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The Grand Convention - I Will Never Confederate · American Political History

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season 16 of American Political History The Grand Convention.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: I will never Confederate.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: By the second week of June 1787, the Committee of the Whole had worked its way through most of Virginia's resolutions, and the shape coming off its table was everything George Reed had warned his colleagues about in May.
0:23
SPEAKER_00: A national legislature of two branches, seats in both of them apportioned to population.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: Each time the question of representation came to a vote, the big states had the votes, and won.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, june ninth, the small states stopped arguing the clauses and declared political war underneath.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: David Barley, the Chief Justice of New Jersey, the man Major Pierce had called good rather than brilliant, with every virtue to recommend him, rose and attacked the foundation itself.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Proportional representation, he argued, sounded fair and was not.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: Virginia was sixteen times the size of Delaware, give the states seats by population, and three large states would govern the rest.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: If the Convention truly wanted fairness, Judge Barley said there was one honest way to get it.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Lay the map of the United States on the table, erase the boundaries of the states and lay off thirteen equal parts.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: Erase the states and draw thirteen equal ones.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: It was not entirely a debater's flourish.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Judge Barley and his colleagues meant it seriously.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: If representation must be proportional, then make the states proportional first.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: His colleague rose next, William Patterson, the Attorney General of New Jersey, the small, quiet man who never spoke, but when he understood his subject well.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: He understood this one.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: The Virginia plan, he told the committee, exceeded the Convention's powers and the people's readiness both, and as for New Jersey, New Jersey will never confederate on the plan before the committee.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: She would be swallowed up.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: I would rather submit to a monarch, to a despot than such a fate.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: And Mr Patterson reached back thirteen years for his proof to the argument America itself had made against Parliament.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: It had once been proposed by Joseph Galloway and others before the war, that America be given seats in the British Parliament and be bound by its laws.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: America would have held perhaps a third of the members, and been outvoted forever.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: Mr Patterson put the question to the large states in their own revolutionary vocabulary.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Would American rights and interests have been safe under an authority thus constituted?
2:59
SPEAKER_00: Proportional representation to the small states was Galloway's plan with new management.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: New Jersey in Mr.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: Randolph's Congress would be America in Parliament, entitled to its seats and outvoted on everything forever.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: James Wilson of Pennsylvania gave the answer of the large states.
3:21
SPEAKER_00: If New Jersey would not part with her sovereignty, he said, it was in vain to talk of government.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: And Pennsylvania had a threat of her own to lay besides New Jersey's.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: If the small states will not confederate on this plan, Pennsylvania, and he assumed some other states would not confederate on any other.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: I will not confederate.
3:45
SPEAKER_00: Each side now owned that sentence.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: New Jersey would never confederate on proportion.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: Pennsylvania would never confederate on anything else.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: The committee let the question lie and went back to work.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: On Wednesday, june thirteenth, the Committee of the Whole finished its first pass and reported out the amended Virginia plan.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Nineteen resolutions now, a national government on the people, proportional in both houses.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: And on Thursday, june fourteenth, Mr.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: Patterson rose and asked for a day.
4:16
SPEAKER_00: Several deputations, he said, wished time to prepare a plan, purely federal, and contradistinguished from the reported plan.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: The Convention gave him his day, and on Friday, june fifteenth, Mr.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: Patterson laid the small state's answer on the table.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: Nine resolutions known ever since by the name of his state, the New Jersey Plan.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: Its first resolution told the whole story.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: The Articles of Confederation ought to be revised, corrected, enlarged as to render the Federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: The exact vocabulary of the Congressional Commission.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: The vocabulary Governor Randolph had abandoned on the second day.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: This plan stayed on that leash and said so in its opening lines.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: And within that limit it gave the Union real teeth.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Congress, the existing Congress, one house, one vote per state, would gain the power to raise its own money at last, duties on imports, a stamp tax, and postage, the power to regulate trade and commerce among the states and with foreign nations, a federal executive, plural, several men, elected by Congress and removable by Congress on the application of a majority of state governors, a federal judiciary, provisions for admitting new states, a unified rule of naturalization, equal justice for citizens across state lines, and one resolution that reached further than anything in it, further in one respect than Virginia's plan itself.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: All acts of Congress made under the articles shall be the supreme law of the respective states, and that the judiciary of the several states shall be bound thereby in their decisions.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: The supreme law, the small states, fighting consolidation, had drafted the sentence that made federal law king inside the state courthouses of America, because a federal government of any size was worthless if its laws could be ignored.
