History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States Volume I Part 22

On the a.s.sembling of the Convention, Robert Morris, by the instruction and in behalf of the deputation of Pennsylvania, proposed that General Was.h.i.+ngton should be elected President. John Rutledge of South Carolina seconded this suggestion, observing that the presence of General Was.h.i.+ngton forbade any observations on the occasion which might otherwise be proper.[398] His opinions, at the time when he took the chair of the Convention, as to what was proper to be done, and what was practicable, can only be gathered from his correspondence. He had formed some general views of the principles on which a national government should be framed, but he had not proceeded at all to the consideration of details. The first and most important object he held to be, to establish such a const.i.tution as would secure and perpetuate the republican form of government, by satisfying the wants of the country and the time, and thus checking all tendency to monarchical ideas. He had come to the Convention, as we have seen, in order that the great experiment of self-government, on which this country had entered at the Revolution, might have a further trial beyond the hazards of the hour.

He knew--he had had occasion to know--that the thought of a monarchy, as being necessary to the safety of the country, had been to some extent entertained. There had been those in a former day, in the darkest period of the war, who had proposed to him to a.s.sume a crown,--men who could possibly have bestowed it upon him, or have a.s.sisted him to acquire it,--but who met a rebuke which the nature of their proposition and his character should have taught them to expect. There were those in that day who sincerely despaired of republican liberty, and who had allowed themselves to think that some of the royal families of Europe might possibly furnish a sovereign fitted to govern and control the turbulent elements of our political condition. Was.h.i.+ngton understood the genius and character of the people of this country so well, that he held it to be impossible ever to establish that form of government over them without the deepest social convulsions. It was the form of the government against which they had waged a seven years' war; and it was certain that, apart from all questions of theoretical fitness or value, nothing but the most frightful civil disorders, menacing the very existence of society itself, could ever bring them again under its sway.

He was also satisfied, that, whatever particular system was to be adopted, it must be one that would create a national sovereignty and give it the means of coercion. What the nature of that coercion ought to be, he had not considered; but that obedience to the ordinances of a general government could not be expected, unless it was clothed with the power of enforcing them, all his experience during the war, and all his observation since, had fully satisfied him. He was convinced, also, that powers of a more extensive nature, and which would comprehend other objects, ought to be given to the general government; that Congress should be so placed as to enable and compel them to exert their const.i.tutional authority with a firm and steady hand, instead of referring it back to the States. He proposed to adopt no temporizing expedients, but to have the defects of the Confederation thoroughly examined and displayed, and a radical cure provided, whether it were accepted or not. A course of this kind, he said, would stamp wisdom and dignity on their proceedings, and hold up a light which sooner or later would have its influence.[399]

Persuaded that the primary cause of all the public disorders lay in the different State governments, and in the tenacity with which they adhered to their State powers, he saw that incompatibility in the laws of different States and disrespect to the authority of the Union must continue to render the situation of the country weak, inefficient, and disgraceful. The principle with which he entered the Convention, and on which he acted throughout to the end, was, "with a due consideration of circ.u.mstances and habits, to form such a government as will bear the scrutinizing eye of criticism, and trust it to the good sense and patriotism of the people to carry it into effect."[400]

The character of Was.h.i.+ngton as a statesman has, perhaps, been somewhat undervalued, from two causes; one of them being his military greatness, and the other, the extraordinary balance of his mind, which presented no brilliant and few salient qualities. Undoubtedly, as a statesman he was not constructive, like Hamilton, nor did he possess the same abundant and ever-ready resources. He was eminently cautious, but he was also eminently sagacious. He had had a wide field of observation during the war, the theatre of which, commencing in New England, had extended through the Middle and into the Southern States. He had, of course, been brought in contact with the men and the inst.i.tutions of all the States, and had been concerned in their conflicts with the federal authority, to a greater extent than any other public man of the time. This experience had not prepared him--as the character of his mind had not prepared him--to suggest plans or frame inst.i.tutions fitted to remedy the evils he had observed, and to apply the principles which he had discovered.

But it had revealed to him the dangers and difficulties of our situation, and had made him a national statesman, as incapable of confining his politics to the narrow scale of local interests and attachments, as he had been of confining his exertions to the object of achieving the liberties of a single state.

He would have been fitly placed in the chair of any deliberative a.s.sembly into which he might have been called at any period of his life; but it was preeminently suitable that he should occupy that of the Convention for forming the Const.i.tution. He had no talent for debate, and upon the floor of this body he would have exerted less influence, and have been far less the central object towards which the opinions and views of the members were directed, than he was in the high and becoming position to which he was now called.

