CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE & "RESISTANCE" -A Symposium: Charles Beard and The Founding Fathers
Hofstadter, Richard
We are pleased to print below three sections from a forthcoming book tentatively entitled The Progressive Historians: Beard, Turner, Farrington, to be published by Alfred Knopf in...
...When one realizes that, in a society in which the revolutionary debt loomed so large, any merchant of substance and of cosmopolitan interests was likely to hold some public paper, one recognizes that support for the Constitution by many public creditors was a function of their mercantile position, not of their concern about their security holdings...
...which would protect substantial property rights and provide a check on a simple legislative majority, was a sound ingredient in a balanced government...
...But they never imagined that the evils of society could be cured by eliminating the popular voice from government...
...When men thought about civic events, they thought not simply about the state of their own accounts but of the state of New Jersey or Georgia, and often the two were intertwined...
...But if both sets of leaders were skeptical of popular legislative majorities and in favor of checks and balances, Beard's concentration on the Federalists alone for their views on the subject makes little historical sense...
...The longer they talked about their problems, the more respectful their references to "the people" became...
...IN SHORT, THE FOUNDING FATHERS were not democrats in the sense that many Populists and Progressives were a hundred years afterward: they neither practiced nor professed the social and philosophical egalitarianism that had become widespread by Beard's day...
...The Antifederalists performed an indispensable function—that of seeing to it that the Constitution received a thorough and demanding scrutiny—and won a major victory on one count, their demand for the inclusion of a bill of rights, on which their arguments seem far more impressive than those of their opponents...
...The central political idea behind the Constitution was a variation of the ancient idea of balanced government...
...This will help us to remember that what we say about the relation of the Constitution to democracy elevates the problem of democracy to a position it did not have in the minds either of the Constitution's friends or its foes...
...No one of any consequence in America doubted that government should be based upon consent, that it was responsible to the people...
...They were eager to see the British get out of the northwestern posts, and would have considered it a good trade to get a national government that could win this end at the cost of getting some of the planters to pay their repudiated debts to British merchants...
...Democracy might mean simply the ancient idea of direct government—the people assembling without the intermediation of representatives to pass on issues of state...
...Since there was no power to impose a tariff or regulate commerce, or tax the citizens directly or levy troops, the fiscal power of the Confederation and its power to negotiate with other nations were badly crippled...
...It is also true that, in their whole approach to the problem of representation the Antifederalists were raising an important problem of democracy and arguing from what they thought to be the democratic side...
...It may be necessary to put ourselves in mind again of the extent to which we can say that the Americans did not have a nation under the Articles of Confederation...
...Such ideals would have been beyond their ken...
...outside the city, however, sentiment against it was strong...
...and rather little besides...
...Among these was the idea that representation should be given to separate corporate interests, orders, or "estates" in society— hardly the framework for modern democratic organization...
...and among the many proposed changes in the Constitution, amendments to the paper-money and obligationof-contracts clauses are conspicuous by their absence...
...The idea that democracy was unsuitable to the government of large territories was a fundamental tenet of the age, and one which the Fathers found it essential to controvert...
...Pennsylvania's constitution of 1776, with its unicameral legislature and suffrage limited only to taxpayers (which meant nearly all adult males), came closest to embodying these principles...
...In all these states ratification came quickly and easily: it was unanimous in Georgia, New Jersey, and Delaware (despite their overwhelmingly agrarian composition), and went through by margins of three to one in Connecticut and six to one in Maryland...
...And it will generally be found true that both elite factions had more than negligible support from the ranks of the ordinary farmers...
...They accepted the idea that majorities can be oppressive...
...An important determining force 53 RICHARD HOFSTADTER might be the extent to which men and regions had experienced the Revolution in local terms or in terms of the larger world...
...WE MAY WELL BE PERSUADED THAT BEARD was right in finding a positive relation between socio-economic position and Federalist convictions...
...machinery for settling disputes among the states...
...The case of Maryland, racked by a political schism in its planter aristocracy, is more complex, and will not yield to quick simplification...
...If we look only for popular rhetoric—for denunciations of aristocrats, special interests, and professional and learned men, and for encomiums on the wisdom and virtue of the common people—I think there is little doubt that we will find much more of it in Antifederalist than in Federalist literature...
...and expedient that the other should be chosen by the legislatures of the states...
...No government could long subsist without the confidence of the people...
...The people," said the leading New York Antifederalist, George Clinton, "when wearied with their distresses, will in the moment of frenzy be guilty of the most im50 CHARLES BEARD & THE FOUNDING FATHERS prudent and desperate measures...
...At home its theoretical power to regulate coinage could not resolve a monetary hodge-podge...
...But many contemporaries were afraid that the "imbecilities" of the Confederation, to use Beard's term, might be fatal to the union, to order and prosperity, and in the end to liberty...
...During the Revolution—as they drew up new constitutions and in so doing reconsidered their political principles and their techniques of organization—the Americans began (especially under the pressure of the large towns, which were on a numerical basis underrepresented) to couple property with numbers, on the ground that numbers (and taxation) formed a rough index of the distribution of property...
