Copy of the Proposed New Constitution for Sale in North Carolina

Document dealer Seth Kaller alerted me to an unusual artifact up for sale through Brunk Auctions on Saturday, 28 September.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, that body sent its report to the Confederation Congress, then meeting in New York. That report took the form of the draft constitution.

The Congress accepted that report and had 100 copies printed on 28 Sept 1787. Charles Thomson, the Congress’s secretary, sent official copies to the states with the invitation to convene ratification conventions.

In North Carolina, Gov. Samuel Johnston presided over a convention in Hillsborough from 21 July to 4 August 1788. In the end they voted 184 to 84 to…reach no decision. The Anti-Federalist contingent insisted on a Bill of Rights, among other things. But they weren’t ready to reject the document outright.

All of the other states but Rhode Island did approve the new Constitution, however—some linking that approval to a Bill of Rights (saying “yes as long as…” rather than “no unless…”). The new federal government formed with only eleven states participating.

On 10 May 1789, Gov. Johnston and the North Carolina Council approved an address to George Washington, congratulating him on becoming President. That letter expressed hope that Congress would start the process of adding to the Constitution to “remove the apprehensions of many of the good Citizens of this State for those liberties for which they have fought and suffered in common with others.”

Washington was too ill to reply right away, but on 19 June he wrote back that he was “impressed with an idea that the Citizens of your State are sincerely attached to the Interest, the Prosperity and the Glory of America.”

In a letter to Rep. James Madison, Johnston responded, “Every one is very much pleased with the President’s answer to our Address. I have agreeably to your Wishes published them…” The exchange appeared in the State Gazette of North Carolina and in a broadside.

On 25 September, Congress approved twelve amendments to the Constitution. In November, North Carolinians gathered for another discussion of ratification, once again under Gov. Johnston. Public opinion had swung in favor of the new form of government, or at least not being left out of it. This time the vote was 194 to 77 for the Constitution.

Johnston then resigned as governor to become one of North Carolina’s first two U.S. Senators. On leaving Congress in 1793, he moved to another plantation, leaving his Hayes Farm in the hands of his son, James Cathcart Johnston. While having children with an emancipated mistress, Johnston never married, and in 1865 he bequeathed the property to his friend Edward Wood.

In recent years the Wood descendants started the process of turning that estate into a public historic site. In 2022, people cleaning the house looked through a file cabinet and found:

• A copy of the printed Constitution signed by Thomson and evidently sent to North Carolina. This is one of only seven such copies known and the only one in private hands. The last time a copy was sold was in 1891.
• A 1776 printing of the proposed Articles of Confederation.
• A printing of the proceedings of the Hillsborough Convention, the one that rejected the Constitution. 
• A copy of the broadside promulgating North Carolina’s letter to Washington and the new President’s reply.

I happen to be in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, as I type this, so I could conceivably attend this auction on Saturday. But since I’m here for another event, and since the opening bid for the printed and signed Constitution is $1,000,000, I won’t be in the bidding.

The J.A.R. Books of the Year for 2023

Last month the Journal of the American Revolution announced its 2023 Book of the Year and the runners-up.

The top honor went to The Lionkeeper of Algiers: How an American Captive Rose to Power in Barbary and Saved His Homeland from War by Des Ekin:

[James Leander] Cathcart was one of many captured on the high seas by the Barbary pirates, who were eager to take advantage of the young nation’s inexperience and weakness. The city of Algiers becomes a subject in the book, for its politics and physical layout made escape impossible. Ekin tells the story of how Cathcart was always in the right place at the right time. Being so fortunate, he readily took advantage of his situation to go from being the chief lionkeeper in the Dey’s personal zoo to becoming the Dey’s most important non-Muslim advisor and clerk. Although Cathchart had to endure the violent and unpredictable temperament of the Dey, he was able to take care of other American captives.

Cathcart’s true importance was as a liaison between Algiers and the American government under President George Washington. The administration appeared inept and unable to handle the captured sailors’ predicament, so Cathcart became instrumental in negotiating for their release. Although he could have purchased his own freedom at any time, Cathcart made sure that all the Americans were well-cared for. Ekin’s book is an easy and exciting narrative, making the reader eager to turn the page to see how long Cathcart’s luck would hold out.

Here are the two other books held up for praise.

Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution by Eli Merritt:

Merritt argues that the men who sat in Congress between 1774 and 1783 were constantly preoccupied by fears that the states would descend into conflict over borders and resources that would shatter the Union. As a result, “the American Union was an unwelcome alliance formed by bitterly conflictual colonies”; in other words, the creation of the United States was “a shotgun wedding.”

The Untold War at Sea: America’s Revolutionary Privateers by Kylie A. Hulbert:

This reconsideration of the role privateers played in the American Revolution challenges their place in the accepted popular narrative of the conflict. Despite their controversial tactics, Kylie Hulbert illustrates that privateers merit a place alongside minutemen, Continental soldiers, and the sailors of the fledgling American navy. This book offers a redefinition of who fought in the war and how their contributions were measured.

