Speech to the Virginia ratifying Convention, Part XV: Governments of Dissimilar Structures

Before at last delving into the broader significance of Patrick Henry’s aforementioned predilection for manipulative – but nonetheless ingenious – rhetoric, I would beg my readers to indulge me just a few more examples of the kinds of tactics which he saw fit to deploy. I would say that their significance will be revealed before this final entry in the current series has concluded – and that is indeed the case – but it would approach somewhat closer to the truth for me to simply admit that I think they stand to make for an interesting discussion. In casting about for some means of securing a rhetorical victory over his opponents, Henry seized upon various and varied topics, the selection of which to some extent speaks to the prejudices and predilections which he believed his audience possessed. Thus, briefly, let us take a moment to reflect upon some of the things which one of the greatest orators in American history believed would capture the attention of his countrymen circa 1788.

Whereas it would become quickly much more common to hear an American statesman draw a comparison between his own government and that a foreign polity in an exclusively negative sense – indeed, Henry had himself already done so when briefly drawing attention to the sorry state of the contemporary House of Commons – the speech which the former Governor of Virginia delivered to his fellow delegates at their shared home state’s ratifying convention did contain a rare example of a positive comparison. That is to say, seeking to demonstrate the viability of a given principle or policy within the American context, Henry drew attention to a foreign example whose success he seemed to think spoke very well of the same. Specifically, eager as he was to establish that the union of American states as governed by the Articles of Confederation was perfectly adequate to the needs of the inhabitants thereof and that the proposed constitution was accordingly unnecessary, the subject of his oration turned to the subject of Switzerland. That country, he avowed,

Is a confederacy, consisting of dissimilar governments. This is an example which proves that governments of dissimilar structures may be confederated. That confederate republic has stood upwards of four hundred years; and, although several of the individual republics are democratic, and the rest are aristocratic, no evil has resulted from this dissimilarity; for they have braved all the power of France and Germany during that long period. The Swiss spirit, sir, has kept them together; they have encountered and overcome immense difficulties with patience and fortitude.

Broadly speaking, this was an accurate assessment. Switzerland, as it existed in 1788, was a confederacy of dissimilar governments possessed of only a skeletal national authority in the form of a delegated assembly called the Tagsatzung. Some of the republics, or cantons, were relatively democratic – like Uri, Schwyz, Glarus, and Appenzell – while others were dominated by wealthy landed patrician families or merchant guilds – Solothurn and Fribourg being of the former, Basel and Schaffhausen being of the latter. It was also true – remarkably so – that the Swiss had managed to resist numerous attempts at conquest between the 14^th and 16^th centuries by Austria, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, so successful were the Swiss in battle that the various cantons became the premier suppliers of mercenary soldiers to the Great Powers of Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries following the formal establishment of Swiss neutrality in 1647. Beyond these basic points of description, however, Henry’s evaluation grows increasingly tenuous. 

“No evil [,]” Henry asserted of the differing styles of administration practiced in the Swiss cantons, “Has resulted from this dissimilarity [.]” While there were instances which a student of Swiss history in 1788 could have pointed to that might have served to complicate this assessment – conflicts, namely, which occurred within certain republics over the nature and source of political authority – it was at least broadly true that the Swiss Confederacy had never succumbed to all-out civil war over any manner of political disagreement. That being said, it wasn’t true that Switzerland had never experienced internal conflicts of any kind. In addition to various peasant revolts which the combined cantonal governments worked to swiftly and brutally suppress, the Protestant Reformation brought sectarian violence to the Swiss cantons in the form of the Kappel Wars – single-day exchanges with occurred in 1529 and 1531, respectively – and the Villmergen Wars – months-long campaigns in 1656 and 1712 – both of which pitted the Catholic and Protestant republics against one another over which faction would dominate the internal affairs of the confederacy. While it accordingly remained true, as Henry had avowed, that “no evil had resulted” specifically from the differences in government between the various cantons, a significant amount of evil had nevertheless been the consequence of some differences. Indeed, though Henry was not wrong to cite the political system of the contemporary Swiss Confederacy as ostensibly conducive to – or at least not prejudicial towards – domestic harmony, it might likewise have been accurate to claim that this selfsame system of decentralized administration was not wholly immune of civil strife of any kind. The administrative structure of early modern Switzerland may not have caused the religious conflicts cited above, but nor did it serve in any way to prevent them.

Just so, though Henry claimed of Switzerland with some justification that, “The Swiss spirit […] has kept them together; they have encountered and overcome immense difficulties with patience and fortitude [,]” the specifics of Swiss history paint a far messier picture. It cannot be denied, of course, that the Swiss managed to field some of the most formidable fighting men in Europe during the early modern period (circa 1500 to 1800), defeated better trained, better equipped, and numerically superior armies on many occasions, and managed to carve out a prominent space for themselves in European geopolitics amidst the regional machinations of larger and ostensibly much more powerful empires. That being said, it would seem as accurate to affirm that the various cantons accomplished these feats because of the threats they faced externally as it would be to claim that some indefinable “Swiss spirit” had allowed them to do so in spite of those threats. The Swiss Confederacy, at its heart, was a mutual defensive pact whose signatories shared the common objective of maintaining their administrative autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire against the encroachments of Hapsburg Austria. Without the threat of the Hapsburgs, however, or the Holy Roman Empire, or the French, or the Burgundians, the cantons arguably would not have had all that much reason to band together. They were possessed of different administrative traditions, and different customs, and even spoke different languages. All that they shared, fundamentally, was a desire to remain independent of Hapsburg – and later Imperial – hegemony. The civil wars brought on by the Reformation made this especially clear. Absent an external threat to their common desire for autonomy, the Swiss Confederacy showed itself to be as susceptible as any political community to petty internal divisions. To put it another way, the Swiss Confederacy as much owed its existence to the aggressive ambitions of the House Hapsburg as the Hapsburgs actively threatened that existence. If there was such a thing as “Swiss spirit,” it came about after the fact in response to being near-constantly besieged and consisted of only a bare skeleton of national identity. Certainly, it hadn’t been enough to stop Swiss people of different religious faiths from trying to kill each other on several occasions. And certainly it did very little to endear the peasants living in the various rural cantons to their feudal overlords. What good, then, was this spirit? Or did it even exist?

