Gouverneur Morris

by Theodore Roosevelt

It is impossible to read through the debates of the convention without being struck by the innumerable shortcomings of each individual plan proposed by the several members, as divulged in their speeches, when compared with the plan finally adopted. Had the result been in accordance with the views of the strong-government men like Hamilton on the one hand, or of the weak-government men like Franklin on the other, it would have been equally disastrous for the country. The men who afterwards naturally became the chiefs of the Federalist party, and who included in their number the bulk of the great revolutionary leaders, were the ones to whom we mainly owe our present form of government; certainly we owe them more, both on this and on other points, than we do their rivals, the after-time Democrats. Yet there were some articles of faith in the creed of the latter so essential to our national wellbeing, and yet so counter to the prejudices of the Federalists, that it was inevitable they should triumph in the end. Jefferson led the Democrats to victory only when he had learned to acquiesce thoroughly in some of the fundamental principles of Federalism, and the government of himself and his successors was good chiefly in so far as it followed out the theories of the Hamiltonians; while Hamilton and the Federalists fell from power because they could not learn the one great truth taught by Jefferson,—that in America a statesman should trust the people, and should endeavor to secure to each man all possible individual liberty, confident that he will use it aright. The old-school Jeffersonian theorists believed in "a strong people and a weak government." Lincoln was the first who showed how a strong people might have a strong government and yet remain the freest on the earth. He seized—half unwittingly—all that was best and wisest in the traditions of Federalism; he was the true successor of the Federalist leaders; but he grafted on their system a profound belief that the great heart of the nation beat for truth, honor, and liberty.

This fact, that in 1787 all the thinkers of the day drew out plans that in some respects went very wide of the mark, must be kept in mind, or else we shall judge each particular thinker with undue harshness when we examine his utterances without comparing them with those of his fellows. But one partial exception can be made. In the Constitutional Convention Madison, a moderate Federalist, was the man who, of all who were there, saw things most clearly as they were, and whose theories most closely corresponded with the principles finally adopted; and although even he was at first dissatisfied with the result, and both by word and by action interpreted the Constitution in widely different ways at different times, still this was Madison's time of glory: he was one of the statesmen who do extremely useful work, but only at some single given crisis. While the Constitution was being formed and adopted, he stood in the very front; but in his later career he sunk his own individuality, and became a mere pale shadow of Jefferson.

Morris played a very prominent part in the convention. He was a ready speaker, and among all the able men present there was probably no such really brilliant thinker. In the debates he spoke more often than any one else, although Madison was not far behind him; and his speeches betrayed, but with marked and exaggerated emphasis, both the virtues and the shortcomings of the Federalist school of thought. They show us, too, why he never rose to the first rank of statesmen. His keen, masterful mind, his far-sightedness, and the force and subtlety of his reasoning were all marred by his incurable cynicism and deep-rooted distrust of mankind. He throughout appears as advocatus diaboli; he puts the lowest interpretation upon every act, and frankly avows his disbelief in all generous and unselfish motives. His continual allusions to the overpowering influence of the baser passions, and to their mastery of the human race at all times, drew from Madison, although the two men generally acted together, a protest against his "forever inculcating the utter political depravity of men, and the necessity for opposing one vice and interest as the only possible check to another vice and interest."

Morris championed a strong national government, wherein he was right; but he also championed a system of class representation, leaning towards aristocracy, wherein he was wrong. Not Hamilton himself was a firmer believer in the national idea. His one great object was to secure a powerful and lasting Union, instead of a loose federal league. It must be remembered that in the convention the term "federal" was used in exactly the opposite sense to the one in which it was taken afterwards; that is, it was used as the antithesis of "national," not as its synonym. The states-rights men used it to express a system of government such as that of the old federation of the thirteen colonies; while their opponents called themselves Nationalists, and only took the title of Federalists after the Constitution had been formed, and then simply because the name was popular with the masses. They thus appropriated their adversaries' party name, bestowing it on the organization most hostile to their adversaries' party theories. Similarly, the term "Republican Party," which was originally in our history merely another name for the Democracy, has in the end been adopted by the chief opponents of the latter.

The difficulties for the convention to surmount seemed insuperable; on almost every question that came up, there were clashing interests. Strong government and weak government, pure democracy or a modified aristocracy, small states and large states, North and South, slavery and freedom, agricultural sections as against commercial sections,—on each of twenty points the delegates split into hostile camps, that could only be reconciled by concessions from both sides. The Constitution was not one compromise; it was a bundle of compromises, all needful.

Morris, like every other member of the convention, sometimes took the right and sometimes the wrong side on the successive issues that arose. But on the most important one of all he made no error; and he commands our entire sympathy for his thorough-going nationalism. As was to be expected, he had no regard whatever for states rights. He wished to deny to the small states the equal representation in the Senate finally allowed them; and he was undoubtedly right theoretically. No good argument can be adduced in support of the present system on that point. Still, it has thus far worked no harm; the reason being that our states have merely artificial boundaries, while those of small population have hitherto been distributed pretty evenly among the different sections, so that they have been split up like the others on every important issue, and thus have never been arrayed against the rest of the country.

Though Morris and his side were defeated in their efforts to have the states represented proportionally in the Senate, yet they carried their point as to representation in the House. Also on the general question of making a national government, as distinguished from a league or federation, the really vital point, their triumph was complete. The Constitution they drew up and had adopted no more admitted of legal or peaceable rebellion—whether called secession or nullification—on the part of the state than on the part of a county or an individual.

Morris expressed his own views with his usual clear-cut, terse vigor when he asserted that "state attachments and state importance had been the bane of the country," and that he came, not as a mere delegate from one section, but "as a representative of America,—a representative in some degree of the whole human race, for the whole human race would be affected by the outcome of the convention." And he poured out the flood of his biting scorn on those gentlemen who came there "to truck and bargain for their respective states," asking what man there was who could tell with certainty the state wherein he—and even more wherein his children—would live in the future; and reminding the small states, with cavalier indifference, that, "if they did not like the Union, no matter,—they would have to come in, and that was all there was about it; for if persuasion did not unite the country, then the sword would." His correct language and distinct enunciation—to which Madison has borne witness—allowed his grim truths to carry their full weight; and he brought them home to his hearers with a rough, almost startling earnestness and directness. Many of those present must have winced when he told them that it would matter nothing to America "if all the charters and constitutions of the states were thrown into the fire, and all the demagogues into the ocean," and asserted that "any particular state ought to be injured, for the sake of a majority of the people, in case its conduct showed that it deserved it." He held that we should create a national government, to be the one and only supreme power in the land,—one which, unlike a mere federal league, such as we then lived under, should have complete and compulsive operation; and he instanced the examples as well of Greece as of Germany and the United Netherlands, to prove that local jurisdiction destroyed every tie of nationality.

It shows the boldness of the experiment in which we were engaged, that we were forced to take all other nations, whether dead or living, as warnings, not examples; whereas, since we succeeded, we have served as a pattern to be copied, either wholly or in part, by every other people that has followed in our steps. Before our own experience, each similar attempt, save perhaps on the smallest scale, had been a failure. Where so many other nations teach by their mistakes, we are among the few who teach by their successes.

Be it noted also that, the doctrinaires to the contrary notwithstanding, we proved that a strong central government was perfectly compatible with absolute democracy. Indeed, the separatist spirit does not lead to true democratic freedom. Anarchy is the handmaiden of tyranny. Of all the states, South Carolina has shown herself (at least throughout the greater part of the present century) to be the most aristocratic, and the most wedded to the separatist spirit. The German masses were never so ground down by oppression as when the little German principalities were most independent of each other and of any central authority.