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.

Quote of the Day (George Washington, on a Standard for “The Wise and Honest’)

“If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.”—George Washington, Speech to the Constitutional Convention, as quoted by Gouverneur Morris in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Max Ferrand (1911)

Photo of the Day: Forgotten Founder

You’re looking at what I think may be the most approachable statue in our nation’s capital. I came across the George Mason Memorial by accident last November, when I was trying to reach the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. 

But I don’t think its subject, planter-patriot George Mason (1725-1792), would have minded in the least being in the shadow of the Tidal Basin monument to his fellow Virginian.

With no known painting from life existing of Mason, nobody knows how accurately this statue depicts the face and body of this all-but-forgotten major influence on the American Revolution and the early republic. 

But I can’t help but think that sculptor Wendy Ross has perfectly captured the personality that impressed virtually all who met him: friendly, engaged, but still, slightly removed from the world now visiting his doorstep. 

You have, after all, interrupted him in one of his favorite pursuits: reading in the garden that gave him a much-needed sense of tranquility. I photographed so much while down in Washington, but this particular image, I knew, was a necessity.

Mason’s vow to “risque the last Penny of my Fortune, and the last Drop of my Blood” for independence endeared him to younger patriots, including Washington, who saw him as a mentor, and Jefferson, who believed him to be "the wisest man of his generation." 

His most vibrant thought is echoed in this country’s seminal documents, notably this quote: "That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights…namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty…and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

Sound familiar? Jefferson did a masterful job of editing that until he made the words sing in the Declaration of Independence. 

But, as historian Pauline Maier showed in American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, it was Mason’s original words, in his May 1776 draft for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, that were embodied in the initial state constitutions that sought to sum up the ideals of freedom that led them to separate from England. 

Moreover, his willingness to walk out of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 over its refusal to include a Bill of Rights created unstoppable pressure that resulted in the eventual passage of the first 10 amendments.

The Virginia aristocrat embodied what we would nowadays call gravitas. Enormously adept at keeping his plantation profitable (a skill that would elude fellow Virginians Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe), he was treasurer of the Ohio Company, an organization that invested in land located in the Ohio River Valley, and an influential member of the vestry at Washington’s Truro Parish.

Philip Mazzei, an Italian doctor who met him in 1773, might have exaggerated somewhat in likening him to Dante, Machiavelli, Galileo, or Newton. But when you trace influences on the most influential men of the early republic, Mason’s name appears repeatedly on the short list.

The setting of Ross’s statue, dedicated in 2002, illustrates both why so many were drawn to Mason, and to an extent, why he repeatedly drew back. You might have caught him while he’s reading, but now he’ll be happy to explain why those two books to his left should matter to you. And yet…there’s something in reserve. He is, after all, leaning back.

So much conspired to keep Mason where he was, at his estate, Gunston Hall. The ingeniously landscaped grounds that he himself surveyed and laid out find their counterpart in the Tidal Basin memorial site I visited, which was created as a Victorian garden, then redesigned as a pansy garden in 1929.

The cane to Mason’s right at the memorial tips you off to something else that kept him largely stationary: his medical condition. 

Traveling from Virginia to Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention might not sound like much to us, but to someone like Mason, who suffered increasingly from gout as the years went by, the experience was enormously painful.

Pain of an emotional kind also plagued Mason in the revolutionary period: His wife of two decades died while bearing him a child in 1773. The widower, distraught over losing a woman he had come to cherish, also now found himself, he said, playing the role not just of father but also mother to his children. (Nine managed to survive to adulthood.)

In the end, Mason shied away from heavier involvement with politics because he sensed how much it would cost. Nowhere was this borne home more forcefully than in Philadelphia in 1787. He was bothered not just by the lack of a bill of rights, but by accommodations made to the slave states. 

Despite owning numerous slaves himself, Mason disliked this system in which “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant,” and he correctly predicted, “By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins, by national calamities.” 

He could not have been more dismayed, then, when the convention ignored his advice to ban the slave trade immediately, as South Carolina and Georgia worked out a deal with the New England States that the institution would not be touched another 20 years.

Mason’s vehement disagreement on this and the lack of a bill of rights led him to reject a document he had worked to support until near the end of deliberations. It also drove a wedge between him and Washington that lasted through Mason’s death in 1792.

The original memorial for Mason had envisioned only a round bas relief in his honor, but Ross won out with her proposal for a full-figure representation. Mason did not found a country, like Washington, or even a political party, like Jefferson, and so the sculptor has not created a demigod of the American civic religion or even a man on horseback. 

But the representation here is unique: a patriot who comes off as someone you would love to spend the afternoon chatting away with, by which time you were bound to be infected by his love of ideas and his passion for liberty.

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on Humor at the Constitutional Convention—or Lack of It)

“A good joke always distracted [New York delegate Gouverneur] Morris. The one story about him that everyone knows is about a humorous bet. At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton, a fellow delegate, offered to buy Morris dinner if he would go up to George Washington, president of the Convention, hero of the Revolution, and father of his country, slap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘My dear General, I am glad to see you looking so well.’ Morris slapped his slap and won his dinner, but said afterward that the look Washington gave him had been the worst moment of his life.”— Richard Brookhiser, “The Forgotten Founding Father,” City Journal, Spring 2002

Okay, even Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Jimmy Fallon would have a hard time loosening up ol’ George. But he was the indispensable presence at the Constitutional Convention, which, in Philadelphia on this date in 1787, after four months of debates, concluded with its 55 remaining delegates (some had dropped out, in opposition to the final product, already) signing the Constitution of the United States.

Gouverneur Morris, the convention’s wordsmith, wrote the clauses that would be cited for generations to come, and the Virginia delegate James Madison became known as the Father of the Constitution for the original plan that the delegates haggled over. 

But it was George Washington—so dignified, alas, that he was humorless, as poor Morris found out—who was the one everyone else framed the document around. He might not have wanted the job, but everyone knew that he would become the first President of the republic under this new plan to replace the Articles of Confederation. Would the new government be strong enough under him? The delegates debated, pondered—then voted accordingly.

I don’t think we need to be too upset about the lack of humor at the original proceedings, do you? The last 225 years have brought more than its share of levity from our nation’s representatives, even if they did so inadvertently. As Will Rogers remarked: “Things are terribly dull now. We won’t have any more serious comedy until Congress meets.”