...What I would like to suggest is that, contrary to the implications Beard drew from certain scattered texts, the Fathers, though wary of what they thought to be its possible abuses, were not notably dissatisfied with the measure of democracy that already existed in the American states...
...Lee Benson has rightly warned against assuming that public assemblies are simply the electorate in microcosm...
...In Beard's terms the behavior of these men is incomprehensible, but it was neither irrational nor devoid of considerations of self-interest...
...Those whose military experience had been in the Continental line rather than the state militias, and who had marched from state to state and experienced the struggle against British "tyranny" as a continental, common American struggle would be similarly disposed...
...Concern about the future of the country was widespread, and it is bootless to try to decide exactly how far it can be called an economic concern, since thoughts of personal gain and loss were mingled with thoughts of the common peace and safety and of the common advantage...
...On one point we may be reasonably clear: the Beardian picture of a unified national elite aligned against a relatively unified, if politically less effective, agrarian debtor mass, simply will not hold in a statebystate analysis...
...But where there is a significant cleavage within the elite and both elite factions draw significant support from the lower ranks of society, sharp polarization is much less likely to occur and compromise and accommodation become possible...
...In New York, where majority sentiment against the Constitution seems beyond argument, the opposition was led by the powerful faction of Governor Clinton...
...James Wilson, one of the outstanding juridical thinkers among the Fathers, argued "strenuously," as Madison's notes record, for the direct election of members of the House of Representatives by the people: "He was for raising the federal pyramid to a considerable altitude, and for that reason 48 CHARLES BEARD & THE FOUNDING FATHERS wished to give it as broad a basis as possible...
...Property must be seen from the standpoint of what was being both superseded and built upon in the eighteenth century, and not from the standpoint of the problems facing twentieth-century Progressives in dealing with the large business corporation...
...Often when men spoke of democracy as unusable or impossible in a large territory, they were speaking in this sense...
...Madison was quick to second him with the remark that he "considered the popular election of one branch of the national legislature as essential to every plan of free government...
...Attempts to impair the normal popular composition of the lower house, or its efficacy, fared badly...
...When the Fathers spoke critically of democracy they were at times implying condemnation of particular policies...
...but it had only a small if vociferous minority opposed to the Constitution on grounds quite unlike those depicted by Beard...
...45 RICHARD HOFSTADTER cal classification, they were neither radical democrats (as some Europeans believed) nor ultra-conservatives (as many historians in the Populist-Progressive tradition have argued) but moderate Whigs...
...In the South the Spaniards, also allied with Indians whom they supplied with arms, held the mouth of the Mississippi which they had closed to American shipping, were busy encouraging Westerners in Kentucky and Tennessee to quit the Union, and laid claim to a large piece of American territory in what is now Georgia and Alabama...
...By now it was widely accepted that to be politically legitimate a government should be referred to the people for their approval at its beginning...
...However, we need not be surprised that the possession of large, significant amounts does have some positive relation to Federalist adherence...
...To be sure, some of the feeling in favor of property requirements came from fear that mobs might be led to dangerous ends...
...Quite the contrary: all of them—with the possible exception of Hamilton—would have feared the amputation or crippling of the popular house as a threat to a central principle of balanced government and to well-founded popular rights...
...And let us assume further that as nationalists in a country still made up of separate provinces the Fathers found it necessary, like all innovators and reformers, to keep public opinion in mind— and, indeed, references to what would please the people or what they would approve rippled through the discussion of the Convention...
...The theorists of balanced government believed that a popular arm, the lower house of the legislature, which would be based upon a broad suffrage, was indispensable...
...Lawrence to Lake Michigan, and in this area they were still effectively and ominously linked with the Indian tribes...
...Debt was characteristically a sign not of poverty but of enterprise, sometimes of daring speculation...
...IF WE ARE TO TRY to characterize the Fathers in the very loose language of politiI Cf...
...But the limitations of this finding can only be seen when we ask how high a correlation it was...
...And if a patriot like Beard, looking back from the relatively detached vantage point of the Progressive era, could still see "imbecilities" in the Confederation (a term also used by Edmund Randolph in the Convention), we need not imagine that a patriot of 1787 had to have a stack of continental securities to come to the same conclusion...
...The townsmen argued that their property was not adequately represented and proposed to register its weight by the measure of numbers and taxes...
...He accordingly pictured a largely unified national elite of wealth lined up against the clamorous agrarian masses, the two sides ranged against each other in good part i)y their opposing interests and conviction% about the state of prices and debts, and the putative effects of the Constitution upon them...
...It is true that the Pettit group found strong allies in western Pennsylvania who roughly correspond to the populist-frontiersman stereotype of Beard and the Turnerians (though some of the leaders of this set also were beneficiaries of speculation...
...Paper money was indeed controversial, but it was controversial within the elites...
...Since there was no executive power to 51 RICHARD HOFSTADTER speak of, there was no center of national leadership...
...The idea of a convention elected by the people for the sole and specific purpose of ratifying a constitution was a remarkable innovation of their own devising, which was intended to satisfy this scruple...
...As one of their Massachusetts spokesmen put it, they considered that "the sober and industrious part of the community should be defended from the rapacity of the vicious and idle"—a statement that sounds interchangeable with the notions attributed by Beardian scholars to the Federalists...
