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The Grand Convention - The Committee of Detail · American Political History

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to season sixteen of American Political History.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Grand Convention, the Committee of Detail.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: On july twenty third, seventeen eighty-seven, with the great questions of representation settled and the resolutions piling up amended and reamended, the Convention voted unanimously to hand everything to a committee, five members to reduce two months of votes into the form of an actual constitution.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: The next day it balloted the five names.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: John Rutledge of South Carolina in the chair, the man they had called Dictator John when he ran the state's war government.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Edmund Randolph of Virginia, the plan's original voice.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, who had presided over the committee of the whole since May.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, the author of Partially National, Partially Federal, and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, five lawyers, and a map of the country in miniature.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Northern New England, Lower New England, the Middle States, the Upper South, the Lower South, one of each man.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Judge Barley wrote to the absent Jonathan Dayton with the whole handoff in a sentence.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday we completed the great principles which we have been so long considering, and committed them to five gentlemen to put into proper form and detail.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: On july twenty sixth, the convention adjourned for ten days and the five men went to work.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Randolph opened the labor by a rough sketch, and at its head he wrote out the committee's two working rules, a drafting philosophy for a constitution, stated in advance.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: To insert essential principles only, least the operations of government should be clogged by rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable, which ought to be accommodated to times and events, and to use simple and precise language and general propositions.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Essential principles only but a constitution that decided everything would strangle the government that had to live inside it.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Simple and precise language and general propositions, after the example, as Randolph noted, of the state constitutions.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Randolph sketched the skeleton, Wilson wrote and rewrote the connected drafts, the surviving manuscripts are mostly in his hand, and Rutledge edited with a chairman's pen, and on the table in front of them lay every text they could mine, the amended resolutions, the Articles of Confederation, the State Constitutions, the New Jersey plan, and Charles Pickney's draft of a federal government retrieved from the files where it had gone on may twenty ninth and queried at last for its usable parts.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: Outside the doors the country had spent the summer guessing.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: The windows of the chamber stayed shut through the heat for secrecy's sake, the sentries kept the curious off the state house steps, and the newspapers printed rumors in place of news.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: The most durable of them?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: That the convention meant to set up a king and had sent abroad for the son of King George III.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: In August, a Philadelphia paper carried the one authorized sounding leak of the whole summer, a correction attributed to the delegates themselves.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Though we cannot affirmatively tell you what we are doing, we can negatively tell you what we are not doing.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: We never once thought of a king.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well they worked, the convention scattered.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin did not have far to go, he climbed up the stairs, Pennsylvania Supreme Executive Council, which he presided over, met on the second floor of the same state house directly above the empty convention chamber.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Pierce Butler wrote to his relation in England what he could do.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: No doubt you have heard of the purpose of the meeting to form a stronger constitution on strictly federal principles for the government of the whole.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I hope I may succeed.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Our country expects much from us.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We have sat every day since the twenty fifth of May.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And George Washington went fishing.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: On july thirtieth, misses Elizabeth Powell invited him to the theater.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sagrian's School for Scandal was playing, and Washington sent his regret, and Washington sent his regrets in the third person.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: General Washington presents his respectful compliments to misses Powell and would with great pleasure have made one of a party for the School of Scandal this evening, had not everything been arranged, and Mr Governor Morris and himself on the point of stepping into the carriage for a fishing expedition.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: His diary for that Monday?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: In company with Mr Governor Moores, and in his carriage with my horses, we went up to Jane Moore's in vicinity of Valley Forge to get trout.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Jane Moore's farm sat on grounds the general knew.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: The next day, while Governor Morris finished the creek, Washington got on a horse and rode alone.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Will is to mister Morrison finished, I rid over the old cantonments of the American army of the winter of seventeen seven and eight, visited all the works which are in ruins, and the encampments in woods where the grounds had not been cultivated.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: The hut fields had gone back to woods.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Nine years and seven months earlier, eleven thousand of his soldiers had starved and frozen on that ground, and some two thousand of them had died, waiting for a Congress that could not feed them.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: The government whose replacement five lawyers were drafting that same afternoon, twenty miles away.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: His diary records what he saw, and nothing about what he felt or thought.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: On Monday, august sixth, the Convention reassembled.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Mr.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Rutledge rose and delivered the committee's report.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And for the first time, the thing on the table was not a set of resolutions, it was a draft of the Constitution.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Printed by Dunlap and Claypool, the same shop that had printed the Declaration of Independence.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: The draft constitution was printed on seven large pages, with a wide margin down the left side for every sheet for a delegate's pen.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: A preamble and twenty three articles, seven articles for the legislature and its powers, one for the executive, one for the judiciary.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: The rest for the states, the amendments, the ratification, the machineries of a beginning of a government.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Each member took his copy, and the convention adjourned for the rest of the day.