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The Grand Convention - Nine States · American Political History

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Season sixteen of American Political History, The Grand Convention, Nine States.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: Article thirteen of the Articles of Confederation, the clause the whole decade had died on, required that no alteration ever be made in the Articles unless agreed to in Congress and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every state.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: Every state.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: The impost of seventeen eighty one died on that sentence in the hands of Rhode Island alone.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: The impost of seventeen eighty three died of it in New York.
0:43
SPEAKER_00: thirteen sovereignties in any one of them a veto on the rest.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: The arithmetic every man in Philadelphia had lived under, and the arithmetic their new constitution now had to escape twice.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: Once for its birth and once forever after for its own repair.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: The repair question came first, and it came early.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: When the amendment resolution was first debated in June, George Mason had stated the whole case.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: Amendments would be necessary, and it would be better to provide for them in an easy, regular and constitutional way than to trust to chance and violence.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: And the amending power could not sit with the national legislature alone.
1:29
SPEAKER_00: It would be improper to require the consent of the national legislature because they may abuse their power and refuse their consent on that very account.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: No government could be trusted to hold the only key for change.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: The Convention finally built in the second week of September and it ran on two tracks.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses deemed it necessary, could propose amendments, or on the application of two thirds of the state legislatures, a convention would propose them, whether Congress liked it or not.
2:09
SPEAKER_00: Either way, nothing became part of the Constitution until ratified by three quarters of the states.
2:16
SPEAKER_00: Not a majority.
2:18
SPEAKER_00: A majority would always be in flux.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: Three quarters, hard enough that the document could not be easily rewritten, and possible enough that it could actually be repaired.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: Congress proposed track was Hamilton's edition, argued on the floor on september tenth, with a prediction about each state's appetites.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: The state legislatures will not apply for alterations but with a view to increase their own power.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: The national legislatures will be the first to perceive and will be the most sensible to the necessity of amendments.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: That same day, Governor Randolph rose and told the Convention, for the first time, in a list, what he could not accept.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: The Senate should not try impeachments, a presidential veto should be overturned by two thirds of each house, not the three fourths then in the draft.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: Standing armies should be limited.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: The clause about laws necessary and proper was too broad, navigation acts should not pass by bare majority, exports should not be taxed, a state's executive should not be able to call in the Union's force against its own people, the line between the state and national courts was too vague, and the president's pardon reached too far.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: And he left that the state conventions be left free to propose amendments to be taken up afterwards by a second general convention.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: A second track, the state's forcing a convention over Congress's head, nearly vanished in the final drafting and was restored on the last Saturday by Governor Morris and Elbridge Jerry together.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: Over Madison's mild worry that difficulties might arise as to its form, it stayed, each side of the federal balance would hold its own road to amendment.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: The Congress its proposals, the states their convention.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: And then, before the article closed, two clauses were carved out of the amendment power entirely.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: The convention's two great bargains protecting themselves.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: The first came on September 10th from the chairman of the Committee of Detail.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: Rutledge said he could never agree to give a power which the articles related to slaves might be altered by the states not interested in that property and prejudice against it.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: No amendment made before the year 1808 shall in any manner affect the slave trade.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: The second came on the Convention's last working Saturday, september fifteenth.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman expressed the fear.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: Three fourths of the states might be brought to the things fatal to particular states, as abolishing them altogether or depriving them of their equality in the Senate.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: The Great Compromise itself repealed by amendment, three quarters of the Union against the rest.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: Sherman moved his protection and lost, and Governor Morris, the man who had fought the equal Senate all summer, rose and moved the sentence that ended the anxiety.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: That no state without its consent shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: And Madison recorded This motion being dictated by the circulating murmurs of the small states, was agreed to without debate, no one opposing it or on the question saying no.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: The circulating murmurs, the equal vote of the states had gone in on july sixteenth and never come out.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: On september fifteenth it was displaced where the amendment power itself could not reach.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: Of the two protections that summer, Rutledge's shield carried its own expiration, the year 1808.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: Morris's sentence carries no year, no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: To this day, the one line in the Constitution that three quarters of the states cannot touch, and it was agreed to without argument.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: That was the repair, the birth was harder, because the birth had to break the law.
