American Political History

No question defeated the Constitutional Convention like the question of how to choose a president. Across the summer of 1787 the delegates balloted on it some 60 times — popular election crushed 9 states to 1 after George Mason compared it to referring “a trial of colours to a blind man”; election by Congress condemned by Gouverneur Morris as “the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals”; electors adopted in July and unwound 5 days later; a motion for a president serving for life that drew 4 states, Virginia among them; James Wilson reduced to proposing the executive be chosen by lot. Hugh Williamson told the room it was pretty certain America would someday have a king — the only question was how long it could be postponed. Then, in September, a committee chaired by the man who had once proposed erasing the state boundaries handed down a machine nobody had proposed: electors who assemble in 13 places at once, vote for 2 names, and evaporate — a conclave that cannot be corrupted because until election day it does not exist. This is the story of the electoral college, and of the accidental office its arithmetic invented: the vice presidency.

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On June 1st, 1787, the Constitutional Convention reached the resolution nobody had wanted to write: a national executive. James Wilson moved that it consist of a single person — and the room went silent, long enough that 81-year-old Franklin had to coax the delegates into speaking. The reason for the silence sat on the dais: every man present was measuring an office for General Washington, in his presence, weighing out loud how much power one man could be trusted with while the man himself said nothing. This is the story of the 4 days that invented the presidency: Randolph calling a single executive “the foetus of monarchy” and Wilson answering that unity was the best safeguard against tyranny; Franklin proposing the office serve without pay, and pointing at the chair — “a Patriot whom I will not now offend by any other praise”; Dickinson praising limited monarchy as the best government on earth and conceding America could never have it; Hamilton and Wilson demanding an absolute veto and losing 10 states to none; and Franklin’s warning that echoes down every administration since: the first man at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.

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The most notorious fraction in American history did not begin as a claim about personhood. It began as a tax formula — proposed in 1783, in the same Philadelphia room, by James Madison himself, to settle how slave states would be billed for the war debt. In that fight the North demanded the enslaved be counted in full, and the South demanded they barely count at all... because the count meant money. Four years later, James Wilson lifted the dead amendment’s exact words into the plan of the new government — “three fifths of all other persons” — and the incentive silently reversed: the count now meant power, and every argument swapped sides with it. This is the story told through the record alone: Paterson asking whether a single enslaved person would ever cast the votes their count created; Butler and Pinckney demanding the enslaved be counted as whole persons; Gouverneur Morris declaring himself reduced to a choice between injustice to the South and injustice to human nature; the fraction voted dead on July 11th — and welded back the next morning to a tax lock that made every claimed seat a taxed seat. Six words, for 700,000 people.

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On June 11th, 1787, Roger Sherman proposed the settlement — population in the House, one vote per state in the Senate — and the Constitutional Convention voted it down without a debate. This is the story of the 5 weeks it cost to walk back: Luther Martin’s 2-day endurance speech; Benjamin Franklin, 81 and unchurched, asking a deadlocked room why it had never once prayed — and the convention adjourning without a vote because it couldn’t afford a chaplain; Gunning Bedford telling the large states “I do not, gentlemen, trust you” and threatening a foreign ally; the July 2nd tie, 5–5–1, decided by an absent bachelor and a Connecticut-born Georgian’s lonely aye; Washington writing that he repented ever having agency in the business; and July 16th — 5 states to 4, Massachusetts divided against itself — when the equal vote of the states carried by the width of a single delegation. Then the large states caucus to plot their answer... and discover, in Madison’s own words, that they have nothing. The Senate was born out of accidents. It never came out.

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In the second week of June 1787, the small states stopped losing votes politely. David Brearley proposed erasing every state boundary and redrawing America into 13 equal parts. William Paterson declared New Jersey would never confederate on proportional representation — “I would rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate” — and James Wilson answered that Pennsylvania would never confederate on anything else. This is the story of the counterstroke: the New Jersey Plan, 9 resolutions that stayed inside the congressional commission and quietly contained the seed of the supremacy clause. And it is the story of the most astonishing day of the summer — June 18th, when Alexander Hamilton, outvoted by his own delegation and silent for 3 weeks, held the floor for 6 hours to propose a senate for life, an executive for life, and the British constitution as “the best model the world ever produced”... and sat down to total silence. Praised by everybody, supported by none. Then Madison rises, takes the New Jersey Plan apart disease by disease, and names the rest of the summer: the great difficulty lies in representation.

