An Historical Masterpiece

 Perhaps a month ago I came across a reference to a book about the writing of the Constitution, The Framer's Coup, by one Michael Klarman.  (More on him much later.)  It took a couple of weeks to get the book, published in 2016 by the Oxford University Press, from the local library system.  It includes 631 pages of text and 181 pages of endnotes.  It is probably the single best work of American history published in the 21st century, and its appearance received almost no notice in the national press.

Klarman, now in his mid-sixties, was not trained as an historian, and apparently learned the historian's craft by reading books similar to his own.  As he explains in his introduction, he decided to tell the story of the creation of the constitution in the founders' own words, and that is exactly what he did.  He freely lets his admiration for many of the key players shine through, and he provides lengthy biographical footnotes about some of the lesser-known ones.  Some of his conclusions in my opinion bow to contemporary trends in history, but those trends have militated against even attempting books of this nature, and he paid no attention to that.  Few historical cohorts have been studied or published about more thoroughly than the founders, of course, and he used a large team of skilled research assistants to find what they thought about what they were doing.  That is the way real history needs to be written, and I will try to summarize what I learned from this book.

The writing of the constitution was not an intellectual exercise designed to enshrine particular political principles, but rather an attempt to design new governmental institutions that could save the experiment of the United States from complete collapse.  The government established by the Articles of Confederation, which had almost no executive or judiciary, had failed to govern, with disastrous consequences at home and internationally.  Finance was the biggest problem.  Both the states and the central government emerged from the revolution with enormous debts, and the national government had no taxing power to raise the money to pay its own.  It had to beg the individual states for money, and the states, with their own problems, frequently refused to provide it.  Some of the states had begun to pay their debts in paper money that they printed, which had rapidly depreciated, driving gold and silver out of circulation.  That violated provisions of the peace treaty of 1783 with the British, and was losing all respect for the US from the European powers.  The British had refused to withdraw from forts on the US western frontier in retaliation, cutting off Americans from the lucrative fur trade.  

That was not all.  Having lost most of its trade with the British empire after independence, the new nation needed to conclude commercial treaties with other nations, but the Confederation required unanimous consent among the states to ratify any treaties, and differing interests meant that that was never forthcoming.  In the last years of the Confederation John Jay, acting as Secretary of State, caused a crisis by suggesting that the US might give up navigation rights on the Mississippi as part of a commercial treaty with Spain.  States were imposing tariffs on each other to raise their own revenue.  And last, but hardly least, public order was beginning to break down.  Trying to raise the money it needed, the Massachusetts legislature in 1786 had imposed several new taxes which farmers claimed that they could not pay.  Five western Massachusetts counties began Shay's rebellion, refusing to pay taxes and forcing the courts to adjourn rather than foreclose on indebted farms.  Rebels eventually formed military units and tried to seize the Springfield arsenal.  They were defeated, but the annual elections of 1787 produced a new legislature that gave the rioters much of what they wanted.  The leaders of the earlier revolution--Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, John Adams, and others--discussed these events in correspondence and agreed that they demanded changes in the government.  Led by Madison, they persuaded most of the states to send delegates to Philadelphia for the constitutional convention.

I came away from Klarman's book focused on one particular explanation of how the constitution turned out as it did.  The key players believed that the nation needed a much stronger central government to survive--a government with full taxing powers, the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, the power to coin money and define legal tender, and the capacity to negotiate and ratify treaties that the states and the population would have to observe.  In my opinion, they had correctly identified the key features of a state that could survive against both foreign and domestic threats.  They could only secure these provisions, however, by satisfying delegates who either feared that any strong central authority would become a tyranny, or worried that that new authority would benefit other parts of the country at the expense of their own.  Since for example southerners opposed tariffs because they thought they would hurt their agricultural exports while northerners wanted them to protect nascent industry and raise necessary money, it was impossible to please everyone.  The federalists (as they were already properly called well before their political party was formed)  got what they wanted above all by agreeing, after by far the longest and bitterest debates of the convention, to equal representation for large states and small in the Senate.  That critical concession, as we shall see, not only saved the convention itself, but also got the ratification process off to an excellent start, when several small states immediately approved the new document.  In my opinion, the leading federalists kept their focus where it needed to be: on the establishment of a strong central government for its own sake, as the sine qua non of the survival of the new nation.  They also had strong views about economic questions, about the desired extent of true democracy, and in some cases, about slavery, but only the economic questions, it seems to me, could really be compared in importance to the fundamental political ones that had led them to Philadelphia in the first place.