6:32
SPEAKER_00: The Articles of Confederation said every state, and their thirteenth article bound the states to it as a perpetual union.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: A constitution ratified by fewer than thirteen was, by the standing law of the Union, no constitution at all.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: Every man in the room knew Rhode Island, absent from the first day to the last, would never say yes.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: Write unanimity into the ratification rule, and the whole summer belonged to Rhode Island.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: The Convention's answer had two parts, and the first was decided back in July.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: The Constitution would not be sent to the state legislatures at all.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: It would go to conventions, bodies of delegates chosen by the people in each state for this one question.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth had moved for the legislatures and stated his case.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: A new set of ideas, he observed, seemed to have crept in since the Articles of Confederation were established.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Conventions of the people, or with power derived expressly from the people, were not then thought of.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: The legislatures had made the old Union.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: The legislatures could make this one, and Elbridge Jerry backed him with concerns about his own constituents.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: The people of the eastern states had, at this time, the wildest ideas of government in the world.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: In Massachusetts, they were for abolishing the Senate itself.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: George Mason answered with the Constitution's logic.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: The legislature has no power to ratify it.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: They are the mere creatures of the state constitutions and cannot be greater than their creators.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: Whether then must we resort to the people with whom all power remains that has not been given up?
8:22
SPEAKER_00: And he added a practical dagger.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: Whenever one legislature adopted, a succeeding legislature of equal authority could undo.
8:31
SPEAKER_00: A constitution ratified by the legislatures would sit on thirteen revocable votes forever.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: Madison built on that.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: The difference between a system founded on the legislatures only and one founded on the people, he said, was the true difference between a league or treaty and a constitution.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: And the law of nations said what treaties were worth.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: A breach of any one article by any of the parties freed all the others.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: Ratify by legislature, and America has signed a treaty, dissolvable by the first state that broke a clause.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: Ratify by the people, and it was something else, a thing no state government had made and no state government could unmake.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth's motion lost three states to seven.
9:18
SPEAKER_00: Conventions carried nine states to one.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: The state legislatures would recommend the conventions and then stand aside.
9:26
SPEAKER_00: The second part was the number, and the number was fought at the end of August.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Article twenty one of the draft read This Constitution shall take effect between the states ratifying it upon the ratification of blank states.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: James Wilson opened the bidding at seven, a bare majority of the thirteen.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Others moved for eight and ten.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman and George Mason converged on the same figure from the same instinct.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: Nine states.
9:55
SPEAKER_00: Mason argued have been required in all great causes under the Confederation, and that number was on the account preferable.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: The country knew what nine meant, nine carried eight states to three.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: Maryland alone voted against the Convention mode that day.
10:11
SPEAKER_00: Daniel Carroll explained that Maryland's own Constitution bound its legislatures to the Article's way of doing things, and that its delegates could hardly vote to walk around it.
10:21
SPEAKER_00: And Governor Morris finished the machinery with one more stroke.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: The draft sent the Constitution to the old Congress for its consent before going to the states.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: Morris moved to strike the word.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: The plan would pass through Congress on its way to the conventions, but would not require the blessing of the government it replaced.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: The motion carried.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: Nine States in Convention of the People.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: The double end run complete around the unanimity rule and around the state legislatures, both escapes chosen with an eye open, argued as principle by Mason and Madison, and as necessity by everyone else.
11:01
SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin told the room what he thought of the machinery.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: The people would not ratify it, he believed, unless hurried into it by surprise.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: Elbridge Jerry called the system full of vices and dwelt on the impropriety of destroying the existing Confederation without any unanimous consent of the parties to it.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: And George Mason seconded a motion to postpone the article, and said the sentence that hung over the last three weeks.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: I would sooner chop off my right hand than put it to the Constitution as it now sits.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: He wished to see certain points not yet decided settled before he gave his final opinion.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: His wish would be to bring the whole subject before another general convention.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: The author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights at the end of August one hand out the door.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: Around the two great articles, the Convention filled in the machinery that made thirteen jurisdictions one country.
