The Founders Flee to Philadelphia
In early May, 1787, George Washington, well tailored and
well appointed, stepped into a fine coach, bid a farewell to his beloved Mount
Vernon, and, attended by three men, headed for Philadelphia for a Convention
that would change the course of American history.
We are at a moment in time where the viability of the new
American nation is at risk. The War for
Independence has been won, but the British are not exactly rushing to get
out of town (or country). The government
envisioned by the original Articles of the Confederation really doesn’t work,
and the major movers in the country (Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton,
Madison, John Jay, etc.) all know it.
The national currency, such as there is one, is basically worthless
script. There is no ability as a nation to do much of anything
collectively, because each state guards its own priorities and privileges—and
those priorities do not include giving up much power to a central government.
Not everyone agrees that something has to be done. It has taken many months to even get people
to come to a convention—and the word “Constitutional” is so fraught for some
states that it can’t really be used.
But, eventually, enough of them buy into the idea that they are willing
to send representatives—if for no other reason to make sure that not one iota
of their authority is in any way abridged.
Washington’s trip is filled with irony from the start. The three men escorting him north are not
really whole men at all, at least in the eyes of the law. All three are slaves—his personal manservant,
a coachman, and a groom. One wonders
what thoughts might have been going through their minds, or how they might have
felt when they learned that the leading men of the country had assigned their
lives a 3/5 value.
But this one moment, with Washington being helped into his
coach by his liveried servants, bidding farewell to his plantation, with its
more than 300 slaves, on his way to help define the way that you and I, our cities
and states and national government interact with each other, tells you some
absolutely critical things about the very people we ascribe mystical powers to,
“The Founders.”
First, a majority of
them were slaveholders. Franklin, who
formed an anti-slavery society earlier in the eighteenth century, notably was
not. But owning slaves was the norm, and
it was not just the planter class—in no place in America were slaves barred,
and the economic value of slavery extended beyond the Southern States to the
great port cities of the Mid-Atlantic and North . We New Yorkers like to think
of ourselves as enlightened—but it wasn’t until 1799 (after, if you are
counting, both the Revolution and the Constitution) when we adopted a gradual emancipation plan—to be completely
effective by 1827. And New Yorkers did
reasonably well. New Hampshire and New
Jersey didn’t formally outlaw it until 1865. Salary and the slave economy was
pervasive. And, the very idea of
equality among races (political, economic, or social) was unthinkable.
Second, they were men.
Women didn’t always have full property rights, much less voting
rights. At Mount Vernon itself, over
half the staff were “dower-slaves” that were owned by Martha Washington’s first
husband, who died without a Will.
Washington freed his slaves on his death. When Martha passed, her 200 or so dower souls
reverted back to the Custis Estate, to be distributed amongst his heirs. The political rights they would be arguing
over had little application to women.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, they were largely
aristocrats and men of wealth, and certainly men of power. Whatever our mythology about the Revolution
leading to democracy and the rise of the individual as a citizen with equal
rights, with marvelous pictures of great orators rising in defense of the
common man, our form of government was negotiated by people who were largely
deciding how to allocate power amongst themselves and their states.
This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because self-interest largely
became a proxy for the general welfare. Even the most aristocratic among them
recognized that the rights they were negotiating for themselves would also
apply to a broad swathe of the citizenry—not all of it, not Africans, not
women, but certainly free white men.
But, what did they really want? The best way to think about what went on in
the Convention, and afterwards, is to think about our political system as roughly
a capital I, with power flowing both horizontally and vertically
The vertical axis is defined by the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to
the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
The top
horizontal bar contains the three branches of Federal government, the Executive,
the Congress and the Judiciary. The
bottom bar consists of “the people” with certain enumerated rights, that have
largely come to be defined by the Bill of Rights, Amendments 1-10. In those Amendments are expressed the ones we
tend to revere--things like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, prohibitions
against unlawful search a seizures, rights to a fair trial, gun rights.
But,
at the moment the Convention began, these rights, these power, and these interlocking
duties didn’t really exist in a single document, nor was there any agreement on
even basic principles. Americans had a
general sense of what they wanted as people, which roughly translated to what
they thought were the rights of Englishmen, without the monarchy. And they had
a basic idea of what they expected in government. As to lawmaking, they had a
vague idea of a legislature, drawing from their own state legislatures, and
from the English tradition of bicameralism, but even there, how much power each
house should have, where bills should originate, what type of representation
there should be, who should choose those representatives, and the ratio of
representatives to states was the source of both confusion and real debate. Finally, most thought there was some need for
an executive of some type, but what kind of Executive, how much power he should
have (or even whether there should be a single one) was hotly debated. They had just rid themselves of a despotic
King. They weren’t about to embrace
another.
And
yet, enough people knew there to be change.
The potential for a great nation, even a new empire (bear in mind that
we had barely gone as far as Ohio) was there—enormous tracts of land that gave
opportunity for those without a lot, but willing to work hard. Tremendous natural resources, water, timber,
furs, fish. It was all there, as was the
remarkable energy and ambition of a restless population. It needed structure and infrastructure, and a
government ready to deliver on it.
The
time was ripe for a Constitutional Convention—enough people knew they had to
move forward and take a chance. But
could the representatives put aside their own ambitions, and parochial
concerns?
That
was the unanswered question when Washington arrived in Philadelphia on May 15,
1787, in his fine clothes, his manly bearing, his perfect manners, his slaves
in tow.
He
was greeted, and feted and praised and clucked over.
The
bickering soon followed.
May
15, 2015
Michael
Liss (Moderate Moderator)
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