“Pray Subscribe for me the Declaration of Independence”

Elbridge Gerry left Philadelphia on 16 July 1776, heading for home in Massachusetts with a pound of green tea.

His fellow Continental Congress delegate John Adams wrote that Gerry was “worn out of Health, by the Fatigues of this station.”

But Adams also wrote that he expected Gerry to enthusiastically inspect the Continental Army and fortifications while traveling through New York, and that’s just what Gerry did.

On Sunday, 21 July, while staying near the King’s Bridge that connected Manhattan to the mainland, Gerry sat down to write a long letter to Adams and his cousin, Samuel Adams.

Gerry wrote of the Continental officers:

they appear to be in high Spirits for Action and agree in Sentiments that the Men’s as firm and determined as they wish them to be, having in View since the Declaration of Independence an object that they are ready to contend for, an object that they will chearfully pursue at the Risque of Life and every valuable Enjoyment.

The area was well fortified, he judged, and the people of New Jersey and New York City enthusiastic about the Patriot cause.

He reported on Adm. Lord William Howe’s interactions with Gen. George Washington, which included rejecting a proposal for a prisoner swap of Philip Skene, Loyalist governor of Crown Point and Ticonderoga, for James Lovell, a Boston Patriot.

Gerry recommended removing Gen. Philip Schuyler from command of the Northern Department. Indeed, he suggested that Schuyler should be “sent to Boston, recalled to answer any Charges that may be brot against him.” With the collapse of the invasion of Canada, “The N England Colonies are warm for the Measure.”

After discussing how to reenlist and resupply the army, Gerry shared an idea for increasing business with the French:

Would it not be a good Measure to propose to the French Court to supply with Grain their Army in the West Indies and to impower them to employ suitable persons in the States for that purpose who shall be supplyed by Congress with Money and Ship it in their own Vessels; Whilst they are to make Returns by allowing Us a Factor in their Kingdom to purchase Arms or other military Stores to a certain Amount who is to be furnished by their Court with Money for that purpose. This would be a speedy Way of coming at Arms and Ammunition, and open a Channel for a Breach with Britain.

Finally, Gerry addressed two political matters. He asked for one of the confidential printed copies of the new draft Articles of Confederation, and he wrote:

Pray Subscribe for me the Declaration of Independence if the same is to be signed as proposed. I think We ought to have the privilege when necessarily absent of voting and signing by proxy.

After Gerry had left Philadelphia, the Congress formally approved creating the handsome handwritten Declaration that we know. If Gerry’s proposal had been adopted, some of those signatures would not have been the delegates’ actual signatures but signatures of their friends for them. Gerry was worried that after voting for independence he’d be left out.

TOMORROW: About Gerry’s signature.

The Hartford Wits and the Voice of Anarch

The “Poetry and the Constitution” event I described yesterday made me think there must have been poetry about the Constitution, part of the debate around that document. So I went looking.

In October 1786, some fraction of the “Hartford Wits”—David Humphreys (shown here twenty years later), Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins—published a poem in The New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine.

Those verses were represented to the public as fragments of an ancient text found in a fort somewhere off to the west, like Ohio.

Over the next several months the Wits produced more verses for the newspaper, most supposedly pieces of a mock epic called The Anarchiad. This text told the story of a war between the spirit Anarch [boo! hiss!] and Hesper, “the guardian of the clime.”

By presenting these poems as “fragments,” the authors could eschew narrative or logical coherence and present their views on current troubles, such as:

• The Articles of Confederation just weren’t working out, and Connecticut hadn’t even participated in the Annapolis Convention to fix them.
• In western Massachusetts middling farmers were resisting taxes and shutting down courts while Rhode Island was issuing lots of paper money.
• A couple of local officials were being a real bother. (The Wits were already feuding with those men in the newspapers.)
• Young people today.

Here’s a short taste from Book IV, in the voice of Anarch:

Behold the reign of anarchy, begun,
And half the business of confusion done.
From hell’s dark caverns discord sounds alarms,
Blows her loud trump, and calls my SHAYS to arms,
O’er half the land the desperate riot runs,
And maddening mobs assume their rusty guns.
From councils feeble, bolder faction grows,
The daring corsairs, and the savage foes;
O’er Western wilds, the tawny bands allied,
Insult the States of weakness and of pride;
Once friendly realms, unpaid each generous loan,
Wait to divide and share them for their own.

Now sinks the public mind; a death-like sleep
O’er all the torpid limbs begins to creep;
By dull degrees decays the vital heat,
The blood forgets to flow, the pulse to beat;
The powers of life, in mimic death withdrawn,
Closed the fixed eyes with one expiring yawn;
Exposed in state, to wait the funeral hour,
Lie the pale relics of departed power;
While conscience, harrowing up their souls, with dread,
Their ghost of empire stalks without a head.

That installment was first published on 11 Jan 1787. A couple of weeks later, Daniel Shays’s Regulator force tried to seize the federal armory in Springfield. Militia general William Shepard and his men fought them off, killing four. “Behold the reign of anarchy,” indeed.