12:00
SPEAKER_00: Most of it lifted from the articles tightened and made enforceable.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: Full faith and credit.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: Every state must honor the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: A judgment in Boston is a judgment in Savannah.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: Privileges and immunities.
12:14
SPEAKER_00: The citizen of each state is entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: No state may treat another state's citizen as foreigners.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: Extradition.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: A fugitive from justice fleeing across a state line, delivered up on demand, no state a sanctuary from another's courts.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: And the territory clause, the Congress to dispose of and regulate the territory of the United States, the Western Empire the states had ceded to be administered.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: Then the section about a map that would not hold still.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Three pieces of the Union were that summer in open revolt against the states that claimed them.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: Vermont had declared itself independent of New York in 1777 and had governed itself ever since.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: Its own legislature, its own courts, its own money, recognized by nobody.
13:01
SPEAKER_00: The Western counties of Virginia beyond the mountains had been petitioning for years to become a state of their own.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: We now call that state Kentucky.
13:09
SPEAKER_00: And the Western District of North Carolina had seceded outright in 1784 and set up a government it called the state of Franklin.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: Now we call that state Tennessee.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: With its own governor and assembly at war with the Cherokee and unrecognized by the Congress, it kept petitioning.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: Among the North Carolina delegates in the room was William Blout, who held Western land claims larger than any other man there.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: So the clause on admitting new states was not a clause about some distant future.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: It was a clause about three arguments going on while the men wrote it.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: The Committee of Details draft said new states should be admitted on the same terms with the original states.
13:49
SPEAKER_00: The Northwest Ordinance's promise, on equal footing, copied into the Constitution.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: On August 29th, Governor Morris moved to strike those words out.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: He did not wish to bind down the legislature to admit Western states on equal terms.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Madison answered that the Western states neither would nor ought to submit to a union which degraded them from an equal rank with other states.
14:13
SPEAKER_00: This time Morris won, six states to five, and every no came from a small state.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: The harder fight was on the other half, whether a new state could be carved out of an old one without that state's permission.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin said, Nothing would so alarm the limited states as to make the consent of the large states claiming the western lands necessary to the establishment of new states within their limits.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: Shall Vermont be reduced by force in favor of a state claiming it?
14:42
SPEAKER_00: Franklin and the Western country of Virginia were in a lack situation.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: John Langdon's objections was Vermont too, from the tax side.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: If Vermont were not taken in and remained exempt from the Union's taxes, it would prove a great injury to New Hampshire and her neighbors.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: John Dickinson dwelt on the impropriety of requiring the small states to secure the large ones in their extensive claims to territory.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: James Wilson answered for the large states.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: When the majority of a state wished to divide, they could do so.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: The aim of the opposition, he perceived, was that the general government should abet the minority and by the means divide a state against its own consent.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: And Governor Morris put the threat plainly.
15:28
SPEAKER_00: If the forced division of states was the object of the new system and was to be pointed against one or two states, he expected the gentlemen from those states would pretty quickly leave the convention.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: The next day, Daniel Carroll moved to strike the requirement of the state legislature's consent altogether, and Martin seconded him.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson answered for the state with the most to lose, North Carolina.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: He said, was well disposed to give up her western lands, but attempts at compulsion were not the policy of the United States.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: Carroll's motion failed three states to eight, the eyes being New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: And Wilson stated the principle that carried the day.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Nothing would give greater or juster alarm than the doctrine that a political society is to be torn asunder without its consent.
16:20
SPEAKER_00: The clause was agreed to eight states to three.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: The new states would be admitted by the legislature into the Union, but no new state shall be formed or ejected within the jurisdictions of any of the present states without the consent of that state's legislature as well as the federal legislature.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: Equal terms struck out, consent required, the finished constitution says only that new states may be admitted by Congress into the Union.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: On what terms?