6:25
SPEAKER_00: The sentence went into the pile with everything else.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: But nowhere in the nine resolutions was the rule of suffrage changed.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: One state, one vote, stood exactly where the articles had put it.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: That was the plan's foundation and its purpose.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: Two governments now lay on the table.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: The convention spent Saturday, june sixteenth, arguing about which one to build.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: John Lansing of New York, Governor Clinton's man, the Albany mayor, opened for the New Jersey side and aimed at the Virginia plan's deepest nerve.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: The states never feel a sufficient confidence in a general government to give it a negative on their laws.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: The scheme is itself totally novel.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: There is no parallel to it to be found.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: The Articles of Confederation is familiar to the people, and an augmentation of the powers of Congress will be readily approved by them.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: Totally novel, no parallel to be found, and in 1787 that was not a compliment.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: Then Mr Patterson stood to defend his own work, and gave the Convention the plainest statement on the small states case yet made.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: He preferred his plan, he said, because it accorded with the power of the Convention and with the sentiments of the people.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: If the Confederacy was radically wrong, let us return to our states and obtain larger powers, not assume them for ourselves.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: And then the sentence that summed up his entire understanding of what a delegate was.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: I came here not to speak my own sentiments, but the sentiments of those who sent me.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Our objective is not such a government as may be best in itself, but such a one as our constituents have authorized us to prepare and as they will approve.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: Against a room full of men designing from first principle, Mr Patterson planted a flag.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: We are servants, the states are our masters, and the masters said revise.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: James Wilson answered him with a lawyer's inventory.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: Two plans laid side by side, article against article, thirteen points of difference read out loud in sequence.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: Two branches against one, a legislature of the people against a legislature of the states.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: And to Mr Patterson's argument about the Convention's powers, Mr Wilson gave the nationalist answer.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: Authorized to conclude nothing, but to be at liberty to propose anything.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: Conclude nothing, propose anything.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: The Convention on this view was not a legislature exceeding its writ, it was a committee of advice, and advice has no leash.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: And Governor Randolph closed the day for Virginia with the gloves off.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: By Madison's record, he was not scrupulous on the point of power.
9:21
SPEAKER_00: When the salvation of the Republic is at stake, it would be treason to our trust not to propose what we found necessary.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Treason not to exceed the commission.
9:34
SPEAKER_00: That was how far the argument had travelled in three weeks.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: The mover of the Virginia plan now called obedience to the leash a betrayal to the country.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: The committee adjourned for the Sabbath with two plans on the table and no decision.
9:49
SPEAKER_00: And on Monday morning, june eighteenth, before either could be voted on, a third voice took the floor, and held it for the rest of the day.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: Alexander Hamilton had said almost nothing for three weeks, and Madison's notes opened the day by recording exactly why.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: Mr Hamilton had been hitherto silent on the business before the convention, partially from the respect to others whose superior abilities, age, and experience rendered him unwilling to bring forward ideas dissimilar to theirs, and partially from his delicate situation with respect to his own state, to whose sentiments, as expressed by his colleagues, he could by no means accede.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: His delicate situation, Judge Yates and Major Lansing sat beside him, outvoting him for New York on every question, committed to the New Jersey side.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: Whatever Hamilton said he said for himself alone, and could deliver nothing.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: He said it anyways.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: The crisis, Madison recorded him saying, was too serious to permit any scruples to prevent over every man's duty to contribute.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: And then, for somewhere between five and six hours, working from a sketch of notes, Alexander Hamilton told the Convention what he actually believed.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: He was, he declared, unfriendly to both plans on the table.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: The New Jersey plan he rejected utterly.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: No amendment of Confederation leaving the states in possession of sovereignty could possibly answer the purpose.
