#1569 Ten Things About the Constitutional Convention
2023-10-16 01:00:45
Listening to America aims to “light out for the territories,” traveling less visited byways and taking time to see this immense, extraordinary country with fresh eyes while listening to the many voices of America’s past, present, and future. Led by noted historian and humanities scholar Clay Jenkinson, Listening to America travels the country’s less visited byways, from national parks and forests to historic sites to countless under-recognized rural and urban places. Through this exploration, Clay and team find and tell the overlooked historical and contemporary stories that shape America’s people and places. Visit our website at ltamerica.org.
Hello everyone, it's Clay Jenkinson with this podcast introduction to this week's program, Ten Things About the U.
S Constitution. My conversation with Dr. Lindsey Chervinsky. She's really become a stalwart on this program.
She's up and coming, she's soon to be one of the premier presidential historians in the United States. She's doing a great deal of media, We're glad to have her at this formative stage of what will be a mighty career. We've really become close friends and I think you can hear it on the program.
We're not afraid to challenge each other, to tease each other. We lay it on a little thick. I'm not quite as much a Jeffersonian as she thinks, and she's not quite as enamored of her man, George Washington, as I like to suggest. But it makes for really good conversation. It's so important that serious intellectuals, if that's what we are, can disagree with some possibility. We don't have to agree on these things.
There's so many things we just don't know.
Why did Madison start as a close ally of Hamilton's? Particularly at this period when they not only were at the Constitutional Convention, but were two of the three writers of the federalist papers. And then drifted apart to become something like enemies after Jefferson got back from Paris in 1789.
Why didn't the North call the bluff of the southern states, particularly South Carolina? On the question of slavery, when we look at the three-fifths clause today, every five slaves counted as three for the purposes of proportion and representation. We not only cringe, but we're ashamed that that can be a historical fossil in the charter of a nation that said that it was dedicated to liberty.
It's an extraordinary story and there are many fascinating ways to look at it. And I think we really cover the ground nicely in this program. Lindsay's new book will be out in a year's time, but it's now out of her hands, except for some page proofs and the last second revisions. It's about John Adams and particularly his presidency. So that will be something I can't wait, actually to read it and to talk with her about it. I like John Adams very well, but I don't like him as well as Joseph Ellis and now I think Lindsay Chervinsky.
I'm a Jeffersonian, I think that Jefferson was the founding father because somebody had to articulate the highest aspirations of a free people. Let me say that again, there are countries that behave like countries, Canada is one of them.
England is one of them, France is one of them, Finland, but the United States is unique in that it pitched its national destiny at this high level of abstraction and idealism. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The right to revolution is built into the Constitution of the United States. We're unique in this enlightenment, high-flown idealism. And the person more responsible for that aspirational nature of the American experiment than anybody else is Thomas Jefferson. And yes, he was a slaveholder, and yes, he was sometimes hypocritical, and yes, he was more political than he liked to pretend. Yes, he's a paradox, a liberty-loving slaveholder, etc. But imagine our national destiny without him. Without that idea that we were going to be something new under the sun, that we were going to set a new standard for government and for human destiny.
I don't want to live in a country that doesn't have a Jefferson at its center, I don't want to live in a country that's sort of realistic. The way John Adams country would have been, or cynical and obsessed with power and money and militarism, the way Hamilton's country would have been. We're uniquely Jeffersonian, and so it's so much fun to try to make sense of him at this time. When he's really in disarray, when he's really regarded as toxic in a number of quarters, and I see that toxicity, and I lament it, you know?
Of course, but imagine America without Jefferson at its core. You just can't. When you go to Monticello, you think this is a really, really remarkable and whimsical human visionary. And the Jefferson Memorial, which is not as moving as the Lincoln Memorial, but somehow is absolutely epitomized as Jefferson, except for the statue. I think he would find that embarrassing.
But the neoclassical dome and the columns, and the sense of a kind of a temple of human freedom. And, of course, you can shatter that by saying, Sure, really great Jefferson, you who had 200 enslaved human beings and bought and sold enslaved people, including while you were president. Of course, you can besmirch Jefferson's core character and reputation by bringing this up, and we should, but you can't say that's enough to entirely displace Jefferson. That he's all that, but he's also more than that, and that we can't have one without the other.
That we used to pretend that he was a reluctant slaveholder, and he sort of got a Hall pass on that issue. But more recently, we're just excoriating him, flagellating him, eviscerating him, demolishing him, shaming him. A little of that goes a long way in my opinion. So it's the last days of August here in North Dakota, hot day, cool nights.
When I walk out in the morning, I open the door, I feel the whiff of autumn in the air. I love to sit out now on my small deck in the evening. The nights are coming sooner, the days are shortening. I lament that I like autumn, I like the period between the first real freeze and then the first real blizzard.
It's about a six week period between mid to late September and the 10th or so of November. And after that, it's what Theodore Roosevelt called the season of iron desolation.
I'm so excited about what is happening with Listening to America and with the Jefferson Hour, and with my plans to travel this country in my airstream. And the Edward S. Curtis Elders project, in which I'm interviewing Native Americans about the achievement of Edward S. Curtis. This is a wonderful, fruitful, amazing time, and next week I'll be in Athens.
I'm leaving shortly, first to go to South Carolina to give a couple of talks as J. Robert Oppenheimer, and then I fly through Newark to Athens. And I'll be there for 10 days and I will get to see the most important person in my universe. One Katherine Missouri Walker Jenkinson, who is now finishing up her doctorate at the University of Oxford. So I live in anticipation. I'm counting down to the day that I'm sitting on a rooftop boutique hotel with her, a modest hotel she's found with her usual capacity. On the internet. We'll be having a drink on the roof in about a week's time. Looking across at the Acropolis lit up in the evening and the world's single most beautiful building in ruins there and debating.