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On May 29th, 1787, Edmund Randolph — 33 years old, governor of Virginia, owner of the finest voice in the room — rose to open the main business of the Federal Convention, and 3 notebooks took him down. Madison recorded a statesman’s autopsy of the Confederation and an exhortation not to let the moment pass. Doctor McHenry caught the raw material Madison left out: “Are we not on the eve of war?” and the maxim that America’s chief danger arose from “the democratic parts of our constitutions.” And Robert Yates, Governor Clinton’s watchdog, heard a confession — “a strong consolidated union, in which the idea of states should be nearly annihilated.” This is the story of the 2 days that set the summer’s course: the polite resolution to “correct and enlarge” the Articles, withdrawn by its own mover and replaced with the doctrine that a union “merely federal” will not do; Gerry’s warning that a convention with this power could annihilate the Confederation; Gouverneur Morris’s answer — a supreme government now, or a despot in twenty years, “for come he must”; the vote, 6 states to 1. And before the day ends, tiny Delaware threatens to walk. Then the first great question of design: who elects the people’s house — Sherman wanting the people to have as little to do as may be, Gerry blaming the excess of democracy, and Mason and Wilson answering with the grand depository and the federal pyramid on the broadest possible base.

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4 prisoners from the Walnut Street jail carried Benjamin Franklin to the Constitutional Convention in a sedan chair — the oldest delegate, 81, riding above the cobblestones to sit with the youngest, a 26-year-old former army captain. Jefferson, reading the delegate list in Paris, called them “an assembly of demigods.” William Pierce of Georgia, sitting among them, wrote down what they actually looked like — and his private sketches of every man in the room are the heart of this episode: Madison, whose greatness “every Person seems to acknowledge”; Hamilton, brilliant and vain, caged by the two colleagues sent to outvote him; Wilson, who argued by force of reasoning; Sherman the shoemaker-turned-judge who “seldom fails”; the silent Robert Morris; and a young Charles Pinckney lying about his age. It is also the story of who wasn’t there — Jefferson and Adams an ocean away, and Patrick Henry, refusing his seat because, as Virginians told it, he “smelt a rat.” Meet the demigods... as their own colleague saw them.

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James Madison stepped off the New York stage on May 3rd, 1787 — 11 days before the Federal Convention was scheduled to open, and 22 days before it actually could. This is the story of those waiting weeks and the first days of business: the muddy roads that held the delegates back, the Virginia delegation caucusing every afternoon to shape a plan that would speak first, General Washington’s escort into the city, and his apology, from the president’s chair, for his own inexperience. It is also the story of the rules the textbooks skip. Why Rufus King and George Mason demanded that no man’s vote be recorded by name. Why any settled question could be reopened. And why the most argumentative men in America agreed that nothing spoken in that room would reach the outside world — a decision Jefferson called “abominable” from Paris, Madison called prudent, and General Washington enforced with a dropped paper, a bow, and a silence no one ever broke. Before a single idea was debated, they built the room that made the arguing possible.

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This is the finale of A Failed Nation. In February of 1787, the Confederation Congress faced the most awkward decision in its short and unhappy life: whether to bless a convention summoned, however politely, to replace it. Six states had already sent delegates to Philadelphia without waiting for permission. John Jay thought the whole thing legally “questionable.” Madison found Congress “much divided and embarrassed.” And on February 21st, by a vote of eight states to one, the dying government did the strangest thing a government can do — it authorized the meeting that would end it, leashing the delegates to the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation,” even as it named the real goal in the same breath: “a firm national government.” It was a leash that would not hold for a single day. This is the story of how the most useless Congress in American history did one genuinely useful thing at the end — it got out of the way — and of a failed nation that, having watched its every weakness laid bare, refused to give up on self-government, and resolved instead to try again.

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The convention that produced the Constitution was born, improbably, out of a fishing dispute and a failure. This is the story of the strange chain of events that led to Philadelphia. It begins in 1785 at Mount Vernon, where commissioners from Virginia and Maryland settle a quarrel over the Potomac — and prove that states can cooperate outside a paralyzed Congress. It runs through Annapolis in September of 1786, where a grand convention on interstate trade collapses when only five states bother to show up — and where a dozen men with no authority whatsoever, led by Alexander Hamilton’s pen, make a desperate gamble: they call for a far larger convention, at Philadelphia, to remake the entire frame of government. And it turns on Shays’ Rebellion, the armed uprising that did the persuading no argument could, frightening state after state into sending delegates. James Madison doubted the whole thing would work. Even he could not have guessed that a half-empty room in Annapolis had just lit the fuse — and that the matter was now bound for a reluctant Congress that would have to decide whether to bless a convention it had never called.

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