11:22
SPEAKER_00: By Judge Yates' record, he dismissed Mr.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: Patterson's plan in a kitchen metaphor.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: It was the old Confederation still.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: Pork still with a little change of sauce.
11:35
SPEAKER_00: As for the Convention's powers, the scruple mister Patterson had built on his plan, Hamilton swept it aside in a sentence to rely on and propose any plan not adequate to the exigencies merely because it was not clearly within our powers would be to sacrifice the means to the end.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: Then he laid out the machinery of his government.
11:58
SPEAKER_00: There was, he said, five great and essential principles by which any government stands.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: He walked the committee through them all, showing that everyone in America pulled for the states and against the Union.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: An active and constant interest in supporting the government.
12:17
SPEAKER_00: The states had it, the union did not.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: The states had shown nothing but a disposition to claw back what they had delegated.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Third, the habitual attachment of the people, and the whole force of that tie ran to the states, whose protection the people saw and felt every day.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: Fourth, force, and here Alexander put his finger on the fantasy inside every plan for coercing states.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: But how can this force be exerted on the states collectively?
12:48
SPEAKER_00: It is impossible.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: It amounts to a war between parties.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: And fifth, influence, the honors and offices that attach men to government, nearly all of them in the state's hands.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: All the passions then we see, of avarice, ambition, interest, which govern most individuals and all public bodies fall into the current of the states and do not flow in the stream of the general government.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: Every confederacy in history, he argued, had drowned in that current.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: The Greek councils, whose decrees were mere signals of war, the German Empire reduced to a nominal sovereignty, the Swiss cantons at war with one another, and Mr.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: Patterson's plan would drown in it too.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: Its reserve would fall short and fall back on requisitions, which experience proved could not be relied on, and its foundation the equal vote he attacked.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: It is not in human nature that Virginia and the large states should consent to it, or if they did, that they should long abide by it.
13:53
SPEAKER_00: It shocks too much the idea of justice and every human feeling.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Two sovereignties, he told them, cannot coexist within the same limits.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: The general power, whatever its form, must swallow up the state powers, or be swallowed up by them.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: Then Hamilton arrived at the question of what to build instead, and Madison recorded the strangest and most honest passage of the day.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: What then was to be done?
14:21
SPEAKER_00: He was embarrassed.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: The extent of the country to be governed discouraged him.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton still continued to go further.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: If the state governments were extinguished outright, great economy might be had.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: He did not mean, he said, to shock the public opinion by proposing such a measure, but he saw no other necessity for declining it.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: Subordinate authorities would be named, district tribunals, corporations for local purposes.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: But in his phrase, to what good the vast and expanse of apparatus now appertaining to the states?
14:56
SPEAKER_00: And then the confession, exactly as Madison took it down.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: This view of the subject almost led him to despair that a Republican government could be established over so great an extent.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: He was sensible at the same time that it would be unwise to propose one of any other form.
15:16
SPEAKER_00: In his private opinion, he had no scruple in declaring, supported as he was by the opinions of so many of the wise and good, that the British government was the best in the world, that he doubted much whether any sort of it would do in America.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: The best in the world, spoken four years after the British Army sailed out of New York City's harbor, to a room full of veterans of the war against it by a man who had commanded artillery in the war and stormed a redoubt at Yorktown.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: He gave them his reasoning.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: In every community, he argued, industry divides men into a few and the many, debtors and creditors, and their interests separate.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: Give all the power to the few, they will oppress the many.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: Both therefore ought to have power that each may defend itself against the other.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: To the want of a check, he said, America owed its paper money and its installment laws.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: To its proper adjustment the British owed the excellence of their Constitution.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: The House of Lords is most noble institution, having nothing to hope for by a change and a sufficient interest by the means of their property in being faithful to the national interests, they form a permanent barrier against the pernicious innovation, whether attempted on the part of the crown or the commons.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: No temporary Senate, he argued, would have firmness enough.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: Seven years was nothing against the amazing violence and turbulence of the democratic spirit.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: And the executive, the English model, he said, was the only good one on the subject, a hereditary king whose interests were so interwoven with the nations and whose personal annulments were so great that he stood above the danger of being corrupted from abroad.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: The weak side of republics was exactly there, foreign influence, working on men of little character holding great power.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: So he drew to his conclusion in a sentence the whole speech had been building toward.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: We ought to go as far in order to attain stability and permanency as Republican principles will admit.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: Let one branch of the legislature hold their places for life or at least during good behavior.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: Let the executive also be for life.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: A Senate for life, an executive for life, and Hamilton asked the obvious question himself and answered it.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: But is this a Republican government?