FOOTNOTES:

[389] Madison's Debates in the Federal Convention. Elliot, V. 244.

[390] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 166.

[391] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 121.

[392] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 167.

[393] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 212.

[394] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 219.

[395] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 221.

[396] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 236.

[397] Sparks's Life of Was.h.i.+ngton, p. 435.

[398] Madison's Debates, Elliot, V. 123.

[399] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 250.

[400] Was.h.i.+ngton's Writings, IX. 258.

CHAPTER VIII.

HAMILTON.

Next to the august name of the President should be mentioned that great man who, as a statesman, towered above all his compeers, even in that a.s.sembly of great men,--Alexander Hamilton.

This eminent person is probably less well known to the nation at the present day, than most of the leading statesmen of the Revolution. There are causes for this in his history. He never attained to that high office which has conferred celebrity on inferior men. The political party of which he was one of the founders and one of the chief leaders became unpopular with the great body of his countrymen before it was extinct. His death, too, at the early age of forty-seven, while it did not leave an unfinished character, left an unfinished career, for the contemplation of posterity. In this respect, his fate was unlike that of nearly all his most distinguished contemporaries. Was.h.i.+ngton, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Jay, and in fact almost all the prominent statesmen of the Revolution, died in old age or in advanced life, and after the circle of their public honors and usefulness had been completed.

Hamilton was cut off at a period of life when he may be said to have had above a third of its best activity yet before him: and this is doubtless one cause why so little is popularly known, by the present generation, of him who was by far the greatest statesman of the Revolutionary age.

It is known, indeed, traditionally, what a thrill of horror--what a sharp, terrible pang--ran through the nation, proving the comprehension by the entire people of what was lost, when Aaron Burr took from his country and the world that important life. In the most distant extremities of the Union, men felt that one of the first intellects of the age had been extinguished. From the utmost activity and public consideration, in the fulness of his strength and usefulness, the bullet of a duellist had taken the first statesman in America;--a man who, while he had not been without errors, and while his life had not been without mistakes, had served his country, from his boyhood to that hour of her bitter bereavement, with an elevation of purpose and a force of intellect never exceeded in her history, and which had caused Was.h.i.+ngton to lean upon him and to trust him, as he trusted and leaned upon no other man, from first to last. The death of such a man, under such circ.u.mstances, cast a deep gloom over the face of society; and Hamilton was mourned by his contemporaries with a sorrow founded on a just appreciation of his greatness, and of what they owed to his intellect and character. But by the generations that have succeeded he has been less intimately known than many of his compatriots, who lived longer, and reached stations which he never occupied.

He was born in the island of St. Christopher's, in the year 1757; his mother being a native of that island, and his father being a Scotchman.

At the age of fifteen, after having been for three years in the counting-house of a merchant at Santa Cruz, he was sent to New York to complete his education, and was entered as a private student in King's (now Columbia) College. At the age of seventeen, his political life was already begun; for at that age, and while still at college, he wrote and published a series of essays on the Rights of the Colonies, which attracted the attention of the whole country. These essays appeared in 1774, in answer to certain pamphlets on the Tory side of the controversy; and in them Hamilton reviewed and vindicated the whole of the proceedings of the first Continental Congress. There are displayed in these papers a power of reasoning and sarcasm, a knowledge of the principles of government and of the English Const.i.tution, and a grasp of the merits of the whole controversy, that would have done honor to any man at any age, and in a youth of seventeen are wonderful. To say that they evince precocity of intellect, gives no idea of their main characteristics. They show great maturity;--a more remarkable maturity than has ever been exhibited by any other person, at so early an age, in the same department of thought. They produced, too, a great effect.

Their influence in bringing the public mind to the point of resistance to the mother country, was important and extensive.