She's a little more critical of eurocentrism than I am. My view is, hey, that's who we are, and look what eurocentrism has done. Of course, there's a whole negative side, a dark side, but on the whole, you want to live in an enlightened, an enlightenment country. Just ask Britney Spears, just ask the people of Ukraine.
And for all of its manifold faults, the enlightenment has created the only world worth living in if you believe in things like due process and the rule of law.
So the founders met for a few months, May 14th through September 17th, 1787, to create a more perfect union. And they did not without fundamental weaknesses. We're still living with that instrument more than 230 years later. And this conversation with Lindsay Chervinsky is about 10 things relating to the formation of the Constitution of the United States. So hello everyone, thank you for being listeners and being friends to this program.
If you can help in any way, we would love that. I have my airstream now, I need gas cards, I need a few $3,000 gas cards. And that will get me at least from Bismarck to Fargo when I undertake this gigantic John Steinbeck tour of the United States, beginning in the spring of 2024..
So let's go to the program 10 things about the Constitution of the United States.
Hello everyone and welcome to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. Today, my guest is Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky. 10 things about the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Lindsay, first, welcome but also congratulations. You just sent me a PDF of the cover of your forthcoming book. John Adams Making the Presidency John Adams and The Precedents That Forged the Republic.
Hearty congratulations.
Thank you, I'm very excited. I was quite impatient for this milestone and I was nervous about it because I really loved my first cover. I don't have any strong thoughts about what cover should be, so I kind of leave it up to the press and I'm very pleased.
Lindsay It has a beautiful image of John Adams as an older statesman, mostly bald, with sort of wild white-gray hair and a distinguished black suit. And what I love about it is that he couldn't look more human. There's no mask, there's no character armor here, this is John Adams.
Yeah, I agree. I had sent a couple of things to the press as ideas. And this portrait is among the less well-known ones and really hasn't been used on other covers. And so those are all good things. But I agree with you. He looks very alive, he looks very real. And that's really one of the things that I want people to take away from the book.
So it's fitting, then, that the cover says that, too.
So speaking of which, our subject today is 10 things about the Constitution in our very popular 10 things series, so let's start there. He wasn't there, Jefferson wasn't there, Patrick Henry wasn't there.
Samuel Adams wasn't there. Some of the most important figures in the founding generation were not there. Where was poor John Adams?
John Adams was in London doing nothing because the British had decided that it was useless to negotiate with the Americans under the articles of Confederation. And for good reason, because they couldn't really do anything. So he was just kind of in London and hanging out with his family, not really doing anything. And I do think he actually really enjoyed London and enjoyed the arts and the sciences, and the literature and the architecture and all those kinds of things. But he was very much ready to come home, so he was not present, as was Thomas. Jefferson was also in Europe.
So they had good reasons not to be there. The others were not there for more political purposes, right?
So Patrick Henry famously said he smelt a rat. What did he mean by that?
So this gets at two of our points one is the, of course, people who are not there, which we've been discussing, the other is the Constitutional convention was agreed upon by the states and agreed upon by Congress to amend the articles of Confederation, not to replace it, to amend it. And from the beginning. Patrick Henry. When asked why he wasn't there, he said he smelt a rat because he suspected that a larger cahoots was in progress. And indeed, he was correct. Because pretty much the first thing they did once they had a quorum, was agree to scrap the articles of Confederation and start over, which I think needed to be done. But others disagreed.
He smelt a rat. That's beautiful language, of course, I won't comment on your use of the word cahoots. But was the rat that he thought they would tear up the existing articles of Confederation, or was the rat that he thought? Whatever happens is going to be too centralized?
I think both, I mean, isn't that kind of a, you know? There were people like George Mason who genuinely believed that the articles could be amended to meet the needs of the nation. And I think Patrick Henry initially believed that as well. And one of the objections, of course, to the new constitution by many of the anti-federalists, of whom Patrick Henry and George Mason were among them, was that it was too centralized. It was too strong with federal government.
It didn't have enough rights reserved to the states, it didn't have enough protections guaranteed to the people, the executive was too powerful. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think they were one in the same objection, really. It was just coming out from different reasons.
So Jefferson also believed, I'm quoting now, a few careful amendments to the good old fabric, the venerable fabric of the Articles of Confederation, would be enough to fix it. So he wanted stronger commercial capacity, wanted to remove the requisition clause for taxation. To give the national government a little bit more authority over coordinating our international relations. But beyond that, Jefferson thought that would be enough. The articles are fine, they just don't have enough power in those limited areas.
I take it, you disagree with that.
Well, those were certainly among the more problematic areas. The states were squabbling amongst themselves over commerce. Especially when you think of rivers, there are several places in the United States where rivers divide two states. So if you think about Maryland and Virginia, and New York and New Jersey, and commerce between the two states. As well as transportation, ferry transportation were highly problematic. Because who paid for these things, who taxed these things? And the states were competing against one another to see who could offer better incentives to merchants and traders, and so commerce was a huge issue.
There was, of course, the foreign intercourse, by which I mean both trade and defense. That was a huge problem because you can't have 13 foreign policies, otherwise it's a disaster. And then one of the bedrock problems underlying all of these issues was that Congress was totally impotent. Because it had zero funds with which to do anything, because it couldn't get any money. So I think that Jefferson is correct in articulating some of the main problems, I just don't know that amending. Even if those had been amended, it still would have been a confederation in which all states had equal votes and all states had to have unanimous approval for anything significant.
