History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States Volume I Part 24

The Convention was graced and honored by the venerable presence of Dr.

Franklin, then President of the State of Pennsylvania, and in his eighty-second year. He had returned from Europe only two years before, followed by the admiration and homage of the social, literary, and scientific circles of France; laden with honors, which he wore with a plain and shrewd simplicity; and in the full possession of that predominating common-sense, which had given him, through a long life, a widely extended reputation of a peculiar character. The oldest of the public men of America, his political life had embraced a period of more than half a century, extending back to a time when independence had not entered into the dreams of the boldest among the inhabitants of the English Colonies. For more than twenty years before the Revolution commenced, he had held a high and responsible office under the crown, the administration of which affected the intercourse and connection of all the Colonies;[418] and more than twenty years before the first Continental Congress was a.s.sembled, he had projected a plan of union for the thirteen Provinces which then embraced the whole of the British dominions in North America.[419] Nearly as long, also, before the Declaration of Independence, he had become the resident agent in England of several of the Colonies, in which post he continued, with a short interval, through all the controversies that preceded the Revolution, and until reconciliation with the mother country had become impossible.[420]

Returning in 1775, he was immediately appointed by the people of Pennsylvania one of their delegates in the second Continental Congress.

In the following year, he was sent as commissioner to France, where he remained until he was recalled, and was succeeded by Mr. Jefferson, in 1785.

With the fame of his two residences abroad--the one before and the other after the country had severed its connection with England--the whole land was filled. The first of them, commencing with an employment for settling the miserable disputes between the people and the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania, was extended to an agency for the three other Colonies of Georgia, New Jersey, and Ma.s.sachusetts, which finally led him to take part in the affairs of all British America, and made him virtually the representative of American interests. His brief service in Congress, during which he signed the Declaration of Independence, was followed by his appointment as Commissioner at the Court of Versailles, which he made the most important sphere that has ever been filled by any American in Europe, and in which that treaty of alliance with France was negotiated which enabled the United States to become in fact an independent nation.

His long career of public service; his eminence as a philosopher, a philanthropist, and a thinker; the general reverence of the people for his character; his peculiar power of ill.u.s.trating and enforcing his opinions by a method at once original, simple, and attractive,--made his presence of the first importance in an a.s.sembly which was to embrace the highest wisdom and virtue of America.

It is chiefly, however, by the countenance he gave to the effort to frame a Const.i.tution, that his services as a member of this body are to be estimated. His mind was at all times ingenious, rather than large and constructive; and his great age, while it had scarcely at all impaired his natural powers, had confirmed him in some opinions which must certainly be regarded as mistaken. His desire, for example, to have the legislature of the United States consist of a single body, for the sake of simplicity, and his idea that the chief executive magistrate ought to receive no salary for his official services, for the sake of purity, were both singular and unsound.

But there were points upon which he displayed extraordinary wisdom, penetration, and forecast. When an objection to a proportionate representation in Congress was started, upon the ground that it would enable the larger States to swallow up the smaller, he declared that, as the great States could propose to themselves no advantage by absorbing their inferior neighbors, he did not believe they would attempt it. His recollection carried him back to the early part of the century, when the union between England and Scotland was proposed, and when the Scotch patriots were alarmed by the idea that they should be ruined by the superiority of England, unless they had an equal number of members in Parliament; and yet, notwithstanding the great inferiority in their representation as established by the act of union, he declared, that, down to that day, he did not recollect that any thing had been done in the Parliament of Great Britain to the prejudice of Scotland.[421]

Although he spoke but seldom in the Convention, his influence was very great, and it was always exerted to cool the ardor of debate, and to check the tendency of such discussions to result in irreconcilable differences. His great age, his venerable and benignant aspect, his wide reputation, his acute and sagacious philosophy,--which was always the embodiment of good sense,--would have given him a controlling weight in a much more turbulent and a far less intelligent a.s.sembly. When--after debates in which the powerful intellects around him had exhausted the subject, and both sides remained firm in opinions diametrically opposed--he rose and reminded them that they were sent to consult and not to contend, and that declarations of a fixed opinion and a determination never to change it neither enlightened nor convinced those who listened to them, his authority was felt by men who could have annihilated any mere logical argument that might have proceeded from him in his best days.

Dr. Franklin was one of those who entertained serious objections to the Const.i.tution, but he sacrificed them before the Convention was dissolved. Believing a general government to be necessary for the American States; holding that every form of government might be made a blessing to the people by a good administration; and foreseeing that the Const.i.tution would be well administered for a long course of years, and could only end in despotism when the people should have become so corrupted as to be incapable of any other than a despotic government, he gladly embraced a system which he was astonished to find approaching so near to perfection.