...Lee Benson, Turner and Beard, American Historical Writing Reconsidered, Free Press, 1960 (paper, 1965), p. 172...
...In the eighteenth century, political society was conceived as being the voluntary association of those with property...
...These two western regions of the state were strong in immigrants who did not have the powerful attachments that prevailed among the old planting families...
...Antifederalist forces were probably too divided in opinion on this issue in most states to take a strong stand on it...
...IT IS IMPORTANT TO TAKE NOTE Of the fact that the debate over the Constitution, as Cecelia Kenyon has shown, did not take the form of a debate over democracy as such...
...For all practical purposes, this meant in the American states a freehold or its equivalent...
...This is not to say that these states had no class divisions or political conflicts, but simply that such conflicts *ere not deeply or seriously mobilized by the constitutional issue, because men on all sides found so much common gain in stronger union...
...Being heavily biased toward the dissenting churches, they were reassured by the promise of religious liberty under the Constitution and did not even seek for additional amendments .° IN NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA the issue of the Constitution became involved with well-developed struggles between leading po57 RICHARD HOPSTADTER litical factions, struggles which in Pennsylvania were so systematic and continuous as to foreshadow the two-party system...
...Congressmen, disheartened by their continuing ineffectuality, ran up a remarkable record of sporadic attendance, and at last this problem became so acute that for extended periods Congress could not act for lack of a quorum...
...whereas those who came of age during or before the agitations against British tyranny that quickened after 1763 had had their minds fixed at a formative age more upon the dangers of arbitrary governmental power and would be harder to dislodge from the combative and militant anticentralist republicanism that the Revolution called into being...
...The conclusion of J. R. Pole: "Once the Federal government was in operation, its electoral system gave a possibly unintentional but nevertheless an unmistakable impetus to the idea of political democracy...
...To have political competence, it was assumed in Whig theory, a man must stand above being ordered about, or bought or bribed, and this status would be safeguarded by the possession of some property: only in this way would the voter have, it was said (following Montesquieu and Blackstone), "a will of his own...
...that the suffrage was indeed widely available, and was exercised at times to quite a remarkable degree...
...That once dissolved, our States would be of short duration...
...Most theorists of balanced government would have agreed with John Adams that the executive ought not to be embroiled in the factional partisanship of the legislature, particularly of the upper house, and many of them thought with Gouverneur Morris that the executive ought to have a special relationship to, a particular rapport with, the people, which would add to its strength and to their protection...
...see the discussions Ibid, I, 48-50, 132-38, 214-15, 358-62...
...To make matters worse— and this point proved in the end to be quite decisive constitutional terms requiring the unanimous consent of the states made the Confederation virtually unamendable, and thus deprived it of an essential mechanism for self-preservation...
...In New York City both merchants and the lower classes favored the Constitution...
...The leading advocates of paper money in the eighteenth century were not backwoods farmers or doctrinaire demagogues but outstanding merchants, leading planters, public officials, and professional men...
...Edmund Randolph could thus speak of "the democratic licentiousness of the state legislatures...
...Hamilton's cool reception in the Convention was a token of this...
...With this picture in mind, we need not be surprised that many men, including even some who later found grounds to oppose the Constitution, favored a move toward some kind of stronger union...
...The principal point at which modern democratic thought deviates from that of the Fathers rests on its opposition to the formal qualifications and the multiplicity of checks they wanted to put on majority rule...
...Direct election of the members of the House of Representatives was first passed in the Convention by a vote of six to two, with two states divided...
...A still more important point about property and politics must be understood: under the social and political conditions of eighteenthcentury America, the appeal to the voice of property was not retrograde in its effects, or even conservative, but tended rather to give a startlingly strong, if unintended, impetus to the development of democracy and political individualism...
...Martin's Press, 1966, p. 365, and the discussion on pp...
...and in their own day such views were still rare among the educated and articulate classes...
...but the situation in Maryland, where the relatively weak opposition was based largely upon a minority of rich planters who had gone heavily into debt because of speculation, is quite close to its opposite...
...The slight 8 We know a great deal about the social and economic position of the delegates at the ratifying convention, but much less about their constituencies...
...It is not always easy to be sure exactly what they had in mind, because the term democracy was then in a transitional state and was not used consistently...
...Georgia, as Beard knew, was so haunted by fear of an Indian war that nothing mattered there as against the military advantages of strong union...
...We do not know all we need to know about debts and credits in the late eighteenth century, but certain complications have been at least partially clarified...
...and this, as well as urban and commercial economic interest, may help to explain the higher concentration of Federalists near the seaboard and at certain exposed points of the frontier...
...49 RICHARD HOFSTADTER tic, the deviation of the Fathers from the developing democracy of their own era should not be exaggerated...
...Their trade routes ran from North to South, and this gave them a strong interest in national power...
...They would not be at odds with most modern democratic thinkers in believing that there ought to be some such limits and that the survival of free government in fact depends on them...
...They also shut American ships out of the Spanish trade, which had become important during the Revolutionary war, and offered to reopen it only on terms which the Americans in the South and Southwest could not possibly accept—the continued closure of the Mississippi for 25 years or more...
...Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Macmillan., 1935 (paper, Free Press, 1965), pp...
...The situations in the several states are much too complex to lend themselves readily to brief characterization...
...The Fathers generally accepted the "stake-in-society" conception of suffrage rights—the notion that anyone, to qualify 46 CHARLES BEARD & THE FOUNDING FATHERS for the right to have a say in the management of the political order, should have some token of permanent attachment to its interest...
...Nor were Antifederalist leaders interested in changes that would make possible a government of simple majority controls...
...INDEED, WHEN ONE LOOKS at the situation from state to state, one is impressed by the difficulty of making continent-wide generalizations about the character of economic alignments as they affected the constitutional issue...
...But a good deal of it came from other, more philosophical premises...
...They wholly violate the pattern of expectation set up by the TurnerBeard categories, and they were acting in accordance with considerations not always taken account of by historians in this tradition...
...Age too is a factor worth exploration...
...The vain young South Carolina aristocrat Charles Pinckney (who, Beard tells us, "had no confidence in popular government" and who indeed did want more checks than some members) presented an interesting philosophical statement to the Convention during the discussion of the mode of electing senators...
...and insofar as the attitudes of the agrarian masses can be rather loosely inferred from the pattern of their representatives' votes, 8 they were divided also...
...What we find instead is a series of divided state elites...
...To simplify, Connecticut and New Jersey, each lacking a suitable port, were at the mercy of the port of New York, and could see large advantages in a strong union that would put the power to regulate commerce in the central government...
...5 At least among the leaders on both sides, then, the argument over the Constitution was an argument between two groups both of which were suspicious of simple majority rule...
...In addition, they considered that a separate upper house...
...A motion to include a national freehold qualification for electors choosing the lower house was beaten by seven to one, with one divided...
...This conception led to the stereotype, embodied in Turner's work and taken over by Beard, of the poor debtor-farmers locked in more or less uniform combat from Massachusetts to Georgia in a battle for cheap money and higher prices against rich merchants, great planters, speculators, and creditors, whose attitudes on such matters were taken to have been rather like those of Wall Street confronted by William Jennings Bryan...
...free elections...
...Patrick Henry, supposedly the voice of the people, arguing in Virginia against the Constitution, complained that there was "no check in that government...
...Yet, if we are to avoid being anachronis3 Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Yale University Press, 1966, I. 49, 134, 136...
...They hoped to achieve such balance by the separation of powers and by a system of mutual checks—and more sophisticated thinkers among them, like Madison, considered that this balance in the machinery of government ought to be paralleled by balance in the variety of social interests and groups within the society...
...And after the Constitution was framed and ready for discussion, this issue was complicated by a second one: whether the particular national state now proposed would be more likely to destroy or to protect the liberties and the powers of selfgovernment that most Americans thought they had long enjoyed and had just fought a war to keep...
...0 NE OF THE IMPORTANT MISCONCEPTIONS of Beard's book, derived from the free silver controversies of the 1890's, inherited from the Turnerians, but shared equally by the Progressive and conservative historians of his day, was the notion that the economic situation of the 1780's, insofar as paper money and debts were involved, was quite simply analogous to that of the 1890's...
...in fact, it was a point made by some of their leaders that the Constitution did not contain checks and balances enough...
...Long ago Robert E. Thomas found, in a study of the personnel of the ratifying convention at Richmond that the Federalist and Antifederalist leaders were members of the same class, with almost the same average number of slaves and roughly the same military ranks attained in the Revolution...
...3 The framers did not, by and large, think that it was by any means impossible to achieve their nationalist goals and construct an "energetic" government within the framework of the popular will, as it then normally found expression...
...PERHAPS THE BEST WAY to break through the perplexities which arise when we compare Charles Beard's simple view of the Founding Fathers with the more complex view that closer inspection reveals is to start, once again, free of his categories...
...The Fathers spoke, rather, of "popular government" or "republican government" or "free government...
...Those who had had major political experience in Congress and had witnessed its impotence during and after the revolutionary struggle, or those who were drawn into political activity for the first time by their sense of the political failure of the Confederation would be more disposed than firmly rooted local politicians to feel the need of a stronger union...
...see this work, passim, for a subtle and detailed explication of the changing political role of property...
...Their representatives were strong in men who had fought in the Continental line...
...AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE IDEA of balanced government helps us to comprehend what such terms as "the people" and "democracy" might have meant in the late eighteenth century...
...There were plenty of rich debtors and solvent farmers...
...Indeed, one of the purposes of the Bill of Rights, which they so wisely insisted on, was to protect the minority from what the same writer called "the usurpation and tyranny of the majority...
...4 This is not, as the whole context makes clear, the voice of a sentimental democrat...
...advocates of the Constitution had to draw more heavily in some areas upon newly concerned amateurs, men from business and the professions not previously active in politics but now mobilized by their desire for union...
...The independent judiciary, which was to be guaranteed by undisturbed tenure, was thought to have a special relation to the rule of law—a difficult problem and one which many theorists a hundred years later concluded concealed a trap for democratic institutions in the form of judicial review...
...255-68...
