The Genius of America (6 page)

Madison wrote that the “more fatal” cause of the new nation's crisis “lies among the people themselves.” Similarly, Washington observed in a letter to John Jay, dated August 15, 1786, “Experience has taught us, that men will not adopt & carry into execution, measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power.” Americans did not conduct themselves according to a shared vision of the common good, but were motivated by their own self-interest, which they often viewed as the common good. “It is a just observation that people commonly
intend
the Public Good,” wrote Hamilton. But, he concluded, “this often applies to their very errors.” Or as Benjamin Franklin noted, “Most men indeed . . . think themselves in possession of all truth, and that whatever others differ from them it is so far error.”

In the pursuit of their self-interest, Americans frequently joined similarly interested people. Factions, the framers called them, or groups “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of an interest adverse to the rights of other citizens.” And, as the framers viewed the American landscape in 1787, factions were at war. “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.” And these tendencies toward conflict were enhanced by ambitious leaders who “inflamed” their factions “with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to co-operate for their common good.”

The crisis was enormous. The very basis on which they had built their separation from England and their new democracy— that Americans set free would work together—had been wrong.

This conclusion raised a basic question for the framers. Where could they find the coercive power Washington said was needed without giving up the liberty from monarchy they had just won? Did the weakness of public virtue mean that a democratic republic was impossible? Some of their own supporters thought the answer to this question was yes. Richard Price, an English minister and political essayist (invited by Congress in 1778 to become an American citizen because of his support of independence), wrote that he had been “mortified” by accounts of “dissipation,” “excessive jealousy” and “clashing interests” in America, which threatened “that the fairest experiment ever tried in human affairs will miscarry and that a revolution which had revived the hopes of good men and promised an opening to better times will become a discouragement to all future efforts in favor of liberty and prove only an opening to a new scene of human degeneracy and misery.”

Many others shared this view. Nathaniel Gorham's letter to the prince of Prussia was one of several suggestions for restoring a monarch in America, a thought which horrified Washington. As Washington described in a letter, the national turmoil was feeding a call for tyranny. “What astonishing changes a few years are capable of producing! I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror. From thinking proceeds speaking, thence to acting is often but a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous!”

When we recall the courage of the revolutionary generation, we usually think of Private Martin's shivering through the winter at Valley Forge or Washington on that scow crossing the Delaware. Brave they surely were. But in many ways the greatest act of courage in the entire revolutionary saga was this moment eleven years later.

Faced with the collapse of the very idea on which they had built their new nation, the framers refused to give up. They had already fought too hard and sacrificed too much. They refused to accept that Americans could not govern themselves. “It is evident,” wrote James Madison, “that no other form” of government other than a republic “would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination, which animates every votary of freedom.” James Wilson of Pennsylvania said, “The citizens of the United States, however different in some other respects, are well known to agree in one strongly-marked feature of their character—a warm and keen sense of freedom and independence.”

But if they were to go forward, if they were to preserve the liberty they had fought for, they had to invent a new kind of government. “The American war is over,” Dr. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania wrote in January of 1787 in his address to the people of the United States. “But this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is disclosed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government; and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens, for these forms of government, after they are established and brought to perfection.”

They needed a new government based not on the romantic ideal of public virtue but on recognizing people as they really are. They needed a government that guaranteed liberty, while protecting people from the excesses of liberty. They needed a government that would channel self-interests, rather than counting on people to set them aside. They needed, Madison said, “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”

And so they gathered in Philadelphia and invented one.

2

APPROACHING SO NEAR TO
PERFECTION AS IT DOES

Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?

—A
LEXANDER
H
AMILTON
, 1787

A
NESSAY ON
Thomas Jefferson once defined
genius
as the capacity to see ten things where the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to then apply those perceptions to the material of his art. Rarely has there been a man who better illustrates this definition of genius than Jefferson's friend James Madison. Madison's grasp of the political world of 1787 was unsurpassed. He then applied those perceptions to a work that was to the art of government as brilliant and inventive in its age as Einstein's rethinking of time and space, and Picasso's reshaping of form and image, were in theirs. Madison wrote the blueprint for American democracy. Then he did even more. He carefully guided his plan through the convention in Philadelphia. To succeed, the delegates, Madison included, had to compromise on many specific points. By modifying his own proposals, even if sometimes grudgingly, Madison became both the father of the Constitution and the midwife of the most important principle underlying the nation's success: His new political structure only worked if its participants were willing to compromise. The spirit of America, as drafted by James Madison and revised by the delegates at Philadelphia, was a spirit of compromise.

The story of the convention at Philadelphia has been told many times. Each generation finds its own meaning. The framers meant to give the states great power, or no power at all, went the arguments before the Civil War. The framers were heavily motivated by mercantile interests, or barely motivated by them at all, raged the debate as the frontier closed and the nation's industrial might rolled.

