The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (140 page)

The debates that followed were confused. The delegates may not have felt fatigue after reaching compromise on equality in the second branch, but they showed impatience. They also realized that much remained to be accomplished, and when agreement seemed impossible they pushed ahead to fresh resolutions. Before they adjourned on July 26, for ten days, in order to give a committee of detail -- surely an illchosen name -- time to pull together a constitution in the rough, they managed to make several important decisions. To James Madison's dismay, they tossed out his cherished notion of a congressional veto of state laws. They also decided that the judiciary should be appointed by the upper house, another decision unsatisfactory to Madison; and they agreed that provisions should be made for amendment of the constitution. Ellsworth and Paterson, in a revival of their earlier partnership, argued that the state legislatures should ratify whatever constitution the Convention drafted. Madison argued for popular ratification and carried the Convention with him.

Throughout the last days of July, when these matters came up, the Convention returned over and over again to the definition of the executive.
No clear alignments persisted throughout the convoluted discussions

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and votes of these days. There were consistent lines of argument, however: Madison and Wilson strongly urged election by the people, or at least election by some body of electors chosen by the people. Madison also argued strongly for giving the authority to revise laws to the executive and a part of the judiciary. His and Wilson's reasons hinged on their conviction that the national legislature would likely encroach on all other authority and would be an "overmatch for them" even if they. did cooperate. As Madison' saw things: "Experience in all the States had evinced a powerful tendency in the Legislature to absorb all power into its vortex. This was the Teal source of danger to the American Constitutions; and suggested the necessity of giving every defensive authority to the other departments that was consistent with republican principles." Ellsworth, who did not agree with Madison on the method of election, agreed with him on executive and judicial cooperation.
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There were by previous standards other curious alignments until finally on July 26, the Convention put the results of its agreements and disagreements into the hands of the committee of detail. This group was charged to draft a constitution which conformed to the decisions already taken in the Convention. It had also to reckon with the "decisions" the Convention had been unable to make, including several about the executive. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney also delivered his own charge, a warning that if the committee failed to find a way of preventing the emancipation of slaves and the taxation of slaves, his state would withhold its support. The Convention listened politely and then carefully selected a committee which included Pinckney's colleague John Rutledge, who served as chairman of the group. The other members were Randolph, Gorham, Ellsworth, and James Wilson.
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The committee of detail reported on August 6 as scheduled. It apparently had worked together without major disagreements. Randolph and Wilson seem to have written most of the report, a document which in rough became the Constitution after further revision. The committee of detail had heeded C. C. Pinckney's warning not to tamper with slavery. The seventh article of the report contained a flat injunction against prohibiting the importation of persons. As far as the rest of the report was concerned, the committee had drawn on the Virginia Plan and earlier decisions of the Convention, and it had incorporated the powers of Congress set forth in the Articles of Confederation. It had also added a number of ideas of its own and ignored one of the most important

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of the Convention's: the general grant of power to Congress which Bedford had moved. Still, the Congress as envisioned by the committee would not lack authority -- it could tax just about as it wished except that direct taxes must be in proportion to a census, a requirement also intended to protect slavery. Congress was also authorized "to make all laws that shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution" the powers it and the government were vested with.
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Although the Convention modified portions of the report, it responded generally with favor. It left intact the structure of government recommended by the committee, and it accepted the enumeration of powers, though it would do much more about legislative power in following weeks. What the Convention refused to do may have been almost as important as any of its responses to the report. The committee of detail had recommended that the electors of the lower house be the same as those choosing the more numerous branch of the states' legislatures. Gouverneur Morris feared or professed to fear that this provision invited tyranny. "The time is not distant," Morris argued, "when this Country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers." Morris doubted that these workers could resist the opportunity of selling their votes to the rich who would set themselves up as an aristocracy. To forestall this development Morris urged that the suffrage be confined to freeholders, men of property -- "the best guardians of liberty," as John Dickinson, who agreed, called thern.
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The association of liberty with property had long found approval in England and America, and it proved hard at first for the Convention to resist Morris's amendment. Wilson and Ellsworth disputed Morris's claims at once, joined soon by Mason and Rutledge. Madison seemed for a time unable to make up his mind but he did state that on "its merits alone, the freeholders of the country would be the safest depositories, of republican liberty." What prevented Madison from voting for Morris's proposal may have been a feeling that the ordinary people of the nation would be repelled by it and would then reject the constitution. Benjamin Franklin helped reinforce this notion in an effective answer to Morris. Franklin reminded the Convention of the people's "virtue and public spirit" which, he said, had contributed so much to the winning of the war. Debate stopped soon after Franklin spoke, and Morris's motion was rejected.
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This decision on the suffrage did not consume much time. Yet it involved a revealing set of motives and premises. It drew on republican theory; it elicited short analyses of the American people and predictions of what they might become; it also forced the delegates to consider how politics actually worked. Was there anything else below the surface? A regard for property and a class bias surely were; they indeed inhered in republican theory.