"The opinions I have had of its errors," said he, "I sacrifice to the public good. Within these walls they were born, and here they shall die. If every one of us, in returning to our const.i.tuents, were to report the objections he has had to it, and endeavor to gain partisans in support of them, we might prevent its being generally received, and thereby lose all the salutary effects and great advantages, resulting naturally in our favor, among foreign nations as well as among ourselves, from our real or apparent unanimity. Much of the strength and efficiency of any government in procuring and securing happiness to the people depends on opinion,--on the general opinion of the goodness of the government, as well as of the wisdom and integrity of its governors. I hope, therefore, that for our own sakes as a part of the people, and for the sake of posterity, we shall act heartily and unanimously in recommending this Const.i.tution (approved by Congress and confirmed by the conventions) wherever our influence may extend, and turn our future thoughts and endeavors to the means of having it well administered."[422]

And thus, with a cheerful confidence in the future, sustaining the hopes of all about him, and hailing every omen that foretold the rising glories of his country,[423] this wise old man pa.s.sed out from the a.s.sembly, when its anxious labors had been brought to a close with a nearer approach to unanimity than had ever been expected. He lived, borne down by infirmities,

"To draw his breath in pain"

for nearly three years after the Convention was dissolved; but it was to see the Const.i.tution established, to witness the growing strength of the new government, and to contemplate the opening successes and the beneficent promise of Was.h.i.+ngton's administration. Writing to the first President in 1789, he said: "For my own personal ease, I should have died two years ago; but though those years have been spent in excruciating pain, I am pleased that I have lived them, since they have brought me to see our present situation."[424]

FOOTNOTES:

[418] In 1753, he was appointed Deputy Postmaster-General for the British Colonies, from which place he was dismissed in 1774, while in England, on account of the part he had taken in American affairs.

[419] In 1754. See an account of this plan, ante, p. 8.

[420] He first went to England in 1757, as agent of the Pennsylvania a.s.sembly to settle their difficulties with the Proprietaries, where he remained until 1762. In 1764, he was reappointed provincial agent in England for Pennsylvania; in 1768, he received a similar appointment from Georgia; in 1769, he was chosen agent for New Jersey; and in 1770, he became agent for Ma.s.sachusetts. His whole residence in England, from 1757 to 1775, embraced a period of sixteen years, two years having been pa.s.sed at home. He resided in France about nine years, from 1776 to 1785.

[421] He added, with his usual quiet humor, that "whoever looks over the lists of public officers, civil and military, of that nation, will find, I believe, that the North Britons enjoy their full proportion of emolument." Madison, Elliot, V. 179.

[422] Madison, Elliot, V. 554.

[423] Mr. Madison has recorded the following anecdote at the end of the Debates, as an incident worthy of being known to posterity. "Whilst the last members were signing, Dr. Franklin, looking towards the President's chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him, that painters had often found it difficult, in their art, to distinguish a rising from a setting sun. 'I have,' said he, 'often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitude of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now, at length, I have the happiness to know that it is a rising, and not a setting sun.'"

[424] Sparks's Life of Franklin, 528.

CHAPTER XI.

GOUVERNEUR MORRIS.

This brilliant, energetic, and patriotic statesman was born in the Province of New York, at Morrisania,--the seat of his family for several generations,--in the year 1752. He was educated for the bar; but in 1775, at the age of three-and-twenty, he was elected a member of the Provincial Congress of New York, in which he became at once distinguished. When the recommendation of the Continental Congress to the Colonies, to organize new forms of government, was received, he took a leading place in the debates on the formation of a new const.i.tution for the State; and when the subject of independence was brought forward, in order that the delegates of New York in the Continental Congress might be clothed with sufficient authority, he delivered a speech of great power, of which fragments only are preserved, but which evidently embraced the most comprehensive and statesmanlike views of the situation and future prospects of this country. Speaking of the capacity of America to sustain herself without a connection with Great Britain, he said:--

