The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (141 page)

to bring in a report on still unresolved questions. Included among these questions was a recommendation of the committee of detail that Congress receive power

to provide, as may become necessary, from time to time, for the well managing and securing the common property and general interests and welfare of the United States in such manner as shall not interfere with the Governments of individual States in matters which respect only their internal Police, or for which their individual authorities may be competent.
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This grant was immense. It summed up earlier proposals by Madison and Sherman, and the already approved resolution by Bedford. The committee on unfinished parts had to decide whether to include this clause in the general enumeration of Congressional powers or to set a more modest limit. It had also to consider how taxing authority should be defined, for what purposes, who should originate money bills, the powers of the Senate, and the method of selecting the President.

This last problem had already vexed the convention for weeks -- both Madison and Wilson agreed that it had caused more heartburn than anything else -- and it continued to undergo discussion. The committee made its recommendations on it and the other questions in the early days of September. The President, it said, should be elected by the people through an electoral college, serve for four years, and be eligible for re-election. Should no candidate receive a majority, the Senate should choose from the five receiving the most votes. The committee cut the Senate down to size by proposing that it not make treaties and choose Supreme Court judges and ambassadors, responsibilities the Convention had seemed determined to vest it with. Nor would the Senate be permitted to originate money bills although it might amend them. The massive grant of power to do virtually all things in the name of the general welfare was quietly discarded, replaced by a narrower but still powerful authorization. This grant pertained to the authority of Congress to spend and lend: "The legislature shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States."
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This wording made its way into the Constitution as did the other solutions proposed by the committee.
The one important revision of

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the committee's work concerned the method of electing the President. By this time the electoral college had won acceptance, but disagreement persisted over who should act if it was unable to reach a majority. The committee on unfinished parts had recommended that the Senate choose, a recommendation acceptable to most of the small-state delegates. After further discussion and much unsuccessful maneuvering the convention apparently was swayed by Mason and Wilson who argued that giving the Senate this power would create "an aristocracy worse than absolute monarchy." Roger Sherman suggested a way out of this tangle: election by the House of Representatives, each state delegation casting one vote.
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The most important work of the Convention was completed by September 8, when one more committee was chosen -- a committee of style and arrangement -- charged to revise the mass of articles into the coherent form of a constitution. Madison and Alexander Hamilton both sat on this committee, but the real work was done by Gouverneur Morris, who had the pen of a gifted editor. Morris slashed the accumulation of excess words, reorganized those remaining, and rewrote the Preamble. When he and the committee were done, they discovered that they had satisfied the Convention, a body not easily satisfied.
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On September 17, the delegates signed. George Mason, still unhappy over the decision to drop the two-thirds requirement for the passage of navigation acts, refused as did Edmund Randolph and Elbridge Gerry. Randolph explained that without promise of another convention which would consider amendments he would have to withhold his signature, although he had not decided on whether to oppose or support ratification. Gerry's reasons do not seem entirely clear; a sympathetic account of his refusal lays it to his belief that the Constitution was not appropriate to a republican people.
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The others did not agree and signed, apparently sharing a hope that ratification might follow without difficulty. Ratification was given in the next nine months, but not without difficulty and a certain amount of strain. Perhaps the difficulty was inevitable. On the whole it was minor, given what the Americans had already overcome.

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What had happened in the Constitutional Convention? A fairly common opinion in 1787 had it that there had been a withdrawal of the original commitment to the principles of the American Revolution. Those of this persuasion pointed out that the Constitution virtually destroyed the old Confederation of sovereign states and replaced it with what they called "consolidated" government. In this government, power and sovereignty lay at the center -- not in the individual states. In the year following the close of the federal Convention there were to be many variations on the meaning of consolidation.

Since 1787 many historians have expanded these opinions, and describe the Constitution as the expression of a conservative movement. Not many any longer' see it as the product of a conspiracy by holders of public securities, all bent on lining their own pockets and those of their class. Perhaps more argue that in the Constitution an elite established a frame of government which, for a short time at least, successfully curbed a growing democracy. The Constitution in this interpretation was a conservative response to a profound move toward democracy stimulated by the Revolution. In 1776, we are told, the democracy captured the Revolution and proclaimed its great principles. In the process, democratic political arrangements were fashioned, in particular the state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation. These institutions and the ideals they embodied presumably all revolved around the premise that sovereignty lay in the people. The historians who detect a democracy surging into public life in 1776 insist that the years from 1776 to 1781 saw the Revolution defined, and they judge all that took place afterwards

against those years, against what they presume to be the true standard of revolutionary action.

