CHAPTER VII
THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
Mr. Madison is called "the Father of the Constitution." A paper written by him was laid before his colleagues of Virginia, before the meeting of the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, and was made the basis of the "Virginia plan," as it was called, out of which the Constitution was evolved. In another way his name is so identified with it that one cannot be forgotten so long as the other is remembered. From that full and faithful report of the proceedings of the convention, in which his own part was so active and conspicuous, we know most that we do or ever can know of the perplexities and trials, the concessions and triumphs, the acts of wisdom and the acts of weakness, of that body of men whose coming together time has shown to have been one of the important events in the history of mankind.
Then it is also true that no man had worked harder, perhaps none had worked so hard, to bring the public mind to a serious consideration of affairs and a recognition of the necessity of reorganizing the government, if the States were to be held together. Never, it seemed, had men better reason to be satisfied with the result of their labors when, a few months later, the new Constitution was accepted by all the States. Yet the time was not far distant when even Madison would be in doubt as to the character of this new bond of union, and as to what sort of government had been secured by it. Nor till he had been dead near thirty years was it to be determined what union under the Constitution really meant; nor till three quarters of a century after the adoption of that instrument was the more perfect union formed, justice established, domestic tranquillity insured, the general welfare promoted, and the blessings of liberty secured to all the people, which by that great charter it was intended, in 1787, to ordain and establish. All the difficulties, which they who framed it escaped by their work, were as nothing to those which it entailed upon their descendants.
Two parties went into the convention. On one point, of course, they were agreed, else they would never have come together at all,—that a united government under the Articles of Confederation was a failure, and, unless some remedy should be speedily devised, States with common local interests would gravitate into separate and perhaps antagonistic nationalities. But the differences between these two parties were radical, and for a time seemed insurmountable. One proposed simply to repair the Articles of Confederation as they might overhaul a machine that was out of gear; the other proposed to form an altogether new Constitution. One wanted a merely federal government; not, however, meaning by that term what the other party—soon, nevertheless, to be known as Federalists—were striving for, but a confederation of States, each independent of all the rest and supreme in its own right, while consenting to unite with the rest in a limited government for the administration of certain common interests.[10]
This idea of the independence of the States was a survival of the old colonial system, when each colony under its distinct relation to the crown had attained a growth of its own with its separate interests. Each of these colonies had become a State. The Revolution had secured to each, it was maintained, a separate independence, achieved, it was true, by united efforts, but not therefore binding them together as a single nation. It was held as a legitimate result of that doctrine that each State, not the people of the State, whether many or few, should be represented by the same number of votes in a federal government as they were under the Articles of Confederation, because such a government was a union of States, not of a people.
All men, it was argued,—going back to a state of nature,—are equally free and independent; and when a government is formed every man has an equal share by natural right in its formation and in its subsequent conduct. While numbers are few, every member of the State exercises his individual right in person, and none can rightfully do more than this, however wise, or powerful, or rich he may be. But when government by the whole body of the people becomes cumbersome and inconvenient through increase of numbers, the individual citizen loses none of his rights by intrusting their exercise to representatives, in choosing and instructing whom all have an equal voice. So when States are united in a confederacy each State has the same relation to that government that individuals have to each other in a single State. They are free and equal, and none has a larger share of rights in the confederacy because its people are more numerous, or because it is richer or more powerful, than the rest. In such a confederacy it is not the individual citizen who is to be represented, but the individual State. In such a confederacy there would be the same representation for a State, say of ten thousand inhabitants, as for one of fifty thousand. This, it was maintained, preserved equality of suffrage in the equality of States; while the representation of the individual citizens of the States would be in reality inequality of suffrage, because the autonomy of the State would be lost sight of. If in such a case it were asked what had become of the rights which the majority of forty thousand had inherited from nature, the answer was that those rights were preserved and represented in the state government. The difficulty, nevertheless, remained: how to reconcile in practice this doctrine of the equal rights of States, where there might be a minority of persons, with the actual rights of the whole people where, according to the underlying democratic doctrine, the good of the whole must be decided by the larger number.
Those who proposed only to amend the old Articles of Confederation, and opposed a new Constitution, objected that a government formed under such a Constitution would be not a federal but a national government. Luther Martin said, when he returned to Maryland, that the delegates "appeared totally to have forgot the business for which we were sent.... We had not been sent to form a government over the inhabitants of America considered as individuals.... That the system of government we were intrusted to prepare was a government over these thirteen States, but that in our proceedings we adopted principles which would be right and proper only on the supposition that there were no state governments at all, but that all the inhabitants of this extensive continent were in their individual capacity, without government, and in a state of nature." He added that "in the whole system there was but one federal feature, the appointment of the senators by the States in their sovereign capacity, that is, by their legislatures, and the equality of suffrage in that branch; but it was said that this feature was only federal in appearance."