And we know today how difficult it is to get 60 approval of anything, let alone 66, let alone unanimous. So I think that there would have still been huge obstacles, that would have been impossible.
Right, the constitution, out of the articles, could only be amended with unanimous consent, which was a fatal problem of it. Lindsay, Does it bother you at all, as a lover of due process? That the 55 men who met in Philadelphia exceeded their authority and tossed out the articles? And started fresh in the sense they were violating the instructions they were given by sovereign states.
Above two minds, principally, I would like to say yes. But practically the thing is is that politics is just so very messy and governing is so, very messy. And this was one of Hamilton and John Adams real complaints with Thomas Jefferson was that he had such nice ideas. But sometimes when you actually get into the practice of doing things, it requires compromise, which he did then very well as president, but before objected to other people compromising. And I also think the other part of it is that, and we know this from our own government inadequacies. Sometimes you need secrecy, you need privacy, you need people to be able to take unpopular votes and not have everyone see what you're doing. And so I think that had they tried to stick to the process designated, I just don't think anything would have gotten done.
All right, John Adams wasn't there, Thomas Jefferson wasn't there, Samuel Adams wasn't there, Patrick Henry wasn't there.
If Adams had been there, how might things have been different?
So I think that there may have been more attention paid to the executive. I think that Adams was, I think, actually by and large fairly pleased with the Constitution, and the Constitution actually reflected a lot of his own principles. There's an amazing article by Mary Sarah Builder that looks at how John Adams defense of the Constitution was coming out right as the constitutional convention was happening in serial form and was actually really shaping a lot of the delegates thoughts about this process. And so I think he actually would have been pretty pleased. My guess is there would have been a little bit more attention paid to the executive because he believed in the importance of it.
And as we've discussed before, it ended up kind of being an afterthought because they were tired and they didn't want to deal with it. And they kind of trusted Washington to figure out the fuzzy bits, and he was sitting there, so it was very awkward. And et cetera, et cetera. And they really put all of their attention into Congress.
We're talking with Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky 10 things about the U.S Constitution. I think it's good that Jefferson wasn't there actually, although he became a bit of a nuisance afterwards. And he certainly annoyed poor Madison by saying, Oh, nice start, why don't you have a second round of this?
And maybe you'll do a better job on the second round. But, you know, the rap on Adams is, you know, comes from almost the American myth from the Broadway hit 1776. Sit down, John, sit down. Would he have just been, like, obnoxious and speaking all the time if he'd been there?
Yes, he had trouble not sharing his thoughts.
And you know, when he got into the Senate as the vice president, initially, he had lots of thoughts to share. And the Senate told him politely to keep his mouth shut. So yes, I think he would have had a lot to say.
But he did regard himself. I don't want to get stuck on it, but you're fresh from this great piece of scholarship. He regarded himself, I think, as the actually the world's leading authority on constitutions. He had written this multivolume history of the Constitution of the United States. It was immense, almost unreadable.
He had done an enormous amount of writing and thinking about this. I think he thought, I, John Adams, am the expert. Others might be the expert on war or on finance, but this is my area. And so if he had been there, I think his influence would have been strong, but not always agreeable to some of the other members.
Yeah, it's interesting, counterfactual, one of the interesting parts of the story, and I think this is one of the numbers on my list. Yes, the Virginia Mac Nations ahead of time. Washington Edmund, Randolph, James Madison. They all get there early and there is not a quorum, and they spend the time waiting for the other members to arrive to plan basically their line of attack. And they work with some other members, especially those from Philadelphia or from Pennsylvania. Because, of course, they were in Philadelphia to sort of figure out what the plan was going to be for a strong, centralized government.
If Adams had been there, it's interesting to think about, would he have partnered with them? would he have met with them, would he have been a part of that process? I think, certainly ideologically, he was in line with them, and I think in terms of his own thoughts about his constitutional knowledge. The only other person that really gave him a run for his money at that time was James Madison.
But James Madison hadn't published anything about it yet. Not that that conversation ever really happened. But boy, if I had my way, I would have loved to put the two of them together in May of 1787..
I can imagine John Adams saying to young Jemmy Madison, Good, some nice preliminary thoughts. Young man. Thank you very much. You've done quite well, all right. So that was, Oh, there goes Quincy wanting your attention.
We need to take a break in a minute, let's do a simple one in a minute or less. So the first thing they did, aside from tearing up the existing Constitution, thus violating their instructions, was to vote for secrecy. That nothing would leave the room, windows would be sealed, everyone was sworn to keep this private. Most constitutional historians say that was the making moment of the Constitution.
If there'd been any leakage, or if there'd been any publication of any of this in the news, the process would have broken down in all sorts of ways. Do you agree that the secrecy rule was actually essential to the success of the process?
I do, I think that, as I alluded to earlier, people had to take a lot of unpopular votes, had to make a lot of unpopular decisions. They had to compromise. The Constitution is a series of compromises, and compromises are really hard to do when people are watching.
We need to take a short break. We're talking with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky 10 things about the Constitution. We've actually done two.
When we come back, I want to talk about the committee of the whole. This is listening to America. We'll be back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America. 10 Things about the U..S. Constitution between May 14, 1787 and September 17. 55 men who met in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania to craft a new constitution for the United States. Which we have been using for more than 230 years, with 27 amendments, 10 of them right off the start. Lindsay. They adopted a secrecy rule, but they also decided that they would dissolve into a committee of the whole. And instead of having binding votes from the beginning, they would have sort of preliminary straw votes. And that people would be able to change their views as time went on. And that they wouldn't lock anything in until they had done a great deal of preliminary debate and conversation.
