Citizen or subject?

by Francis X. Hennessy

At Philadelphia, in 1787, they did know it. They had no doubt whatever about it. We shall see that quickly in our brief review of the record they made at Philadelphia in ascertaining and deciding, as a legal necessity, to whom their First Article and its enumerated grants of national power must be sent and, when we boast of how quickly we knew the answer, we should admit that we did not know it until after we had lived again with them through their experience of the preceding ten or twelve years which had educated them, as it has just educated us, to that knowledge. Furthermore, many of us average Americans will be unable to explain, until later herein, why, during the last five years, our own leaders have not known the right answer. The Statute of ’76 has not been wholly unknown to them. The record of the Philadelphia Convention and the ratifying conventions has not been entirely a closed book to them. The important and authentic statements of Webster and other leaders of past generations have been read by many of them. If they did not understand and know the correct answer, as we now realize they have not known, let us not withhold from the Americans at Philadelphia our just tribute of gratitude that they did accurately know, when it was amazingly important to us that they should know.

When those Americans came to answer that question, there were facts which might have misled them as other similar facts of lesser importance have undoubtedly misled our leaders.

In 1776, from that same Philadelphia had gone a suggestion that a constitution of government, with Articles granting power to government, be made in each former colony. In 1787, there had gone from that same Philadelphia a proposal that a constitution of a general government for America be made, with Articles granting power to that government. The proposal of 1776 had suggested that the proposed Articles be made by the people themselves, assembled in conventions. The proposal of 1777 had suggested that the proposed Articles be made by the legislative governments of the states. Both proposals, even as to the makers of the respective Articles, had been acted upon. All the Articles, although some had been made by the people themselves and others by legislatures, had been generally recognized as valid law. Some of the men at Philadelphia in 1787 had been members of the proposing Second Continental Congress, when the respective proposals of 1776 and 1777 had gone from Philadelphia. When, in 1787, they were called upon to find and state, as their legal decision, the correct answer to their important question, it was necessary for them to ascertain, as between state “legislatures” and the people themselves, in “conventions,” which could validly make the Articles which had been worded and were about to be proposed. It would not, therefore, have been beyond the pale of our own experience if the earlier proposals had misled them and they had made the wrong answer to the question which confronted them. Furthermore, as we have already noted, although we can little realize the influence of such a fact upon men seeking the correct legal answer to an important question, their whole proposal was a new adventure for men on an uncharted sea of self-government. Under all of which circumstances, let us again pay them their deserved tribute that they went unerringly to the only correct answer.

We know that the essence of that answer is expressed in the Seventh Article proposed from Philadelphia. Only one answer was possible to Americans of that generation. They had been “subjects” and had become “citizens.” They knew the vital distinctions between the two relations to government.

The Convention which framed the Constitution was, indeed, elected by the state legislatures. But the instrument, when it came from their hands, was a mere proposal, without obligation, or pretensions to it. It was reported to the then existing Congress of the United States, with the request that it might “be submitted to a convention of delegates, chosen in each state by the people thereof, under the recommendation of its legislature, for their assent and ratification.” This mode of proceeding was adopted; and by the Convention, by Congress, and by the state legislatures, the instrument was submitted to the people. They acted upon it in the only manner in which they can act safely, effectively, and wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in convention. It is true, they assembled in their several states; and where else should they have assembled? No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the states, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they [the American people] act, they act in their states. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the state governments. From these conventions the Constitution [the First Article grants of power to interfere with individual freedom] derives its whole authority. The government proceeds directly from the people; is “ordained and established” in the name of the people.... It required not the affirmance, and could not be negatived, by the state governments.... To the formation of a league, such as was the Confederation, the state sovereignties were certainly competent.

But, when a general government of America was to be given any national power to interfere with the individual freedom of its citizens, as in the First Article of 1787 and in the Eighteenth Amendment of 1917,

acting directly on the people, the necessity of referring it to the people, and of deriving its powers directly from them, was felt and acknowledged by all. The government of the Union, then, (whatever may be the influence of this fact on the case,) is, emphatically, and truly, a government of the people. In form and in substance it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit. (Marshall in the Supreme Court, M’Culloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316.)

Marshall was one of the Americans who had been at Valley Forge in 1778, and at other places whose sacrifices made it the basic law of America that all power over American citizens must be derived by direct grant from themselves. Later, he was prominent in the Virginia convention where all Americans in Virginia knew and acted upon this basic law. These facts qualified him to testify, from the Bench of the Supreme Court, that all Americans then knew and acknowledged the binding command of that basic law.

Under such circumstances, it was impossible that the Americans at Philadelphia should not have known and obeyed that law in the drafting of their proposed Seventh and Fifth Articles. Both of these Articles, the Seventh wholly, and the Fifth partly, deal with the then future grant of national power over the people and its only legal gift by direct grant from the people themselves, assembled in their “conventions.” Both Articles name the people of America, by the one word “conventions.”

That Philadelphia should not have strayed from the legal road clearly marked by the Statute of ’76 was certain when we recall how large a part Madison played at Philadelphia, and particularly how he personally worded and introduced, in the closing hours at Philadelphia, what we know as its Fifth Article. As to his personal knowledge of this basic law, we recall his letter of April, 1787, where he said, “To give the new system its proper energy, it will be desirable to have it ratified by the authority of the people, and not merely by that of the legislatures.” And we recall his later words, when urging Americans to adopt the Constitution with its Fifth and Seventh Articles, he said of the Seventh, “This Article speaks for itself. The express authority of the people alone could give due validity to the Constitution,” to its grants of power over the people in its First Article. (Fed. No. 43.)