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Forty men walking out into the August heat, each carrying the first draft of the Constitution of the United States.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: The draft was full of things nobody had voted on.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: The committee had done more than arrange.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: The National Executive of ten weeks of debate appeared on the page as the President of the United States.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: The National Legislature was the Congress, its branches the House of Representatives and the Senate.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The Supreme National Tribunal was the Supreme Court.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: An entire christening performed in committee, adopted by the room without ceremony, titles that had drifted in from the state constitutions and the old Congress, fixed now in print.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the document opened with a sentence assembled from the same materials.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: We the people of the states of New Hampshire, of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia do ordain, declare, and establish the following constitution for the government of ourselves and our posterity.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thirteen named states, listed north to south, Rhode Island included, a roll call of a union that had never once assembled in this convention.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the committee had performed one transformation larger than all the naming.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: The resolutions it received granted Congress its power in a single elastic sentence.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature was to legislate in all cases to which the separate states are incompetent or in which the harmony of the United States may be interpreted by the excess of individual legislation.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: One sentence holding everything and specifically nothing, a grant whose size depended entirely on who is measuring it.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: The committee struck it and in its place wrote a list.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, and imposts, to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, to coin money and regulate its value, to establish post offices, to raise armies, to build and equip fleets, and in the draft's original word to make war.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Item by item, power by power, the government's entire reach written out where it could be read and attributed.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And at the foot of the list the committee added one clause.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Congress shall make laws that shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: When the Convention reached that clause on the floor, it was agreed to without a word of recorded debate.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: The powers above it had been fought over clause by clause.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: The clauses about the clause passed in silence.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: The day after the draft appeared, the Maryland delegation gathered by itself to read it, and doctor McHenry's notes preserve what the newest man in the Convention brought to the table.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Mercer, seated two days, produced a list of the Convention's members, and against some twenty names he had written his judgment for them.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: For a king.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty names marked for a king by a man who had sat in the room for two days.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: The convention's month of elective king speeches had traveled.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: What Williamson said as resignation and George Mason as warning, Mercer wrote down as an accusation with a roster attached.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then the grind began.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Article by article, clause by clause, through the whole of August, the Convention voting its way down the printed pages, filling the margins.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: On the first morning, the preamble, we the people of the thirteen named states, was agreed to without a dissenting voice, and so were the first two articles.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: On August sixteenth, the room reached the first power on the list.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Ten years of requisitions, the government that could not feed its army at Valley Forge, ended in an ordinary vote on Thursday.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Most clauses passed in minutes, and even small ones left arguments in the record.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: The qualification clause required a congressman to be inhabitant of his state, the word chosen deliberately over resident, on Madison's motion as less liable to misconstruction.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: A man temporarily absent on public business remained an inhabitant, while a newcomer with a rented room was merely a resident.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And a quorum was set at a majority of each house against those who feared that a smaller number would let a junto carry the country's business into an empty room, and those who answered that in a nation of American distance, requiring more would let a handful of absentees stop the government.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Running through those same days, clause for clause with the powers, was the other question the draft had opened, not what the government could do, but who it would be.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: On august ninth, seventeen eighty seven, the convention took up the qualification for senators, and Governor Morris moved that no man sit in the Senate of the United States who had not been a citizen for fourteen years.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: One of the notebooks kept in the room that day preserved his argument in shorthand.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Foreigners will not learn our laws and constitutions under fourteen years.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Seven years must be applied to learn to be a shoemaker.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Fourteen are at least necessary to learn to be an American legislator.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that period, he added, would be requisite to eradicate the affections of education and native attachments.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: The next argument was over who votes at all.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: On august seventh, the Committee of Details Suffrage Clause was read.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: The electors of the House of Representatives shall be the same in each state as the electors of the most numerous branch of the state's own legislature.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever votes for your assembly votes for your Congress.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: The federal franchise borrowed state by state from whatever each state had.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Governor Morris moved to strike it, and restrained the vote to freeholders, owners of land across the whole Union.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Give the vote to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich, who will be able to buy them.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: The ignorant and the dependent, he argued, could no more be trusted with the public interest than children.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: John Dickinson stood with him.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: The freeholders of the country were the best guardians of liberty, and the restriction a necessary defense against the multitudes without property and without principle with which the country, like all others, would in time be abound.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oliver Ellsworth answered Ought not every man who pays a tax to vote for his representatives who is to levy and dispose of his money?