16:47
SPEAKER_00: It does not say.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: The ordinance's promise of equal footing stood outside the document in an act of the old Congress.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: The guarantee the Constitution declined to repeat.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: And three self-declared American governments, with their own legislatures and their own militias, were left standing outside the door, waiting on the consent of the states that claimed them.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: And the Guarantee Clause, the United States shall guarantee to every state a Republican form of government, shall protect each of them against invasion, and on application of the legislature or executive against domestic violence.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: The application the clause was written for was a year old.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts had faced rebellion alone, with Congress unable to raise a dollar or a regiment for her.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: A rebellion in any state would now face the federal government.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: While those articles were being fought and settled, the document itself was getting its final shape, in a room of five.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, september eighth, seventeen eighty seven, the Convention elected its last committee, five members by ballot with the narrowest charge of the summer.
17:51
SPEAKER_00: To revise the style of and arrange the articles which have been agreed to by the House.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: Style and arrangement, not substance.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: The substance was voted, four months of it sitting in twenty three articles of amended patched and repatched text.
18:08
SPEAKER_00: The committee's job was to make it read like one document written by one hand.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: The ballot chose doctor Johnson of Connecticut in the chair, Alexander Hamilton, Governor Morris, James Madison, and Mr.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: King, and by every account that survives the chair and the committee handed the actual pen to one man.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: James Madison said so himself forty-four years later when Morris's biographer asked.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: Morris, the task having been probably handed over to him by the chairman of the committee, a better choice could not have been made as the performance of the task proved.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: And Morris said so himself in a letter late in his life.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: That the instrument was given by the fingers which write this letter.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: doctor Johnson's diary gives the schedule.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: The committee met after dinner on Saturday the eighth, presumably to divide the work and settle the architecture.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: The drafting was done on Sunday the ninth, revision on the tenth, polish on the eleventh.
19:12
SPEAKER_00: The convention actually assembled on Tuesday morning and adjourned at once because the committee had not finished.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: Four days, one Sunday in the middle of them, and the man with the pen writing straight through.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: The rest of the convention waited.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: Governor Livingston of New Jersey wrote home that his hopes of returning on time were a little clouded, by reason of there being certain creatures in this world that are more pleased with their speeches than they can prevail upon anyone else to be.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: What came back on Wednesday, september twelfth, printed and laid on the tables was not twenty three articles, it was seven.
19:48
SPEAKER_00: Article one, the Congress.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: Everything the summer had built around representation, the two houses, the powers, the prohibitions, gathered into ten sections.
19:58
SPEAKER_00: Article II, the Executive.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: Article III, the courts.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: Article four, the states and each other.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: Article V, Amendment.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: Article six, the Supreme Law.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: Article seven, Ratification.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: The whole machine rearranged and compressed.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: Morris cut connective tissue, merged clauses, struck repetitions, and tightened nearly every sentence the Convention had voted.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: The craftsmanship is visible in the Article's first sentence.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: The three great articles now opened in parallel, each handing its power to its branch in the same grammatical stroke.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: All legislative power herein granted shall be vested in the Congress of the United States.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: The executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States of America.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: At the top of the first page, the Committee of Style had rewritten the Committee of Details preamble, adopted without debate in August, which had opened with a roll call.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, all thirteen states, named North to South, Rhode Island included.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: Article 7 had made that sentence impossible.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: The Constitution would take effect among nine ratifying states, and nobody on earth knew which nine.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: Name all thirteen, and the first refusal falsified the document's first line.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: Name none, and the preamble would say something else.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: It had to name whoever would be left, and so Morris wrote We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: The old preamble has been Had stated no purpose at all.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: It ordained, declared, and established, and stopped.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: The new one carried six union, justice, tranquility, defense, welfare, and liberty.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: Every word of it was the committees, and none of it drew a recorded word of debate on the floor.