17:49
SPEAKER_00: It will be asked.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: Yes, if all the magistrates are appointed and vacancies are filled by the people or a process of electing originating with the people.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: Then the elective monarch objection met head on.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: It will be objected probably that such an executive will be an elective monarch.
18:09
SPEAKER_00: We would reply that monarch is an indefinite term.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: It marks not either the degree or duration of power.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: If this executive magistrate would be a monarch for life, the other proposed by the report from the committee of the whole would be a monarch for seven years.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: A monarch for life or a monarch for seven years, the difference he was arguing was degree, not kind.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: And then he read them his sketch.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: Eleven articles, an assembly, elected by the people for three years, a Senate chosen by electors, serving during good behavior, a single governor for the United States, also chosen through electors, also serving on good behavior, with a veto on all laws, and direction for war and treaty powers with the Senate.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: Every state law contrary to the Constitution or laws of the United States would be utterly void, and to make sure the governor of each state to be appointed by the general government, holding a veto over his own state's laws.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: And Article XI in full No state shall have any force, land or naval, and the militia of all the states to be under the sole and executive direction of the United States.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: No state military forces at all.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: State governors appointed from the center, states kept as districts, corporations for local purposes.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: He closed with a disclaimer.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: He did not offer the paper as a proposition to the committee, it was meant, he said, only to give a more correct view of his ideas.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: The people he knew would adopt neither his plan nor Mr.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: Randolph's at present.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: But he saw the union dissolving or already dissolving, and he believed the public mind was moving.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Madison's notes end the day in a single line.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: The committee rose and the House adjourned.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: No debate, no reply, no seconding his motion.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: After somewhere near six hours, the men in the room stood up and went to dinner.
20:06
unknown: Dr.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut kept a diary that summer, and was fully detailed on all but two days of the entire convention.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: For june eighteenth, the business was simply in convention, Hamilton.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: The next morning, june nineteenth, the convention took up not one word of Hamilton's plan.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: No motion, no second, no debate.
20:28
SPEAKER_00: As if the six hours had not happened.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: The committee returned to the questions of Virginia against New Jersey.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: Three days later, doctor Johnson put the epitaph on it.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: On the floor in a single sentence, Madison wrote A gentleman from New York with boldness and decision proposed a system totally different from both, and though he has been praised by everybody, he has been supported by none.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: That was the reception, and the convention simply moved on.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: The morning of june nineteenth opened by killing the middle road Mr.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Dickinson's gentle substitute from the day before, revised and amended by the articles, was put to a vote at last and lost.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware for it, six states against it, Maryland divided.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: There would not be a soft option about this.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
21:18
SPEAKER_00: Dickinson had drawn the picture of what he wanted two weeks earlier, and it was the best image anyone produced that summer.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: Let the government, he said, be like a solar system.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: Let the general government be the sun, and the states the planets, repelled yet attracted, and the whole moving regularly in their proper orbits.
21:39
SPEAKER_00: The trouble with the picture was the calculation underneath it.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: Nobody in the room disputed that the planets should keep moving.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: They were fighting over the mass of the sun.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: It fell to Madison to finish it.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: He rose and spoke through the morning, and began with the power question that had shadowed every debate since May.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: The Confederation, Mr Patterson had made it.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Argued, was formed by unanimous consent and could be dissolved only in the same way.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: Madison answered from the law of compacts.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: A breach of a compact by one party frees the others.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: And had the federal articles been breached?