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: The right of suffrage was a tender point and strongly guarded by most of the state constitutions.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: The people would not readily subscribe to a national constitution that disenfranchised them.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason called the English freehold rule an ancient prejudice.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Ought they not by now to think as Americans?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Pierce Butler said the word out loud, going further down that road ended in rank aristocracy.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Madison himself leaned toward the freeholders as the safest guardians of liberty, and set down in his own notes an observation.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: In future times a great majority of people will not only be without land, but any other sort of property.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Every answer to the severage question had to hold for that country too, and every answer frightened somebody.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And doctor Franklin rose for the men Governor Morris had disparaged and told them It is of great consequence that we should not depress the virtue and public spirit of our common people, of which they have displayed a great deal during the war, and which contributed principally to the favorable issue of it.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: The honorable refusal of American seamen who were carried in great numbers into the British prisons during the war, to redeem themselves from misery or to seek their fortunes by entering on board the ships of the enemy to their country.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: The common sailors of America, men with no freehold, no property, nothing, offered release from prison hawks if they would serve the enemy, and refusing in great numbers to be bought.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Those were the voters Mr.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Morris proposed to strike.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: The elected, Franklin continued, had no right in any case to narrow the privileges of the electors.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: The freehold motion was crushed, seven states to one, only Delaware for it, and the borrowed franchise stood.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Constitution of the United States contains no definition of the American voter at all.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: It never says who may vote.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Each state's own rules, whatever it is, was adopted sight unseen.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: The widest franchise available in 1787, achieved by declining to write about anyone.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Who serves came in layers, and the first layer was age.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Back in June, the Convention had set the House minimum at twenty five years, over James Wilson's objectives that there was no more reason for incapacitating youth than age, where the requisite qualifications were found.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason had carried the minimum with a confession.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Every man he granted matures differently, but if interrogated, he would be obliged to declare that his own political opinions at the age of twenty one had been too crude and erroneous to merit an influence on public measures.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was built from there.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: Twenty five years old to sit in the House, thirty for the Senate, thirty five in the end for the presidency.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: The next layer was property.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Committee of Details draft empowered the legislature to establish property qualifications for its own members.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: On august tenth, Charles Pickany moved to make them explicit and large, the president, the judges, the legislatures, all to be owners of substantial estates.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: John Dickinson, a rich man himself, answered with the Republican's creed.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: I doubt the policy of interweaving into a Republican Constitution a veneration for wealth, had always understood that the veneration for poverty and virtue were the objects of Republican encouragement.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Dr.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin expressed his dislike of everything that tended to debase the spirit of the common people, adding, from a long life's acquaintances, some of the greatest rogues I have ever been acquainted with were the richest rogues.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: If the Constitution betrayed a great partiality to the rich, he warned it would not only hurt them in the esteem of the liberal minded of Europe, but discourage the very people whose coming they most wished to encourage.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Pickany's motion was rejected.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Madison recorded that the states were not even called to vote.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the qualification clause itself was struck.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: The Finnish Constitution requires no property of anyone, not an acre and not a shilling, for any office in the government up to and including the presidency.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: In seventeen eighty seven, in the whole catalog of the world's constitution on that point, America was alone.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then the deepest layer.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: How American must an American officeholder be?
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Committee of Detail had proposed three years of citizenship for the House.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: On august eighth, George Mason moved to raise it to seven.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: He did not choose, he said, to let foreigners and adventurers make laws for us and govern us, and seven years carried, every state but Connecticut.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: The next day came the Senate, and Governor Morris proposed fourteen, arguing his logic of seven years a shoemaker, fourteen to legislate.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: The lesson we are taught is that we should be governed as much by our reason, and as little by our feelings as possible.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: And what is the language of reason on this subject?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: We should not be polite at the expense of prudence.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: As to those philosophical gentlemen, those citizens of the world, as they call themselves, he did not wish to see any of them in our public councils.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: The fourteen years lost, so did thirteen, so did ten.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: The Senate settled on nine years a citizen, a compromise, as it was later described, between total exclusion of adopted citizens and an indiscriminate and hasty admission of them.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the questions would not settle, and on august thirteenth it came back for a full day of debate.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Wilson and Randolph moved to drop the House's requirement from seven years back to four.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Elbridge Jerry wished eligibility could be confined to natives outright.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Foreign powers will intermedle in our affairs and spare no expense to influence them.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Persons having foreign attachments will be sent among us and insulated into our councils, in order to be made an instrument for their purposes.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone knows the vast sums laid out in Europe for secret services.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: John Dickinson gave the whole argument its method in two sentences.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Experience must be our only guide, reason may mislead us.