Bearing all of this in mind, it might seem rather odd for Patrick Henry to have chosen Switzerland as a shining example of what the United States of America could have been if it remained under the auspices of the Articles of Confederation. As aforementioned, the Swiss Confederacy was the product of mutual self-interest more than a common adherence to a particular strand of political philosophy on the part of the Swiss people. Indeed, there wasn’t really a “Swiss people,” even as late as the 1780s. Culture, language, government, and religion differed – sometimes quite drastically – on a canton-by-canton basis, and internal conflicts were far from unheard of over the relative balance of power between one faction and another or one class and another. All that being said, however – and arguably alongside the Dutch Republic – the Swiss Confederacy was probably more like the American republic than any other country in the 18^th century world. Though there were aristocratic elements to certain segments of Swiss society, they were perhaps no more patrician – in terms of their wealth and prestige – than the planter class that then dominated the American south. Just so, the Swiss cantons and the American states were each adamantly autonomous, both from one another and from their respective national governments. And there was certainly a valid comparison to be made between Congress and the Tagsatzung, in as much as both were delegated assemblies whose domestic authority was formally and functionally very limited.

There were still major, glaring differences, of course. Switzerland was only partly republican, was in other ways still very feudal, had come into existence as a defensive necessity, and had expanded from three cantons to thirteen via conquest and alliance-making. But in the world of the late 18^th century, one could not afford to be too picky about such things. Casting about for some manner of contemporary example that might possibly have aided him in making a case in favor of the Articles of Confederation and the government that they framed, Switzerland was likely about as close as Patrick Henry could likely have hoped to get. In addition to giving evidence of the sheer elasticity of Henry’s reasoning – embodied by the number of otherwise disqualifying facts he endeavored to gloss over on the way to making his argument – this would also seem to point to a relatively obvious but nonetheless extremely important point about the contemporary American republic. Though there was at least one other nation in existence in 1788 that could accurately claim the title of republic – the aforementioned Dutch Republic, which was also highly feudal in character – and though the Swiss Confederacy did share a number of basic traits with the United States of America, in truth there wasn’t really anything quite like it. There had been revolutions before, in the history of the world, and nations had come into being by breaking away from other nations. Switzerland arguably fitted the latter description; the Dutch Republic most certainly did. But the reasoning behind the American Revolution, the manner by which it was accomplished, and the political outcome that resulted set the United States of American firmly apart from any other nation that then existed or had existed.

Granted, the colonies of British America were in some sense attempting to assert their existing rights and privileges in a manner very similar to that which the Swiss cantons adopted vis-à-vis the House of Hapsburg. But then, rather than preserve the status quo for which they had fought after succeeding in combat – which the Swiss very much did, to the point of actively quashing internal threats to the same – the newly-minted American states proceeded to question and reassess a great many of the basic assumptions under which they had but recently labored. Statesmen in Virginia, and Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and New York proceeded to write new constitutions, creating new institutions, and new offices, and new procedures, and new truths about how and why the American people would be governed. Much of what remained was still heavily influenced by the precepts of the English Common Law and the principles embedded in the Bills of Rights (1689) and the Magna Carta (1215), to be sure, but much else was also especially novel. A number of states came to possess chief executives that were chosen by the general electorate. Several more erected legislatures that were intended to wholly dominate the administration thereof. At least one did away with the concept of an executive altogether. And the American national government behaved like no other in the world. The Tagsatzung, as mentioned previously, was not at all unlike Congress in form and function, but there the similarities between the American republic and the Swiss Confederacy just about ended.

There was, in consequence, no roadmap that the American republic could reliably follow in 1788. There were no guarantees, no running the odds, and nothing more solid to count on than the industry and the ingenuity of the American people. For some statesmen, no doubt, this was an exciting proposition. Having cast off the yoke of a conservative, aristocratic empire, the American states were now free to remake themselves in accordance with the kinds of principles which even the most liberal European states could pay heed to only in part. Others, however, were not so sanguine, and perceived in the uniqueness of the American situation a great and abiding risk of failure. Who could say what would work and what wouldn’t? Whether society would respond positively to the changes being wrought or reject them catastrophically? What single decision could possibly be made that might not result in disaster? These were sobering thoughts, to be sure, and far from unreasonable. Resort might accordingly have been made to tradition, to custom, and to the overwhelming example of history. Strong central authority was a proven source of stability, after all. For that matter, so was aristocracy. By adopting these things, even in part, the United States of America could conceivably have charted a much safer path forward than would likely have been the case under the auspices of an exceedingly decentralized national administration. Liberty was all well and good, of course, but what was the point if the nation that attempted to preserve it began to fall apart at the seams?

This, no doubt, is a question that Patrick Henry himself was made to confront upon the submission of the proposed constitution to the various American states at the end of 1787. Clearly, faced with an uncertain future and unproven institutions, some portion of the American political class had sought solace in attempting to emulate the successful centralized models of government being practiced in contemporary Europe. How else could one explain the similarities between the framework described by the proposed constitution and the monarchical governments of France, and Spain, and Great Britain? From a unicameral legislature with no executive, no judiciary, and minimal domestic authority, the Framers were proposing to transform the government of the United States of America into a tripartite arrangement with a strong, king-like executive, a bicameral legislature with a pseudo-aristocratic upper house, and a national judiciary with absolute appellate jurisdiction. Regardless of the dangers that such systems and institutions represented, some portion of the American population evidently felt that there was more to fear from proceeding as they had been under the Articles of Confederation. It might be taken for a given that Patrick Henry strongly disagreed with this assessment, though it would seem far less obvious what he could have offered by way of an alternative model. Switzerland, as aforementioned, was about as near as he could get. Yes, the Swiss Confederacy had been formed under a very different set of circumstances than had the United States of America. And the relationships between the cantons weren’t much like the relationships between the states, and Swiss history – awash as it was with peasant revolts, commercial rivalries, and religious strife – arguably didn’t do much to recommend the confederal form of government. But it was something.

