American Experiment (6 page)

Liberty, indeed, was more than a cause or a symbol; it was a possession and a passion. Sober men referred to the “sweets of liberty”; it was a treasure, a “precious jewel.” No wonder Alexander Hamilton spoke darkly of the “rage for liberty.” If liberty had an uncertain future in America, it

had emerged from a glorious past in England. Once upon a time, it was
thought, liberty had flourished among the Saxons, a simple and virtuous people, only to be assaulted by the barbaric Norman invaders. Liberty had flowered and wilted in other countries, as in Denmark and Italy. It was almost crushed out in England. So liberty was not only precious but pure, virginal, vulnerable. It must be rescued in the New World from its chains in the Old.

Liberty was many-sided. The ideal of liberty of conscience—the most sacred, the most unalienable liberty of all—had been fired and burnished in the crucibles of colonial experience. Many Americans had fled religious oppression in Europe only to find religious establishments somehow surviving in the New World. They were usually mild compared to the British, perhaps, but even in America clerics seemed to plot against a man’s liberty. In one New England town the Baptists, claiming to be the first settlers, balked at paying taxes to support the established Congregationalist church. The Congs, as the disrespectful called them, had then rallied at the town meeting, outvoted the Baptists, and confiscated their property, on the ground that the Baptists were raging schismatics, their church “a sink” for the “filth of Christianity.”

Victories for religious tolerance were all the sweeter for this. During the First Continental Congress in 1774 John Adams and other Massachusetts delegates were invited to Carpenters’ Hall to do “a little business.” On being seated, they discovered facing them across a long table some solemn Baptists flanked by Quakers who looked even more somber under their broad-brimmed beavers. John Adams found himself trying to explain how the Massachusetts men squared their establishment of religion with their paeans to liberty. The grandest victory of all came a month before the Declaration of Independence, when Virginia passed a Declaration of Rights calling for “free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience.”

An equally vital liberty was freedom of the press. Despite the vaunted liberations in the New World, free and unlicensed newspapers hardly existed for the first hundred years after Plymouth. The first free newspaper, appearing in Boston in 1690, was promptly suppressed. Newspaper editors fought for their rights against colonial governors; in 1735 John Peter Zenger was jailed on a charge of criminal libel, for his attacks on the colonial government, only to win his freedom after a brilliant defense. At the age of sixteen Benjamin Franklin was claiming in the
New-England Courant,
the editor of which—Ben’s brother James—was already in jail, that there was “no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another.” It should suffer no other check. Whoever would
overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing free speech and the free press.

Liberty had to be grounded, according to practical Americans like Franklin, in something real and dependable, namely the right to hold property. Not only was “property surely a right of mankind as really as liberty,” in John Adams’ words; each buttressed the other. Property—especially his house and land and tools—was something a man could fall back on, if liberty was threatened; it was the threat of loss of property through foreclosures, leaving them as less than free men, that had so enflamed the Massachusetts Regulators. Yet the close marriage of liberty and property seemed, in the eyes of some sharp observers, to embrace a potential evil, or at least a strain. Could property become the enemy of liberty? Must society, “to secure the first of blessings,
liberty,
“strangle wealth, the first offspring of liberty, to safeguard liberty itself? A member of the Continental Congress summed up the “sad dilemma in politics”: if the people forbade wealth, it would be through regulations “intrenching too far upon civil
liberty.
” But if wealth was allowed to accumulate, “the syren
luxury
” would follow on its heels and contaminate the whole society.

The ugliest form of property in America in the 1780s was slavery. Nothing posed so sharply the issue of the nature of liberty, of the relationship of liberty and property, of the linkage and tension between liberty and equality, as the 700,000 Negroes in the seaboard South, 96 percent of whom were slaves, or the 50,000 in New England, over a fifth of whom were slaves. And nothing was more embarrassing for Americans who boasted of their liberties and compared them to the tyranny of benighted Europe.