• 20:06
  unknown: Dr.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Franklin was not against a reasonable time, but I should be very sorry to see anything like illiberality inserted into the Constitution.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: The people of Europe were friendly with this country, even in the country which they have lately been at war.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: America had during the war and now a great many friends, not only among the people at large, but in both houses of parliament.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: And when foreigners, after looking about for some other country in which they could obtain more happiness, gave a preference to ours, it was a proof of attachment which ought to excite our confidence and affection.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: Hugh Williamson moved nine years for the house too.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: This country should acquire national habits as fast as possible, and wealthy immigrants did more harm by their luxurious examples than good by the money they brought.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Hamilton, born on a Caribbean island and sitting in the room, moved the opposite, require merely citizenship and inhabitancy, and let the voters judge the rest.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Madison seconded him and wished to maintain the character of the liberty which had been professed in all the constitutions and publications of America, and then he turned to the floor and influence fear.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: If bribery was to be practiced by foreign powers, it would not be attempted among the electors, but among the elected, and among natives having full confidence of the people, not among strangers who would be regarded with a jealous eye.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And James Wilson rose, Madison wrote down what he said.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: Mr Wilson said he rose with feelings which were perhaps particular, mentioning the circumstances of his not being a native, and the possibility, if the ideas of some gentleman should be pursued, of his being incapacitated.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: hesitated from holding a place under the very Constitution which he had shared in the trust of making.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: He remarked that liberal complexion which this motion would give the system, and the discouragement and mortification that it must feel from degrading discrimination now proposed.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Born in Scotland, immigrated to America at twenty three, the man who had moved the single executive who had drafted the Constitution's articles with his own hand in the Committee of Detail, telling the room what it was to sit inside that work and be marked by it as not quite trustworthy.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then he gave them the evidence instead of the feeling.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Pennsylvania was perhaps the youngest settlement on the Atlantic except Georgia, yet among its foremost in population and prosperity, built on immigrants.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Almost all of the general officers of the Pennsylvania line in the late army had been foreigners, and no complaints had ever been made against their fidelity or merit.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And three of Pennsylvania's own deputies to this convention Robert Morris, Thomas Fitzsimmons, and himself were not natives.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, Pierce Butler, born in Ireland, an immigrant himself, was strenuously against admitting foreigners into the public councils.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Hamilton's motion lost four states to seven, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia for it, and the rest against.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: The seven stood.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then Governor Morris, mover of the fourteen years, moved a compromise, that the seven year rule not operate retrospectively, so that no man already a citizen would be stripped of an eligibility he presently held.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: John Mercer seconded, men had become citizens under the faith of the laws and stood on a level with natives.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: John Rutledge swept it aside It might as well be said that all qualifications are disenfranchisements, and that to require the age of twenty five years was a disenfranchisement.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman went further the pledges of equal privilege had been made to foreigners by individual states.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: The national government had made no such pledges and was at liberty to discriminate.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: The proviso failed on the floor.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: The seven years applied to everyone, current citizens included, and the naturalized officers of the Pennsylvania line and that naturalized delegates at the Pennsylvania table were covered by the sentence as written.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: The executive was then considered.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: In July, John J, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, not a delegate, had written to George Washington from New York Permit me to hint whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of foreigners into the admission of our national government, and to declare expressly that the command in chief of American Army shall not be given to nor devolve on any but a natural born citizen.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: The Commander in chief walled to be native born the clause appeared in the Barley Committee's September report.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: No person except a natural born citizen shall be eligible to the office of president, alongside the thirty five years of age and fourteen years a resident.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was adopted without recorded debate.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever conversations produced it happened off the floor, and the only surviving argument for the presidency's one closed door is a hint in that letter.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention built one more fence around the men who would serve, and this one faced inward toward the government itself.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Every man in the room knew how the British Crown had governed its parliaments, not by force but by titles, offices, pensions, securities, salaries without duties, members of the commons bought one appointment at a time under the king's ministry John Mercer stated the mechanism as a maxim during the August debates governments can only be maintained by force or influence and an executive stripped of influence would be reduced to force.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Convention chose to strip the influence anyways.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the same section settled one more question.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: The Congressman's wages would be paid out of the national treasury, not by the states.