A more honest approach – one might say a more courageous one – would surely have been to respond to the fears and trepidations which the proposed constitution represented by calling upon the American people to rise once more to the occasion as they had done in the 1760s and 1770s when faced with seemingly insurmountable adversity. Indeed, Henry seemed to do just that in other sections of the same oration being presently examined. “It was but yesterday,” he had earlier remarked, “When our enemies marched in triumph through our country. Yet the people of this country could not be appalled by their pompous armaments: they stopped their career, and victoriously captured them. Where is the peril, now, compared to that?” Henry’s evident need to seek some foreign example to counter that which had arguably influenced the Framers would thus seem yet more curious. Having established himself as a great believer in the strength, the endurance, and the ingenuity of the American spirit – “That spirit [,]” he declared, “Which has enabled us to surmount the greatest difficulties” – why not rely solely on a reaffirmation of the same? The likeliest answer would seem to stem from Henry’s aforementioned reliance on rhetorical chicanery. There was just enough truth in what he claimed about Switzerland, and just enough alike between that country and the United States of America, for him to claim victory in the eyes of the uninitiated and the credulous. Most Americans in 1788 likely knew very little of the history of the Swiss Confederacy, its complexities and its contradictions. Perhaps Henry was himself among them. But what they almost certainly did know was what he had cited explicitly: the Swiss were decentralized, they were peaceful, they had successfully defended themselves against the encroachments of vast empires, and they had managed to endure independently for centuries. So long as they acknowledged these things to be true, the finer details didn’t really matter.

Speech to the Virginia ratifying Convention, Part XIV: The Rights of the Whole of the People

While there was yet some worth in this among Henry’s favored rhetorical techniques – in that confrontation is sometimes necessary in a debate in order to break an impasse or sort out the most basic terms of agreement and disagreement – there is conversely very little that can be said in favor of this same orator’s apparent propensity to mischaracterize the truth. This habit made itself known in several forms across the length of his address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, often in an attempt to supplement an otherwise reasonable argument that had no need of being bolstered. In some cases, the attempt was made to present an ostensibly sensible-sounding fact – one which Henry’s cohorts would likely have accepted without a second thought – whose veracity was in reality almost impossible to confirm. By thus relying on the ignorance of his audience – or their lack of resources, as the case may be – Henry was able to pass off a host of false assertions as though they were the plain and simple truth. In other cases, relying perhaps instead on the tension of the moment, or the suspicion or the pride of his audience, he attempted to give the same presentation to more obvious falsehoods. “Don’t pay attention to what my opponents are saying,” Henry was effectively declaring with the latter technique, “Because you and I know what’s really going on.” The former Governor of Virginia thus sought to establish himself as a purveyor of hidden truths and the only trustworthy participant in a conversation dominated by liars and artificers.

            It was all hogwash, of course – to borrow a charming colloquialism – but cunning hogwash all the same. Consider, by way of example, an assertion which Henry made during his critical examination of the amending formula described by the proposed constitution. As mentioned previously, Henry was alarming by how few people would have actually been required to deny an amendment for it to fail to achieve the force of law, thus essentially placing the fate of the Constitution in the hands of a small minority of the general population. “If, sir,” he lamented accordingly, “Amendments are left to the twentieth, or tenth part of the people of America, your liberty is gone forever.” As contemporary figures well affirm, this represented a perfectly legitimate concern – if a statistically unlikely one – and Henry was by no means behaving in a suspect fashion by attempting to alert his countrymen to the same. But then, for whatever reason, he felt the need to draw a comparison. “We have heard,” he continued,

That there is a great deal of bribery practised in the House of Commons, in England, and that many of the members raise themselves to preferments by selling the rights of the whole of the people. But, sir, the tenth part of that body cannot continue oppressions on the rest of the people. English liberty is, in this case, on a firmer foundation than American liberty.

There was some truth to this assertion, of course. The contemporary House of Commons was notoriously – almost comically – corrupt, shot through with procedural inconsistencies and rife with cronyism and entrenched venality. Whether a given individual could vote or stand for election depended on where in Great Britain they could claim to reside, electoral regulations were a confused and contradictory muddle, and a number of seats in Parliament were the exclusive possession of wealthy patrons who made a practice of either selling the right of election or bestowing the office on a favored friend or relative. Thus, as Henry rightly observed, did many members, “Raise themselves to preferments by selling the rights of the whole of the people.”

But the former Governor of Virginia didn’t stop at merely observing the sorry state of late 18th century British democracy. “But, sir,” he instead went on to say, “The tenth part of that body cannot continue oppressions on the rest of the people.” Granting that the figure of “one tenth” was meant by Henry to form a rhetorical parallel with the issues he had previously cited with the aforementioned amending formula, the claim itself had no basis in fact. Neither Henry, nor any of his countrymen, nor likely anyone in Britain with even an expert knowledge of the deficiencies of the contemporary House of Commons could have said for certain how many seats therein were subject to endemic corruption, what effect their presence had on the ability of the voting public to see their will translated into legislation, or what ratio of corrupt to non-corrupt ridings would have tipped the balance in favor of the former. Such information simply wasn’t available in the 1780s, in no small part because no one was particularly interested in collecting it on a large enough scale to form any actionable conclusions.

