Founding Brothers (12 page)

As Jefferson
and Madison arrived in Philadelphia for the first session of Congress in the
new but merely temporary capital, the newspapers were filled with caustic
commentary on the defiant tone of the Virginia resolution:

The
resolution of the Virginia Assembly respecting the Assumption of the State
Debts … exhibits a very curious phenomenon in the history of the United
States. The majority who voted in favor of the resolution, it seems, fell
asleep in September 1787, (just before the rising of the Federal Convention)
and did not awake till a few weeks ago; during which time the Federal
Government was adopted and established throughout all the States. Their vote
therefore must be ascribed to
ignorance
of what passed during their
long sleep. The
Resolution
is calculated only for those years of
anarchy, which preceded the general ratification of the present HAPPY NATIONAL
GOVERNMENT. It is now nugatory and ridiculous.
⁴⁸

Hamilton
also took note of the implicit secessionist threat contained in
Virginia’s statement. It was, he warned, “the first symptom of a
spirit which must either be killed or will kill the constitution of the United
States.” Back in September of 1787, just as the Constitutional Convention
was completing its business, Hamilton had made a prediction: The newly created
federal government would either “triumph altogether over the state
governments and reduce them to an entire subordination,” he surmised, or
“in the course of a few years … the contests about the boundaries
of power between the particular governments and the general government …
will produce a dissolution of the Union.” Virginia’s posture toward
assumption was now making his prophecy look prescient. Hamilton shared his
ominous sense of the situation with John Jay, his part-time collaborator as
“Publius” in
The Federalist Papers.
But he said nothing to
Madison, his full-time collaborator, since it was no longer clear where Madison
stood. Was he a Virginian or an American? Did he think the truly founding
moment for the new nation was 1776 or 1787? These dramatic questions, as much
as the location of the capital on the Potomac, were the residual legacies of
the dinner at Jefferson’s.
⁴⁹

F
OR THE NEXT
seventy years, until the
outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the essence of political wisdom in the
emergent American republic was to insist that such choices did not have to be
made. But the recognition that these were the competing options, the contested
versions, if you will, of what the core legacy of the American Revolution truly
meant, first became visible in the summer of 1790. The Constitution did not
resolve these questions; it only provided an orderly framework within which the
arguments could continue. Nor would it be historically correct to regard the
issues at stake as exclusively or even primarily constitutional. Legalistic
debates over federal versus state sovereignty were just the most accessible
handles to grab, the safest and most politically suitable ways to talk about
alternative national visions.

The Compromise of 1790 is most famous
for averting a political crisis that many statesmen of the time considered a
threat to the survival of the infant republic. But it also exposed the
incompatible expectations concerning America’s future that animated these
same statesmen. In a sense, it is a very old story, which has been rendered
even more familiar by the violent dissolution of revolutionary regimes in
modern-day emergent nations: Bound together in solidarity against the
imperialistic enemy, the leadership fragments when the common enemy disappears
and the different agenda for the new nation must confront its differences.
Securing a revolution has proven to be a much more daunting assignment than
winning one. The accommodation that culminated in the agreement reached over
Jefferson’s dinner table provides a momentary exposure of the sharp
differences dividing the leadership of the revolutionary generation: sectional
versus national allegiance; agrarian versus commercial economic priorities;
diffusion versus consolidation as social ideals; an impotent versus a potent
federal government. The compromise reached did not resolve these conflicts so
much as prevent them from exploding when the newly created government was so
vulnerable; it bought time during which the debate could continue.
⁵⁰

Thanks to
the efforts of Jefferson and Madison, the ongoing debate would have a decidedly
southern accent. In some vaguely general fashion, they understood this,
regarding the construction of the District of Columbia on the Potomac as a
statement of Virginia’s enduring influence over the federal government.
Although the Virginia-writ-large view of the United States they harbored had an
arrogant and provincial odor about it, their presumptions did reflect certain
demographic and economic realities: Virginia contained one-fifth of the
nation’s total population and generated one-third of its commerce.
What’s more, as John Adams so nicely put it, “in Virginia all Geese
are Swans,” meaning that Virginia’s elite genuinely believed that
it had almost single-handedly launched and led the war for independence. The
Old Dominion was accustomed to thinking of itself as
primus inter
pares
in any confederation of states. The geographic location of the new
capital played to these pretensions by making it the physical projection of
Virginia. It did not matter so much that the Virginia-writ-large vision was
mostly an illusion; it was a deeply felt illusion that the location of the new
capital somewhat appeased.
⁵¹