All of these dispositions, motives, and concerns figured in the review of the rest of the report. By this time the delegates understood one another well, and for the most part they found explaining their assumptions unnecessary. They pushed through a variety of recommendations, accepting some, changing many, and postponing a try at cracking apparently uncrackable nuts. In the final week of August they put together another compromise, one that left them feeling uneasy and perhaps guilty.

The committee of detail had proposed that Congress be prohibited from taxing importations of slaves. As had become the practice of the Convention, the committee had not used the word "slave" but everyone understood which "persons" the committee had in mind in recommending the prohibition. The committee had also included a clause providing that no navigation act should be passed without the assent of two-thirds of the members present in each house.
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The barrier against taxing the slave trade was intended to ease the not-so-tender sensibilities of South Carolinian and Georgian planters. One of the Carolinians warned the Convention in the discussion that neither the Carolinas nor Georgia would approve the constitution if the slave trade were not protected. No doubt C. C. Pinckney and perhaps others as well were issuing similar threats. Whether such predictions were really necessary to obtain protection of the trade is doubtful. The Convention knew that it was near the end of its work, and its spirit was by this time very much in accord with compromise. Still there were members who felt revulsion at any concessions to slavery. Most who did seem to have said so. Rufus King, by this time thoroughly disenchanted with catering to planters' interests, contained his anger and remarked only of the injustice of protecting one sort of property. John Dickinson was considerably blunter. George Mason reckoned the costs of indulging the slave interests in providential terms, saying that slave masters were petty tyrants.
"They bring the judgment of heaven

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on a Country. As Nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." These words undoubtedly came from Mason's conscience -- he himself owned slaves and lived off their labor. But Mason was a Virginian, and his state, which currently had a surplus of slaves, would profit by selling them southward should the importation be stopped. The Carolinians were convinced, as C. C. Pinckney said a few weeks later, that deprived of slaves, South Carolina would soon be a "desert waste." Pinckney questioned whether Mason and the Virginians opposed the trade from principle -- or from purse.
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Concern for purse was not confined to the deep southern states. Northern business would have been affected by the requirement of two-thirds approval for navigation acts, and so might southern planters with staples to sell. The southerners feared that a Congress controlled by the North might bar foreign ships from carrying American trade and that without such competition American shippers would plunder the southerners. Northern delegates naturally considered the proposed two-thirds provision to be unfair -- it gave a veto to a minority in the southern states.

Given the mood of the Convention a compromise was almost inevitable, and in this last week of August it was concluded. A provision against any prohibition of the slave trade before 1808 was agreed to, and, a few days later, the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia supported a change to a simple majority for passage of navigation acts. At the time of the concession to the advocates of the slave trade, Madison remarked laconically: "Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves." Gouverneur Morris's comment had more bite: he was for making the clause read that "importation of slaves into North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia shall not be prohibited." Luther Martin laid bare the savage irony of the situation -- a people opposing Great Britain's attempts to enslave them now take measures to assure themselves a supply of slaves, all the while claiming freedom on the grounds of the natural rights of mankind. But Madison's final judgment a few months later that "Great as the evil is, a dismemberment of the union would be worse" -- was more persuasive to most white Americans.
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On August 31, two days after beating back an attempt to untie this arrangement, the Convention selected a committee on unfinished parts

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