22:19
SPEAKER_00: The vocabulary of the finished text was arranged with the same care, and one word of it was fought over on the very last working day.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: The three clauses that carried the institution of slavery had come out of their battles in other words entirely, the whole number of free persons, the three fifths of all other persons, the migration and importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: And from August, the Fugitive Clause, no person legally held to service or labor in one state escaping to another shall be discharged from that service.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: On September fifteenth, the word legally was struck.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: Madison's notes record the reason in the Convention's own voice.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: The term legally was struck out and under the laws thereof inserted, in compliance with the wish of some who thought the term legal equivocal, and favoring the idea that slavery was legal in a moral view.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: Held to service under the laws thereof.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: The institution would stand on the state's statutes and nothing else.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin, who left before the end, told Maryland's legislature afterward that he had watched, the Convention had anxiously sought to avoid expressions which might be odious to the ears of Americans.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: Nowhere in the seven articles does the word slave or slavery appear.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: Alongside the Constitution, the committee drafted one more paper, the letter that would carry the document to the old Congress written by Morris for George Washington's signature.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: The Constitution which we now present is a result of the spirit of amity and of the mutual deference and concession which the particularity of our political situation rendered indispensable.
24:07
SPEAKER_00: Amnity, deference, concession, the great compromise, the three fifths rule, the bargain of August, the electoral machine all folded into one diplomatic clause.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: The greatest interest of every true American, the letter said, was the consolidation of the Union, in which was involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, and perhaps our national existence, and it closed on a wish that the Constitution may promote the lasting welfare of that country so dear to us all, and secure her freedom and happiness.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: The report that came back that Wednesday went to every table printed once more with the wide margins.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: And the same afternoon the convention took up the last loose ends.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: The first was a fraction.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson moved to reconsider the president's veto.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: The override had been raised in August from two-thirds of each house to three-fourths, and Williamson now motioned it back down, arguing that the three fourths rule put too much power of the president joined with a small minority.
25:08
SPEAKER_00: The convention agreed and the number in Article I, Section 7 became and stayed two-thirds.
25:14
SPEAKER_00: The next loose end was juries.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson observed that no provision was yet made for juries in civil cases and signified the necessity of it.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: Nathaniel Gorham answered that it was not possible to discriminate equality cases from those in which juries were proper.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: The representatives of the people could be trusted with the distinction.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: Elbert Jerry urged the necessity of juries as a guard against corrupt judges, and George Mason lifted the question to its full size.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: He wished the plan had been prefaced with the Bill of Rights.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: It would give great quiet to the people, and with the aid of the state declarations, a bill might be prepared in a few hours.
25:54
unknown: Mr.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: Jerry moved for a committee to prepare a bill of rights.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: George Mason seconded.
25:59
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sermon answered for the majority.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: The State Declaration of Rights are not repealed by this Constitution and being in force are sufficient.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: Madison replied in one sentence.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: The laws of the United States ought to be paramount to the state Bill of Rights.
26:16
SPEAKER_00: The question was put ten states no, one state yes.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts absent from the floor.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: The Convention that had spent four months building powers declined in the space of an afternoon to build a list of what powers it could not touch, and moved to the next item of business.
26:33
SPEAKER_00: The convention spent september thirteenth and fourteenth reading the finished draft against its votes, and one motion of those days passed without a murmur.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: George Mason, holding forth on the extravagance of American manners and the excessive consumption of foreign embellishments, moved a committee to report articles of association, encouraging, by the advance and example of the convention's own members, economy, frugality, and American manufactures.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: Dr.
27:01
SPEAKER_00: Johnson seconded, it was agreed nomcom, nobody speaking against it, and Mason, Franklin, Dickinson, Johnson, and Livingston were appointed to draft the country's manners.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: No report ever came.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: The last idea of the summer came the next day, each rejected with its argument attached.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: Dr.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: Franklin moved a power to provide for cutting canals where deemed necessary.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman objected, the expense would fall on the United States, and the benefit accrue to the places where the channels were built.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: Madison enlarged the motion, a power to grant charters of incorporation where the interests of the United States might require, and the laws of the individual states were incompetent.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: The political obstacles between the states being removed, he argued, a removal of the natural ones ought to follow.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: The motion lost two states to nine.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: Madison and Charles Pickany moved a power to establish a national university, in which no preferences or distinctions should be allowed on the account of religion.
28:01
SPEAKER_00: Governor Morris answered that it was not necessary.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: The legislature of the district would have the power.
