Made In America (12 page)

In not quite four months these thirty or so men created a framework for government that has lasted us to this day and was like nothing seen before. From 25 May to 17 September they worked in session five hours a day, six days a week, and often for long hours outside of that. It was, as Page Smith has put it with perhaps no more than a blush of hyperbole, ‘the most remarkable example of sustained intellectual discourse in history’.
¹⁸
It is certainly no exaggeration to say that never before nor since has any gathering of Americans shown a more dazzling array of talent and of preparedness. Madison’s background reading included the histories of Polybius, the orations of Demosthenes, Plutarch’s
Lives,
Fortune Barthélemy de Felice’s thirteen-volume
Code de I’Humanité
in the original French, and much, much else. Alexander Hamilton in a single speech bandied about references to the Amphictyonic Councils of ancient Greece and the Delian Confederacy. These were men who knew their stuff.

And they were great enough to put aside their differences. In the space of a single uncomfortable summer they created the foundations of American government: the legislature, the presidency, the courts, the system of checks and balances, the whole intricate framework of democracy – a legacy that is all the more arresting when you consider that almost to a man they were against democracy in anything like the modern sense.

For a time they actually considered creating a monarchy, albeit one elected by the legislature. So real did this prospect seem that a rumour – quite without foundation – swept the colonies that the position was to be offered to the Duke of York, George III’s second son. In fact, the idea of a monarch was quickly deemed incompatible with a republic. Alexander Hamilton suggested as an alternative a president and senate elected for life from men of property, with absolute power
over the states.
¹⁹
Edmund Randolph preferred that the presidency be shared among three men, to give the executive office greater collective wisdom and less scope for despotism, sectionalism and corruption.
²⁰
(The prospect of corruption worried them mightily.) Almost all envisioned an America ruled by a kind of informal aristocracy of propertied gentlemen – men much like themselves, in fact. So distant from their thinking was the idea of an open democracy that when James Wilson of Pennsylvania moved that the executive be chosen by popular vote, the delegates ‘were entirely dumbfounded’. In the end they threw the matter of electing a President to the states, creating an electoral college and leaving each state to decide whether its collegial delegates would be chosen by the people or by the legislature.

In a spirit of compromise, they decreed that the House of Representatives would be chosen by the people, and the Senate by the states, an arrangement that remained in force until 1912 when senators at last were popularly elected. In the matter of the Vice-Presidency they decided – unwisely with the benefit of hindsight – that the job should fall to whoever came second in the Presidential poll. It seemed the fair thing to do, but it failed to take into account the distinct possibility that the Vice-President might represent a rival faction to that of the President. In 1804 the practice was abandoned and the custom of electing a two-man slate adopted.

When most of the rudiments were agreed, the delegates appointed a Committee of Detail to put their proposals on paper. One of the committee members, John Rutledge, was an admirer of the Iroquois, and recommended that the committee familiarize itself with the treaty of 1520 that had created the Iroquois confederacy. It begins: ‘We, the people, to form a union ...‘
²¹
These were of course essentially the very words they chose:

After this simple statement of intent, there follow seven Articles, six of which set out – sometimes sketchily, sometimes with fastidious detail – the mechanisms of government, with a seventh announcing that the document would take effect once it had been ratified by nine states. (A number not chosen lightly; the delegates thought it doubtful that more than nine states would ratify.)

At just twenty-five pages, the Constitution is a model of concision. (The state constitution of Oklahoma, by contrast, is 158 pages long.
²²
On some matters it was explicit and forthright – on the age and citizenship requirements for senators, representatives and the President, and most especially on the matter of impeachment. The framers seemed cautious almost to the point of paranoia about providing instructions for how to depose those found to be disloyal or corrupt. However, on other matters it was curiously vague. There was no mention of a cabinet, for instance. It mandated the setting up of a Supreme Court, independent from the other branches, but then rather airily decreed that the rest of the judiciary should consist of ‘such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish’. Sometimes this vagueness was a consequence of oversight and sometimes of an inability to arrive at a more specific compromise. Where it was specific, it almost always left room for later change. After decreeing that Congress should assemble at least once a year, beginning on the first Monday in December, it thoughtfully added ‘unless they shall by law appoint a different day’. The upshot is that the
Constitution is an extraordinarily adaptable set of ground rules.

In terms of its composition, surprisingly few oddities of spelling and syntax stand out. Three words are spelled in the British style,
behaviour, labour
and
defence,
but not
tranquillity,
which even in 1787 was being given a single l in America. Only once is there an inconsistency of spelling –
empeachments
in one paragraph and
impeachment
in the next – and only two other words are spelled in an archaic way:
chuse
and
encreased.
The opening sentence contains a double superlative (’more perfect’), which might not survive the editing process today, though it was unexceptionable enough at the time. The occasional appearance of a discordant article and noun combination (’an uniform’), a rather more fastidious use of the subjunctive (’before it become a law’, ‘if he approve he shall sign it’), the occasional capitalization of nouns that would now be lower-cased (’our Posterity’), and the treating of ‘the United States’ as a plural (it would remain so treated until about the time of the Civil War),
²³
more or less exhaust the list of distinctions.