This isn’t to say, mind, that the topic of reform had never before entered into Britain’s national political discourse. The adoption of universal suffrage – along with a great many other similarly audacious proposals – had been passionately debated during the waning years of the English Civil War (1642-1651), particularly by such factions of the Parliamentary army as believed it essential while they yet controlled the reins of power to “level” as much of British society as substantively possible. While the emergence of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) as de facto sovereign of the English Commonwealth in the early 1650s effectively dashed any such hopes in the immediate, the state of corruption in the House of Commons remained troubling enough to some portion of the British political establishment that the issue reared its head again in the 1760s at the behest of William Pitt the Elder (1708-1778) and in the 1780s at the hands of William Pitt the Younger (1759-1806). Sincere though this father and son duo most certainly was to see the so-called “people’s house” reformed to the point where it might actually be said to reflect the will of the general British public, however, both men faced impossibly long odds. Pitt the Elder, perhaps because he had himself been first sent to Parliament as the Member for Old Sarum – arguably the most “rotten” seat in all of Britain, controlled at that time by the Pitt family of Boconnoc, Cornwall – and perhaps in recognition of the fact that there were many more men of influence who had arrived in the House of Commons by the same means, declined to suggest the elimination of the corrupted boroughs in question. Instead, hoping to counterbalance what he regarded as the detrimental influence of the borough ridings – a number of which, because of the way that they allocated votes, were horrendously unrepresentative – by adding an additional seat to each of the county ridings. Unsurprisingly, this proposal met with significant resistance. Those in possession of borough ridings did not take well to the notion that their influence needed to be actively decreased. Others held that giving more power to the landed gentry who dominated the county ridings would do little to counteract the tendency of Parliament to become a tool in the hands of an interested few. The proposal accordingly failed to generate even token legislation, and the issue of reform resumed its accustomed dormancy.

Pitt the Younger, though more successful – and perhaps more tenacious – than his father at getting the prospect of reforming the House of Commons a formal public hearing, likewise failed to achieve even the modest program of reform which he believed it wisest to pursue. Attempting initially, as a backbencher, to resurrect his father’s proposal – an effort which, though it did come to a vote, ultimately went down to defeat to the tune of 140 against – Pitt next proceeded as Prime Minister to introduce a far more ambitious program in 1785 that would have eliminated the representation of thirty-six rotten boroughs while also slightly extending the electoral franchise in all that remained. While this latter effort represented by far the most wide-ranging bid to alter the essential composition of the House of Commons since the 1640s – a testament, to be sure, to the political imagination of its author – it was perhaps for this exact reason that it could not but have met with eventual defeat. Though 174 Members of Parliament voted in its favor, 248 voted against. For the remainder of his term in office – the first stint of which lasted from 1783 to 1801 – Pitt the Younger declined to raise any further discussion of reforming the House of Commons.

The issue of Parliamentary corruption having been essentially settled in Britain in 1786 for at least the next forty years – until the first rumblings of the debate which would lead to the passage of the Reform Act of 1832 – it would seem audacious indeed for Patrick Henry to claim in 1788 to possess anything like a deep and precise knowledge of the effects and significance thereof. The events which finally led to the first successful act of legislative reform in British history took place over a period of several years in the early 1830s, during which time a great deal of information had to be gathered and collated so as to provide the authors of the bill in question with a set of precise figures and proposals to be presented to their fellow MPs. Only by the end of this process, therefore, could anyone on Earth truly claim to know with a certainly how and to what extent the existence of endemic corruption in the House of Commons had thus far affected the business of Parliament. In the end, the terms of the Reform Act mandated the total abolition of fifty-six boroughs, the reduction of a further thirty from two seats in the House to one, and the creation of a further one hundred and thirty seats divided among a number of otherwise unrepresented or underrepresented counties and towns across England and Wales. Recalling that Pitt the Younger’s 1785 plan called for the abolition of only thirty-six boroughs, one is forced to wonder at the nature of the discrepancy. Where his standards less stringent than those of his eventual successors? Did he consciously restrain his attentions to only the worst cases so as not to lose potential allies? Or did he simply lack the information that the later Reform Act proponents ultimately had several years to gather and analyze? Likely the answer embodies some combination of each of these factors. Sincere though he surely was, Pitt the Younger also doubtless possessed canny enough political instincts to know how far he could push a particular measure before it lost even a hope of success. And he almost definitely possessed less and spottier information than would his counterparts some four decades later.

Bearing all of this in mind, it would once again seem eminently bizarre for Patrick Henry, some two years after Pitt the Younger’s last effort at Parliamentary reform failed and on the entire other side of the world, to speak with evident authority as to the nature and implications of political corruption in the contemporary House of Commons. One-tenth of that body, he said, could not “continue oppressions on the rest of the people.” But how could he possibly have known that? On what data did he base this statement? Maybe one tenth of the sitting members were exactly enough to capture and hold the initiative of Parliament, particularly if the members in question belonged to particularly influential families or factions. Or perhaps, in a negative sense, one tenth of the sitting MPs could introduce enough delay and sow enough chaos as to stymie the passage of otherwise salutary legislation. Indeed, one tenth may have been more than enough, not that the figure itself had any significance beyond what Henry gave it. By the reckoning of the authors of the aforementioned Reform Act of 1832 – accepting, of course, that the final terms of said act represented a compromise – one hundred and forty-three total seats were abolished. As a percentage of the total number of seats then allocated in Parliament – that being, as of 1831, six hundred and fifty-eight – this would amount to just under twenty-two percent. Affirming, once again, that this figure likely represents the most accurate contemporary understanding of the depth of corruption within the House of Commons, Henry’s citation of one tenth or ten percent would appear almost wholly nonsensical. That is to say, even if a corrupt ten percent of the sitting members in the lower house of Parliament could not, as Henry said, “continue oppressions on the rest of the people,” the actual figure as of 1788 was likely closer to double that.