TOMORROW: More constitutional commentary.

“Equal Suffrage in the Senate”

When people discuss the undemocratic nature of the Electoral College, the conversation often leads on to the U.S. Senate.

After all, one way the Electoral College distorts our votes derives from how each state has two U.S. Senators and the electors were originally a shadow version of the entire Congress, both House and Senate. The result is disproportionately large representation in the Electoral College for voters who live in small-population states.

Of course, small-population states have even more disproportionate power in the Senate, which has approval power over major Presidential appointments, judges, and (with a two-thirds supermajority) treaties.

Equal representation for each state in the Senate was part of the compromise at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that convinced small states to give up their even more disproportionate power under the Articles of Confederation. It was a product of that historic moment.

Historians can point out that in 1790 the most populous state, Virginia, contained 748,000 people, or 631,000 as calculated by counting enslaved people as only three-fifths of a person, while Delaware had 59,000 or 55,000 people. The largest state was thus only about twelve times bigger than the smallest. Despite small states having disproportionate sway, Virginia, home of four of the first five Presidents, still managed to exercise a lot of political power.

In contrast, today the most populous state, California, is more than 67 times larger than the least populous, Wyoming. Despite being only 1.5% the size of California, Wyoming has 5.5% of the larger state’s weight in the Electoral College and 100% of its weight in the Senate.

Our incoming Senate is split down the middle in terms of political party, with fifty Republicans on one side and fifty Democrats and independents caucusing on the other. Yet the Democratic side represents 41 million more of us people—equivalent to the entire population of Argentina. 

I think there’s an argument to be made that we citizens are served by having some of our national representation determined by state boundaries. Because of differing laws, each state’s population does end up being an interest group in itself. But as to whether the Dakotas (combined population 1.7 million) should have twice the Senate power as Illinois (population 12.6 million), that’s hard to justify except on the basis of inertia.

Since the Constitution requires three-fourths of the states to approve amendments, it would be hard to change the Electoral College by re-amending Amendment 12. (That’s why the National Popular Vote Compact appears to be the most promising way to reform the system, asking state legislatures to make the decision and stick to it.)

Changing the makeup of the Senate, however, would be even harder—well nigh impossible. That’s because of a usually overlooked clause at the end of Article V of the Constitution:

…no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

Changing the design of the U.S. Senate would thus not only require a supermajority of states, as with an amendment, but complete unanimity. This is the only surviving exception to the amendment process. (The other was forbidding any attempt to limit the slave trade until 1807.)

It would probably be easier for the very large states to split into smaller ones, each having two Senate seats.

(The picture above, courtesy of Wired, is a British map of North America from 1741. Europeans still thought California was an island.)

Seminar on John Dickinson and the Constitution, Starting 21 Oct.

Back in 2012 I made a point about the steady flow of books on Thomas Paine by comparing that output to the sparse number of books on John Dickinson.

I counted over a dozen recent books on Paine and only two on Dickinson—one published by an outfit co-founded by William F. Buckley to promote conservative politics on college campuses and one written by Jane E. Calvert, who became a professor at the University of Kentucky.

Calvert formed the John Dickinson Writings Project to produce a scholarly edition of this Founder’s output, which will ease further research and publications on his work.

That enterprise has now published the first volume of The Complete Writings and Selected Correspondence of John Dickinson, covering the man’s legal training in London and early law practice in the 1750s. The editorial staff is forging ahead on more.

This autumn Prof. Calvert is leading a three-session seminar on “John Dickinson and the Making the the U.S. Constitution, 1776-1788” through the Library Company of Philadelphia.

This seminar will consider the innovative contributions of John Dickinson to the creation of the United States Constitution through his work on the Articles of Confederation (1776), the Annapolis Convention (1786) that met to consider the shortcomings of the Articles, the ensuing Federal Convention (1787), and the debate over ratification (1788).

As the only leading figure to contribute substantially to every phase of the American Founding beginning with the Stamp Act resistance, Dickinson also played a key role during the constitutional era. This timely seminar will explore drafts, notes, and essays, along with selected secondary source readings, to understand Dickinson’s contributions to the U.S. Constitution, reflecting on both what he offered and what his colleagues rejected.

Calvert’s seminar guests will include Liz Covart of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, John Kaminski of the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Jack N. Rakove, emeritus W. R. Coe Professor of History and American studies at Stanford University.

The conversations will take place online over three Wednesday evenings, 5:30–7:00, two weeks apart: on 21 October, 4 November, and 18 November. Register here. Registrants will receive a syllabus and readings for the three sessions.

“Terror Twice Told” Seminar in Boston, 3 Apr.

On Tuesday, 3 April, the Massachusetts Historical Society will host a session of Boston Area Early American History Seminar that promises a lively discussion among some of the region’s most incisive historians of the Revolutionary period.