This argument is parochial and in some ways ahistorical, presuming as it does to lay down a norm against which later history is rendered invalid. For the Revolution was a complex set of events taking place over almost thirty years, events which in fact went through a number of phases. To assume that one phase is more "revolutionary," or more "conservative," than another inhibits understanding of them all.

Once independence was won and peace made, revolutionary issues changed. The period before 1783 had one set of problems, all connected to establishing independence. The period following concerned many of the same problems, especially of how free men should govern themselves. Yet these periods differ too -- a war dominated the years between 1775 and 1783, a war with its own imperatives and objectives. Everyone recognized that some of the methods of governance resorted to in war were not suitable for peace. Thus, though the problems after the war look similar to those of the earlier years, concerning as they did governance, they were in fact different because they occurred in a context of peace. It is true that in the 1780s Americans had to face problems inherited from the war, but independence and peace put these problems in a new setting.

When the war ended, men of affairs -- merchants, lawyers, large farmers, and planters -- were running the Congress, the state legislatures, and the army. They were men of vision and not without passion, but the concern for a virtuous republic probably was not as prominent in their minds as it had been earlier, or as it had been in the minds of the likes of Samuel Adams. Rather, efficiency in commerce and energy in government seemed almost as important as virtue -- and essential to it. Their vision, perhaps their dreams, now focused on large organizations, including the nation, and the power that these organizations could muster. Their preoccupations were natural given the problems that remained from the war and given their own experience in government, especially in the Congress and the army.

Such men wrote the Constitution. They did so in a mood marked by disenchantment. For the delegates shared the widespread suspicion that virtue might be in flight from a deteriorating America. But they were not devoid of hope based on the American achievements of the previous thirty years. These achievements remained so dazzling that few if any among the delegates were disposed to give up an equally powerful conviction that the American experiment in republicanism would yield a great example to,the world.

These complex attitudes give evidence of the persistence of Protestant and Whiggish values which had saturated American atmospheres in the 1760s and up to at least 1779. They testify as well to the strength of the old morality and its power to shape perceptions of politics. For public life in the 1780s, as before the war, was understood to derive its health from the morality of the people. A virtuous people, most Americans agreed, were a people who valued frugality, despised luxury, hated corruption, and preferred moderation and balance to extremes of any sort, especially in the orders of society. Above all else they were a people who retained a sense of responsibility to public interests even when those interests clashed with private purposes.

The slackening in these old standards and the lust for private gain that seemed to follow the war convinced the delegates to the Convention that a reordering of American government was necessary. Their disillusionment with the people's behavior forced them to admit to themselves the truth of a previously inadmissible proposition: the people themselves might be the source of tyranny. This recognition marked the appearance of a new realism in American constitutionalism which, like the radical Whig ideology at its center, had been prone, at least early in the Revolution, to idolize the people. This older version of Whig thought had conceived of the problem of politics as the opposition of the ruler to the ruled. How, this politics asked, was the ruler to be controlled, for if he were not controlled he would become a tyrant. Now in the 178os, and most clearly in the Constitutional Convention, a new source of tyranny was identified -- the people themselves.

Along with the new realism about politics went a new realism about society. The older Whig theory had assumed that because the people were one, all their interests were the same. From this assumption came all the facile talk about the public good, as if the people had only one thing on their minds. During the war political thought began to accommodate itself to the existence of interest groups, factions in eighteenthcentury parlance, and thereby gained an unusual accuracy. At the Convention, James Madison spelled out the sources of faction and argued that in a large and complicated nation factionalism could be made to protect private rights. Madison's brilliant insight anticipated the course of two hundred years of American political life. He attained this prophetic accuracy at least in part because he saw deeply into the nature of the society that had emerged from the Revolutionary War.