“How is it,” Samuel Johnson growled, “that we hear the loudest
yelps
for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Preachers, editors, and a few politicians, especially in the northern states, made the same charge of hypocrisy. By the mid-seventies, slavery was under attack in some northern areas as a cruel and un-Christian institution, but only Pennsylvania achieved an act of gradual abolition. Despite all the oratory, the other states could not act, or would not. The institution of slavery survived, essentially intact, both the Revolution and the Articles of Confederation.

Still, American whites somehow were able collectively to love liberty, recognize the evils of slavery, and tolerate slavery, all at the same time. The spreading stain of bondage did not blot out the American self-image of a chosen people engaged in a grand experiment. In the seventeenth century the colonists had carried the “spirit of Liberty” from England, where it had been perverted and corrupted, to the wilderness, where it had taken root
and flowered. “To our own country,” Americans were told, “must we look for the biggest part of that liberty and freedom that yet remains, or is to be expected, among mankind.” This self-image battened on enlightened Europe’s view of a people, “in the vigour of youth,” as Richard Price put it, “inspired by the noblest of all passions, the passion for being free.” This people, virile and virtuous if a bit rustic and bumptious, basked in its sense of a special mission. “The Eyes of Europe, nay of the World,” proclaimed South Carolina’s President John Rutledge, “are on America.”

Such was the sustaining, the elevating, the euphoric self-image of most Americans during the Revolution and for a few years after. Then came a time of disillusionment and, by 1787, a pervasive feeling that the new nation had fallen into “evils and calamities” that were precipitating a profound crisis.

On the face of it, the crisis was simply the Confederation’s seeming ineffectiveness and near-paralysis. Even in their private correspondence men like Washington, Hamilton, and Madison spoke in the most urgent terms of the lack of a strong central government. The “mortal diseases of the existing constitution,” Madison wrote Jefferson in March 1787, “… are at present marked by symptoms which are truly alarming, which have tainted the faith of the most orthodox republicans, and which challenge from the votaries of liberty every concession in favor of stable Government not infringing fundamental principles.” By this time, Gordon Wood found, most reformers were seeking some change in the structure of the central government as the best, and perhaps the only, solution to the nation’s problems. Anti-Federalists of the day—and some historians since—contended that the failures of the Confederation were grossly exaggerated and its successes, such as the return of some prosperity, minimized. But few Americans perceived these achievements, and if they did, the successes led to heightened expectations that were soon to be crushed in the oil of early 1787.

A far more profound crisis—a crisis of mind and morality—lay behind the failure of institutions, centering in the palpable need for liberty and the increasing doubts and confusion over it. Five years after the Revolution Americans were discovering that it was not enough to apotheosize liberty; it was increasingly necessary to define it, and to see its linkages with other values. What kind of liberty? Whose liberty? Protected by whom, and against whom? Above all, how did liberty relate to other great aims? Some Americans felt that the pursuit of liberty ultimately would safeguard other values, such as order and equality; others saw order and authority as prior goals in protecting liberty.

The crisis of liberty was often seen too as a crisis of property. Thus John
Quincy Adams, who was by no means a young fogy, devoted his Harvard graduation speech of 1787 to a dramatic portrait of a nation in which the “violent gust of rebellion” had hardly passed and the people were groaning under the burden of “accumulated evils” such as luxury and dissipation, but where the root problem appeared to be a decline in the punctual observance of contracts and in that public credit upon which historically “the fabric of national grandeur has been erected.”

By the mid-1780s both sides were disillusioned. The pursuers of liberty feared that the nabobs were conspiring to restrict their freedom, perhaps in that ominous constitutional convention to be held in Philadelphia; in any event, the achievement of liberty had not brought them more prosperity or security or equality. Those who hungered for order and stability were in even greater despair. The capture of the Rhode Island legislature by cheap-money men, unrest in other states, the fear of violence at the hands of Indians and even slaves, the inability of government to maintain order, and above all the shocking rebellion in Massachusetts—all these were warnings that liberty was safe neither under the state governments nor under the Confederation. Glumly they recalled the apparent lessons of history: that republics had disintegrated as they descended the fateful road marked by steps leading from
LIBERTY
to
DISORDER
to
ANARCHY
to
POPULAR DESPOTISM
and finally to
TYRANNY.

