire summer when all fifty-five delegates were present.
Woody Allen, 80 percent of life is showing up.
Ironically, to the extent that the delegates at Philadelphia succeeded, their success was dependent on violating all of our contemporary convictions about transparency and diversity, which is one reason why their success could never be duplicated in our time.
The potency of the Progressive interpretive tradition in the first half of the twentieth century derived in great part from the easy exposure of such a mythical and hagiographic depiction as patriotic nonsense.
Madison’s proposal for an executive veto over state legislation was dead on arrival at the convention because it seemed almost designed to conjure up the ghastly image of George III imposing his presumptive power in arbitrary and capricious fashion.
slavery was, on the one hand, a cancerous tumor in the American body politic and, on the other, a malignancy so deeply embedded that it could not be removed without killing the patient, which in this case was a newly created American nation.
It is clear that Madison’s intention in drafting his proposed amendment was to assure those skeptical souls that the defense of the United States would depend on state militias rather than a professional, federal army. In Madison’s formulation, the right to bear arms was not inherent but derivative, depending on service in the militia. The recent Supreme Court decision (Heller v. District of Columbia, 2008) that found the right to bear arms an inherent and nearly unlimited right is clearly at odds with Madison’s original intentions.37
While modern-day critics of the founders and the constitutional settlement they brokered often deliver their critical judgments from our present perspective, and the politically correct posture it permits, the more historically correct conclusion is to begin with the recognition that the founders inhabited a premodern world that cannot be understood, much less judged, in modern terms.