With respect to those economic questions, Klarman, I think, substantially vindicates the great 20th-century historian Charles A. Beard, who shocked the nation during the Progressive Era with his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.  In a key provision, Article I Section 10, the Constitution prohibited states from coining money, making anything but gold and silver legal tender for debts, or passing any law impairing the obligation of contracts, that is, arbitrarily reducing or eliminating debts. As Klarman notes, critics in the 1950s essentially refuted Beard's implied claim that the founders were trying above all to help themselves, since many of them held government securities which were only redeemed at face value thanks to the Constitution and the policies that Alexander Hamilton implemented under it.  But Klarman's book makes it very clear, it seems to me, that Article I Section 10 and other provisions were indeed designed to allow our already-capitalist economy to function, which inevitably meant, as Thomas Piketty demonstrated a decade ago, that it would tend to increase the wealth of the already wealthy.  Klarman does not ask whether the inflationary policies of some of the state governments could have worked in the long run--a question that goes far beyond the history he was trying to write--but he makes clear that many antifederalists continued to favor them and that their opposition had to be overcome to secure ratification, as it quite narrowly was.  The antifederalist argument in favor of inflation as opposed to "sound money" came up again more than a century later when agrarian interests called for "free silver," another inflationary strategy that doomed the Democratic Party to minority status when William Jennings Bryan ran on it in 1896.  Franklin Roosevelt did pursue different inflationary policies to battle the Depression, however, and the nation tolerated some inflation from the late 1940s through the 1970s, after which the Federal Reserve adopted draconian measures to stop it.  That, however, is another story.  Beard was right: key provisions of the Constitution favored dominant economic interests.  That may have been necessary, however, to create a functioning economy at all.

Klarman also demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that most of the key players had relatively little trust in the mass of the people and inserted many provisions that were designed to control their influence.  The states were routinely re-electing their governments every year, but the convention, after long arguments, settled on two-year terms for the House, six for the Senate, and four for the President.  They rejected forced rotation in office, which many states and the Confederacy had practiced.  A proposal to elect the president by direct popular vote lost by a vote of nine to one, and they created the electoral college.  Yet partly because so many citizens favored more democracy, many key issues remained unsettled and subject to decision by the voters themselves.  Many delegates favored property qualifications for voters and/or office holders, but since these varied so widely from state to state, the final text leaves the qualifications for voting for the House of Representatives up to the states. As a result, universal male suffrage became the default within a few decades.  (Klarman does not mention, I think, one of my favorite points: that there is still nothing in the Constitution to prevent property qualifications for voting, should a state decide to impose them.)    Nothing prevented state legislatures from turning the choice of presidential electors over to the voters either, and by 1860 every one of them but South Carolina had done so.  Delegates who did not want salaries for senators to ensure that they would be well-off men lost that battle, as well.  The framers may have distrusted the common people but the document that they wrote did not freeze them out from political influence for very long.

Not surprisingly in a book written in the 21st century, The Framer's Coup devotes a whole chapter to the issue of slavery.  Once again the author delivers the facts so thoroughly and clearly as to allow the reader to draw slightly different conclusions than he, which I did.

The whole revisionist onslaught portraying the United States as irretrievably racist from 1609 until the present depends upon denying reality in several periods of American history, including the 1780s.  The delegates and their constituents obviously held at least three very different opinions about that institution.  The northern states were in the midst of abolishing it--some of them gradually--and some of them regarded it as an unqualified evil that the Constitution must in no way endorse.  Slaveowners in the Carolinas and Georgia, on the other hand, were determined to protect this cornerstone of their economy to the maximum extent possible.  And in the upper south and mid-Atlantic, many, including prominent slaveowners such as Washington and Jefferson, regarded it as a regrettable evil which they hoped and believed would disappear with the passage of time.  In addition, even some of those who defended slavery had come to regard the shipment of new slaves from Africa as barbarous.  

Given these views, it is not surprising that the Constitution provided the Congress with the power to outlaw the importation of slaves--but only after 20 years had passed after the ratification of the Constitution.  Jefferson had the honor of recommending the outlaw of the trade to Congress and signing a measure that did just that, after a long debate, in 1808.  Only the spread of the cotton gin and the admission of Deep South states into the union, along with the growth of a new generation, turned many southern leaders into heated advocates for slavery and paved the way for the controversies that led eventually to the Civil War.

The infamous three-fifths clause, which allowed the slave states to count 3/5 of their slaves as part of their population when congressional seats were apportioned and direct taxes levied, was not, as so often claimed, an attempt to define black people as inferior beings.  The southern states wanted to count them all to increase their representation, and some northern delegates wanted to count only free persons.  Klarman shows that this debate was closely connected to another southern demand: that commercial legislation require a supermajority of perhaps two-thirds in Congress to pass, allowed the southern states to veto any unwelcome measures as they had under the Confederation.  They lost that battle but got the 3/5 clause.  The Constitution did require states to return "persons held to service or labor" to the states where their masters lived--a provision that applied to apprentices and indentured servants as well as slaves.  In addition, the federal power to suppress insurrections could apply to slave insurrections--but on p. 164 Klarman, scrupulous scholar that he is, tells us that no one ever brought up that possibility in Philadelphia, focusing instead on uprisings like Shays's Rebellion.