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Ellsworth had moved state payment and lost because a legislature paid by his state legislature answered to his paymaster.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Article I Section six would be written against these issues No Senator or representative shall be appointed during his term to any federal office created during that term or whose pay was increased during it, and no person holding any office under the United States shall be a member of either house while he holds it.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: You may legislate or you may hold offices in the executive not both, and the Congress may not invent jobs for its own members to fill.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the same section armored the legislators themselves, privileged from arrest while attending and traveling and for any speech or debate in either house, never to be questioned in any other place.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: A Congressman could not be sued, prosecuted or hauled before a hostile court for what he had said on the floor of Congress.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: The English Parliament's hardest won liberty written whole into the Constitution Madison then warned if the President's veto reached only things called bills, the legislature could evade it by simply styling its acts as resolutions, and the next day Randolph put in the polished fix every order, resolution or vote requiring the concurrence of both houses shall be presented to the president and approved or repassed like a bill.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: The veto would follow the substance not the label of the legislation Article I Section four The states would set the times, places and manners of electing their congressmen, but the Congress could at any time make or alter such regulations itself.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: The objections came at once why should the general government reach into the state's own election laws?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Madison's answer because a state legislature that controlled the elections absolutely could simply decline to hold them, and a state could succeed from the Union by calendar without ever announcing it.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: The backstop held section five each house to judge its own electors, make its own rules, expel its own members, and keep a journal of the proceedings published from time to time accepting such parts as may in their judgment require secrecy.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: The clause was argued and adopted, and the Convention moved to the next section August seventeenth the war clause the draft gave Congress the power to make war.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: Charles Pickany thought even that was too slow.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: The legislature met but once a year, the Senate alone must be a better choice.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Pierce Butler swung the other way entirely and proposed vesting the power in the president, who will have all the requisite qualities.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody seconded the president.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Instead Madison and Jerry moved together to strike the word make and insert the word declare leaving the executive the power to repel sudden attacks.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: The distinction did the summer's work in two words the president, commander of the army, could defend the country the hour it was struck, no waiting for a Congress three weeks right away.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: But the decision to begin a war, to take the nation at peace and to put it at war belonged to the legislature alone, the branch that represented the men who would fight for it and pay for it.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Sherman put the rule in a sentence The executive should be able to repel and not to commence a war.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Rufus King added the lawyer's point that settled the wording to make war might be read as to conduct it, and conducting war was the executive's function.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: Declaring it was not George Mason drew the principle whole he was against giving the power of war to the executive because it would not safely be trusted with it.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was for clogging rather than facilitating war, but for facilitating peace and Oliver Ellsworth had to put the same asymmetry as a rule of design.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: There was a material difference between making war and making peace.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: It should be more easy to get out of war than to in it.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the Constitution was built lopsided on purpose.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: War requires the whole Congress peace, a treaty requires the President and the Senate.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: The doors into war were made heavy and the doors out lighter the motion carried.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: The next day the room turned to the army itself.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: A standing army in peacetime was the instrument every tyrant in history had reached for and Elbridge Jerry wanted the Constitution to cap it.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: No more than two or three thousand men under arms in peace.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: The motion failed no fixed number could foresee the country's dangers but the fear it spoke was answered in the appropriations clause instead no appropriation of money for the army's support shall be longer in term than two years.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: The army could exist, but it could never own itself.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Every two years its funding died and a fresh House of representatives, fresh from the people had to choose to raise the money for it again.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: A perpetual army was made constitutionally impossible without a perpetual series of consents.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: The militia followed the state's own sword, the fight over who directed it.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: George Mason wanted the regulation national thirteen states will never concur in any one system if the disciplining of the militia be left in their hands.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: The Congress would organize, arm and discipline the militia and govern it when called into federal service.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: The states would keep their appointment of its officers and the authority of training one sword, two hands on the grip.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of the list filled in around the great powers mostly without debate, a uniform rule of naturalization, uniform bankruptcy laws, the fixing of weights and measures, the punishment of counterfeiting and piracies, post offices and post roads, a federal district not exceeding ten miles square for a seat of government owned by no state, a clause with a memory attached in June of 1783 some four hundred unpaid continental soldiers had marched on the state house in Philadelphia, penned the Congress inside for a day, and the Congress had asked Pennsylvania for protection and been refused.