...In Pennsylvania the opposition to the Constitution was led by a rich, powerful, and well-knit faction of speculators and public security owners, headed by Charles Pettit, who owned over $55,000 in public securities and Blair McLenachan who owned over $74,000...
...They looked to a skillfully designed balanced government to render impossible the concentration of excessive power in any one arm of government or in any single interest in society...
...They, as well as the Federalists, believed in a government of checks and balances...
...Anarchy or intestine wars would follow till some future 52 CHARLES BEARD & THE FOUNDING FATHERS Caesar seized our Liberties, or we would be the sport of European politics, and perhaps parcelled out as appendages to their several Govemments...
...After all, what the Americans were displacing was not some perfect primitive ur-democracy but rather a set of political institutions brought from England and having a medieval ancestry...
...and in fact the Supreme Court's one-man-one-vote decision of 1964 shows how tardy we have been in trying to implement these demanding ideals, even in the most rudimentary way...
...Seen in this light, the Fathers become not the authors of a nationalist Thermidor imposing reaction upon particularist revolutionaries, but rather the architects of a viable national scheme by which the revolutionary impulse toward democracy was taken out of its particularist moorings and made into a continental reality...
...The central issue, around which the others circled like dim and distant satellites, was whether the American union should become a national state...
...THE AMERICAN STATES, after some ups and downs, were again beginning to enjoy moderate prosperity in the year or so before the Constitution went into effect, and it is conceivable that they might have gone on for some years more under the Confederation...
...It is probably most accurate to say not that the Fathers were antidemocrats but simply that their republicanism had nothing utopian about it...
...And, though it was found unsatisfactory and replaced by a bicameral constitution in 1790, it is worth noting that it hardly brought about the destruction of the class system or the subversion of propertied interests...
...IN THE STANDARD DISCOURSE of eighteenthcentury politics, "democracy" was not used as it came to be used in the nineteenth century...
...The British still held seven fortified posts on American soil, embracing every strategic point on the Great Lakes, from the region of the St...
...Property as a qualification for voters found no formal cognizance in the plan for representation, except insofar as the new Constitution paid deference to the requirements already imposed on voters in the constitutions of the states...
...Nor should we assume, in any case, that the desire to keep the freehold suffrage, particularly in the context of American society, necessarily had to be inspired by dark reactionary sentiments...
...We must, as has been observed, suit our government to the people it is to direct...
...RESISTANCE TO THE CONSTITUTION might well have been strongest among some of the isolates, those remote from military action, living in relatively self-sufficing agricultural areas but not endangered by Indians...
...More recent writers, among them Richard Lester, E. J. Ferguson, Bray Hammond, and Joseph Dorfman, have done much to cor7 One of the difficulties in discussing the political role of public creditors is that both Beard and some of his critics count men as security holders without paying attention to the size of holdings in relation to their total business investments, though it is obvious that small holdings would be unlikely to sway political allegiances...
...9 Robert E. Thomas, "The Virginia Convention of 1788," Journal of Southern History, XIX (1953), 63-72...
...56 EARD & THE FOUNDING FATHERS difference that he found showed the typical Antifederalist to own a larger number of slaves and to represent counties in which there were more slaves than in those represented by Federalists...
...In New York both parties had support from speculators and from large and small landholders...
...Some of the states were coping quite effectively with their own affairs...
...Setting aside these state-by-state considerations, and trying to draw a composite and rather abstract picture of the forces at work for and against the Constitution, we might do well to begin not with the revolutionary war debt but with the whole revolutionary experience...
...What they had was what the Articles in fact asserted the Confederation to be: "a firm league of friendship," a loose union, providing mutual citizenship, and giving the central government a bare minimum of the sanctions needed to carry out national functions: the conduct of foreign relations and the power to make treaties or wage war...
...47 RICHARD HOFSTADTER In the Federal Convention of 1787, though the idea of the explicit representation of property as well as numbers was initially the object of a good deal of concern, it was ultimately abandoned in order to give to the upper house another function: the Senate was instituted not on the principle of the representation of property, but simply to recognize the parity of the several states in one of the two chambers...
...The executive and judiciary would both be independent...
...And he warned that, in the absence of a hereditary nobility such as Britain had, the government would not incorporate any "real balances and checks . . . only ideal balances...
...nor how and by whom the public debt should be paid—a question of importance, but not the central one in 1787...
...Having also come to look with disdain on the state militias as disorderly irregulars and on-and-off patriots, the Continental veterans were sometimes given, in the manner of the recently demobilized, to interpreting civic life in the light of their military experiences...
...Practically all American Whig theorists agreed on the desirability of formal guarantees of popular rights...
...We are pleased to print below three sections from a forthcoming book tentatively entitled The Progressive Historians: Beard, Turner, Farrington, to be published by Alfred Knopf in 1968.—EDITORS...
...and, of course, in a society in which property was so widely distributed, this disfranchised only a minority of adult whites...
...But the diplomatic impotence of the Confederation cast a dark shadow over prospects for the future, and Americans were not by any means free of involvement in the European state system...
...As revolutionaries who felt that they had suffered from tyrannical government, the Fathers were primarily moved by fear of concentrated and arbitrary power...
