Coerce the States! [he cried]. Never was a madder project devised! Do you imagine that the result of the failure of one State to comply would be confined to that State alone? Are you so willing to hazard a civil war? Consider the refusal of Massachusetts, the attempt at compulsion by Congress. What a series of pictures does this conjure up? A powerful State procuring immediate assistance from other States, particularly from some delinquent! A complying State at war with a non-complying State! Congress marching the troops of one State into the bosom of another! This State collecting auxiliaries and forming perhaps a majority against its Federal head! And can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself?—a government that can exist only by the sword? And what sort of a State would it be which would suffer itself to be used as the instrument of coercing another? … A Federal standing army, then, must enforce the requisitions or the Federal treasury will be left without supplies, and the government without support…. There is but one cure for such an evil—to enable the national laws to operate on individuals like the laws of the States. To take the old Confederation as the basis of a new system, and to trust the sword and the purse to a single assembly organized upon principles so defective, giving it the full powers of taxation and the national forces, would result in what—Despotism! To avoid the very issue which appears to be held in such abject terror, a totally different government from anything into which the old Confederation can be twisted, or fitted out with wings and gables, must be established with proper powers and proper checks and balances.
His words created a palpable uneasiness. The outburst was the more effective for following and preceding close passionless and pointed reasoning, a trenchant review of other republics ancient and modern, and an elaborate argument in favour of the representation prescribed by the new Constitution.
Hamilton was not only the most brilliant, resourceful, and unanswerable orator of his time, but he was gifted with an almost diabolical power over the emotions of men, which he did not hesitate to use. At this momentous assembly he kept them in exercise; when he chose, he made his audience weep; and the Clintonians weakened daily. Had not many years of trouble and anxiety made their emotions peculiarly susceptible, Hamilton would have attempted their agitation more sparingly; and had he been theatrical and rhetorical in his methods, he would have lost his control of them long before the end of the session. But he rarely indulged in a trope or a flight, never in bathos nor in bursts of ill-balanced appeal. Nothing ever was drier than the subjects he elucidated day after day for three weeks: for he took the Constitution to pieces bit by bit, and compelled them to listen to an analysis which, if propounded by another, would have bored them to distraction, vitally interested as they were. But he not only so illuminated the cold pages of the Constitution that while they listened they were willing to swear it was more beautiful than the Bible, but the torrent of his eloquence, never confusing, so sharp was every feature of the Constitution to his own mind, the magic of his personality, and his intense humanity in treating the driest sections of the document, so bewitched his audience that, even when he talked for six hours without pausing on the subject of taxation, perhaps the baldest topic which the human understanding is obliged to consider, there was not a sign of impatience in the ranks of the enemy.
He by no means harrowed them daily; he was far too astute for that. There were days together when he merely charmed them, and they sat with a warm unconscious smile while he demolished bit by bit one of Melancthon Smith's clever arguments, in a manner so courteous that even his victim could only shrug his shoulders, although he cursed him roundly afterward. Then, when his audience least expected an assault, he would treat them to a burst of scorn that made them hitch their chairs and glance uneasily at each other, or to a picture of future misery which reduced them to pulp.
Clinton was infuriated. Even he often leaned forward, forgetting his own selfish ambitions when Hamilton's thrilling voice poured forth a rapid appeal to the passions of his hearers; but he quickly resumed the perpendicular, and set his lips to imprison a scarlet comment. He saw that his men were weakening, and as much to the luminous expounding of the Constitution, to the logic of the orator, as to a truly satanic eloquence and charm. He held long private sessions at his mansion on the turnpike, where he was assisted by much material argument. But even Melancthon Smith, who distinguished himself in almost daily debate, acknowledged more than once that Hamilton had convinced him; and others asserted, with depression, that their minds, which they had supposed to be their own,—or Clinton's,—seemed to be in a process of remaking.
After all, for the most part, they were sincere and earnest; and although it is difficult for us of the present day to comprehend that enlightened men ever could have been so mad as to believe that the country would prosper without union, that a mere State should have been thought to be of greater importance than a Nation, or that a democratic constitution, which permits us to coddle anarchists in our midst, and the lower orders to menace the liberties of the upper, was ever an object of terror to men of bitter republican ideals, yet the historic facts confront us, and we wonder, when reading the astonishing arguments of that long and hard-fought contest, if Hamilton's constitution, had it passed the Great Convention, would not have ratified with a no more determined opposition.
Melancthon Smith was one of the brightest and most conspicuous men of his time, but his name is forgotten to-day. He was sincere; he was, in his way, patriotic; he was a clever and eloquent orator. Moreover, he was generous and manly enough to admit himself beaten, as the sequel will show. To insure greatness, must the gift of long foreknowledge be added to brilliant parts and an honest character? If this be the essential, no wonder Melancthon Smith is forgotten. We have him asserting that in a country where a portion of the people live more than twelve hundred miles from the centre, one body cannot legislate for the whole. He apprehends the abolition of the State constitutions by a species of under-mining, predicts their immediate dwindling into insignificance before the comprehensive and dangerous power vested in Congress. He believes that all rich men are vicious and intemperate, and sees nothing but despotism and disaster in the Federal Constitution.
But, like most of the speakers of that day, he was trenchant and unadorned, so that his speeches are as easy reading as they must have been agreeable to hear. It is a curious fact that the best speakers of to-day resemble our forefathers in this respect of trenchant simplicity. Mediocrity for half a century has ranted on the stump, and given foreigners a false impression of American oratory. Those who indulge in what may be called the open-air metaphor, so intoxicating is our climate, may find consolation in this flight of Mr. Gilbert Livingston, who had not their excuse; for the Court-house of Poughkeepsie was hot and crowded. He is declaiming against the senatorial aristocrats lurking in the proposed Constitution. "What," he cries, "what will be their situation in a Federal town? Hallowed ground! Nothing so unclean as State laws to enter there, surrounded as they will be by an impenetrable wall of adamant and gold, the wealth of the whole country flowing into it!" "What? What WALL?" cried a Federal. "A wall of gold, of adamant, which will flow in from all parts of the continent." The joyous roar of our ancestors comes down to us.
Hamilton's speech, in which he as effectually disposed of every argument against the Senate as Roger Sherman had done in the Great Convention, is too long to be quoted; but it is as well to give the precise words in which he defines the vital difference between republics and democracies.
It has been observed by an honourable gentleman [he said] that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity. When they assembled, the field of debate presented an ungovernable mob, not only incapable of deliberation, but prepared for every enormity. In these assemblies the enemies of the people brought forward their plans of ambition systematically. They were opposed by their enemies of another party; and it became a matter of contingency, whether the people subjected themselves to be led blindly by one tyrant or another.