Notwithstanding his need to quote a figure that had no particular connection to reality, Henry’s comparison of the corrupt cohort within the contemporary House of Commons to the bare minimum assortment of states necessary to block an amendment under the formula described by the proposed constitution was on its own merits fundamentally flawed. For one thing, the Parliament of Great Britain was a body which met constantly – though not perpetually – over the course of its term of existence between one election and another. Legislation was considered, and read, and debated, and voted upon, all of which provided the members sent from “rotten” constituencies any number of opportunities to exert their influence over the business of government. The tenth percentage of the American population of which Henry expressed his especial dread represented a comparative abstraction. He was not referring to ten percent of the membership of the House of Representatives, or ten percent of the Senate, or ten percent of the state legislatures, or even ten percent of the men elected to and seated therein. What he claimed to fear was rather that ten percent of the total population of the United States of America whose elected representatives in the state legislatures could defeat a proposed amendment to the Constitution by withholding ratification. The figure itself, it bears recalling, was not wrong. The delegates of one tenth of the American population could in fact stymie the passage of an otherwise successful amendment. This was, however, an exceptionally unlikely outcome given the arrangement of states whose legislators would need to find common cause. It was also preconditioned by the need for a proposed amendment to secure a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. As this latter requirement represented, by design, a steep hill for any proposal to surmount it was thus also quite unlikely on any given day that the aforementioned alliance of state lawmakers would even be given the chance to flex their obstructionist muscles.

Not only did Parliament, by comparison, meet multiple times a year, every year, but that same body possessed far greater constitutional authority than even its closest counterpart in the proposed United States Congress. As mentioned above, alterations to the text of the United States Constitution would need to pass through a complex – and theoretically quite lengthy – process of approval before finally being implemented. After first securing the agreement of either two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate or a simple majority of the state delegations in a national convention called in response to the petition of two-thirds of the state legislatures, the amendment in question would then require the further ratification of three-fourths of the total number of state legislatures or of three-fourths of the total number of conventions called by the same for the purpose of ratification. In theory and in practice, the need to follow such procedures introduced a great deal of delay into the process of altering the United States Constitution and ensured that no one body or constituency could claim exclusive control. Notwithstanding the 27^th Amendment – a historical oddity, being one of the first proposed and the last ratified – many of the successful articles in question have experienced lengthy gestation periods between being approved by Congress and validated by the states. The first parcel of ten amendments, for example, collectively known as the Bill of Rights, received the requisite congressional approval on September 25^th, 1789 – seven months into the first session of Congress – and was fully ratified over two years later on December 15^th, 1791. While other amendments have enjoyed much shorter intervals between passage in Congress and ratification by the states – the 26^th claiming the briefest yet at a scant one hundred days – many more clock in at over a year, or over two years, or even in excess of three years. In consequence, amidst all of this time and all of these procedures, it would seem fair to describe amendments to the proposed constitution as both an uncommon occurrence and one whose accomplishment entails a great many opportunities for second thoughts and careful scrutiny.

This is eminently not the case as regards the British Constitution. Being an unwritten document – if such a thing can be said to exist – the constitution of Great Britain essentially comprises every law in force at a given moment within the legal confines of that selfsame nation. The main pillars of the British Constitution are generally held to include the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), the Bill of Rights (1689), and the Act of Union (1707), though in truth any piece of legislation granted approval by Parliament – or indeed any court ruling which determines how legislation is executed – can be said to form a part of the broader constitutional framework. Whereas the United States Constitution represents a singular, integral, codified text, the British Constitution thereby exists as something more like a centuries-old accretion of acts, and rulings, and principles from which the structure and authority of the British government is customarily derived. This undeniably allows for a great deal of flexibility, there being no formal limit upon what Parliament can or cannot do within its particular sphere save whatever laws continue to be in force that it cannot find the consensus to alter. At the same time, however, it also means that any session of Parliament can alter the “Constitution” without special authority and as rapidly as a majority can be assembled. If the Commons and the Lords determined – after much debate, no doubt – to repeal the terms of the Bill of Rights, for example, they could absolutely do so. It would be a terribly foolish thing to attempt, the Bill having served for centuries as a guarantee of Parliament’s independence against the interference of the Crown. All the same, it would be entirely within their power to accomplish.

Bearing this fact in mind, the approximately twenty percent of the membership of the House of Commons whose seats, as of the turn of the 19^th century, were owed directly to the mechanism of political corruption inarguably possessed a far greater influence over the character of the British Constitution than did their American counterparts as described by Patrick Henry. Granting, of course, that this selfsame cohort of MPs sent from the various rotten boroughs were unlikely to share a common objective – and were thus unlikely to bring their full, collective strength to bear upon or against a given initiative – their presence as Members of Parliament placed them far closer to the reins of power than the obstructionists that Henry attempted to identify. The latter being the various state legislators who together represented one-tenth of the total population of the American republic, their ability to exert any effect at all upon the relevant constitutional status quo would be wholly contingent upon the passage of amendments through the aforementioned first step of a codified two-step procedure. And even in the event that a proposed amendment was successfully submitted to the states – an outcome which, between 1789 and 1992, occurred on average about once every thirteen years – the offending ten percent would be so scattered among small and dissimilar states as to render a convergence of opinion and action practically impossible. The rotten MPs, while similarly unlikely to cooperate, would enjoy a great many more chances to do so and could act far more directly upon the primary object in question. Henry’s claim, therefore, that, “English liberty is, in this case, on a firmer foundation than American liberty [,]” would appear to be wholly unfounded. 