...But it is also true—and here we move into areas where Beard's categories begin to make contact with reality—that the exposure of various segments of the population to these concerns was far from uniform...
...The people," it is true, did not mean all adult males...
...Somewhere along this range a change in quantity may result in a wholly different qualitative picture of the society: it is the difference between a social order that is harmonious and viable and one that is not...
...But democracy might also on occasions be used to refer to that part of a mixed government, the "democratical" part, in which the power of the people was represented, that is, to the lower house of the legislature...
...If Beard's information on the commercial experiences and interests of political leaders had been as detailed, as novel and intriguing and "hard" and statistically manageable as his evidence from the Treasury records, he might have put considerably stronger stress on the general interests and experiences of the mercantile classes and less stress on the public debt...
...A few were troubled by the supposed dangers of a monarchical restoration or a military dictatorship, but many seem to have been troubled by the more real danger that the Union would be supplanted by two or three smaller and more tightly organized confederacies—a prospect that suggested, in modern terms, that the continent would be Balkanized, that its states might enter internecine quarrels, that they might be forced indefinitely to carry on their commerce under extortionate or crippling terms, and perhaps at last fall victim to reconquest by European powers...
...To me it seems that the central issue of American politics in 1787 was not whether government should protect property—a question over which "radicals" and "conservatives" agreed...
...In Vermont they were intriguing with potential American separatists and threatening to bite off a chunk of territory...
...His government had only recently taken advantage of the prosperity of the state by devising its own funding system in which the entire state debt was funded and a portion of the continental debt was assumed and made interchangeable with state securities...
...Having grievances concerning taxation and representation against the state government, many of them considered that the new federal Constitution represented a more equitable departure...
...The most immediate danger that hung over the Confederation was that of an internal collapse from a sheer failure of morale...
...But Ferguson too thinks that to emphasize the question whether creditors on the whole supported the Constitution constitutes a distortion, [and finds the security holders] rather too few in number to serve as the fulcrum upon which to raise a new political structure...
...77-79...
...the right to regulate the value of coin issued by itself and by the several states...
...It is also to be remembered that in some cases the antagonisms of state factions and of leading personalities, which had their origins in intrastate concerns quite irrelevant to the merits or defects of the Constitution, became involved in the argument over its ratification...
...When, in the development of the states, property became "a sort of substitute for the faded and inadequate idea of the separate 'estate' of an aristocracy with a right to separate representation," the change marked "one of the greatest departures in the origins of modern and democratic government...
...In both cases, these delegates were sent by a region where debtors (as elsewhere in the state) were common...
...Even the Levellers had not believed in universal manhood suffrage...
...Here I must start from some distressingly 5 See Cecelia Kenyon, "Men of Little Faith," William and Mary Quarterly, XII (1955) 33-34, 36...
...339-65...
...The public creditors, of whom there were many in Clinton's camp, thus found their interests tied to the fiscal success of the state, and New York became one of those states (Pennsylvania was another) in which it was by no means easy for a public creditor to be sure that the government under the new Constitution would improve the value of his holdings...
...John Dickinson, undoubtedly one of the most conservative members of the group (Beard mentions him primarily for his belief in limited monarchy and in a freehold suffrage qualification), agreed: it was "essential that one branch of the legislature should be drawn immediately from the people...
...In January 1786 Chairman David Ramsay (who was acting in that capacity because President John Hancock himself had not bothered to show up) sent out a desperate appeal to the state executives in which he said that the delinquency of the states in maintaining representation "naturally tends to annihilate our Confederation...
...nor whether the new government should be more or less democratic than the existing one—a somewhat misleading question...
...In the United States of the 1780's practically the whole political spectrum was taken up by a moderate Left and a Center...
...They often advocated annual elections as a means of keeping political leaders close to the popular will...
...The use of paper money to depreciate debts was widely decried by Antifederalist as well as Federalist writers...
...nor whether it should advance the interests of personalty as against realty—a question which no historian today takes very seriously...
...Contemporaneous democrats, on the other hand, often preferred a simple government with a strong unicameral legislature, based on the unrestricted suffrage of free adult males...
...Let us start with the proposition, at first almost too obvious to be interesting, that their main object was to form what they often called a "more energetic" government—that is, a true national state with all the customary powers—without losing the liberties they had...
...Men who lived in such states as Connecticut, Georgia, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey did not divide very decisively over the Constitution at all, and for them such differences as we may find between farmers or merchants, debtors or creditors, were not of central consequence...
...the mind of the eighteenthcentury freeholder had a lively terror of mobs and "demagogues...
...It is often noted that many influential men on the Antifederalist side also had large security holdings...
...Very few indeed among them were opposed to popular government, and when they criticized democracy, which they classified as one of the varieties of popular government, they almost always had something more limited in mind...
...Though we should not fail to add (as Beard saw) that it was joined in this by its dependents in the towns—the seamen, artisans, mechanics, and small tradesmen who lived in the orbit of commerce—and (as Beard did not see) that it was allied to many ordinary farmers who seem to have recognized that they too had an interest in trade...
...political and religious rights for minorities...
