This Day in Federal History (Compromise-Carved Constitution Signed)

Sept. 17, 1787—After meeting for nearly four months behind closed doors amid a muggy Philadelphia summer, 38 of 41 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed a document nearly all had grave reservations about, including the two men that later generations would hail as its “father” and “author.” But all clung to the hope that the institutions set up for the new government—an untried experiment in federalism, blending central and state government—would cool the unruly passions of men.

There is no federal holiday celebrating the U.S. Constitution, as there is for the Declaration of Independence. It is far from a perfect state paper. But were it not for the Constitution and the relative stability it created, Americans would probably be in no position to recall the Declaration at all, and if it did not ensure a “more perfect union,” it allowed the young republic to continually move toward it.

Just about the one point of agreement among the delegates meeting in the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) was that the new federal government would be in good hands in the short run because of the man expected to lead it as President—the same man who had presided over their often stormy confab, George Washington. 

The Revolutionary War hero was almost revered because of his sense of resolution throughout the war, his refusal to become a king or dictator afterward, and his good judgment at all times. The delegates feared that too much power vested in the office of the Presidency would tempt demagogues to exploit recent outbursts of mass discontent such as Shays’ Rebellion, but also did not want to restrain the President so much that Washington would be impotent to lead the new government.

“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications,” Alexander Hamilton, one of New York’s delegates at the Constitution, wrote in The Federalist Papers. Within a dozen years, he felt so alarmed that events were already undercutting this optimistic contention that he persuaded Federalists in the House of Representatives to support Thomas Jefferson—with whom he had clashed repeatedly over the prior decade over the direction of the government—rather than Aaron Burr, whom he had come to regard as utterly unprincipled.

(I myself will make no comment on the worthiness of the current occupant of the White House, other than to direct the reader’s attention to a Slate article this past spring, whose title and subtitle say volumes: “Trump Is a Stress Test for Democracy; We Are Failing.”)

Much of the uneasiness felt about the Constitution by the men who created and signed it—as well as those attendees who could not support it in the end—stemmed from what it was: from first to last, an elaborate series of compromises. Nobody got all that they wanted, including the Virginia delegate who was its prime mover, James Madison. Worried that the new federal government would not have the authority to overrule state legislation, he pessimistically predicted to his Virginia friend Thomas Jefferson that the new plan, “should it be adopted will neither effectually answer its national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which every where excite disgusts agst the state governments.”

For all his misgivings about the final form of the new government, no other Founding Father has been associated more with its creation than Madison, the “Father of the Constitution.” It wasn’t just that he proposed the so-called Virginia Plan desiring proportional representation, which would benefit large states such as his own. 

No, Madison also had created a painstaking list of the problems with the Articles of Confederation ("Vices of the Political System of the United States") that served as a point of comparison with the desired government he and others wanted; he spoke more than 100 times during the proceedings; he secretly kept detailed notes on the secret debates among the delegates that serve as historians' primary source of what went on; he interpreted the document (along with Hamilton and John Jay) in The Federalist Papers; and, as Secretary of State and President within the next generation, he applied what he learned.

Over 30 years after the convention, John Quincy Adams, disgusted by one of its compromises—the refusal to confront the evil of slavery—groused privately in his diary, “The Constitution is a compact with Hell, and a life devoted to its destruction would be a life well spent.” About the best that can be said of the framers’ work on this point is that events would nudge politicians to discover a solution that they couldn’t.

One delegate who dared to broach the matter of slavery was Madison’s fellow member on the convention’s Committee of Style, Gouverneur Morris. Most people know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; far fewer know that Morris had the same task with the Constitution. 

He was, in many ways, Madison’s polar opposite. While  Madison was reticent, serious, and painfully shy around women,  Morris was urbane, humorous, and a ladies’ man. No delegates spoke more often at the convention than Morris. 

The two men had deep, serious disagreements: Madison charged Morris with desiring a monarchy in the United States, while Morris, during the War of 1812, felt so strongly that President Madison had initiated the conflict to enlarge the lands of Southern slaveholding states that he supported the Hartford Convention, a foolhardy attempt to hasten the secession of New York and New England.

Nevertheless, even Madison felt it necessary to acknowledge the Pennsylvania delegate’s role in the final document. “The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris,” wrote Madison. “A better choice could not have been made.”

One telling exhibit of Morris’ craftsmanship: The draft supplied by the Committee of Detail simply began: “We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts . . . ” and so on, through Georgia. Morris pared it down to the simple, but crucially important words, “We the people of the United States.” 

It was not simply an enormous stylistic improvement, but an essential statement on the source of sovereignty in the new republic. In other words, the nation derived its authority not merely from a confederation of individual states that might leave at any time, but from the ordinary citizens who gave rise to the states--and who could not so easily depart.