The reading for the seminar is Boston University professor Brendan McConville’s paper “Terror Twice Told: Popular Conventions, Political Violence, and the Coming of the Constitutional Crisis, 1780-1787.” The event description says:

As the revolutionary war ended, members of committees, conventions and other extraordinary revolutionary institutions continued to operate as independent political actors. Between 1781 and at least 1786, committeemen and conventioneers launched forceful, violent efforts to reengineer American society. Committee-directed mobs expelled “tories” from many communities, and committeemen and conventioneers used both local laws and contract theory to legitimate these expulsions.

This paper argues that the wave of political violence after the American victory at Yorktown in 1781 ultimately reflected conflicts within the American political community over who could be an American, what institutions constituted “the people” in a republic, and the character and limits of the “the people’s” power to form self-governing institutions. These disputes played an important role in creating the 1787 constitutional crisis.

The main commentary will be offered by University of Connecticut professor Richard D. Brown. Then discussion can become general.

McConville is the author of The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 and These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace: The Struggle for Property and Power in Early New Jersey.

Brown is the author of numerous books including Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War, Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic (coauthored by Doron S. Ben-Atar), The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (coauthored by Irene Quenzler Brown), The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865, and Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772-1774.

This seminar is scheduled to start at 5:15 P.M. It is free and open to the public, but the society asks people to R.S.V.P. to ensure seating and adequate munchies for afterward. In addition, the conversation will be much easier to follow if one comes early to peruse the paper.

“Purporting to have been delivered by Samuel Adams”

Yesterday I described an oration that Samuel Adams delivered in Philadelphia on 1 Aug 1776—or at least that was what a pamphlet published in London said.

In his 1865 biography of Adams, descendant William V. Wells wrote:

There appeared in London this year a printed oration, purporting to have been delivered by Samuel Adams on the 1st of August at Philadelphia. Written in the style of Adams, with but one or two exceptions, it was evidently prepared by some person familiar with his writings. Even his frequent italicizing of words, intended to convey pointed meanings, is not neglected. It must have had an extended circulation, several copies being now preserved in various libraries. Its spuriousness was not suspected in England, where its effect had been the principal object of the author; but whoever was the writer, it is difficult to see what was the immediate point to be gained by the deception. . . . The only contemporary notice was apparently written in London, after a perusal of the oration; and the writer expresses the general opinion of the subtlety of Samuel Adams as beyond that of all others in Congress.

In a footnote Wells laid out the “numerous and palpable” arguments against the authenticity of the pamphlet:

1. Congress was in session on the 1st of August, when the oration purports to have been delivered. It is hardly possible that on such an occasion, that body would not have adjourned; and the title-page bears the words, “delivered at the State House.”

2. Contemporary records make no mention of any public celebration on the 1st of August; nor could the signing of the engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence on the following day have had any association with the speech. None of the American reminiscences of those times refer to it, either in diaries, letters, or newspapers, and it is not likely that so interesting an occurrence would have escaped mention.

3. This professes to be a reprint of the original Philadelphia pamphlet. No such American edition has ever been seen, but at least four copies are known of the London issue.

4. Though the oration is dated nearly a month after the Declaration of Independence, it is silent as to that event, which the unceasing efforts of Adams had particularly pushed to consummation, showing that the author (evidently in London) was ignorant of the Declaration. . . .

6. The oration repeatedly alludes to the “present Constitution” as then in force, as being already “composed, established, and approved.” No constitution existed at this date. The only approach to such an instrument were the Articles of Confederation; and Samuel Adams being one of the committee which had reported them in the previous month, none better than he knew that they had not been approved. Congress, on that very day, resolved upon the consideration of them, and the debate continued far into August, when they were laid aside, and not taken up until the next spring.

Wells also stated that “contains certain indecent passages which it would be absurd to suppose for a moment that Samuel Adams could ever have written.” Unfortunately, those were too indecent to point out. Nothing stands out as indecent to my eyes, but I immediately had doubts about Adams quoting Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In 1875, Charles Francis Adams showed a copy of the oration to the Massachusetts Historical Society while adding that “there was no evidence that Samuel Adams ever delivered such an oration, nor had there ever been discovered a copy published in Philadelphia.”

In the early 1900s, Harry Alonzo Cushing edited a comprehensive collection of The Writings of Samuel Adams. He referred to the pamphlet only in a footnote, citing Wells’s arguments against its authenticity while noting that the text continued to be reprinted “as recently as 1900.” Cushing also quoted a contemporaneous American reference to the “oration” as dubious:

John Eliot of Boston apparently had the matter in mind when he wrote to Jeremy Belknap, June 17, 1777: “Mr S. Adams is a gentleman who hath sacrificed an immense fortune in the service of his country. He is an orator likewise, & there is a famous oration upon the independance of America, which, it is said, he delivered at Philadelphia, January [sic], 1776, but which was never seen in America before.”

Today the oration is recognized as a hoax by bibliographers and booksellers. But with so many anthologies of American oratory reprinting the text in the 1800s and early 1900s, the internet has rediscovered it and brought it back as a seemingly authentic statement by Samuel Adams. The sentence “Truth loves an appeal to the common sense of mankind” seems particularly popular and, given the deceptive source, particularly ironic.