Although it
never seemed to be part of the conscious intention of either Jefferson or
Madison at the time, the isolated location and
de novo
character of
the national capital had even deeper political implications. For at the start
and for several decades thereafter, it remained a vast and nearly vacant plot
of ground. Visitors in those early years who stopped to ask directions to the
American capital were often astonished when told they were standing squarely in
its center. Anyone apprehensive about the encroaching powers of the federal
government must have felt a palpable sense of reassurance that the seat of
power was virtually invisible. Or if, like Jefferson, one believed that cities
were sores on the body politic, and agrarian values were the mainstay of
American virtue, then Washington, D.C., must have seemed the perfect capital
for the new republic, since it was really not a city at all. If the clustering
together or consolidation of political power touched some primal nerve,
conjuring up horrific scenes of courtiers in London or Paris plotting against
the rights of ordinary citizens, again the American capital performed visual
therapy by lacking courts, corridors, or many public buildings whatsoever. It
symbolized the victory of diffusion over consolidation.
⁵²

Nor were
Hamilton’s dreaded moneymen likely to find it a particularly hospitable
environment. The pervasive emptiness and stultifying summer heat were only
minor deterrents when compared with the more elemental consideration that all
the banking and commercial institutions were based elsewhere, chiefly in
Philadelphia and New York. By selecting the Potomac location, the Congress had
implicitly decided to separate the political and financial capitals of the
United States. All the major European capitals—Berlin, London, Paris,
Rome, Vienna—were metropolitan centers that gathered together the
political, economic, and cultural energies of their respective populations in
one place. The United States was almost inadvertently deciding to segregate
them. The exciting synergy of institutional life in an all-purpose national
metropolis was deemed less important than the dangerous corruptions likely to
afflict a nexus of politicians and financiers.
⁵³

And so while
Hamilton and his followers could claim that the compromise permitted the core
features of his financial plan to win approval, which in turn meant the
institutionalization of fiscal reforms with centralizing implications that
would prove very difficult to dislodge, the permanent residence of the capital
on the Potomac institutionalized political values designed to carry the nation
in a fundamentally different direction. It was also symbolic in a personal
sense for Jefferson and Madison. For the Compromise of 1790 signaled the
resumption of their political partnership after five years of separation. Now
“the great collaboration” was truly an alliance worthy of its
name.

Many of their closest friends and colleagues in Virginia had
urged them to regard Hamilton’s program as clinching evidence of a
foreign takeover of the national government that fully justified a withdrawal
from the union. Jefferson and Madison claimed to share their apprehensions and
their political principles, but not their secessionist impulses. Their strategy
was different. They would not abandon the government, but capture it. Like the
new capital, it would become an extension of Virginia, or at least the Virginia
vision of what the American Revolution meant and the American republic was
therefore meant to be. Jefferson would oversee and orchestrate this campaign
and provide its rhetorical foundation, which enjoyed a privileged association
with the spirit of ’76. Madison would actually lead the troops and do the
necessary political infighting. Though it would not be easy, and would take the
remainder of the decade to accomplish, that is pretty much what
happened.

CHAPTER THREE

The Silence

J
UST A FEW
months before
Jefferson staged his historic dinner party, something happened in the Congress
of the United States that no one had anticipated; indeed, most of the political
leadership considered it an embarrassing intrusion. On February 11, 1790, two
Quaker delegations, one from New York and the other from Philadelphia,
presented petitions to the House calling for the federal government to put an
immediate end to the African slave trade. This was considered an awkward
interruption, disrupting as it did the critical debate over the assumption and
residency questions with an inflammatory proposal that several southern
representatives immediately denounced as mischievous meddling. Representative
James Jackson from Georgia was positively apoplectic that such a petition would
even be considered by any serious deliberative body. The Quakers, he argued,
were infamous innocents incessantly disposed to drip their precious purity like
holy water over everyone else’s sins. They were also highly questionable
patriots, having sat out the recent war against British tyranny in deference to
their cherished consciences. What standing could such dedicated pacifists enjoy
among veterans of the Revolution, who, as Jackson put it, “at the risk of
their lives and fortunes, secured to the community their liberty and
property?”
¹