Many historians believe this, too, was essential to the success of the Constitutional Convention. There were so many variables, so many plates spinning. What's a presidency? what will our foreign policy be? how will we elect?
What's the relationship between the national government and the state? Should we have proportional representation, or should we have equal representation, and so on? Do you agree with the conventional wisdom that doing it in this way was essential to the progress they made that summer?
I do, because the final form of the constitution actually really did not take place until fairly far along in the summer. They were working on a lot of different plans, they were talking about a lot of different things, they were moving things around. They had to come back to the executive time and time again.
And so I think that they needed that flexibility in order to try and find where there was enough agreement. We talked about compromises and that was especially important with the representation in Congress. Those compromises required a lot of different pieces and a lot of different considerations. And so in order to get that in place, you needed to have space for people to move forward and backwards and left and right, and you needed to not. Also have a hard record, necessarily of what people said so that they could feel comfortable changing their minds, which they did do over the course of the summer.
And helped again by secrecy. So one could send up a kind of a trial balloon and wouldn't be held accountable to it in the press. And then later could change one's mind. It's a bit like a kaleidoscope as you move the presidency, then the courts become different and so on. It seems to me that that was another really intelligent choice. So, Lindsay, the importance of George Washington, and let me just give a little bit of background.
Washington retired after the war handed in. His commission made a big deal about being the American. Cincinnatus. Was going to go home and sit under his vine and fig tree. That if he ever came back into the public, it would somehow degrade his reputation. Because it would show that he was ambitious and loved power. But if he won the war and then broke his sword and went home and became a gentleman farmer, that he would solidify his place in American memory forever. Eventually, they wore him down. I think, is the only way to put this, and he reluctantly decides to come. How important is that?
It's essential a couple of other sort of background facts. So initially, when they started talking about having this convention, they asked him to come, and he said, no. So what happened was Virginia appointed a slate of delegates to go, and it was largely engineered by Edmund Randolph, who was the governor of Virginia at that time. Washington says no, and then Randolph just conveniently forgets to tell the state legislature that Washington has said no, so they can't appoint a replacement.
And in doing so, gives his colleagues, his allies, basically six months to wear down. Washington, which includes James Madison, who was in on this plot, Edmund Randolph himself and Henry Knox, and they convinced him to go. They say it's essential, and they were right. Because we've talked a lot about his over several episodes, his unparalleled stature at this moment.
It's really hard for us to even wrap our minds around how famous, how popular, how trusted he was. People were already referring to him as the father of the country. And so if there's a new project like this and he's not involved, it's not going to work because people aren't going to take it seriously. In reverse, if he is there, it's going to give it a stamp of legitimacy. That is absolutely essential and required if the project is going to have any hope of success.
I feel sorry for him, so he just wants to retire, he really wants to retire. But he also knows that that's the way to become the immortal cincinnatus of American life. So he gets kind of almost trapped into coming to the Constitutional convention. Well, then it becomes clear that he's also going to be drafted to be the first president.
So now he has a double problem, because this is not just like presiding over this convention. Now he's back at the center of power, and then after a single term, he just he's had some health issues. He just very much wants to retire. And Hamilton and Jefferson, who can't agree on anything else, put on a full court press and persuade him to stand for reelections. And then, when he finally retires in 1797, he's down to two years of the rest of his life.
And so, luckily, his status was not in the end damaged as he thought it would be, by ambition and by coming back to the arena. But he certainly felt that he would be diminished in history by allowing himself to be drafted in this way.
Yes, especially if it failed, because if it failed, then he had played his hand for no good reason. So once he committed to it, he committed to it. And he was very determined to make sure that it worked, that it was effective, that it solved the problems that they were worried about, or at least some of them, and then that it was ratified. And so he did so in a couple of ways.
So one, he didn't miss a single session. He was there every day and in doing so, sort of set an expectation that others would be there. He was unanimously elected as president of the convention, which had very little authority. Except that when they were not in Commedia as a whole. He was up in front of the room in this sort of raised dais, which adds to the pressure of his judgment. And critically, what I think a lot of people forget is that he was voting with the Virginia delegation.
So people could see how he was voting for things. Gouverneur Morris crafted a letter for him. That was basically the cover letter for this draft constitution that they sent to Congress, saying, Oops, we decided to come up with something new. Please send it to the states for review. And only he signed that, as opposed to the constitution, which almost everyone else signed.
And in doing so, it essentially was his personal endorsement for the constitution which carried really. It's hard for us to quantify how much weight, but it certainly carried a great deal of weight.
No question, Lindsay, I'm talking with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky 10 things about the U.S. Constitution. So Washington sits in front, they're talking about the presidency.
What is our executive going to be? And they're all hardheaded realists who've read their history of the Roman Republic and so on. And so they want to say, well, what if we get a corrupt schnook? what if we get a power hungry guy? What if we get somebody who is in it for himself?
They can't really talk that way because there he is. And so they're all kind of talking around the issue of the executive. Because they don't want to offend the great man. But they also know, as Jefferson put it in a letter, you won't be around forever. And so we need to make some auxiliary provisions for lesser men. Who might be president?
Well, I know one of the items on your list was Franklin's role and this particular part of it. He plays a very important part. So perhaps you could tell us that story?
So, Franklin, I know a lot about this, I'm fascinated by this. He was too old, he was ill, he had stones.