Before he was nineteen years old, Hamilton entered the army as a captain of artillery; and when only twenty, in 1777, he was selected by Was.h.i.+ngton to be one of his aides-de-camp, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In this capacity he served until 1782, when he was elected a member of Congress from the State of New York, and took his seat. In 1786, he was chosen a member of the legislature of New York. In 1787, he was appointed as a delegate to the Convention which framed the Const.i.tution. In the following year, when only thirty years old, he published, with Madison and Jay, the celebrated essays called "The Federalist," in favor of the form of government proposed by the Convention. In 1788, he became a member of the State Convention of New York, called to ratify the Const.i.tution, and it was chiefly through his influence that it was adopted in that State. In 1789, he took office in Was.h.i.+ngton's administration, as Secretary of the Treasury. In 1795, he retired to the practice of the law in the city of New York. In 1798, at Was.h.i.+ngton's absolute demand, he was appointed second in command of the provisional army, raised under the elder Adams's administration, to repel an apprehended invasion of the French. On the death of Was.h.i.+ngton, in 1799, he succeeded to the chief command. When the army was disbanded, he again returned to the bar, and practised with great reputation until the year 1804, when his life was terminated in a duel with Colonel Burr, concerning which the sole blame that has ever been imputed to Hamilton is, that he felt constrained to accept the challenge.

His great characteristic was his profound insight into the principles of government. The sagacity with which he comprehended all systems, and the thorough knowledge he possessed of the working of all the freer inst.i.tutions of ancient and modern times, united with a singular capacity to make the experience of the past bear on the actual state of society, rendered him one of the most useful statesmen that America has known. Whatever in the science of government had already been ascertained; whatever the civil condition of mankind in any age had made practicable or proved abortive; whatever experience had demonstrated; whatever the pa.s.sions, the interests, or the wants of men had made inevitable,--he seemed to know intuitively. But he was no theorist. His powers were all eminently practical. He detected the vice of a theory instantly, and shattered it with a single blow.

His knowledge, too, of the existing state of his own and of other countries was not less remarkable than his knowledge of the past. He understood America as thoroughly as the wisest of his contemporaries, and he comprehended Europe more completely than any other man of that age upon this continent.[401]

To these characteristics he added a clear logical power in statement, a vigorous reasoning, a perfect frankness and moral courage, and a lofty disdain of all the arts of a demagogue. His eloquence was distinguished for correctness of language and distinctness of utterance, as well as for grace and dignity.

In theory, he leaned decidedly to the const.i.tution of England, as the best form of civil polity for the attainment of the great objects of government. But he was not, on that account, less a lover of liberty than those who favored more popular and democratic inst.i.tutions. His writings will be searched in vain for any disregard of the natural rights of mankind, or any insensibility to the blessings of freedom. It was because he believed that those blessings can be best secured by governments in which a change of rulers is not of frequent occurrence, that he had so high an estimate of the English Const.i.tution. At the period of the Convention, he held that the chief want of this country was a government into which the element of a permanent tenure of office could be largely infused; and he read in the Convention--as an ill.u.s.tration of his views, but without pressing it--a plan by which the Executive and the Senate could hold their offices during good behavior.

But the idea, which has sometimes been promulgated, that he desired the establishment of a monarchical government in this country, is without foundation. At no period of his life did he regard that experiment as either practicable or desirable.

Hamilton's relation to the Const.i.tution is peculiar. He had less direct agency in framing its chief provisions than many of the other princ.i.p.al persons who sat in the Convention; and some of its provisions were not wholly acceptable to him when framed. But the history, which has been detailed in the previous chapters of this work, of the progress of federal ideas, and of the efforts to introduce and establish principles tending to consolidate the Union, has been largely occupied with the recital of his opinions, exertions, and prevalent influence. Beginning with the year 1780, when he was only three-and-twenty years of age, and when he sketched the outline of a national government strongly resembling the one which the Const.i.tution long afterwards established; pa.s.sing through the term of his service in Congress, when his admirable expositions of the revenue system, the commercial power, and the ratio of contribution, may justly be said to have saved the Union from dissolution; and coming down to the time when he did so much to bring about, first, the meeting at Annapolis, and then the general and final Convention of all the States;--the whole period is marked by his wisdom and filled with his power. He did more than any other public man of the time to lessen the force of State attachments, to create a national feeling, and to lead the public mind to a comprehension of the necessity for an efficient national sovereignty.

