Lion of Liberty (31 page)

Washington accused Lee and other opponents of the Constitution of using “every art that could inflame the passions or touch the interests of men” to defeat ratification. “The ignorant are told that should the proposed government obtain, their lands would be taken from them and their property disposed of, and all ranks are informed that the prohibition of the navigation of the Mississippi (their favorite subject) will be a certain consequence of the adoption of the Constitution.”
¹¹

In Paris, meanwhile, Jefferson joined the debate, taking a middle road: “Were I in America,” he wrote to John Adams, “I would advocate it warmly till nine [states] should have adopted it and then as warmly take the other side to convince the other four that they ought not to come into it till the declaration of rights is annexed to it.”
¹²
In a subsequent letter to Washington, Jefferson was more specific, saying,

A month after refusing to sign the Constitution, Governor Randolph published a letter in the form of a pamphlet addressed to the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates giving his reasons: the lack of presidential term limits, the lack of restrictions on judicial powers, and the failure to draw “a line between the powers of Congress and individual states . . . so as to leave no clash of jurisdiction or dangerous disputes . . . ”
¹⁴

With the publication of his pamphlet, Randolph joined Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and the Antifederalists, who favored retention of a confederation made up of relatively small, independent republics, tied to each other only in the maintenance of a common defense. Hard off their experience with British rule, the majority of ordinary Americans harbored Antifederalist fears that a powerful national government would strip them of individual liberties. Arrayed against them however, were the enormously wealthy and influential Federalists, led by the redoubtable “Father of Our Country,” George Washington. Although Washington made a show of remaining aloof from the political fray, he made his views known through James Madison and other champions of a strong national government. Only such a government, they argued, could pay the nation's debts and end the farmer tax riots raging across the nation. As Washington put it, “There is no alternative between the adoption of it [the Constitution] and anarchy. ...”
¹⁵

When Henry returned to the Virginia Assembly, he moved to block the call to a ratification convention. “No man is more federal than I,” he protested, hoping to seduce pro-constitution delegates into joining his camp. Like George Mason, he opposed calling a ratification convention until amendments were added to the document to guarantee individual and
states' rights. He warned that a ratification convention, as proposed, would have no power to amend—only to accept or reject—unless the Assembly gave it the power of proposing amendments. Mason seconded Henry's proposal, but the Assembly voted them down. As in other states, voting restrictions based on property ownership prevented Virginia's Antifederalists from converting their popular majority into a majority of Assembly delegates. Although Henry failed to block the call to convention, he had enough allies in the Assembly to delay elections to the convention until March and the actual convention until June 2, by which time, he hoped, other states might well have rejected the Constitution and rendered Virginia's ratification vote moot.

“The refusal of our governor and Colonel Mason to subscribe to the proceedings of the convention,” Washington warned, “will have a bad effect in this state.” Accusing them of “alarming” voters, he said that “some things are . . . addressed to the fears of the people and will no doubt have their effect.”
¹⁶
Madison wrote to Jefferson in Paris and accused Henry of seeking “a partition of the Union into several confederacies.” He said he feared that Henry would convince the Virginia ratification convention to vote against ratification and for a second constitutional convention to limit the new government's powers.

In fact, the objections of Lee, Mason and Henry were already having their effects far beyond Virginia. “Beware! Beware!” warned the
Massachusetts Centinel
. “You are forging chains for yourself and your children—your liberties are at stake.”
¹⁷
Philadelphia's
Independent Gazetteer
predicted that the Constitution would create “a permanent ARISTOCRACY,”
¹⁸
while the
Freeman's Journal
, another Philadelphia newspaper, warned of congressional powers “to lay and collect taxes.”
¹⁹

The Antifederalist campaign gradually swayed public opinion against ratification of the Constitution, but Federalists controlled most state legislatures, and, one by one, they called ratification conventions. By February 6, 1788, conventions in six states had ratified the Constitution: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The three smallest states—Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut—had favored ratification because of the military protection offered by a continental army. Sparsely settled Georgia—beset by Indian raids from Spanish-held
Florida—also needed help from a strong federal force. In Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, powerful trading interests in Philadelphia and Boston had controlled the majorities of convention delegates—despite popular opposition to the Constitution in both states. To eke out their victory, Massachusetts Federalists pledged to “recommend” a bill of rights to the First Congress, while Pennsylvania Federalists simply stole their victory. Benjamin Franklin, of all people, ignored all principles of self-government by leading the delegation out of the Constitutional Convention and marching into the Pennsylvania Assembly hall in the same building. Interrupting the Assembly's proceedings, he all but promised that Philadelphia would be the new federal capital if Pennsylvania was first to ratify the Constitution. He urged state legislators to call a state ratification convention immediately, without debate. Like other major property owners in the city—along with merchants and business owners—Franklin stood to reap enormous profits if the new government established the capital in Philadelphia.