TOMORROW: Who created this hoax?

Getting the Job Done

Signers of the Declaration of Independence not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 56):

• Button Gwinnett
• Francis Lewis
• Robert Morris (shown here)
• James Smith
• George Taylor
• Matthew Thornton
• James Wilson
• Rev. John Witherspoon

Signers of the Articles of Confederation not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 48):

• William Duer
• Francis Lewis
• James Lovell
• Robert Morris
• Daniel Roberdeau
• Edward Telfair
• Rev. John Witherspoon

Framers of the Constitution not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 55):

• Pierce Butler
• William R. Davie
• Thomas Fitzsimons
• Alexander Hamilton
• James McHenry
• Robert Morris
• William Paterson
• James Wilson

Members of the first federal Congress not born in the thirteen colonies (out of 95):

• Aedanus Burke
• Pierce Butler
• Thomas Fitzsimons
• James Jackson
• Samuel Johnston
• John Laurance
• Robert Morris
• William Paterson
• Thomas Tudor Tucker

Fowler on the Crises after Yorktown in Lexington, Jan. 29

On Friday, 29 January, the Lexington Historical Society will host a free talk by William Fowler, Jr., on the topic of his book American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783.

The publisher’s description:

Most people believe the American Revolution ended in October, 1781, after the battle of Yorktown; in fact the war continued for two more traumatic years. During that time, the Revolution came closer to being lost than at any time in the previous half dozen.

The British still held New York, Savannah, Wilmington, and Charleston; the Royal Navy controlled the seas; the states—despite having signed the Articles of Confederation earlier that year—retained their individual sovereignty and, largely bankrupt themselves, refused to send any money in the new nation's interest; members of Congress were in constant disagreement; and the Continental army was on the verge of mutiny.

William Fowler’s An American Crisis chronicles these tumultuous and dramatic two years, from Yorktown until the British left New York in November 1783. At their heart was the remarkable speech Gen. George Washington gave to his troops encamped north of New York in Newburgh, quelling a brewing rebellion that could have overturned the nascent government.

Fowler is a a professor at Northeastern University and a former director of the Massachusetts Historical Society. His short biography of Samuel Adams was the spur that got me into studying Revolutionary history intently about eighteen years ago, so he might have a lot to answer for.

This talk is in the historical society’s Cronin Lecture series. It will take place at the Lexington Depot starting at 8:00 P.M. It is free and open to the public.

The “5-Page Topic Outline” and the “98-Page Framework”

One of the common complaints about the new Advanced Placement U.S. History Course guidelines is that they’re so much longer than they were before. For instance, World Magazine reported:

The new framework is 98 pages long, compared to the five-page topic outline teachers used previously, [critic Larry] Krieger said.

That criticism from Krieger, founder of Insider Test Prep (shown here), has been echoed on a lot of websites; just look for the phrase “five-page [or 5-page] topic outline” and the mention of “98 pages.”

That struck me as another claim about the College Board’s new course guidelines (P.D.F. download) that could be objectively tested. So I looked for the older guidelines, and found a set labeled for May 2006 and May 2007 (P.D.F. download). And I looked at them side by side. Does that comparison hold up as accurate and fair? Not really.

To start with, I can’t figure out why Krieger describes “the new framework” as “98 pages long.” The entire booklet is 142 pages, including title page, contents, index, and those pages paradoxically printed “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank.” The Framework starts on page 9. Ninety-eight pages later takes us to page 106, which is in the middle of the sample questions. The page header “The AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework” continues until page 119. So that actually looks like 111 pages of Framework material, not including the index for it.

The pages under the “AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework” header include sections titled “Introduction,” “Historical Thinking Skills,” “Thematic Learning Objectives,” “The Concept Outline,” “The AP U.S. History Exam,” and “Sample Exam Questions.” So if we want to fairly compare the Framework’s length to the older version, we have to include all the equivalent sections in the older booklet.

Turning to that older booklet, I find that the “five-page Topic Outline” actually takes up five and half pages, so that count is off by 10%. Furthermore, that “Topic Outline” looks like the equivalent of the “Concept Outline” section in the new booklet—i.e., just one of the relevant sections. The earlier booklet also contains sections titled “Introduction,” “The AP U.S. History Exam,” “Themes in AP U.S. History,” another page about teaching the course, and “The Exam” with sample questions. Those total to 33 pages.

Obviously the expansion of 33 pages into 111 is significant—the new guidelines are more than three times as long as the old ones. But Krieger and everyone parroting his figures (without apparently checking them) have transformed that into an explosion from 5 pages to 98—more than nineteen times longer! That doesn’t show a great concern for accuracy or fairness.

Turning from quantity to quality, the older booklet’s “Themes in AP U.S. History” simply lists topics. Here’s one section as an example:

4. The American Revolutionary Era
The French and Indian War
The Imperial Crisis and resistance to Britain
The War for Independence
State constitutions and the Articles of Confederation
The federal Constitution

There’s no exact equivalent to that section in the new guidelines, but to show how they treat some of the same ideas, here’s Key Concept 3.2.II on the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the new Constitution.