Indeed, he was the first to perceive and to develop the idea of a real union of the people of the United States. To him, more than to any one else, is to be attributed the conviction that the people of the different States were competent to establish a general government by their own direct action; and that this mode of proceeding ought to be considered within the contemplation of the State legislatures, when they appointed delegates to a convention for the revision and amendment of the existing system.[402]

The age in which he lived, and the very extraordinary early maturity of his character, naturally remind us of that remarkable person who was two years his junior, and who became prime-minister of England at the age of twenty-four. The younger Pitt entered public life with almost every possible advantage. Inheriting "a great and celebrated name,"[403]

educated expressly for the career of a statesman, and introduced into the House of Commons at a moment when power was just ready to drop into the hands of any man capable of wielding it, he had only to prove himself a brilliant and powerful debater, in order to become the ruler of an empire, whose const.i.tution had been settled for ages, and was necessarily administered by the successful leaders of regular parties in its legislative body. That he was a most eminent parliamentary orator, a consummate tactician and leader of party, a minister of singular energy, and a statesman of a very high order of mind and character, at an age when most men are scarcely beginning to give proofs of what they may become,--all this History has deliberately and finally recorded. What place it may a.s.sign to him among the statesmen by whose lives and actions England and the world have been materially and permanently benefited is not yet settled, and it is not to the present purpose to consider.

The theatre in which Hamilton appeared, lived, and acted, was one of a character so totally different, that the comparison necessarily ends with the contrast which it immediately suggests. Like Pitt, indeed, he seems to have been born a statesman, and to have had no such youth as ordinarily precedes the manhood of the mind. But, in the American colonies, no political system of things existed that was fitted to train him for a career of usefulness and honor; and yet, when the years of his boyhood were hardly ended, he sprang forth into the troubled affairs of the time, with the full stature of a matured and well-furnished statesman. He, in truth, showed himself to be already the man that was wanted. Every thing was in an unsettled and anxious state;--a state of change and transition. There was no regular, efficient government. It was all but a state of civil war, and the more clear-sighted saw that this great disaster was coming. He was compelled, therefore, to mark out for himself, step by step, beginning in 1774, a system of political principles which should serve, not to administer existing inst.i.tutions with wisdom and beneficence, but to create inst.i.tutions able to unite a people divided into thirteen independent sovereignties; to give them the att.i.tude and capacity of an independent nation; and then to carry them on, with constantly increasing prosperity and power, to their just place in the affairs of the world. It was a great work, but Mr. Hamilton was equal to it. He was by nature, by careful study, and by still more careful, anxious, and earnest thought, eminently fitted to detect and develop those resources of power and progress, which, in the dark condition of society that attends and follows an exhausting period of revolution, lie hidden, like generous seeds, until some strong hand disenc.u.mbers them of the soil with which they had been oppressed, and gives them opportunity to germinate and bear golden fruit. At the age of three-and-twenty he had already formed well-defined, profound, and comprehensive opinions on the situation and wants of these States. He had clearly discerned the practicability of forming a confederated government, and adapting it to their peculiar condition, resources, and exigencies. He had wrought out for himself a political system, far in advance of the conceptions of his contemporaries, and one which, in the hands of those who most opposed him in life, became, when he was laid in a premature grave, the basis on which this government was consolidated; on which, to the present day, it has been administered; and on which alone it can safely rest in that future, which seems so to stretch out its unending glories before us.

Mr. Hamilton, therefore, I conceive, proved himself early to be a statesman of greater talent and power than the celebrated English minister whose youthful success was in the eyes of the world so much more brilliant, and whose early death was no less disheartening; for none can doubt, that to build up a free and firm state out of a condition of political chaos, and to give it a government capable of developing the resources of its soil and people, and of insuring to it prosperity, power, and permanence, is a greater work than to administer with energy and success--even in periods of severe trial--the const.i.tution of an empire whose principles and modes of action have been settled for centuries.

Hamilton was one of those statesmen who trust to the efficacy of the press for the advancement and inculcation of correct principles of public policy, and who desire to accomplish important results mainly through the action of an enlightened public opinion. That he had faith in the intelligence and honesty of his countrymen, is proved by the numerous writings which he constantly addressed to their reason and good sense, in the shape of essays or letters, from the beginning to the end of his career, upon subjects on which it was important that they should act with wisdom and principle.

His own opinions, although held with great firmness, were also held in subordination to what was practicable. It was the rare felicity of his temperament, to be able to accept a less good than his principles might have led him to insist upon, and to labor for it, when nothing better could be obtained, with as much patriotic energy and zeal as if it had been the best result of his own views. The Const.i.tution itself remains, in this particular, a monument of the disinterestedness of his character. He thought it had great defects. But he accepted it, as the best government that the wisdom of the Convention could frame, and the best that the nation would adopt. In this spirit, as soon as it was promulgated for the acceptance of the country, he came forward and placed himself in the foremost rank of its advocates, making himself, for all future time, one of the chief of its authoritative expounders.