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: It moved to Princeton and after that to Annapolis and then Trenton and then New York City.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: The government of the United States had been chased out of this very building by its own army and no state had lifted a hand.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: The new one would own the ground it sat on.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: The committee's list also received back everything the members thought it had missed.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: On august eighteenth, Madison and Pickany each handed in a written menu of additional powers for referral, to grant charters of incorporation, to establish a university, to encourage the advancement of useful knowledge, to regulate stages of the post roads, to secure copyrights, to dispose of the Western territory, a whole range of what an American government might someday be asked to do laid on the committee's table for sorting.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: And on august twentieth, Charles Picany submitted a different kind of list thirteen miscellaneous clauses referred to the committee without a word of debate, among them the writ of habeas corpus secured in the most expeditious and ample manner.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: No soldier quartered in any house in time of peace without consent of the owner, the military always subordinate to civil power, no religious test annexed in any oath of office, and seven new words for the draft The liberty of the press shall be inviolately preserved.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: The same day, Governor Morris and Pickney sent the committee a plan for a council of state, five department secretaries around the president, the cabinet drawn on paper.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: The committee sorted the pile as committees do, the habeas corpus clause back into the draft, the religious tests surface at the end of August, the rest, the press, the quartering, the subordination of the military, the council, stated in the committee's papers, and the printed constitution the members were voting through said nothing about any of it.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: And through the second half of August the Convention built Section nine, the wall of things the new Congress could never do.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: The privilege of writ of habeas corpus, the ancient demand that a jailer produce the prisoner before a judge shall not be suspended, unless, when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: No bill of attainer, no legislature ever again declaring a named man guilty by statute.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: The men voting it had a recent American example in front of them, not an English one.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: In 1778, the Virginia Assembly had passed an act of attainder against a man named Josiah Phillips, an outlaw leading an armed band in Norfolk County, an act drafted by Thomas Jefferson passed by Edmund Randolph, who at the time was the state's attorney general.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Phillips was in the end taken and tried in the ordinary courts which is part of what the story the arguments afterwards tend to leave out.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: The act had existed all the same.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: And no ex post facto law, no statute reaching back to punish what was lawful when it was done, moved into the text by Mr Jerry and Dr.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: McHenry together.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: No tax or duty on articles exported from any state, the committee's own insertion, the first installment of a sectional price still being argued.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States, and no officer of the government shall accept any present, annulment office or title of any kind whatever from a king, prince or foreign state without the consent of Congress.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the lock on the treasury itself no money shall be drawn but in consequences of appropriations made by law.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: No dukes, no secret spending, no named traitor statues, no suspension of judges' doors except in rebellion or invasion, the men writing the list had lived every item on it, under another government and were writing that government out of the Constitution.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: At last, on august thirtieth, near the end of the long grind through the articles, the Convention reached the oaths.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: The draft required every federal and state officer to be bound by oath to support the Constitution.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Charles Pickany moved to add eleven words No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Roger Sherman thought the clause unnecessary, the prevailing liberty being sufficient security against such tests.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was adopted all the same without a state opposing What those eleven words declined was on the books of the states that same year.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: Delaro required every officeholder to subscribe a declaration I do profess faith in the God the Father and in Jesus Christ his only Son, and in the Holy Ghost one God blessed forevermore, and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: Pennsylvania's legislatures declared a belief in God, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked and acknowledged the scriptures as divinely inspired, a test written by a state convention in seventeen seventy six over which doctor Franklin himself had presided.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: North Carolina barred from every office any person who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion and barred every clergyman of any denomination from the legislature besides.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Maryland required a declaration of belief in the Christian religion.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: In all, nine of the state constitutions carried a religious test, seven of them confining the office to Protestants alone, and only Virginia and New York required nothing.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Against that new federal government would require an oath to the Constitution and nothing else.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: No confession, no communion, no creed.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: The states kept their tests for their own officers.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: The United States never would have one.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: In May, Virginia had proposed a Congress that could legislate wherever the separate states were incompetent, one sentence holding everything.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: By the end of August the sentence was gone and in its place stood a list every power on it granted and everything off it withheld thank you for listening to this episode of American political history.
• 39:17
  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.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you again and until next time