 It remains something of an open question whether Henry knew this to be the case or not. As mentioned above, likely no one on Earth in 1788 could have spoken with certainty as to the relative level and influence of corruption within the contemporary British House of Commons. The relevant information simply hadn’t been gathered, and indeed wouldn’t be for some forty years on. What was known, however, as something of a truism on both sides of the Atlantic was that the House of Commons as it then existed was very, very corrupt. People knew what a rotten borough was, and that certain wealthy families essentially owned them, and that the resulting seats in Parliament were little more than aristocratic possessions. In Britain itself, suspicion of this arrangement and desire for reform most certainly did exist as of the waning decades of the 18^th century, though it tended to remain confined to certain isolated factions within the larger proto-party structure. In the United States, however, whose inhabitants had but recently settled a successful war for independence from the authority of Parliament and the Crown, belief in the corruption of the House of Commons was doubtless much closer to being universal. Having just witnessed – and suffered at the hands of – what to their eyes appeared to be a determined impulse within Parliament towards unprincipled self-interest, the late 18^th century inhabitants of the United States of America had no particular reason to believe that the House of Commons wasn’t tremendously, overwhelmingly, irredeemably corrupt. Not only would this perception have afforded with their understanding of why the events of the 1760s and 1770s transpired as they did – Parliament having been taken over by a coterie of petty gentry and greedy financiers – but it would also have served to buttress their emerging national self-image. Whereas everybody knew that Great Britain was plagued by endemic corruption, they could conceivably begin to tell themselves, the United States was possessed of a political culture that prized liberty, integrity, and justice above all else.

Herein Patrick Henry’s rhetorical genius was able to spring into action. If everybody “knew” that the House of Commons was horrendously corrupt despite a complete absence of solid data as to the nature and extent of the problem, it was possible in the course of a given debate to say just about anything that was generally consistent with the theme thereof without fear of being called into question. Parliamentary corruption could thus fairly be said to exist, within the context of late 18^th century American political discourse, as a fixed point of knowledge. It was a cliché, a maxim, a piece of received wisdom; its validity was taken almost entirely for granted in spite of there being little in the way of hard data to back it up. Depending on the nature of the debate and its participants, of course, someone might conceivably call into question the extent to which such claims were really true. But just as its proponents couldn’t rigorously support the claim, neither could its detractors offer much evidence to the contrary. For the purposes of Patrick Henry – whose aim, again, was to convince his fellow delegates to the Virginia Ratifying Convention that the proposed constitution was too dangerous to be adopted – this vague but immutable sense of validity was arguably the key. If every member of his audience believed or had heard tell that the British House of Commons was notoriously corrupt and none of them could prove conclusively that this wasn’t the case, then what might be the effect of asserting that this selfsame House of Commons in fact offered greater security to the liberties of the British people than did the proposed constitution to those of their American counterparts? What counter might Henry’s opponents possibly have offered?

Doubtless their first instinct would have been to affirm that the proposed constitution was not near so poorly designed as to permit the kind of lopsided distribution of authority for which the contemporary House of Commons had in America become notorious. There could be no comparison, they might fairly have claimed, between the unlikeliest outcome of the amending formula and the effects of the everyday corruption implied by the very existence of the rotten boroughs, and it was plainly disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Sound though this argument would have been, however, it had also yet to be proven or disproven. Likely the supporters of the proposed constitution were right and the scenario that Henry forecasted was so improbable as to be practically meaningless. But, then again, perhaps Henry was right and the ability of so small a proportion of the population to stymie the passage of potentially needful amendments would in time spell the downfall of liberty in the American republic. Only time, as it were, would tell for certain. Casting about for alternative arguments, Henry’s opponents would likely have been at a loss to lay hands on anything more solid.

They might have attempted to affirm that the House of Commons was not as corrupt as all that, the purpose of which would have been to thereby insinuate that the proposed constitution was more secure than Henry had described. Having to push against the overwhelming weight of popular opinion would have made this an especially undesirable approach, however, and one which the aforementioned paucity of hard data would have rendered yet more difficult in turn. Supporters of the proposed constitution might also have avowed that the House of Commons was in fact far more corrupt than Henry indicated and that the peculiarities of the amending formula – while indeed problematic in theory – were in practice much less likely to obstruct the realization of the general public good than was the persistent ability of a moneyed few to buy and sell seats in Parliament. While this would surely have embodied a more outwardly favorable approach, it would also have run up against the aforementioned absence of verifiable information. How, in short, could one determine in 1788 precisely the degree to which the House of Commons was corrupt? All that Henry had said was, “We have heard that there is a great deal of bribery practiced in the House of Commons, in England, and that many of the members raise themselves to preferments by selling the rights of the whole of the people.” In order to convincingly argue that this represented an understatement of fact, one would have ideally had to bring to bear such definite figures as would render the question wholly unequivocal. It would not do to simply say, “Actually, things are much worse.” Rather, one ought to have explained how much worse and by what means. Since this would have proven next to impossible to accomplish – absent the time and resources necessary to complete an exhaustive survey of the rotten boroughs and the effects of their influence – this counterargument to Henry’s decidedly vague assertion would likewise have availed his opponents of little advantage.

Perhaps the most accurate response to Henry’s claim would have been to agree in principle that the contemporary House of Commons was very corrupt and that the amending formula described by the proposed constitution was not without its flaws while also pointedly affirming that these two truths bore little if any relation to one another. The corruption represented by the existence of the rotten boroughs stemmed from a general resistance within contemporary British political culture to institutional reform and to the expansion of the electoral franchise. The deficiencies of the amending formula – including its theoretical vulnerability to minority control – were conversely the unintended but perhaps inevitable consequences of attempting to describe a practical system of constitutional modification which struck a balance between stability and openness. Both of these embodied potential problems for the respective political frameworks of which they were a part. But they were problems of a fundamentally different nature; comparing them directly could yield but little of philosophical value.