He was carried by prisoners in a sedan chair, prisoners from the Walnut Street jail. He was like, he was the world historical figure. Washington might've been the greatest man in the world, but Franklin was like the celebrity. And he didn't say much, and what he did say wasn't particularly useful.
He wanted a unicameral system that wasn't going to fly at one point when they were squabbling, he said. Maybe we should be praying every day, maybe we should bring in God as a kind of auxiliary to this set of conversations. At the end, it was this incredible speech in which, he says it may not be the best that could be done. But I dare say it's as good as anything I've ever seen. And whatever its defects are, will be repaired by the wise people who run this country hereafter.
And I ask each of you when you go home to realize that this is probably the best we can have. And if it's not the greatest, then I don't know what the greatest constitution would have looked like. I haven't given it justice, as you know, but it's a magnificent speech in which he basically says, Look, folks, nobody is really happy here. But this is a really good thing we have done and we shouldn't be in any way remorseful about the product. So I love that.
I think that's just so perfectly. Benjamin Franklin I don't think Jefferson could have spoken that way, I don't even think that Washington or Madison could have spoken that way. But his second thing, as you know, is, of course, one of the most famous of all stories from the convention.
At the end, when they finally say enough and everyone's going home, and they walk out the door. And a prominent woman of Philadelphia says to Dr. Franklin, Well, sir, what have you given us? And Franklin then says, Immortally, a republic if you can keep it.
That story is very useful for American history, although there is a fair amount of-.
Don't you tell me it's not true?
Well, it's probably not, because the woman was Eliza Willing Powell. And she was one of the best hostesses in Philadelphia and regularly had a lot of the delegates over to dinner. She was good friends with Washington. So when she read that this, I mean, this story started circulating, like right after the Constitution. When she read it, she said, I wouldn't have said that. I knew exactly what kind of government it was. So-.
Okay, I hate to see you do this to our favorite tropes in history. But is it possible that he still said that a republic if you can keep it?
It certainly is possible that Franklin said that at some point, and it certainly sounds like Franklin. And it's a very useful phrase, even if it wasn't necessarily prompted by Eliza Willing Powell. The one I was thinking was when they were discussing the presidency and they were discussing methods of punishment and removal. And no one wanted to talk about it, no one wanted to talk about impeachment, especially. And he basically said, like, we all agree that the first president is going to be great. Like, nod, nod, wink, wink. But we can't expect that the people after him are going to be so conscientious.
So, like, spit it out, folks is basically what he was saying, like, you know, talk about it. So, Franklin, although he was not there every day because he was in poor health, as you said. And although he did not necessarily come up with any of the crafting of the forms, he certainly had an, I think, outsized influence.
So the Sun story, I think, is probably apocryphal. So at the end, he says, You know, I've been sitting here for the last few months and I've noticed that chair up on the dais. And there's a sun halfway above the horizon there. And I've been wondering all this time, is it a setting sun or is it a rising sun? And after all of this, I'm now disposed to believe that it's probably a rising sun. That sounds very Franklin-esque, but it also sounds a little corny to me.
It is a little bit corny, I think, that Franklin liked Corny sometimes.
He had a kind of corn-pone, you know, rustic kind of persona in Poor Richard, and you know, he's always telling a tedious anecdote. I try to think of him Lindsay because, you know, he's a world historical figure by now, and some people just can't stand him. I mean, John Adams just loathes him, admires him, but loathes him because he had to work with him. But he also realized I may be brilliant, but I don't have the Franklin touch.
Franklin has the touch and I think he envied it and therefore had to assail it, but there were other people that didn't particularly admire Franklin by this point. He had been accused of near treason during the run-up to the revolution. And had to kind of salvage his reputation when he got back to this country after 20 years abroad, I think everyone there must've thought this is the venerable, famous celebrity world, historical Franklin. But there's a fair amount of eye-rolling, I think.
Like, here, he comes on his sedan chair again. There's this kind of sense that he's just of a different breed from everybody else. And I think there was some belief that maybe he got more attention than he deserved.
Yeah, I mean, he was kind of, in some ways, and by design, a cartoon character.
I love it, you know? And he leaned into that in France and he used it to his advantage. And there was certainly an amusing element of him when he came back to the United States. But while he certainly was of another generation, so he was quite literally on his way out as these new sort of generations were coming in. He did have weaknesses, but I think that what's perhaps most interesting about him is he clearly had what we would think of as real emotional intelligence.
He had a real ability to bring people to him, he was very charismatic. And that was useful. And we talked about in terms of, like the symbolism of Washington, the symbolism of Franklin was also quite helpful.
And you know, he was a world-renowned scientist, we kind of lock him into the kite, but in fact, he did pioneering work in electricity. He was a serious inventor. He's sort of a Carl Sagan figure. In addition to being the venerable Dr.
FRANKLIN All right, so in your usual mean-spirited way, you speak of the machinations of the Virginians and that they're in cahoots. It is true that they rallied early and they had gotten their act together, and Madison had read everything. He asked Jefferson to send books. Jefferson sent 80 books.
Madison read them and digested them and wrote about them, and so on. He did a long essay on the vices of constitutions. He was, I think, the best prepared person in the room. And the Virginians sort of stacked the debates by getting in early with the Virginia Plan, which was articulated by Edmund Randolph. Do you think, looking at it from this perspective, that the Virginians had too much authority at the convention?
No, because I think that they were, I mean, a lot of their proposals were really speaking for the big states, they weren't necessarily just speaking for Virginia. In that sense, they did have quite a bit of influence. Speaking for the big states, but as we see as we go through some of the compromises, the little states really held their own. And they held their own in a lot of ways. By basically bluffing, or by saying, you know, if you don't give us something in return, we're leaving.