28:06
SPEAKER_00: It lost four states to six, one divided.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: And Pickany and Gerrett moved to declare that the liberty of the press should be involubly observed.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman answered in two sentences.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: It was unnecessary.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: The power of Congress does not extend to the press.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: The motion failed, and the Constitution went to its final vote saying nothing about the press at all.
28:27
SPEAKER_00: Saturday, September 15th, ran long, the equal suffrage proviso placed beyond amendment, the fugitive clause one word struck.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: George Mason made one more try at a clause that had cost his section its shield.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: The Navigation Acts, he moved, to require two thirds of each house until the year 1808.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: The motion lost, and the August bargain stood untouched.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the day, the three dissenting men made their stand together.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: Edmund Randolph, the mover of the Virginia plan, stated the pain the whole summer had cost him and moved his remedy, that amendments to the plan might be offered by the state conventions and submitted to, and finally decided on by another great convention.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: If the motion failed, he said, it would be impossible for him to put his name to the instrument.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: George Mason seconded him.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: This constitution, Mason argued, had been formed without the knowledge or idea of the people.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: It was improper to say, the people, take this or take nothing.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: As it stood now, he could neither give his support in Virginia nor sign it here.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: The government it built would end either in a monarchy or a tyrannical aristocracy.
29:38
SPEAKER_00: And Elbert Jarrett rose and enumerated his objections numbered like a bill of particulars.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: The duration and reliability of the Senate, the House power to conceal its journals, Congress's power over the place of elections, the three fifths rule, the vice president made head of the Senate, all of these, he said, he could get over if the rights of the citizen were not rendered insecure by three things he could not get over.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: The general power to make what laws the legislature may please to call necessary and proper, the power to raise armies and money without limit, and the power to establish a tribunal without juries, which will be a star chamber as to civil cases.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: The Star Chamber, England's old juryless court, abolished as a tyranny nearly a century and a half before.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: A second general convention Jerry concurred, or his name withheld.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: The question was put on the second convention.
30:38
SPEAKER_00: Madison recorded the answer in five words.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: All the states answered no.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: Charles Pickany answered, the three of them in the room.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: Conventions are serious things and ought not be repeated.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: He was not without objections himself, the executive was contemptibly weak and dependent and a bare majority of Congress could govern commerce.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: But apprehending the danger of a general confusion and an ultimate decision by the sword, he would give the plan his support.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: No second convention, no amendments from the state conventions.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: The plan the country would see was this plan, as written, whole, take it or leave it.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: The three men still in the room had just said on the record that they would leave it.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: And George Mason had begun writing down what he would tell the country.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: In the convention's final days, on the blank leaf of his printed copy of the Committee of Styles report, he wrote out a paper he titled Objections to This Constitution and Government, and its first sentence was the september twelfth afternoon distilled.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: There is no declaration of rights, and the laws of the general government being paramount to the laws and constitution of the several states, the declaration of rights in the separate states are no security.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: And objections ran on down the page.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: There is no declaration of any kind of preserving the liberties of the press, or the trial by jury in civil cases, nor against the dangers of standing armies in time of peace.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: The very motions the floor had turned aside that week entered now on the other side of the ledger.
32:21
SPEAKER_00: Under their own construction of the general clause at the end of the numerated powers, the Congress may extend their powers as far as they think proper.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: And the paper closed, where his Saturday speech had the government which set out a moderate aristocracy and terminate in a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical aristocracy.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: And then in the early evening the question that four months had been building was put at last to agree to the Constitution as amended.
32:54
SPEAKER_00: Madison commented.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: The Constitution was then ordered to be engrossed, and the House adjourned.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: All states aye, eleven delegations on the floor, not one of them opposed.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: Whatever three of the men sitting in them intended for Monday.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: Ordered to be engrossed, copied fair, in a formal hand, into parchment for signing.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: The job went out that evening to a clerk.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: Jacob Scholas, assistant clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly, who worked in the same building.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: He had Sunday to make four sheets of vellum, some forty four hundred words, and he was paid roughly thirty dollars for the work.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: Nine states in Convention of the People.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: That question now belonged to the country.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: The convention adjourned to Monday morning, september seventeenth, to meet their document.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share the show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.