For one of Henry’s opponents in the Virginia Ratifying Convention to have attempted to affirm this point, however, would arguably have been to commit an even worse tactical blunder than embodied by the first two approaches here described. Admitting that either of the points which Henry had attempted to make was in any sense true would have been tantamount, rhetorically, to admitting defeat. By the terms of debate which the former Governor of Virginia had set out, the only options available to his audience were either to agree with his assertions or deny them outright. There could be no quibbling about details, no pointing to specifics, for neither would have helped to avoid the trap that Henry had set. Speaking just enough truth to maneuver his opponents into admitting that he was in some capacity correct, he could then swiftly claim victory and dismiss all else that was said. Harnessing popular opinion – by, for example, trying an argument against the proposed constitution to the common perception of corruption within the British House of Commons – made this kind of tactic yet easier to deploy.

Such was the admitted genius – one might even fairly say the deviousness – of Patrick Henry within the realm of public debate. It didn’t matter, under the rules he had set for himself, that he tended to make gross generalizations, or treat assumption as though they were facts, or practice a “winner take all” style of argument wherein complexity had no place. So long as he could claim to have won – by forcing his opponents to grant any part of his premise or to wrestle their way out of the logical frameworks he had constructed – the actual substance of his arguments mattered very little. What did matter were the things for which Henry claimed to stand. As he made clear quite often over the course of his oration before the assembled delegates of the Virginia Ratifying Convention, he was a firm believer in the absolute sovereignty of the American states. He believed in American liberty first, and the American Union second. He thought it paramount that the American people refuse to acquiesce to any form of government that did not explicitly recognize their fundamental natural rights. And he held it to be an absolute truth that human beings simply weren’t built to voluntarily relinquish whatever power came into their possession. It was wholly inconsequential that almost none of the arguments which Henry offered alongside these principles in any way served as proof of their essential validity. The important thing was that Henry consistently “beat” his opponents. If he was right, and he believed “x,” “y,” and “z,” then it followed by a kind of transitive property that “x,” “y,” and “z” must also be right. Logically, of course, this kind of equation is exceedingly specious. Nevertheless, it makes perfect rhetorical sense, and Patrick Henry was nothing if not an undisputed master of the rhetorical arts.       

Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part XIII: The Greatest of all Earthly Blessings

Probably the most characteristic quality of Patrick Henry’s address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention in the summer of 1788 – indeed, the most characteristic qualify of any of Henry’s many public orations – was the degree to which the former Governor of Virginia more or less set logic aside and instead gave vent to such soaring flights of rhetoric as were bound to forcefully strike the ears of his listeners. Capable though he was of incisive reasoning and prosecutorial rigor, Henry’s career as a public servant had been largely built upon his ability to rouse the sentiments of his countrymen rather than engage their critical faculties, and his performance during the debate over the ratification of the proposed constitution did not stray much at all from this pattern. The origins of this tendency, by all accounts, were entirely sincere. Though born to a devoutly Anglican father, and a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church himself, young Henry was exposed by his mother to the emotionally-charged preaching of some of the Presbyterian ministers then working their way across the colonies amidst the continent-wide Protestant religious revival known to later generations as the First Great Awakening (1730-1755). One of these evangelists in particular, Delaware-born Samuel Davies (1723-1761), preached specifically in Hanover County between 1748 and 1759 and was reported by Henry as a major influence upon his later rhetorical predilections. In addition to absorbing from Davies a deep respect for the liberty of the individual as a moral being, he also seemed to internalize the preacher’s evident conviction that the most effective way to reach people was by combining appeals to reason with a stirring emotional dialogue.

While this particular style of oration was undoubtedly effective – feelings, as a rule, being much harder to dismiss than ideas – and was wielded by figures like Davies with honesty and passion, it could very easily become something of a crutch if misapplied or indulged in carelessly. Patrick Henry, to be sure, made exceedingly effective use of emotional appeals as a part of his rhetoric during the years between 1763 (the Parson’s Cause) and 1779 (the end of his first term as Governor of Virginia). Accusing George III (1738-1820) of tyranny for vetoing the Two Penny Act  in – the purpose of which was to provide the government of Virginia with a degree of economic relief during a period of poor tobacco harvests – was perhaps the slightest bit excessive, but the general thrust of Henry’s argument was nonetheless entirely sound. Notwithstanding the British monarch’s formal position as legal sovereign of the Province of Virginia, the legislature thereof retained a great deal of functional autonomy, up to and including the passage of laws requiring only the assent of the appointed royal governor. Just so, while it remains far from certain that Henry would truly rather have died than submit to the heavy-handed authority of the British Crown in spite of his assertion to the contrary in a speech delivered in Richmond in March of 1775, the position for which he was advocating was not the least bit hysterical or absurd. The Crown and Parliament alike had shown themselves to be increasingly resolved to confront the discontent yet roiling the Thirteen Colonies – in the form of riots, protests, boycotts, and intercolonial cooperation – with military force. Thus confronted with the true face of “British liberty” in the form of bayonets and economic blockades, Henry was wholly justified in asking of his countrymen whether it was worth any longer remaining loyal to a government that treated its constituents with compassion and forbearance only as long as they never questioned the rightness of its actions.

By deploying arguments such as these where and when he did, Henry was likely able to spur more people to action on some of the most important issues of the day than would have been the case if he had relied on reason alone. No doubt many of those present at the Hanover County courthouse in October, 1763 who heard Henry speak knew on some level that vetoing the Two Penny Act did not really make the reigning British sovereign a tyrant. Julius Caesar (100-44 BC), who effectively trampled upon the laws and customs of the Roman Republic by placing himself above the influence of the Senate, the magistrates, and the Roman people, was a tyrant. George III was simply a constitutional monarch who was attempting to take advantage of the fact that the government of distant Virginia presented less of a threat to his authority than that of Parliament. In the moment, however, this fact seemed doubtless to matter less than the implication that Henry was attempting to promote, namely that that the rights of the people of Virginia were being abrogated by an authority which they had not chosen and which they could not control. If exaggeration helped to get this point across with greater force, it was arguably an excusable transgression. People are sometimes slow to act if the problem they are being confronted with remains confined to the realm of intellectual abstraction. Often as not, they need to feel scared, or angry, or prideful, or disturbed before they begin to move toward a viable solution.