"Thus, Sir, by means of that great gulf which rolls its waves between Europe and America; by the situation of these Colonies, always adapted to hinder or interrupt all communication between the two; by the productions of our soil, which the Almighty has filled with every necessary to make us a great maritime people; by the extent of our coasts and those immense rivers, which serve at once to open a communication with our interior country, and to teach us the arts of navigation; by those vast fisheries, which, affording an inexhaustible mine of wealth and a cradle of industry, breed hardy mariners, inured to danger and fatigue; finally, by the unconquerable spirit of freemen, deeply interested in the preservation of a government which secures to them the blessings of liberty and exalts the dignity of mankind;--by all these, I expect a full and lasting defence against any and every part of the earth; while the great advantages to be derived from a friendly intercourse with this country almost render the means of defence unnecessary, from the great improbability of being attacked. So far, peace seems to smile upon our future independence. But that this fair G.o.ddess will equally crown our union with Great Britain, my fondest hopes cannot lead me to suppose. Every war in which she is engaged must necessarily involve us in its detestable consequences; whilst, weak and unarmed, we have no s.h.i.+eld of defence, unless such as she may please (for her own sake) to afford, or else the pity of her enemies and the insignificance of slaves beneath the attention of a generous foe."[425]

In 1778, Mr. Morris was chosen a delegate to the Continental Congress from the State of New York. His reputation for talent, zeal, activity, and singular capacity for business, had preceded him. On the very day when he presented his credentials, he was placed upon a committee to proceed to Valley Forge, to confer with General Was.h.i.+ngton on the measures necessary for a reorganization of the army. He remained in Congress for two years, discharging, with great ability and high patriotism, the most important functions, and subjected all the while to the most unjust popular suspicions of his fidelity to the cause of the country. Few of all the prominent men of the Revolution sacrificed or suffered more than Gouverneur Morris. The fact that all the other members of his family adhered to the royalist side, and an ineffectual effort which he once made to visit his mother, at his ancestral home, then within the British lines, gave his enemies the means of inflicting upon him a deep injury in the popular estimation. He was not re-elected to Congress; but short as his career in that body was, it was filled with services inferior to those of none of his a.s.sociates.

Before he left Congress, in February, 1779, he made--as chairman of a committee to whom certain communications from the French minister in the United States were referred--a report which became the basis of the peace that afterwards followed; and when the principles on which the peace was to be negotiated had been settled, he drew the instructions to the commissioners, and they were unanimously adopted without change.[426]

On leaving Congress, Mr. Morris took up his residence in Philadelphia, and resumed the practice of the law. His remarkable talent for business, however, and his intimate knowledge of financial subjects, led to his appointment as a.s.sistant Financier with Robert Morris. In this capacity, he suggested the idea of the decimal notation, which was afterwards made the basis of the coinage of the United States.[427]

Having been appointed one of the delegates from the State of Pennsylvania to the Convention for forming the Const.i.tution of the United States, Mr. Morris attended the whole session, with the exception of a few days in June, and entered into its business with his accustomed ardor. To remove impediments, obviate objections, and conciliate jarring opinions, he exerted all his fine faculties, and employed his remarkable eloquence. But he is chiefly to be remembered, in connection with the Const.i.tution, as the author of its text. To his pen belongs the merit of that clear and finished style,--that _lucidus ordo_,--that admirable perspicuity, which have so much diminished the labors and hazards of interpretation for all future ages.[428]

The character of Gouverneur Morris was balanced by many admirable qualities. His self-possession was so complete in all circ.u.mstances, that he is said to have declared, that he never knew the sensation of fear, inferiority, or embarra.s.sment, in his intercourse with men.

Undoubtedly, his self-confidence amounted sometimes to boldness and presumption; but we have it on no less an authority than Mr. Madison's, that he added to it a candid surrender of his opinions, when the lights of discussion satisfied him that they had been too hastily formed.[429]

He was a man of genius, fond of society and pleasure, but capable of prodigious exertion and industry, and possessed of great powers of eloquence.

He loved to indulge in speculations on the future condition of the country, and often foresaw results which gave him patience under the existing state of things. In 1784, writing to Mr. Jay, at a time when the clas.h.i.+ng commercial regulations of the States seemed about to put an end to the Union, he said: "True it is, that the general government wants energy, and equally true it is, that this want will eventually be supplied. A national spirit is the natural result of national existence, and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, yet this generation will die away and give place to a race of Americans."[430]

He was himself, at all times, an American, and never more so than during the discussions of the Convention. Appealing to his colleagues to extend their views beyond the narrow limits of place whence they derived their political origin, he declared, with his characteristic energy and point, that State attachments and State importance had been the bane of this country. "We cannot annihilate," said he, "but we may perhaps take out the teeth of the serpents."[431]

In truth, the circ.u.mstances of his life had prevented him from feeling those strong local attachments which he considered the great impediments to the national prosperity. Born in one State, he had then resided for seven years in another, from whose inhabitants he had received at least equal marks of confidence with those that had been bestowed upon him by the people among whom he first entered public life.