The Constitution is more notable for what it does not include. The words
nation
and
national
appear nowhere in the document, and not by accident or oversight. The delegates carefully replaced the words wherever they appeared. They feared that
national
smacked of a system in which power was dangerously centralized. They instead used the more neutral and less emotive
federal,
derived from the Latin
fides,
’faith’, and in the eighteenth century still carrying the sense of a relationship resting on trust.
²⁴

The other part of the Constitution with which we are most familiar, the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, came later. They were not adopted until 1791 (and in the case of Massachusetts not until 150 years later, when it was discovered that their ratification had been accidentally overlooked). These guarantees of basic freedoms were as
radical and novel as anything that preceded them – even now Britain has no bill of rights, but then it has no written constitution either – but it is worth bearing in mind that the framers often meant something quite different by them. Consider the wording of the first Amendment: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble ...’
^*15
Note in particular those first five words: ‘Congress shall make no law...’ The founders were not trying to free America from such restrictions, but merely endeavouring to ensure that matters of censorship and personal liberty were left to the states.
²⁵
And at the risk of exciting correspondence from the National Rifle Association, the much vaunted right of the people to keep and bear arms was never intended as a carte blanche, semi-divine injunction to invest in a private arsenal for purposes of sport and personal defence, as the full sentence makes clear: ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.’ The framers had in mind only the necessity of raising a defence force at short notice. If they did favour the idea of keeping guns for shooting animals and household intruders, they never said so,

Astonishingly, at the time of its adoption almost no one saw the Constitution as a great document. Most of the delegates left Philadelphia feeling that they had created an agreement so riddled with compromise as to be valueless – ‘a weak and worthless fabric’, as Alexander Hamilton dispiritedly described it. Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Patrick Henry were all opposed. Fifteen of the convention delegates refused to sign it, among them George Mason,
Elbridge Gerry and even two of the five men who had written it, Edmund Randolph and Oliver Elsworth. (Randolph soon showed an even more breathtaking measure of hypocrisy by accepting the post as the nation’s first attorney general, thus becoming the man most directly in charge of upholding the document he had lately disowned.) Even its heartiest proponents hoped for no more than that the Constitution might somehow hold the fragile nation together for a few years until something better could be devised.
²⁶

None the less, the document was duly ratified, Washington was selected as the first President, and 4 March 1789 was chosen as the day to begin the new government. Unfortunately, only eight senators and thirteen representatives troubled to show up on the first day. Another twenty-six days would have to pass before the House of Representatives could muster a quorum and even longer before the Senate could find enough willing participants to begin productive work.
²⁷

One of the first orders of business was what to call the new Chief Executive. The Constitution had referred to ‘the President of the United States’, but such had been the pomp and costly splendour of Washington’s inauguration and so stately the demeanour of the new office-holder as to encourage Congress to consider a title with a grander ring to it. Among the suggestions were
His Highness, His Mightiness, His Magistracy, His Supremacy,
and
His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.
This last was the title very nearly chosen before the Congressmen returned to their senses, and the original wording of the Constitution, and settled for the respectful but republican
President of the United States.
Even so, Martha was often referred to as ‘Lady Washington’.

The Vice-Presidency seems to have caused no such difficulty, though some among the droller elements of Congress joked that the first incumbent, the portly John Adams, should be referred to as ‘His Rotundity’.

Washington was a firm believer in the dignity of his office. Visitors were expected to remain standing in his presence and even his closest associates found him aloof and disquietingly kingly in his deportment (leading one to wonder if America had exchanged George III for George I). To be fair to Washington, he had to establish from the outset that a President should be treated with utmost respect. In the early days of his presidency people would actually wander in off the street, to wish him luck or ask how things were going. (Eventually, he hit on a system whereby twice a week he set aside time during which any ‘respectably dressed person’ could come and see him.) He was acutely aware that he was setting patterns of executive behaviour that would live beyond him. ‘There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent,’ he wrote a trifle gloomily. After sitting through hours of inconclusive debates in the Senate, he fled, muttering that he ‘would be damned’ if he ever subjected himself to such unproductive tedium again, and since that time no American President has taken part in legislative debates, a striking departure from British practice, though there is nothing in the Constitution to forbid it.
²⁸

One of the more intractable myths of this period is that Congress (or the Constitutional Convention itself) considered adopting German as the national language. The story has been repeated so often, by so many respectable writers, that it has nearly attained the status of received wisdom.
^*16
So let me say this clearly: it is wholly without foundation. In 1789, 90 per cent of America’s four million inhabitants were of
English descent. The idea that they would in an act of petulance impose on themselves a foreign tongue is clearly risible. The only known occasion on which German was ever an issue was in 1795 when the House of Representatives briefly considered a proposal to publish federal laws in German as well as in English as a convenience to recent immigrants and the proposal was defeated.
²⁹
Indeed, as early as 1778, the Continental Congress decreed that messages to foreign emissaries be issued ‘in the language of the United States’.
³⁰

However, considerable thought
was
given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that
United States of America
was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a
United Statesian
or some other such clumsy locution, or an
American,
thereby arrogating to US citizens a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternative possibilities were considered – the
United States of Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania,
and
Freedonia
or
Fredonia
(whose denizens would be called
Fredes)
– but none found sufficient support to displace the prevailing title.
³¹