...They saw popular government, like other forms, as being attended with certain characteristic failings of its own which they hoped to keep from becoming acute or fatal, and they were trying to devise what Madison called in The Federalist, Number 10, "a republican remedy for the diseases of republican government...
...the privilege of asking for money from the states—but not the power to collect it...
...The mercantile class was as close as any to being unani54 CHARLES BEARD & THE FOUNDING FATHERS mously for the Constitution...
...The basic achievements in democratic development that had thus far been brought about they not only accepted but cherished: the presence of a parliamentary system, with a popular house based upon a broad suffrage...
...Now in a social system in which property was very widely diffused this could, and did, cause the unchallenged authority of property in politics to come to be subtly linked with numbers, and thus to become a channel by which the political weight of numbers was ultimately increased...
...When members of the Convention referred to the troubles of the time as having come from the "excesses" of democracy, they might be referring to mob action (as in the case of Shays' rebellion) or expressing their disapproval of certain types of measures that had received their impetus in the popular assemblies...
...old-fashioned premises about the era— premises rather like those Beard himself came to in the end...
...See on this count Robert L. Schuyler's "Forrest McDonald's Critique of the Beard Thesis," Journal of Southern History, XXVII (1961), 73-80, esp...
...and they were content to plan a government which they thought answered to most popular habits and current practices...
...6 Edmund C. Burnett, The Continental Congress, W. W. Norton, 1964, p. 641...
...Despite some unfortunate episodes in the use of paper money, including one in Rhode Island about which historians have written very dramatically, several of the states had had a good deal of success in ameliorating their chronic currency shortages with paper money issues based upon land security...
...It should be possible to construct a hypothetical model, taking account of the various forces that impelled men to favor or oppose the Constitution, in which some of Beard's perceptions will have a place, even though not the central place...
...but one generalization that will hold better than most is that in those states where there was a fairly even or at least a sharply fought division over the Constitution the provincial elites were themselves divided...
...Moreover, they did not aspire to bring about the formal equalization of political power that became an increasingly powerful motif in American thought a little more than a century afterward and that animated the Progressive demand for democratization of the Senate, for the initiative, referendum, and recall, and other political reforms...
...But if we are looking for substantive differences in Constitutional proposals, we do not, on the whole, find the two sides far apart...
...again, that, under the double necessity of preserving liberty (which they did out of principle) and of pleasing the people (which they did out of a mixture of principle and expediency), they did in fact to some measure, though perhaps in the main inadvertently, advance democratic institutions and practices on a national scale.' This requires us to look away for a moment from their intentions and motives to the results, sometimes unanticipated, of their actions...
...Above all, those who had a great deal of experience and vested emotional as well as practical interests in state politics and state offices frequently looked with jealousy upon the creation of a new arena of federal power, in which they had little interest and no experience, but which threatened to overshadow their local worlds in prestige and importance and to remove decisions of state that had long been in their hands...
...In proposing alternatives to the Constitution's structure, the Antifederalists did not propose direct popular election of the President or senators or argue for a unicameral legislature, or attack the possible exercise of judicial review—positions we might expect them to take if they were simply forerunners of modern Progressivism...
...Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic, St...
...Recent research, particularly that of Robert E. Brown, has shown in fact that the easygoing practices of American electoral politics resulted in a very loose enforcement of the qualifications that did exist...
...One of these results was to bring the existing practices of American democratic politics out of the local arenas in which they were operating and, by creating a national market in political competition, to nationalize and in the end to intensify them...
...To assume that they fathered it, we must suppose them possessed of a degree of power and influence with which they can scarcely be credited . . . A creditor interest certainly existed—yet it was no more than ancillary to the political development that culminated in the founding of the new government...
...Beyond doubt, the movement for the Constitution got much of its driving force, perhaps a decisive measure, from the commercial classes...
...The President, senators, and representatives, all immediately or mediately, are the choice of the people...
...But whereas most modern democrats are content with the limits involved in securely guaranteed rights of opposition, of dissenters and minorities, the Fathers wanted to go beyond this: practically all of them believed in the existing property qualifications for the suffrage...
...but neither is it that of a panicky reactionary...
...Those who lived in areas long occupied or deeply devastated by British forces felt more keenly the necessity of a stronger union...
...E. J. Ferguson considers it "indisputable that as a group the creditors supported the Constitution," and never finds them represented "in a formal statement or petition that did not endorse stronger central government...
...Then, after a move to have them chosen by the state legislatures was defeated eight to three, popular election was reaffirmed by a vote of nine to one, with one divided...
...And it was largely the accumulated weight of ratification by ten other states, along with whispers that the port of New York might secede, that persuaded a decisive number of Antifederalists to move over into the camp of the constitutionalists...
...On the seas, though they enjoyed access to American markets, they had shut the Americans out of the rich trade, so vital in the past, to the West Indies...
...Certainly, the main argument of the Antifederalist leaders was not an argument for simple majoritarianism...
...55 RICHARD HOFSTADTER rect this view of things...
...VIRGINIA makes an interesting study...
...The attitude of the leading Antifederalists toward popular judgment also frequently resembled the attitude attributed by Beard only to the Federalists...