Two other facts, both brought out Klarman, cast significant light on the founders' view of slavery and its relation to the constitution.  First, while the delegates were sitting in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress, sitting in New York, passed the Northwest Ordinance, banning slavery in all the unorganized territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.  In addition, when the first Congress met under the Constitution, it passed that ordinance over again, leaving no doubt that the founders recognized a federal right to ban slavery from specified territories.  And secondly--and here is one point where I would have appreciated more elaboration--the northerners steadily and successfully resisted any attempt to get a specific endorsement of the institution of slavery into the Constitution, or even to refer to it by name.  That is why they resorted to circumlocutions--"persons held to service or labor" or "three-fifths of all other persons"--in provisions relating to it.  All this left slavery in the same position that it had already occupied in the British Empire:  legal only where local law and custom allowed it, as in the West Indies.   Despite their reservations about the political capacity of the common man, the framers did not want the word slave in their new charter of liberty.  Indeed, the original Constitution contains no racist or sexist language at all.  The recent biopic of Ruth Bader Ginsburg shows a Supreme Court justice pointing out to her, while arguing a case before the court, that "The word woman does not appear in the Constitution."  "Neither does the word freedom!" she replied, as if to discredit the founding document.  It would have been more telling, it seems to me, for the character as portrayed to reply accurately, "Neither does the word man!"  "Person" was invariably the word the Constitution used to refer to the citizens of the United States--a fittingly universal word if ever there was one.

And here is where I feel a difference of emphasis with Klarman.  "Finally," he writes in his last pages, "the Framers held certain values that are abhorrent to most Americans today.  Most of them accepted that human beings could be held as property, and they believed that African Americans and Native Americans were inferior in various ways to Caucasians.  None of them thought that women should enjoy full political or civil rights.  Most of them doubted that poor people should be permitted to vote or hold political office."  All of that is true, but I still want to credit them for not writing any of those beliefs into the document that they gave us and using universal language that others almost immediately began using to demand rights for the groups that did not yet enjoy them.  And one by one, from poor people to slaves to women, those groups secured them.

Klarman's account of the ratification process is very enlightening.  The Constitution itself prescribed that it be ratified by state conventions, not state legislatures, who were most unlikely to agree to a document that deprived them of so much power and influence.  I don't think he raises the argument--critical in my view--that this also deprived the southern states of the right of secession in 1860-1.  Their people had willingly transferred ultimate sovereignty from their state governments to the new federal one.  The ratification battle was long and difficult, and the final votes in the three largest states--Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts--were very close.  They all decided to ratify, partly because the countryside was underrepresented in the selection of delegates.  Indeed, the ratification process, like the debates over paper money, revealed the split between town and country that has played such a big role in different periods of US history, including our own.  “One can generalize to a certain extent about which sorts of people supported and opposed ratification," Klarman writes (p. 395). "City dwellers, across class lines, overwhelmingly endorsed the Constitution, while backwoodsmen largely opposed it. Small farmers whose land was encumbered with debt were vastly more likely to oppose ratification than were lawyers and merchants, and their objections were frequently stated in class-conscious terms. Westerners were substantially more likely to oppose ratification than were easterners, and northerners supported the Constitution more than southerners. Small states, as we shall see in chapter 6, produced very few Antifederalists relative to large states.”  Those who favored principle over local interest, those who wanted a sound capitalist economy, and those who favored what we now call globalization supported it.   A similar argument about the recent past, present and future is going on today.

Ever since the late sixties our political thought--especially in academia--has become more and more utopian.  Academics criticize every era, including our own, for falling so far short of the perfection that they can imagine.  The framers succeeded partly because they had no such illusions.  They had one overarching goal and knew they had to compromise to reach it.   They would not be surprised that it haws remained difficult to make it work.  

This is, once again, a great work of history--which, sadly, could no longer be written by a professional historian.  I have explained here many times that political history of all kinds has fallen out of favor, and celebratory political history about the United States is almost universally condemned among professionals.  Klarman may have been a history major in college--I do not know--but he has been a member of the Harvard Law School faculty for many years, and his research assistants were law students.  I thank him to trying, like myself, to keep a great tradition alive.  I was also shocked to find that The Framer's Coup did not rate a review in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or the New York Review of Books.  The brief review in the American Historical Review confined itself to Klarman's observations on the undemocratic beliefs of the founders.  He deserved better.

As long as governments are run by human beings, no document will ever guarantee us against the abuse of power.  Often the opponents of the Constitution identified dangers that have become all too real.  They successfully called for a Bill of Rights after ratification, and Madison, who had initially opposed one, agreed to it.  Even the Bill of Rights, however, has not, as Jefferson predicted, stopped the government from violating the peoples' rights in contentious times.  A few people noted that the Supreme Court's power to hear cases under the Constitution might make it the most powerful institution of all, and at one time or another Americans on all sides of the political spectrum have deeply resented that power--not least in 2024.  They feared that the president's powers over foreign affairs and the military might make him a dictator.  The framers, I believe, accepted these risks because they thought that the nation had to have a strong central government.  I believe they were correct.  As my last book tries to make clear, their new government accomplished extraordinary things over the next 225 years, and nothing they did prevents us from continuing down that path if we find the will to do so.