And so they could not be ignored. And so I think that, you know, certainly, Virginia ideas were powerful. But when we look at the other people who either had a big role in the drafting of the text, Gouverneur Morris is probably responsible for a lot of the language in the final draft. And he's not a Virginian. And one of the most ardent defenders and most important political thinkers during the ratification process was James Wilson.
And he was from Pennsylvania, so I do think that it was really a big state effort, as opposed to just Virginia.
I agree with that. There's kind of a revisionist account now of the convention that says that Charles Pinckney had a plan that was essentially closer to the final product than Madison's. But that Madison, in keeping almost a verbatim transcript of the events, in many respects, actually wrote Charles Pinckney out of history. He, in a sense, he tried to erase his influence at the convention. That seems a little extreme to me, but James Madison was a human being, too, with the usual human ego and ambitions. Do you think that Madison is usually called the father of the Constitution and the best prepared person there?
Do you think that he's overrated in any way at the convention?
I don't think he's overrated, I certainly think he was the force behind many of the ideas. I think that Gouverneur Morris probably doesn't get enough credit for the final shaping. And the amount of work that was done on those committees to make the pieces come together and to get agreement on the pieces. A lot of times, people take his notes as a transcript of what actually happened. And it's very important to recognize it as a primary source, but as a primary source that was intentionally crafted with a political view in mind.
That doesn't mean it's not useful, it just means that we have to keep that lens in place when we're reading it.
It's not an electronic transcription of the kind that we would have today. He shaped it over time, and he shaped it, especially in, I won't say, cahoots. He shaped it in coordination with his man, Jefferson. Because they were fighting for the interpretation of constitutional history, in addition to the transactions of the actual meeting in Philadelphia. 55 men. Not a single woman, not a single Black person, either free or enslaved, not a single American Indian, no Muslims. These were white male privileged property owners, a number of them lawyers, a number of them plantation owners, many of them slaveholders. The legitimacy of that would be zero in the 21st century.
How do you reflect upon that?
In that way, it is a product of its time. So, you know? While I think it's always really important not to totally excuse people for ideas they had at the time, because usually there is some diversity of thought. White property men were citizens, they are the ones that held power, they are the ones that made decisions. And that is in, I think, perhaps the greatest piece of evidence not to dive us into a longstanding historical debate. But I think it is the greatest piece of evidence for why the revolution was not particularly radical.
Because the same people were pretty much in power in the states as they were in the colonies beforehand, with the exception of maybe the royal governors. That's one of the reasons that I think the revolution was actually effective is because it was slow, moving and piecemeal, as opposed to completely overturning society. Which, I know, is not the question you asked. So I think it was a product of its time and in keeping with citizenship at the moment.
I just don't want to venerate in the way that we Americans do a constitution that was created by self-interested white males in a slaveholding society. We'll talk about that when we come back. This is listening to America, we'll see you in just a moment.
Welcome back to Listening to America, Lindsay. We ended the second segment of the program with my strong argument that the legitimacy of our constitution is problematic. Because of the makeup, the demographics of it, and also we tend to venerate it. The Americans are very conservative, small C conservative with respect to the constitution. As if it's some sort of holy writ, I'm with Jefferson.
It's a document. What's your view of how we venerate it, given how it was made?
I think it's essential that we view it as a starting point, and that is how they viewed it, too. You shared Franklin's wonderful speech at the end about how, you know it's really the best that could be had. And while they didn't say it in as nice of language, Washington wrote a letter. When he left Philadelphia. Basically saying the same thing to Benjamin Harrison, Madison said the same thing.
They all felt that it was sort of mediocre, but it was the best that could be had. And they emphasized the ability of future generations to amend it. They hoped that future generations would come up with solutions that they had to. Problems that they knew about, like slavery, but had not yet figured out how to solve, and problems that they could not possibly envision. Because they were not, you know, future tellers. And so I think that if we view it as a starting point, it's a really brilliant, really excellent starting point. But then it does require amendment to expand to include all Americans.
And it does require future generations of citizens to continue to push to make it better. Which is, I think, the legacy of the founding generation that we should hold on to and we should celebrate. And if we don't do that, then I think we are really disappointing that legacy.
It's a cliche, but it's an important point. We need to continue to make it quote a more perfect union. And they all understood that there was a certain temporariness. A kind of this will work, but it will have to be amended or superseded as the country develops. But Jefferson, of course, wants to tear it up every 19 years, which, I'm sure, nearly killed James Madison. So as long as we're on this subject, Hamilton, one of the three members of the New York delegation, was only there some of the time.
He got very frustrated because the other two members of the New York delegation were kind of Stan Pat articles guys who were obstructionists, really to the process. But on June 18th, famously, Hamilton finally stood up and gave a five-hour address in which he outlined his ideal system of government. Calling for a president to serve for life, senators to serve for life, governors to be appointed by the national executive, et cetera. Most of the people who love Hamilton say, Oh, this was just trial balloons. He was just trying to move the conversation to the right. What's your reading of that famous speech, that infamous speech?
Well, there's no doubt that Hamilton could be a little crazy, so it doesn't totally surprise me. Madison and Hamilton had known each other for several years now at this point. They had met when they were first in the Confederation Congress together, and they had both been really frustrated by the limitations of Congress.
They had both tried to amend it, they had failed. And then they had worked together to try and pull together other conventions, the first of which failed. And then the Annapolis convention they were both at, and then used that as a springboard to get to the Philadelphia Convention.