22:15
SPEAKER_00: Among the most notorious was an act of New Jersey herself, by which she expressly refused to compel with the constitutional requisition of Congress.
22:26
SPEAKER_00: New Jersey herself.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: The state now demanding fidelity to the articles had flatly refused a lawful requisition under them, and had never passed an act of compliance.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: Madison did not wish, he said, to draw rigid interference, so he moved on.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Then he put Mr.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Patterson's plan to the examination, its own authors set.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: A proper plan must preserve the Union and remedy the evil of the states.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Would this plan do that?
22:54
SPEAKER_00: It would prevent the violations of treaties and the laws of nations that courted foreign war?
23:01
SPEAKER_00: The files of Congress, he said, already held complaints from almost every nation America had treaties with.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: The plan left the will of the states as uncontrolled as ever.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: Would it prevent the encroachments on federal authority?
23:17
SPEAKER_00: The states had treated with Indian nations in defiance of Congress, compacted with each other without consent, and then the examples sitting in the room's recent memory.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Has not Massachusetts, notwithstanding the most powerful member of the Union, already raised a body of troops?
23:35
SPEAKER_00: Is she not now augmenting them without having even designed to appraise Congress of her intentions?
23:45
SPEAKER_00: The army that put down Shay's rebellion, raised and still growing, without so much as a letter to Congress.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Under Mr.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Patterson's plan, nothing changed.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: Would it prevent the trespass of states on each other?
24:00
SPEAKER_00: The free citizens' preference, the paper money grinding creditor states for the benefit of debtor ones?
24:06
SPEAKER_00: It gave not even a veto on state tax.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: Would it secure the internal tranquility of the states?
24:14
SPEAKER_00: The insurrections in Massachusetts had admonished all of them, and the plan contained no provisions at all for it.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: And though plan's one weapon, coercion of delinquent states, force of that kind could never be used against large states.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: They were impregnatable.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: Only the small could ever feel it.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: He reached for the ban on the German Empire, the Empire's own device for bringing an outlawed member to heel.
24:45
SPEAKER_00: It was the cobweb which could entangle the weak, but would be the sport of the strong.
24:52
SPEAKER_00: And then he asked the small states to look past the plan entirely, at what would follow if their pernicious adherence to it prevented the adoption of any plan, dissolve the Union, and one of two things happen, thirteen sovereignties alone in the world, or two or three confederacies in place of one.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: In either case, would New Jersey's larger neighbors offer her better terms than Mr.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: Randolph's plan did now?
25:21
SPEAKER_00: Would they offer her an equal vote at all?
25:25
SPEAKER_00: Near the end, Madison paused over what the New Jersey men had themselves conceded on June 9th, that a Virginia sixteen times the size of Delaware made equal suffrage indefensible in fairness.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: The expedient proposed by them was that all the states should be thrown into one mass and a new partition be made into thirteen equal parts.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: Would such a scheme be practical?
25:53
SPEAKER_00: The king of France, he observed, with the most enlightened ministers of the age, had found it impossible merely to equalize the usages of his own provinces.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: Nobody was going to redraw America.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: Then he took the committee on a tour of the dead.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: If we remember the examples of other confederacies, we shall find in all of them the same tendencies of the parts to encroach on the authority of the whole, and he went through them one by one.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: The Amphotonic Council and the Aegean League among the ancients, the Helvetic and Germanic, and Belgic among moderns, tracing their likeness to the United States in the Constitution and extent of their federal authorities, in the tendencies of the particular members to usurp on those authorities and to bring confusion and ruin to the whole.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: The Greeks had held on paper everything the Congress lacked, the power to find a delinquent member and to use force against one.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: What was the consequence?
26:58
SPEAKER_00: Their decrees, he answered, were mere signals of war, and Philip of Macedon, taking advantage of their disunion, insulated himself into their councils and became the masters of the Confederacy.
27:10
SPEAKER_00: The Greeks had voted themselves a king by failing to govern themselves.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: Every league of sovereign states in the record had died the same death.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: The members starving the center, the strong members preying on the weak, and a foreign power buying the votes of the ruin.