He was very ably a.s.sisted in the Federalist by Madison and Jay; but it was from him that the Federalist derived the weight and the power which commanded the careful attention of the country, and carried conviction to the great body of intelligent men in all parts of the Union. The extraordinary forecast with which its luminous discussions antic.i.p.ated the operation of the new inst.i.tutions, and its profound elucidation of their principles, gave birth to American const.i.tutional law, which was thus placed at once above the field of arbitrary constructions and in the domain of legal truth. They made it a science; and so long as the Const.i.tution shall exist, they will continue to be resorted to as the most important source of contemporaneous interpretation which the annals of the country afford.[404]

In the two paramount characters of statesman and jurist, in the comprehensive nature of his patriotism, in his freedom from sectional prejudices, in his services to the Union, and in the kind and magnitude of his intellect, posterity will recognize a resemblance to him whom America still mourns with the freshness of a recent grief, and who has been to the Const.i.tution, in the age that has succeeded, what Hamilton was in the age that witnessed its formation and establishment. Without the one of these ill.u.s.trious men, the Const.i.tution probably would never have existed; without the other, it might have become a mere record of past inst.i.tutions, whose history had been glorious until faction and civil discord had turned it into a record of mournful recollections.

The following sentences, written by Hamilton soon after the adjournment of the Convention, contain a clew to all his conduct in support of the plan of government which that body recommended:--"It may be in me a defect of political fort.i.tude, but I acknowledge that I cannot feel an equal tranquillity with those who affect to treat the dangers of a longer continuance in our present situation as imaginary. A nation without a national government is an awful spectacle. The establishment of a const.i.tution, in a time of profound peace, by the voluntary consent of a whole people, is a prodigy, to the completion of which I look forward with trembling anxiety."

FOOTNOTES:

[401] While these sheets are pa.s.sing through the press, Mr. Ticknor writes to me as follows: "One day in January, 1819, talking with Prince Talleyrand, in Paris, about his visit to America, he expressed the highest admiration of Mr. Hamilton, saying, among other things, that he had known nearly all the marked men of his time, but that he had never known one, on the whole, equal to him. I was much surprised and gratified with the remark; but still, feeling that, as an American, I was in some sort a party concerned by patriotism in the compliment, I answered with a little reserve, that the great military commanders and the great statesmen of Europe had dealt with larger ma.s.ses and wider interests than he had. 'Mais, Monsieur,' the Prince instantly replied, 'Hamilton avoit _devine_ l'Europe.'"

[402] See his first speech in the Convention, as reported by Mr.

Madison.

[403] Burke, speaking of Lord Chatham.

[404] The current editions of the Federalist are taken from an edition published at Was.h.i.+ngton in 1818, by Jacob Gideon, in which the numbers written by Mr. Madison purport to have been corrected by himself. There had been three editions previous to this. The first edition was published in 1788, in two small volumes, by J. & A. McLean, 41 Hanover Square, New York, under the following t.i.tle: "The Federalist: a Collection of Essays written in Favor of the New Const.i.tution, as agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787." The first volume was issued before the last of the essays were written, and the second followed it, as soon as the series was completed. The authentic text of the work is to be found in this edition; two of the authors were in the city of New York at the time it was printed, and probably superintended it. It was reissued from the same type, in 1789, by John Tiebout, 358 Pearl Street, New York. A second edition was published in 1802, at New York, in two volumes, containing also "Pacificus on the Proclamation of Neutrality, and the Const.i.tution, with its Amendments." A third edition was published in 1810, by Williams & Whiting, New York. I have seen copies of the first and second editions only, in the library of Peter Force, Esq., of Was.h.i.+ngton, editor of the "American Archives." There are some discrepancies between the text of the first edition and that of 1818, from which the current editions are taken. By whom or on what authority the alterations were made, I have not been able to ascertain, nor have I learned when, or why, or how far Mr. Madison may have corrected or altered the papers which he wrote. Such of the changes as I have examined do not materially affect the sense; but it is very desirable that the true text of the Federalist should be reproduced.

That text exists in the first edition, which was issued while the Const.i.tution was before the people of the United States for their ratification; and as the Federalist was an argument addressed to the people in favor of the adoption of the Const.i.tution, the exact text of that argument, as it was read and acted upon, ought to be restored, without regard to the reasons which may have led any of the writers, or any one else, to alter it. I know of no evidence that Colonel Hamilton ever made or sanctioned the alteration of a word. After the text of the Const.i.tution itself, there is scarcely any thing the preservation of which is more important than the text of the Federalist as it was first published.