The two of them allies at this time, basically made it possible for there to be a constitutional convention in Philadelphia. They were the engineers of the meeting in May next, and so they would later drift apart. But at the time, they are both nationalists who want a new constitution, or at least a heavily revised set of articles.
To me, it is implausible to assume that they had been working together all the way to get this to this point, and then they just stopped working together. And then, if you look at what happens after that speech, Hamilton gives the speech, and Madison, like no one else, says anything, and Madison is quiet. And basically allows the day's events to end. And then the next day comes back, doesn't say anything about it, but instead presents a more moderate. Hamilton's speech was really provoked by the New Jersey plan, which was small, state friendly plan, so rather than replying to Hamilton's plan, Madison basically presents a much more moderate critique.
And I do wonder, to a certain extent, if Hamilton was just trying to change the Overton window on what was acceptable and what was to be considered. And by being so extreme, it made Madison seem quite reasonable. Now again, I have no concrete evidence that that's what Hamilton was doing. But there's a lot of corroboration to suggest that they were planning, and then, of course, the federalist papers afterwards, so their partnership was well-established.
Let me just say, what a bunch of nonsense. Isn't it possible, Lindsay, that he was just a monarchist, period? He actually said what he meant? Would he have preferred a constitutional, or, as Jefferson put it, hereditary monarchy?
I don't know if he wanted a hereditary monarchy, I do think he probably wanted president for life, as long as it was the president he wanted.
Exactly what if it's Jimmy Carter? No, what if it's Gerald Ford? what if it's Rutherford B. Hayes?
There were two giant issues at the Constitutional Convention, one overt and one less, so the overt issue was big state v little State. And the little states like Rhode Island and Delaware, and Maryland and Connecticut were not willing to let the big monster states like Pennsylvania and Virginia and New York have their way. So they held it up.
And the Constitutional Convention nearly fell apart over this. And eventually we got the New Jersey compromise, which says that in the House, there will be proportional representation. But every state will have two senators, irrespective of geographic size or population. That's usually regarded as the famous great compromise of the Constitution. I want you to address that. But, Madison said, that's not the actual issue.
The issue in the long run is going to be slave state, non-slave state. Madison was spot on that slavery was going to become the issue. So the question I want to ask you is, we know that South Carolina particularly was absolutist on this question. If you mess with slavery in any way, we're out.
We'll walk, we'll never come back. Why didn't the rest of the country, the other states, call the Bluff of the South and say, all right, then go your way, form your own little confederacy. We don't want to perpetuate slavery in this instrument.
Earlier, when I said that Hamilton speech was in response to the New Jersey plan, I misspoke. It was in response to I think Delaware, which was the small state plan. So just wanted to correct myself there. Why they didn't call South Carolina on the bluff is because, for better or for worse, they didn't believe it was a bluff. We, a lot of historians now say that South Carolina wouldn't have left.
That South Carolina was making a gambit, was taking a firm line, but would have eventually fallen in line. They didn't know that, and whether or not they were right or they were wrong, they believed that South Carolina would leave. And so they put the future of the nation above solving this issue. And obviously we think that's the wrong choice, but I don't think that we can question their truly held beliefs.
We can say, with the benefit of hindsight, they were wrong, but at the time, that's what they believed.
And let's say that they called the bluff of not just South Carolina, but mostly South Carolina and Georgia, and let's say those states walked out, then what?
Well, I mean, those states would have been really tough position, they would have been really screwed because they really wouldn't have had allies. They probably would have ended up having to ally with a European nation, they would have been picked off by a European empire. I think the argument was the union could have been strong enough with only 11 states.
It would have been just fine. But that would have been such a huge symbolic blow to the convention, to the Constitution, that it probably then would not have been finalized and or ratified.
Plus, I mean, if let's just say that a union is formed of the two Carolinas and Georgia at Tennessee about to come in. Surely the issue of the expansion of slavery westward would have still been an issue and might've led to a civil war, which is what did lead to the civil War. So let me just get my prejudices on the table. The only two things the South has ever done, in my opinion, are faulkner and waffle joints. Just so, you know, Lindsay. The fact that slavery was in the Constitution, the Fugitive Slave clause requiring northern states to cooperate in returning escaped slaves, which was reinforced by legislation well down the road in the 19th century, the Three Fifths clause.
I don't agree with those who say that. That meant that African Americans were three fifths of a person. But for every five slaves, three were counted for purposes of proportion and representation. A 20 year postponement on any regulation or prohibition of the slave trade. These things are shameful, illiberal fossils at the heart of the majestic constitution of the United States. Whenever I hear an originalist talk, I think, surely you want to be an originalist? Because this was a constitution which would not use the word slave in its 4,000 words. But perpetuated and kicked the can down the road and effectively made it worse and worse, and worse. Until it could only be resolved with the blood of almost 800,000 human beings, eight of the first 12 presidents were slaveholders.
When you think of that, it makes you swallow very hard, but it also makes you realize I hate to use this term because it's used so sloppily. But they were men of their times, they were men of their times. And the fact is, we just have to face it. That owning human enslaved people was not a prohibition on being the president of the United States. Then, in a sense, it's that simple.
This tells you a lot about the social attitudes of most of the country at the time. Back to the big states and little states for a moment, you know? Alaska under half a million people, Wyoming under 600,000 people, North Dakota 760,000 people, Vermont two senators each. California with almost 15 million people, two senators. This can't be okay.