William
Loughton Smith from South Carolina rose to second Jackson’s objection.
The problematic patriotism of the Quaker petitioners was, Smith agreed,
reprehensible. But his colleague from Georgia need not dally over the
credentials of these pathetic eccentrics. The Constitution of the United
States, only recently ratified, specifically prohibited the Congress from
passing any law that abolished or restricted the slave trade until 1808.
(Article 1, Section 9, paragraph 1, read: “The Migration or Importation
of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,
shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight
hundred and eight.”) Several current members of Congress also happened to
have served as delegates to the Constitutional Convention, and they could all
testify that the document would never have been approved in Philadelphia or
ratified by several of the southern states without this provision. Beyond these
still warm memories, the language of the Constitution was unambiguous: The
federal government could not tamper with the slave trade during the first
twenty years of the nation’s existence. The Quaker petitioners,
therefore, were asking for something that had already been declared
unavailable.
²

Jackson,
however, was not about to be consoled by constitutional protections. He
detected even more sinister motives behind the benign smiles of the misnamed
Society of Friends. “I apprehend, if through the interference of the
general government, the slave-trade was abolished,” he observed,
“it would evince to the people a general disposition toward a total
emancipation.” In short, the Quaker petition for an end of the slave
trade was really a stalking horse for a more radical and thoroughgoing scheme
to end the institution of slavery itself.

James Madison rose to assume
his customary role as the vigilant voice of cool reason. His colleague from
Georgia was overreacting. Indeed, his impassioned rhetoric, while doubtless
sincere, was both misguided and counterproductive. The Quaker petition should
be heard and forwarded to a committee “as a matter of course.” If,
in other words, the matter were treated routinely and with a minimum of fuss,
it would quickly evaporate. As Madison put it, “no notice would be taken
it out of doors.” On the other hand, Jackson’s own overwrought
opposition, much like airbursts in a night battle, actually called attention to
the issues the Quakers wished to raise. If Jackson would only restrain himself,
the petition would go away and “never be blown up into a decision of the
question respecting the discouragement of the African slave-trade, nor alarm
the owners with an apprehension that the general government were about to
abolish slavery in all the states.” For, as Madison assured Jackson,
“such things are not contemplated by any gentlemen in the
congress.”
³

The next day,
however, on February 12, Jackson’s fearful prophecies seemed to be coming
true. For on that day another petition arrived in the House, this one from the
Pennsylvania Abolition Society. It urged the Congress to “take such
measures in their wisdom, as the powers with which they are invested will
authorize, for promoting the abolition of slavery, and discouraging every
species of traffic in slaves.” Just as Jackson had warned, opposition to
the slave trade was now being linked to ending slavery altogether. What’s
more, this new petition made two additional points calculated to exacerbate the
fears of men like Jackson: First, it claimed that both slavery and the slave
trade were incompatible with the values for which the American Revolution had
been fought, and it even instructed the Congress on its political obligation to
“devise means for removing this inconsistency from the Character of the
American people.” Second, it challenged the claim that the Constitution
prohibited any legislation by the federal government against the slave trade
for twenty years, suggesting instead that the “general welfare”
clause of the Constitution empowered the Congress to take whatever action it
deemed “necessary and proper” to eliminate the stigma of traffic in
human beings and to “Countenance the Restoration of Liberty for all
Negroes.” Finally, to top it all off and heighten its dramatic appeal,
the petition arrived under the signature of Benjamin Franklin, whose patriotic
credentials and international reputation were beyond dispute. Indeed, if there
were an American pantheon, only Washington would have had a more secure place
in it than Franklin.
⁴

Franklin’s endorsement of the petition from the Pennsylvania
Abolition Society effectively assured that the preferred Madisonian
strategy—calmly receiving these requests, then banishing them to the
congressional version of oblivion—was not going to work. In fact, the
ongoing debate on the assumption and residency questions was set aside for the
entire day as the House put itself into committee of the whole to permit
unencumbered debate on the petitions. During the course of that debate, which
lasted between four and six hours, things were said that had never before been
uttered in any public forum at the national level.

Granted, the
delegates to the Constitutional Convention had engaged in extensive debates
about the slave trade and how to count slaves for the purposes of
representation and taxation. But these debates had all occurred behind closed
doors and under the strictest code of confidentiality. (Madison’s
informal record of these debates, the fullest account, was not published in his
lifetime.) Granted also that the place of slavery in the new national order had
come up in several state ratifying conventions in 1788. But these state-based
deliberations quite naturally tended to focus on local or regional
interpretations of the Constitution’s rather elliptical handling of the
forbidden subject. (No specific mention of “slavery,”
“slaves,” or “Negroes” had been permitted into the
final draft of the document.) If political leaders who had pushed through the
constitutional settlement of 1787–1788 had been permitted to speak, their
somewhat awkward conclusion would have been that slavery was too important and
controversial a subject to talk about publicly.
⁵