Angry backcountry Antifederalists, however, refused to appear in the Assembly and left it two members short of a quorum. Speaker Thomas Mifflin, the wealthy Philadelphia merchant, ordered a sergeant at arms and a clerk to find at least two absent members and order them to the hall. A mob of Federalists followed the two to the boarding house where many Antifederalists lodged and physically dragged two assemblymen back to their seats in the State House, where, despite their shouts of protest, sentries physically restrained them while Federalists voted to hold the ratification convention on November 20. In the days and weeks that followed, Antifederalists in the backcountry protested the Assembly's actions, attacking Federalists and burning effigies of Federalist leaders and copies of the Constitution.

“The whole county is alive with wrath,” a reporter wrote from Cumberland County to Philadelphia's
Independent Gazetteer
, “and it is spreading from one county to another so rapidly that it is impossible to say where it will end or how far it will reach.”
²⁰

French chargé d'affaires Louis-Guillaume Otto was appalled, writing to his foreign minister in Versailles that

Henry was equally appalled, saying that Pennsylvania had been “tricked” into ratifying the Constitution. “Only ten thousand were represented in Pennsylvania,” he charged, “although seventy thousand had a right to be represented.”
²²

Ironically, the Pennsylvania ratification convention did not meet until November 20, and, while it was still debating two and a half weeks later, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution—on December 7, 1787.

Although elections to the Virginia ratification convention were not to be held until April, Henry began campaigning in February. By April he had written to leaders in Kentucky and other parts of western Virginia and spoken to crowds outside every courthouse he visited on his legal rounds. “Mr. Henry is supposed to aim at disunion,” Madison wrote to Jefferson. “Colonel Mason is growing every day more bitter, and outrageous in his effort to carry his point, and will probably in the end be thrown by the violence of his passions into the politics of Mr. Henry. . . . I think the Constitution and the Union will both be endangered.”
²³

A few weeks later, Jefferson received a letter from his friend Edward Carrington: “Mr. H. does not openly declare for a dismemberment of the Union, but his arguments in support of his opposition to the Constitution go directly to that issue. He says that three confederacies would be practicable and better suited to the good of commerce than one.”
²⁴

By the time Virginians elected delegates to their state ratification convention, Maryland had ratified, and with the Federalist-dominated convention in South Carolina preparing to ratify in May, only one more state—either Virginia, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, or Rhode Island—
would have to ratify to implement the new government. Rhode Island, however, had refused even to consider the Constitution. Convinced that the state's minuscule proportions would leave it impotent in the new union, its legislature refused to call a convention, and the people confirmed their legislature's decision in a popular referendum in March 1788. Although New Hampshire's legislature had called a ratification convention in February, the convention was so divided about ratification that it adjourned without a decision and agreed to reconvene in June. North Carolina's ratification convention would not meet until July, leaving Virginia, New Hampshire, and New York as the only candidates to become the ninth and definitive member of the new nation.

New York's Governor George Clinton, however, seemed prepared to secede rather than allow his state to ratify the Constitution and cede its sovereignty to a national government. He believed he would find an ally in Patrick Henry. A commander of the New York militia during the Revolution, Clinton won Washington's friendship by sending supplies to Valley Forge and inviting him to participate in a successful land investment in upstate New York. Indeed, Clinton rode in his full brigadier general's regalia alongside Washington to take command of New York City on “Evacuation Day,” when the British quit the city after Britain recognized U.S. independence. Elected governor
and
lieutenant governor, he won the unfailing support of state farmers by reducing property taxes. He added to that support by transferring the state capital from New York City to Poughkeepsie for half the year—to make it easier for farmers to influence legislative and judicial matters. Eighty-five miles up the Hudson River north of New York, the little rural town lay in the heart of the richest agricultural area of the Northeast, stretching from the Berkshire hills on the Massachusetts border, westward to the Pennsylvania border on the Delaware River. A farmer himself, Clinton lived just across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie and, like Patrick Henry, he espoused individual liberty—including the liberty to own eight slaves to harvest his wealth.

When the British left New York, the state began earning as much as $250,000 a year (about $5 million in today's dollars) from port duties—about half the state's annual income and enough to keep property taxes low enough to ensure Clinton's reelection every year. Embraced by farmers and
other property owners, Clinton had more power in his state than any other governor in America. The state constitution vested him with “supreme executive power and authority,” including the powers of former royal governors to call the legislature into special session or to prorogue it for as long as sixty days. It gave him the longest term in office—three years—and set no limit on the number of consecutive terms he could remain in his chair. Far more powerful in New York than Henry was in Virginia, Clinton dispensed hundreds of jobs and local judgeships across the farm belt and built America's first great political machine. He became America's wealthiest governor after seizing his share of about $4 million in confiscated Tory properties. Faced with a federal constitution that would cost the state control of international trade and the flow of import duties into the state treasury, Clinton joined Antifederalists as a bitter foe of ratification.