In his political opinions, he probably went farther in opposition to democratic tendencies than any other person in the Convention. He was in favor of an executive during good behavior, of a Senate for life, and of a freehold qualification for electors of representatives. In several other respects, the Const.i.tution, as actually framed, was distasteful to him; but, like many of the other eminent men who doubted its theoretical or practical wisdom, he determined at once to abide by the voice of the majority. He saw that, as soon as the plan should go forth, all other considerations ought to be laid aside, and the great question ought to be, Shall there be a national government or not? He acknowledged that the alternatives were, the adoption of the system proposed, or a general anarchy;--and before this single and fearful issue all questions of individual opinion or preference sank into insignificance.[432] It is a proof both of his sincerity and of the estimate in which his abilities were held, that, when this great issue was presented to the people, he was invited by Hamilton to become one of the writers of the Federalist.[433] It is not known why he did not embrace the opportunity of connecting himself with that celebrated publication; but his correspondence shows that it was from no want of interest in the result.

He took pains to give to Was.h.i.+ngton his decided testimony, from personal observation, that the idea of his refusing the Presidency would, if it prevailed, be fatal to the Const.i.tution in many parts of the country.[434]

Mr. Morris filled two important public stations, after the adoption of the Const.i.tution. He was the first Minister to France appointed by General Was.h.i.+ngton, and filled that office from May, 1792, until August, 1794. In February, 1800, he was chosen by the legislature of New York to supply a vacancy in the Senate of the United States, which he filled until the 4th of March, 1803. He died at Morrisania on the 6th of November, 1818. "Let us forget party," said he, "and think of our country, which embraces all parties."[435]

FOOTNOTES:

[425] Sparks's Life of G. Morris, I. 103. The florid and declamatory style of this speech belongs to the period and to the youth of the speaker. The breadth of its views and its vigor of thought display the characteristics which belonged to him through life. He had a prophetic insight of the future resources of this country, and made many remarkable predictions of its greatness. His biographer has claimed for him the suggestion of the plan for uniting the waters of Lake Erie with those of the Hudson, and upon very strong evidence.

[426] See the Report and the debates thereon, Secret Journals, II. 132 et seq.

[427] In January, 1782, the Financier made a report, which was officially signed by him, but which Mr. Jefferson says was prepared by his a.s.sistant, Gouverneur Morris. It embraced an elaborate statement of the denominations and comparative value of the foreign coins in circulation in the different States, and proposed the adoption of a money unit and a system of decimal notation for a new coinage. The unit suggested was such a portion of pure silver as would be a common measure of the penny of every State, without leaving a fraction. This common divisor Mr. Morris found to be one 1440th of a dollar, or one 1600th of the crown sterling. The value of a dollar was therefore to be expressed by 1,440 units, and that of a crown by 1,600, each unit containing a quarter of a grain of fine silver. Nothing, however, was done, until 1784, when Mr. Jefferson, being in Congress, took up the subject. He approved of Mr. Morris's general views, and his method of decimal notation, but objected to his unit as too minute for ordinary use. Mr.

Jefferson proposed the dollar as the unit of account and payment, and that its divisions and subdivisions should be in the decimal ratio. This plan was adopted in August, 1785, and in 1786 the names and characters of the coins were determined. The ordinance establis.h.i.+ng the coinage was pa.s.sed August 8, 1786, and that establis.h.i.+ng the mint, on the 16th of October, in the same year. (Jefferson's Autobiography, Works, I. 52-54.

Life of Gouverneur Morris, I. 273. Journals of Congress, XI. 179, 254.)

[428] The materials for the final preparation of the instrument, consisting of a reported draft in detail and the various resolutions which had been adopted, were placed in the hands of a committee of revision, of which William Samuel Johnson, of Connecticut, was the chairman; the other members being Messrs. Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, Madison, and King. The chairman committed the work to Mr. Morris, and the Const.i.tution, as adopted, was prepared by him. (See Mr. Madison's letter to Mr. Sparks, Life of Gouverneur Morris, I. 284. Madison's Debates, Elliot, V. 530.)

[429] Life of Morris, I. 284-286.

[430] Ibid. 266.

[431] Madison, Elliot, V. 276, 277.

[432] Madison, Elliot, V. 556.

[433] Life, I. 287.

[434] Ibid. 288-290.