This explains
the initial reaction of several representatives from South Carolina, who
objected to the suggestion that the petitions should be read aloud in the halls
of Congress. Aedanus Burke, for example, warned that the petitioners were
“blowing the trumpet of sedition” and demanded that the galleries
be cleared of all spectators and newspaper reporters. Jackson also heard
trumpets blowing, though for him they were “trumpets of civil war.”
The position of all the speakers from the Deep South seemed to be that the
Constitution not only prohibited the Congress from legislating about slavery or
the slave trade; it forbade anyone in Congress from even mentioning those
subjects publicly. If this was their position, events quickly demonstrated that
it was an argument they were destined to lose.
⁶

T
HE DEBATE
began when Thomas Scott of Pennsylvania,
speaking on behalf of the petitioners, acknowledged that the Constitution
imposed restrictions on Congress’s power to end the slave trade but said
nothing whatsoever about abolishing slavery itself. As Scott put it, “if
I was one of the judges of the United States, I do not know how far I might go
if these people were to come before me and claim their emancipation, but I am
sure I would go as far as I could.” Whereupon Jackson commented that any
judge rendering such an opinion in Georgia “would be of short
duration.”
⁷

Jackson
then launched into a sermon on God’s will, which he described as patently
proslavery, based on several passages in the Bible and the pronouncements of
every Christian minister in Georgia. Alongside the clear preferences of the
Almighty, there was the nearly unanimous opinion of every respectable citizen
in his state, whose livelihood depended on the availability of slave labor and
who shared the elemental recognition, as Jackson put it, “that rice
cannot be brought to market without these people.” William Loughton Smith
preferred to leave the interpretation of God’s will to others, but he
seconded the opinion of his colleague from Georgia that slavery was an economic
precondition for the prosperity of his constituents, noting that “such is
the state of agriculture in that country, no white man would perform the tasks
required to drain the swamps and clear the land, so that without slaves it must
be depopulated.”
⁸

Smith also led
the debate on behalf of the Deep South on that other great text, which was not
the Bible but the Constitution. In Smith’s version of the story, the
framers of the Constitution had recognized that the chief source of conflict
among the state delegations was between those dependent on slave labor and
those free of such dependency. A sectional understanding had emerged whereby
northern states had agreed not to tamper with the property rights of southern
states. In addition to the specific provisions of the Constitution, which
recognized the slave population as worthy of at least some measure of
representation in Congress and the protection of the slave trade for at least
another twenty years after ratification, there was also an implicit but broadly
shared understanding that the newly created federal government could do nothing
to interfere with the existence of slavery in
the South. All the southern
states had ratified the Constitution with that understanding as a primal
precondition: “Upon that reason they acceded to the Constitution,”
Smith declared. “Unless that part was granted they would not [have] come
into the union.” His evident distress at these Quaker petitions was
rooted in his belief that the current debate represented a violation of that
understanding.
⁹

Representative
Abraham Baldwin of Georgia chimed in to support Smith’s version of the
federal compact. “Gentlemen who had been present at the formation of this
Constitution”—Baldwin himself had been one such
gentleman—“could not avoid the recollection of the pain and
difficulty which the subject caused in that body.” The essential
agreement reached at Philadelphia in 1787, Baldwin claimed, was the decision to
remove slavery in the southern states from any influence by the northern
states. “If gentlemen look over the footsteps of that body,”
Baldwin observed, “they will find the greatest degree of caution used to
imprint them, so as not to be easily eradicated.” Any attempt to
renegotiate that sectional agreement by the current Congress would result in
the disintegration of the national confederation at the very moment of its
birth.
¹⁰

Several northern representatives rose to contest the claim that both the
Bible and the Constitution endorsed slavery. John Laurance of New York wondered
how any Christian could read the Sermon on the Mount and believe it was
compatible with chattel slavery. As far as the Constitution was concerned,
Laurance acknowledged that certain provisions recognized the existence of
slavery and provided temporary protection for those states wishing to import
more Africans. But the larger understanding, as Laurance saw it, was that
slavery was an anomaly in the American republic, a condition that could be
tolerated in the short run precisely because there was a clear consensus that
it would be ended in the long run. Scott of Pennsylvania echoed those
sentiments, suggesting that the defining text was not the Constitution but the
Declaration of Independence, which clearly announced that it was “not
possible that one man should have property in person of another.”
¹¹