27:27
SPEAKER_00: That was the evidence Madison put in front of them, not a preference, a pattern.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: The great difficulties lie in the affair of representation, and if this could be adjusted, all others would be surmountable.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: The great difficulty of the convention lies in representation, not the executive, not the judiciary, not the reach of the laws, who counts and by what rules.
27:53
SPEAKER_00: Mr Patterson's first proposition was postponed generally, only New York and New Jersey voting no.
28:00
SPEAKER_00: Then Rufus King moved the question that ended it.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: Should the committee rise and report Governor Randolph's resolutions to the House without alteration?
28:09
SPEAKER_00: In fact, a question whether Virginia's plan should be adhered to as preferable to New Jersey's.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts, I.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut, I.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: New York no.
28:20
SPEAKER_00: New Jersey, no, Pennsylvania I.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: Delaware, no, Maryland divided, Virginia, I, North Carolina, I, South Carolina, I, Georgia, I.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: Seven states to three, one divided.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: The New Jersey plan was dead.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: Connecticut had voted with the larger states.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: Judge Sherman and Mr.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth, small state men to the bone, had declined to die on Mr.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: Patterson's Hill.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: And nobody who watched them work imagined they had surrendered.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: The House took up the reported resolutions that same afternoon, and the first debate was about what the words meant, and about the speech nobody had answered.
29:02
SPEAKER_00: James Wilson said that by a national government he did not mean one that would swallow up the state governments, as seemed to be wished by some gentlemen.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: Then Rufus King stood and pulled the whole argument's vocabulary apart.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: The words states, sovereignty, national, federal, he said, had been used inaccurately and delusively.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: Were states sovereign?
29:27
SPEAKER_00: They did not possess the particular features of sovereignty.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: They could not make war nor peace, nor alliances, nor treaties.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: Considering them as political beings, they are dumb, for they could not speak to any foreign sovereign whatever.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: They were deaf, for they could not hear any propositions from such a sovereign.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: Dumb and deaf.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: Whatever the states were, they were not nations.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: They had given the essential parts of sovereignty away in 1781, and a union of states was underneath a union of men composing them.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: Luther Martin of Maryland, the verbose attorney general, in his first full speech on the floor, answered with the small state's bedrock doctrine.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: The separation from Great Britain, he said, had placed the thirteen states in a state of nature towards one another.
30:18
SPEAKER_00: They had entered the Confederation as equals, they met now to amend it as equals, and he could never accede to a plan that would introduce an inequality and lay the ten states at the mercy of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: A state of natures, thirteen separate sovereignties joined only by a compact among equals.
30:42
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: Wilson would not let it stand, and to refute it, he picked up the founding document itself and read the Declaration of Independence aloud to the room where it had been signed.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: The United Colonies, he observed as he read, were declared to be free and independent states.
31:00
SPEAKER_00: Independent inferred, not individually, but unitedly.
31:04
SPEAKER_00: They had never been thirteen nations for a single day.
31:09
SPEAKER_00: The House adjourned.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: The next morning, june twentieth, with the Virginia plan re-reported and the committee's work begun again.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth rose with a small motion.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: The first resolution declared that a national government ought to be established, supreme.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Mr.
31:26
SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth moved to alter it, to strike the word national, and resolve instead that the government of the United States ought to consist of a supreme legislature, executive, and judiciary.
31:37
SPEAKER_00: He did not propose to change what the government was, only what it was called.
31:42
SPEAKER_00: The motion was agreed to without opposition, the word national came out of the resolution, and the thing under construction had the name it carries still, the government of the United States.
31:55
SPEAKER_00: The small states had lost the week.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: Their plan was dead.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: The Virginia frame stood, and the committee was building on it.
32:04
SPEAKER_00: What they had won was a word, and underneath the word, nothing had moved at all.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: The rule of suffrage in the second branch stood exactly where Mr.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: Reed had planted Delaware's flag on the first day of debate.
32:18
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of American Political History.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: If you want to support the show, please subscribe, leave a five star rating, and share this show with someone you think would enjoy listening.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Thank you again, and until next time.