Obviously, the new treatment has a lot more words. It’s not just a short list of concepts and buzzwords, but a series of complete sentences connecting those concepts. And it offers more concepts to consider, as well as possible examples for discussion.

In fact, if one were interested in educating young people about the historical transition from the Articles to the Constitution, one might even say the information in the new guidelines is important, pertinent, and useful.

But apparently it’s too long.

TOMORROW: The missing names.

John Dickinson and the Shift to Republican Freedom

Another essay on the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s “Preserving American Freedom” website is “Declaring Independence, Establishing a Republic” by the late Pauline Maier. She wrote:

Independence did not make the American Revolution revolutionary. That, as Thomas Paine later explained, depended upon the Americans’ establishing a new system of government. Their decision to found a republic owed much to Paine’s argument in Common Sense (January 1776) that Britain’s much-praised, unwritten constitution was flawed by two major errors: monarchy and hereditary rule. British freedom, Paine insisted, depended only upon the “republican” part of its government—the elected House of Commons. By mid-1776, the Americans had had enough of earthly kings and discovered, to their surprise, that the people best able to govern them with respect for their rights were themselves.

The main features of American government evolved primarily on the state level through a series of constitutions written from 1776 to the 1780s. The country’s central government underwent a similar transformation. The First and Second Continental Congresses were impermanent bodies, formed under duress. With independence in the offing, a more permanent form of alliance became necessary, and on June 12, 1776, Congress appointed a thirteen-man committee chaired by Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson to draft a plan of confederation. Not much is known about the workings of the Dickinson committee except that it was dominated by Dickinson, who prepared a draft confederation whose “quaeries” (or questions) and extensive editorial changes suggest the complexity of that task and show the extensive alterations made either by Dickinson himself or on the insistence of other committee members.

The committee submitted a new and more finished version to Congress on July 12, 1776. Congress did not send the (much revised) Articles of Confederation to the states until November 1777. And only in March 1781, some seven months before the battle of Yorktown, did the Articles receive the required unanimous consent of the states and go into effect. Already newspaper essayists were calling the confederation inadequate for the needs of the Union.

Also from Dickinson’s papers, the exhibit includes his draft of the Stamp Act Congress’s petition in 1765 and one of the documents by which he freed his many slaves between 1777 and 1786.

Given its Philadelphia-centered collections, it’s natural that Dickinson stands tall on the H.S.P.’s website. But he really was very important in Revolutionary politics, though now remembered most for his opposition to independence in July 1776.

The Real Lessons of the Three-Fifths Compromise

American historians’ Twitter feeds lit up yesterday with links and responses to an essay from James Wagner, the president of Emory University, extolling the value of compromise. Though the essay started talking about national politics, by the end it was clear that Wagner was also addressing the opposition to his program to change the university.

But what really raised eyebrows was the example of compromise Wagner chose to praise:

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union.

Wagner in the past has expressed regret about slavery on Emory’s behalf and written of the university’s “elective amnesia.” But he seems to have had a relapse.

Wagner’s new essay expresses an old view of the Constitution, casting the lifelong servitude of generations of Americans as an acceptable price for creating or preserving the U.S. of A. The rich, white politicians who forged this compromise and benefited most from that union didn’t give up much for it. The provision’s burden fell almost entirely on poor black slaves, and to a lesser extent on relatively poor free farmers in other districts and states who lost voting power.

In fact, most of the states had already agreed to a version of the three-fifths compromise proposed by James Madison during a debate over taxation under the Articles of Confederation. Only two states—New Hampshire and New York—objected, but that was enough to kill the provision under that constitution. James Wilson and Charles Pinckney proposed the same ratio at the Constitutional Convention. After debating the idea, applied to both representation and a “direct tax,” off and on for weeks, the convention adopted it in Article One, Section 2. The convention also declared that its document would be adopted even if four states voted no.

Wagner has other historical examples of compromises to point to. The Constitutional Convention also had to work out deals on a bicameral legislature with two forms of apportionment and the overlapping powers of the government’s three branches. (Of course, some might say those decisions led to periodic gridlock in Washington later.) Nineteenth-century politicians hailed legislative compromises like the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—but they, like the three-fifths clause, had the effect of strengthening slavery.

If I had to choose one example of political compromise from early America that eventually brought wide benefits, it would be the agreement during the states’ ratification conventions to make immediate amendments to the Constitution. The result, today called the Bill of Rights, was mostly a statement of individual rights and protections. But that compromise arose out of a much wider public debate than the elite convention. And Americans didn’t fully enjoy those rights until the Fourteenth Amendment and twentieth-century judicial decisions requiring state and local governments to respect them.