I know why this compromise had to be in the Constitution, because that would have really broken it up. And you couldn't have gone on, you couldn't have said little states, you band together, big states. We'll be a different confederacy because that's geographically impossible, and we wouldn't have had a government at that point. On the other hand, we're so stuck with this Lindsay that it is simply not okay for 450,000 Alaskans to have two senators when. Massachusetts, Florida, New York, Texas, Illinois, et cetera have tens of millions of people, and it's part of the paralysis of our times. And yet, as you know, it was so deeply insisted upon by the small states that we embedded it as a permanent provision. Because the Constitution says, you can't change this by legislation.
This can only be changed by a new constitution. So they locked it in to make it sacrosanct.
Yeah, it's very annoying. I don't really even know what to say. Other than that, I don't really even know what to say about it. Because it's, you're right, it's so stuck. I mean, I do think one doable. This does not fix the Senate, but it does at least provide a little bit more balance in the House than it would provide. More balance in the Electoral College would be to readjust the House again and expand the House, which can be done by legislation, it's not done by a constitutional amendment.
And at least make that representation a little bit more equitable.
But still, Lindsay, it's worse than we're saying. Because there's also the cloture rule in the Senate, which has nothing to do with the Constitution whatsoever, requiring 60 votes to get things moved forward on most issues. But even if you had a House of Representatives with 5,000 members and California and the big states got their proportional due, the Senate can still hold up absolutely everything.
No, yeah, you're right, you're absolutely right. The Senate could hold up absolutely everything. I think that it would at least make presidential elections a little bit more in line with the popular vote. It wouldn't be perfect because, of course, each state's electoral college numbers come from the number of representatives, plus the number of senators.
And so it wouldn't be perfect, but it would be much more in line with the popular vote, which I think would at least be. While it would not in any way address the problem of the Senate, it would address one of the inequities that we have in our political system.
One of the things that the founding fathers had a lot of trouble with was deciding what the president should be. Partly because we had just rejected monarchy, and so we were all experimenting with a much less centralized form of power in the states. But also because Washington was there, of course, sitting in front of everybody, and people didn't really know what the president should be. And they waited until the last period of all this to gel it. And then the vice presidency was even worse. They thought we better give them something and you can provide over the Senate.
One of your questions, or one of your positions, was the Executive Council under the Madison? Under the Virginia Plan, there might've been an executive council, like up to a three member executive. And Madison also wanted a committee of revisal, including members of the executive and the court, the Supreme Court, to look at legislation having been passed.
Yeah, so the term executive council meant a lot of things at the time, so it could be that there was a multi-person executive which at one point was batted around. The executive council could be the sort of committee of Revisa which you mentioned, which would be sort of to review legislation and help the president in deciding things. And then it could also be an advisory body, and so several of the different plans had a provision that included this advisory body.
And sometimes it was made up of the department secretaries and Supreme Court justices and other people, sometimes it was sort of it really did restrict presidential authority. He had to talk to them, he had to meet with them, and at various moments, different committees, the Committee on Postponed Matters, which I think is my favorite, named committee.
It's like Congress in our time, exactly the committee of seven. They at various points cut out these provisions. And at the very end, George Mason basically was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We have cut out an advisory body.
No president, or king, or monarch, or anyone has ever operated without an advisory body. This is going to leave the president open to cronyism and corruption. Is gonna require the Senate to sit in session year round, because, of course, the Senate was supposed to be the great advisory body on foreign policy. And so therefore, it's gonna be too expensive. He's like, we should really have one, and there were different options put forth.
And, interestingly, Charles Coatsworth Pinckney put forth one that was almost identical to what the Cabinet ended up being, and they were all explicitly rejected, they were voted down. And we've talked a lot about the Cabinet, and I know when our very first episode that we did together on the Cabinet, we talked about this. But that decision was really why Washington was reluctant to then create a cabinet for several years into his presidency because he had been there.
He had seen them voted down, and it therefore left the president free as it unfolded. To really have independent and unobserved and unsupervised advisory relations, because there isn't a set, established thing in the Constitution.
We have time for just two quick things. Unfortunately, we should do another program on the future of the U.S constitution soon. But one thing is about the writing. So the draftsman of the final version of the 4,000 some word constitution was largely Gouverneur Morris.
There was a committee on style, but he wrote it essentially, and in the preamble, an enormous change was made in process. Because at the beginning, it said, we, the people of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, et cetera, in order to form a more perfect union. In the end, it was we, the people of the United States. Gigantic change.
Huge, huge, because at the time, people really did still see themselves as citizens of their state. And I think that took a long time to change. But at least it got the process started. Because you had a thing that you could be called. Also, imagine the messiness in the future. Once you admitted states, What are you going to do?
Mend the preamble each time. That doesn't make any sense. But yes, symbolically, yeah, I mean, you would have had like a three-page preamble, but symbolically it's just enormous change.
What's the biggest mistake they made? Aside from slavery, of course.
I think the amendment process, they thought it was going to be easier to amend than it has proven to be, and they had, I think, good reason to think that, of course. Keep in mind they passed the Bill of Rights the first summer that Congress was in session. And then they were ratified. And then there were a series of other amendments in the next several decades.
So it's really only modern America that has had such a resistance to the amendment process. So I don't even think it was a mistake at the time. I think it's proven to be a mistake in how the constitution and politics have unfolded, and maybe it's just unequal to the current moment.
I couldn't agree more. It's a chokehold on the future of human progress. You need to make the bar high, it turns out it's too high. And I can't even imagine an amendment to the Constitution being ratified in our time, Lindsay.
This has been so interesting. We'll carry on in another conversation about all this soon. Thank you Lindsay and congratulations on your book. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.
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