Historians are wary of the notion that, at a critical point in history, a heroic figure, galloping to the rescue, snatches victory from the jaws of defeat and changes the destiny of a nation. In real life the hero’s horse loses a shoe and he fails to arrive; or if he does arrive, it is at the wrong place at the wrong time, and it makes no difference anyway. Historians are especially skeptical of the decisive role of intellectual heroes. The intellectual may not be able to find his horse in the first place, or may have neglected to have it shod; in any event, intellectuals are part of a long, complex, and tumultuous stream of innovation, conflicts, and borrowings of ideas, a process in which individual influence is usually hard to identify. Yet if any American may be included in that small company that plays a critical role at a pivotal point in history, it was James Madison, who almost literally did gallop across the New Jersey flatlands in 1787 to take the lead in confronting and resolving, for a time at least, the dilemma of “liberty versus order.”

Madison’s leadership would have been impossible without magnificent collegiality from brilliant thinkers and actors, impossible without magnificent “followership” from the people who would one day vote to accept or
reject the new constitution. The generation of Americans coming into leadership in the late 1780s had gone through a series of laboratory exercises of unmatched diversity. Collectively they had experimented with British rule in its many forms, with a variety of state constitutions, with revolutionary regimes during the War of Independence. They had tried weak executives and strong, governors appointed by the Crown, by the legislatures, by the “better people” in councils or upper chambers, by “all the people,” by various combinations thereof. They had tried bicameral legislatures and unicameral; legislatures elected in a variety of ways, under a variety of suffrage arrangements, holding a variety of legislative, executive, and even judicial powers. They had experimented with conventions that sprang directly from the people and bypassed legislatures.

These men, self-conscious and thoughtful experimenters, had not merely observed the laboratory exercises; they had conducted them, suffered from them, learned from them. Madison himself had helped draft the Virginia Constitution of 1776; served in the Continental Congress for three years and in the Virginia House of Delegates for two; and attended the Annapolis Convention. By 1787 he was back in Congress, now convened in New York. Many of his colleagues could boast of even broader experience, including service in executive and military establishments.

Learning illuminated experience. Rarely has a generation of activists been so thoroughly schooled in classical political thought as that of Madison and Adams. For them the works of the Greeks and Romans constituted neither dead languages nor dead learning. Many read Montesquieu in his own language. They liked to cite the great English thinkers—Hobbes and Locke and Hume—against English rule itself. Polemicists clinched their arguments by citing chapter and verse. The result of the ferment was an outpouring of broadsides, sermons, addresses, and above all pamphlets. “Almost every American pen” was at work, it was noted. Even “peasants and their housewives in every part of the land” had begun “to dispute on politics and positively to determine upon our liberties.” To a degree perhaps hardly matched in Western history, Americans of the 1780s
thought
their way through a thicket of political problems—and then acted.

Others matched Madison in their grasp of these problems, but no one equaled him in preparations for the convention in Philadelphia. A man of both action and thought, he had busied himself in New York City during the spring helping to win congressional authorization of a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation, then organizing a caucus of fellow Virginians and sorting out his own thoughts. To Jefferson in Paris he wrote a long analysis of the need for reform, resorting to their private code when he touched on controversial matters. Madison kept George Washington
closely informed of events; he was pleased to have the general’s endorsement of the need for “thorough reform of the present system,” and even more pleased to learn that Washington, after much wavering, had decided to attend the convention. Sensing that Governor Edmund Randolph was too busy with state affairs to bone up on national constitution-making, Madison carefully coached him on tactics and substance, and urged him to get to Philadelphia early so that the Virginians could help prepare some “materials” for the other delegates, even if it meant that Mrs. Randolph, who was pregnant, could not accompany her husband.