In contrast, the three-fifths clause is now inoperative and repudiated by all. Indeed, it’s so far back in our past that most people don’t understand how it operated. The Constitution didn’t define blacks as three-fifths human, as some now interpret that clause. For purposes of calculating representation in Congress, the Constitution counted enslaved people in a district and multiplied by three-fifths before adding that number to the free people (white and black). But for all other purposes, the Constitution defined slaves as no-fifths of humans—they were property without rights.

Enslaved Americans might have been better off not being counted for representation. As it was, their numbers, multiplied by three-fifths, provided more influence for the rich white men in the parts of the country where they were enslaved. Those elite voters wielded disproportionate power in the U.S. Congress, the Electoral College, and state legislatures that followed the same system. Their representatives used that power to maintain their status and their human property for decades.

That’s the real lesson of the three-fifths compromise: decision-making by the elite alone tends to maintain the advantages of that elite at a cost to others. Real compromises require the participation of all the people involved and real sacrifices, even from the top.

Why Are Some Founders Forgotten?

At the Imaginative Conservative, Daniel L. Dreisbach shared an essay (originally published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute) on “Founders Famous and Forgotten,” exploring why we remember some politicians and military men from the Revolutionary period but not others.

Consider the political career of Roger Sherman of Connecticut (1721-1793), a largely self-taught man, devout Calvinist, and lifelong public servant. He was one of only two men who signed all three of the great documents of American organic law: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He was a delegate to the First and Second Continental Congresses. He was a member of the five-man committee formed to draft the Declaration of Independence and a member of the committee of thirteen formed to frame the Articles of Confederation. At the federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 he delivered more speeches than all but three delegates and was a driving force behind the Great (Connecticut) Compromise. He was a member of the first U.S. House of Representatives (1789-1791) and later of the U.S. Senate (1791-1793), where he played key roles in deliberations on the Bill of Rights and the creation of a national bank. If any man merits the mantle of “founding father,” surely it is Roger Sherman.

Yet few Americans recall, let alone mention, Sherman’s name when enumerating the founding fathers; even among those familiar with his name, most would be hard pressed to describe his role in the founding. Why is it that a man of such prodigious contributions to our country is today an all but forgotten figure? The same question could be asked about many other patriots—John Dickinson, Elbridge Gerry, John Jay, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, Charles Pinckney, Benjamin Rush, John Rutledge, James Wilson, and John Witherspoon, just to name a few—who labored diligently to establish an independent American republic.

Examining six undoubtedly famous Founders, Dreisbach notes some commonalities:

• “strong, memorable, and (with the possible exception of Madison) colorful personalities.”
• homes in “influential power centers in the new nation.”
• “a voluminous paper trail of public and private documents.”

Yet some other men shared some or all of those qualities. Dreisbach suggests they’ve been forgotten because they:

• retired or died before becoming involved in the federal government.
• focused their energies on state and local governments.
• were on the losing side of debates over the Declaration or Constitution.
• left few papers about their American statesmanship.
• developed an unsavory personal reputation by nineteenth-century standards.

Finally, being a conservative, Dreisbach claims that modern academics are uncomfortable with the piety of some Founders. Indeed, the last section of his essay is basically an argument that recent jurisprudence and legislation (not historiography) pays too little heed to most traditionally religious of the Founders. Of course, some of those men aren’t mentioned in the essay for any significance but their religiosity.

Is “devout Calvinism” really why we don’t remember Roger Sherman as well as John Adams? I doubt it. I think it was the Adams family’s massive paper trail and national offices. Plus, the limited capacity of the human brain to remember everyone and everything, even if experts in the field want them to.

The Rebirth of Anti-Federalism?

Yesterday’s posting discussed how four Supreme Court justices had, perhaps unthinkingly, adopted Alexander Hamilton’s dismissive version of how Anti-Federalists caricatured the Constitution. In other words, they accepted the attitude of the Anti-Federalists expressed in the broadest, most sneering form.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo sees a larger reemergence of Anti-Federalism in today’s politics:

If you read about how the federal constitution came about, one thing is crystal clear: it was devised by people who wanted to create a strong federal government and saw the states as obstacles to doing so. The people who believed in states rights and an anemic federal government — the ancestors of today’s Tea Party — were the Anti-Federalists. And they lost.

But especially in recent decades, these modern day Anti-Federalists hatched a massive bamboozle in which they projected the the aims and values of the losers — the Anti-Federalists — on to the winners of the debates — Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Franklin and the rest of them.

This hasn’t simply been an effort on the terrain of political argument. It’s dominated the high-toned theory of the conservative legal academy as well.

But now it seems that anti-federal government thought has become so powerful and accepted that it’s finally ready to come out of the Anti-Federalist closet and embrace its true heritage: The Articles of Confederation, the failed union of sovereign states the federal constitution was hatched to replace.

In her latest column (thanks to Jon Chait for flagging it), Amity Shlaes proposed a major reversion to the Articles of the Confederation model: removing the federal government’s ability to tax individuals and replacing it with a claim on states. In other words, devolving the taxing power to the states. 

Because that worked so well in the 1780s.