...If there had been no cleavage within the elite classes over such a fundamental issue, and at the same time no cleavage in the lower, and if the two had been ranged against each other, face to face and class to class, a deep social conflict might have resulted...
...The lack of property was associated with servility, if not with servitude...
...But both sides had a following among ordinary farmers, and the battle had more to do with this well-established factionalism than with a polarized struggle between the rich and the poor...
...2 2 Ibid., p. 170...
...They were also, beyond doubt, expressing their reservations about popular wisdom, and they did fear simple majoritarianism as a possible threat to both liberty and property...
...Some speculators, especially in Maryland and Virginia, had, in effect, financed their speculations by going short, as we would now say, on public paper, and the prospect of its rapid appreciation in value threatened them with ruin...
...Forrest McDonald, We the People, Phoenix, 1958, pp...
...Arguing for the choice of senators by the legislatures, Pinckney observed that the people of the United States were singular in having "fewer distinctions of fortune, and less of rank, than among the inhabitants of any other nation . . . . a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country, and an equality which is more likely to continue...
...Opponents of the Constitution, in the aggregate, seem to have attracted a higher proportion of those involved only in state politics...
...Delaware, altogether too tiny to go it alone, was similarly dependent upon Maryland and Pennsylvania...
...The first point to be considered is that the Americans of 1787 had strong provincial loyalties and thought of themselves as citizens of this or that state as well as having certain occupations and interests...
...The Confederation did well in moderating disputes between them and even better in laying the foundations for future Western settlement...
...Ranged against paper money advocates, and intensely prejudiced against what they called "the paper system" in all its forms, were not only some well-to-do merchants and creditors who had suffered from unsuccessful and highly inflationary paper issues but also a great many doctrinaire agrarians like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and even John Adams...
...One must be careful not to assume, then, that invidious references to "democracy" are equivalent to indictments of popular government...
...Hence, for Beard, the Constitution, with its prohibitions against money issues by the states and against the impairment of contracts, took on significance primarily as a bulwark against the "populism" of the 1780's...
...or among those who had fought only in the state militias, which sometimes meant sporadic action to protect local points of vantage...
...The situation in Massachusetts, in the wake of Shays' rebellion, bears some resemblance (though not a perfect one) to Beard's picture...
...Counterposed to it, the upper house would be based perhaps upon a narrower suffrage, and normally upon certain property qualifications for its members (though this was abandoned in the federal Constitution where the basic purpose of the Senate was not to represent property but to represent the states), which would make it a protective safeguard for propertied interests and add deliberative "wisdom" to public counsels...
...BUT HERE BEARD'S CONSIDERATIONS must be counted...
...With property holdings of all kinds on both sides virtually identical, and with the Virginia elite, for a variety of reasons, split quite evenly, the balance for ratification, as Freeman Hart's work indicates, was swung by representatives of the smaller planters and non-slaveholding farmers from the Shenandoah Valley (14 to 0 for the Constitution) and the trans-Allegheny region (13 to 1...
...Pennsylvania, prodded by the Pettit faction, had funded both the state debt and the portion of the national debt owned in the state on terms favorable to security holders and land speculators, and Pettit's forces were waging a vendetta against the Bank of North America run by Robert Morris, the leader of the nationalist faction...
...210-11...
...These are, I believe, as active, intelligent and susceptible of good government as any people in the world...
...It was hardly accidental that the first impetus for a stronger central government came only after Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, had repeatedly failed to put the Union on a sound revenue basis...
...If, in the American political spectrum of the 1780's the Fathers can be ranked somewhat to the Right, it is only because the high aristocrats had been exiled or smashed as a political force during the Revolution, and there was now nothing remaining of far Right antirepublican conservatism on an interstate scale...
...Let us assume, in short, that they were nationalists first of all, whose purpose was neither to restrict nor to enlarge democracy...
...The rest of his discourse made it clear that he was reconciled to this state of affairs, and proposed to design a government that accommodated it...
...0(HAT IS VALID in Beard's perceptions can be saved if they are put into their proper proportion, and this can best be done by beginning with an alternative view of the Constitution and feeding his categories back into the story where they become relevant and only in so far as they seem necessary...
...For the Americans it was a fact of fundamental importance that the Constitution provoked a significant opposition among the wealthy and won a significant support from small farmers, and that these deviants from the Beardian picture were fairly well distributed throughout the country...
...Annual elections were thought to be impractical but a motion by Hamilton for three-year intervals went down by seven to three, with one divided...
...4 Ibid., I, 398, 403-404...
...They considered themselves to be members of independent polities, and in these polities most of the forces that normally maintain a political community—including the habit of reckoning common state interests across the barriers of class—were at work...
...For them, strength and order were at an especial premium...
...Men who were young enough to have come of age around 1775 when the agitations of a dozen years finally irrupted into open violence found the challenge of organization and power that came with the revolutionary war practically coincident with their adult political experience...
...II, 201-205, 215-16...
...And his colleague, Melancton Smith, thought that "Fickleness and inconstancy • . . were characteristic of a free people...
...Freeman H. Hart, The Valley of Virginia in the American Revolution, 1763-1789, University of North Carolina Press, 1942 (out of print), chapter 10...
Vol. 15 • January 1968 • No. 1