We touch on the story again to recall what we think is valuable and relevant to our age: this spirit of compromise at the moment of creation. For it isn't just what they wrote that mattered, as important as the document has become to us. It is how they worked and argued and revised and, amazingly, produced a Constitution “approaching so near to perfection,” in Benjamin Franklin's subtle description, despite the imperfections, narrow interests, selfish motives, prejudices and outright errors of each individual delegate. Out of many voices came one nation. It is that spirit we need to recover.

T
HE
R
IGHT
M
AN AT THE
R
IGHT
M
OMENT

James Madison was the right man at the right moment. It is a very lucky thing for America that he was there on May 25, 1787, when convened in Philadelphia for the first session of what is now known to us as the Constitutional Convention. America was in crisis. Americans had won their liberty from Great Britain, but they had failed to establish a successful self-governing country. Their utopian notion in 1776—that all they needed was simple government, free of England and relying on the public virtue of the people—had failed.

Instead, the country was riven by factions, each intending to impose its interests on others. Self-interest, not public virtue, dominated public conduct. The pursuit of happiness had become the pursuit of individual and group interests and not those of the community or nation. Neither the national government nor the state governments were strong enough to create order out of the chaos these competing groups created.

The fear that their country was failing produced in the framers a new attitude that sounded very much like humility. Take, for example, Alexander Hamilton, who has rarely been thought of as a humble man. “Is it now time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age,” Hamilton said of the failed promise of simple government resting on faith in public virtue, “and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?” Many delegates to the convention held this new attitude. They all believed Americans had been given exceptional opportunity. Perhaps they even had exceptional ambitions for themselves and their new nation. But, the framers had come to realize, as individuals in a political or civic setting, Americans were not actually exceptional in their ability to rise above their own interests. Accepting this reality, that we are just as flawed and self-motivated as “the other inhabitants of the globe,” made all sorts of compromises and agreements possible.

In fact, the convention itself would become a first test of their new thinking about democracy. Almost all the delegates agreed on the need for a stronger national government. But what kind of government? On this question they had, Franklin wrote, “ideas so different, . . . prejudices so strong and so various, and . . . particular interests, independent of the general.” Could men with such varied ideas, prejudices and interests come together, fight for their views, and then accept the outcome of the process?

In answering yes to this question, the framers created a new definition of
public virtue
. Before,
public virtue
had meant setting aside a self-interest to accept a general public interest. Now it assumed that Americans would pursue their self-interest within the halls of government. But if their voices were meaningfully heard, they would respect for the greater good decisions even when adverse to their views. Participation, compromise and respect for process would become the new measures of public good. Good decisions, wrote James Wilson, would require “mutual concessions and sacrifices . . . mutual forbearance and conciliation.”

The delegates viewed the convention as the last chance to rescue the American experiment. Its task, wrote Madison, was “to secure the public good and private rights against the danger” of faction and self interest, “and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government.” If the delegates failed, Franklin wrote to Jefferson, “it must do harm as it will show that we have not wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves; and will strengthen the opinion of some political writers that popular government cannot long support themselves.” “Wise measures,” wrote Washington, were required, “to avert the consequences [tyranny] we have but too much reason to apprehend.”

Wise measures would require wise men able and willing to create a new model of government that would answer two fundamental questions: How could liberty be maintained without the high level of public virtue and simple government they had earlier agreed were necessary? How could a democracy protect individual liberty if a majority wanted to impinge on it?

Madison's answer was a new system that limited what had been previously considered the hallmark of democracy, the will of the majority. The conduct of state governments since the Revolution had convinced them that their commitment to simple government had been, well, simplistic. The will of the majority, the framers now understood, did not automatically produce the common good. Recent history had proven to them that a government too susceptible to the majority voice of its citizens could not protect liberty. “There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore more needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong,” Madison wrote to James Monroe. For the interest of the majority, Madison added, was the “immediate augmentation of property and wealth,” and its realization would compel “the majority in every community to despoil and enslave the minority of individuals; and in a federal community to make a similar sacrifice of the minority of component States.”

The fear in 1787 was not the potential for despotism by the few, although that remained a concern, but, paradoxically, despotism by the many and particularly by majorities. “It is much more to be dreaded that the few will be unnecessarily sacrificed to the many.”

Most Americans would be surprised to be told that at the heart of the invention of our country was a rejection of pure majority rule as the basis for democracy. We so often turn to the majority to answer our questions, from school yard votes on what games to play to Supreme Court decision making. We are brought up on the phrase
majority rules
. But this is not how our government works or was intended to by Madison and the framers. Its purpose is to stop or at least slow actions that were supported by merely a majority. It does so by dividing political power among the various branches of government and allowing one to check the other in ways we will later describe.