Of course, it’s possible to maintain intellectual consistency by arguing that the Federalist Founders wanted a stronger national government for their time but would have opposed the powers that the federal government has taken on since; that the Anti-Federalists’ fears were overblown for their time but have come true since.

But there’s no way to prove or disprove that. We have no idea what James Madison (pictured above) or his opponents in 1787-89 would have thought about the Fourteenth Amendment, or mileage rules for automobiles, or necessary powers for the executive branch in a world with nuclear-tipped missiles.

We can say, however, that Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who both became President declaring their support for a smaller, weaker national government, ended up using the executive branch powers in unprecedented ways. And that’s one reason I have no faith that most of today’s “Anti-Federalist” or “states’ rights” politicians and activists would stick to that philosophy if they found a chance to institute what they want from the federal level.

The Revolution as A Grand Mistake?

Even more provocative than yesterday’s title is The American Revolution: A Grand Mistake, by Leland G. Stauber, a retired professor of political science at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

Stauber recognizes four great advantages to America of how it became independent through the Revolutionary War of 1775-83:

• The “Great Declaration,” including its prefatory statement of equality and natural rights.
• Rejection of titled nobility and monarchy, in contrast to Latin America.
• Early economic independence from Britain.
• “Early democratization to universal white manhood suffrage.”

But then he contrasts the U.S. of A.’s political path with Canada’s route to what’s basically the same level of freedom and self-government, and asks:

Were there, however, with the advantage of hindsight, also major disadvantages to the train of events that led to the total independence of the United States, as distinct from enlarged autonomy and partial independence, at the early date of 1783 and in the context of armed conflict?

Stauber lists four major areas of disadvantage for America:

• The dilemma of slavery. That of course led to a bloody civil war and decades of official discrimination based on race.
• “Legislative union v. Purely voluntary federation.” On this point, Stauber misses the fact that the Articles of Confederation attempted to settle that question by declaring the colonies’ union to be “perpetual.” The Continental Congress actually tried to settle that question; during the early republic’s political battles, some Founders reopened it.
• The American system’s checks and balances, separate legislative and executive branches, and overlapping national and state governments. “It inherently stacked the cards in favor of conservative interests, including a powerful business community, concerned to block governmental actions. It also ranks low, in international comparison, in capacity for coherent decision making.” [You think?] Most democracies now have parliamentary governments, in which the majority of the larger house also determines the executive branch, so there’s no divided government to gridlock. In addition, Stauber notes that it’s relatively difficult to amend the U.S. Constitution—though producing a comprehensive written national constitution was a valuable innovation at the time.
• Underlying American mind-sets about the role of government, projecting the specific concerns about the British government’s expansion in the 1760s onto all centralized government.

Stauber discusses the influence of the American Revolution on Britain, the rest of Europe, Canada, and South America. Curiously, however, there’s only one, negative mention of Haiti, whose first revolution was directly inspired by the American example and led in part by veterans of the American war.

I grant Stauber his argument that having a war of independence wasn’t a necessary prerequisite for entering the 20th century as a large democratic republic in North America. And today there are many more examples of such republics with all sorts of different histories. However, his calculations of how things might have been different don’t factor in the inspirational aspect of U.S. independence by 1783. The American republic offered an example to the rest of the world.

If we think about how the U.S. might have developed differently without the Revolution, we should also think about how the world might have developed differently in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without the U.S. Only then should it be possible to conclude that there was “a grand mistake.”

A Federalist Picture Book

Jacqueline Jules and Jef Czekaj’s picture book Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation acknowledges Anti-Federalist sentiment in the U.S. of A. in the late 1780s. It describes, for example, how Rhode Island refused to participate in the constitutional convention and stayed out of the new Congress until 1790. (The tiny boy playing Rhode Island in the book’s school pageant gets to have other roles as well.)

Nevertheless, the book is clearly on the side of the Federalists. It presents the country’s needs in their terms, and downplays worries about a too-strong national government or encroachments on traditional rights. Even the title Unite or Die reflects the Federalist view, implying that creating a new constitution was a matter of national life or death.

Benjamin Franklin came up with the “Join, or Die” slogan in 1754, thinking about conflict between British and French colonies. American Whigs revived it, substituting the word “unite,” while organizing against new parliamentary taxes. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union completed that unification process for the thirteen states. Legally, those states had already become a nation, and Anti-Federalists didn’t think the nation needed a stronger central government.

During the debate on ratifying the proposed new constitution of 1787, a couple of Federalists brought out the “Unite, or Die” slogan again. James Wilson quoted it during Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention, and Fisher Ames (shown above) appears to have done the same in Massachusetts. But really the issue of the day wasn’t whether to unite, but what the shape of “a more perfect Union” might be.

The title Unite or Die and the text inside say that the U.S. of A. was not in fact united until after 1787, and was in mortal peril. Though its characters act out arguments among the Federalists, the book doesn’t leave room for argument about the necessity of a new constitution at all. Which isn’t that surprising since the Federalists won.

TOMORROW: Sidestepping awkward subjects.