There would seem to be a limit, however, beyond which an instance of stirring rhetoric ceases to be a permissible exaggeration whose negative effects are outweighed by positive outcomes and instead becomes a potentially harmful fabrication whose usefulness cannot but be limited because no part of it is actually true. Patrick Henry unfortunately seemed to have crossed this limit at some point in the 1780s, for his address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention in 1788 was rife with examples of the gross misrepresentation of contemporary reality being passed off as edifying truth. Once content to win people over to his side of a given dispute by using emotional appeals to essentially force them into a personal consideration of the issues at hand, Henry was now evidently content to peddle as many sweet-sounding falsities as were necessary to convince his audience that he was right and his opponents were wrong. This isn’t to say that Henry’s address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention was wholly without philosophical, moral, or political merit. With any luck, this series has provided sufficient examples as to effectively prove the contrary. Nevertheless, the address in question remains overburdened with instances in which its author seemed less concerned with turning the attention of his audience towards the light of truth than with getting them to agree with him by whatever means he could manage.

There were times, it bears noting, when this conviction did not necessarily impel Henry towards indulging in demonstrable falsehoods. Frequently, when attempting to convince his fellow delegates of either the sincerity of his intent or the paramount importance of the issue at hand, he simply gave voice to such expressions of principle as would seem to compare favorably to “Give me Liberty or Give me Death.” When prefacing the extensive examination that was to come of the proposed constitution and what he considered to be its many and various faults, for example, Henry notably declared, “Liberty, the greatest of all earthly blessings—give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else!” What did Henry really mean when he said that liberty was the greatest of all earthly blessings? Was he really willing to give up everything in exchange? How did he define liberty? And what fell under the rubric of “every thing else,” exactly? There were no answers to these questions on offer – answers which might have given Henry’s audience a better sense of what, precisely, he meant – because to do so would have weakened the assertion itself. If Henry had been more specific, more people would have been able to compare his feelings against their own and determine whether or not they agreed with his position. By keeping his exhortations vaguely – though stirringly – worded, he conversely left room for as many of his audience as possible to find a way to endorse what he had said.

In addition, like “Give me Liberty or Give me Death,” the exclamation “give us that precious jewel, and you may take every thing else” arguably functioned as the kind of encouragement which only the most clear-eyed could have easily ignored. When a person claims they’d rather die than live in submission to another, the depth of their conviction would seem ostensibly quite clear. Maybe they don’t actually mean it, and maybe no one around them actually believes it. But they’ve put the idea out into the world that they’re willing to hazard their life in the cause of freedom, and woe to the man who would equivocate in response. In private discussion, perhaps, a person might express the full gamut of their concerns and their feelings as to the relationship between liberty and submission while expecting not to be discriminated against based on their answer. But having heard it said in public that this man is willing to die for his freedom, the expectations of late 18^th century masculinity would demand agreement from all in earshot lest they be branded cowards or worse. Just so, once someone had said in open council that they would surrender all they had to guarantee their liberty, it would do no good for anyone else in attendance to attempt to litigate the specifics of the expression. Henry, without exposing himself to accusations of falsity – for nothing that he had said was provably false – had thus effectively thrown down the gauntlet and dared those to whom he was speaking to refuse his implicit challenge.

A little further on in the same oration, evidently convinced of the need to defend his personal and political integrity, Henry further explained that,

An invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may, in these refined, enlightened days, be deemed old fashioned; if so, I am contended to be so. I say, the time has been when every pulse of my heart beat for American liberty, and which, I believe, had a counterpart in the breast of every true American; but suspicions have gone forth—suspicions of my integrity—publicly reported that my professions are not real. Twenty-three years ago was I supposed to be a traitor? I was then said to be the bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of my country. I may be thought suspicious when I say our privileges and rights are in danger. But, sir, a number of the people of this country are weak enough to think these things are too true.

Again, the thrust of the speaker’s intention would seem to have been to essentially goad his listeners into registering their agreement. Consider, to that end, certain of the expressions that Henry deployed. “In these refined, enlightened days,” he declared, “An invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may […] be deemed old fashioned [.]” Refinement and enlightenment might now seem like virtues – indeed, they surely seem so to many in the 1780s as well – but Henry appeared to use them here as markers of vacuity or pomposity. How else might a person have come to think that “an invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man” was in any way old fashioned? Thus, with minimal effort, Henry served to create a dichotomy: modern sophisticates who thought the love of liberty was outmoded were on one side, crusty old men who thought that freedom was worth dying for were on the other. And from there, relentlessly, he piled it on.

There was a time, he continued, when he and his countrymen were of like minds in their conviction that nothing was more important than the liberty of America. And yet now, some quarter century later, the name of Patrick Henry is called into disrepute. Is he a traitor now, or was he a traitor then? Then, in the midst of the Revolution, he was heralded as a great statesman, followed as a great leader, promoted as a magistrate, and given responsibility over the life and limb of his fellow man. Were Americans simply more foolish in those days? Was the generation that fought and won the freedom of a continent too credulous to know that one of the most heralded among them was in fact their inveterate enemy? Such questions and insinuations were not easily answered, particularly where they appeared to inveigh against the honor of either those being addressed or those they held in particular esteem. According to Henry’s construction, to doubt him was to doubt the entire cohort of Americans responsible for the existence of the United States. He had not changed in all the time that had passed since that event. Indeed, he admitted to being old fashioned in his convictions. The American people, then, must have been the ones whose beliefs had been altered, who had become so “refined” and “enlightened” as to no longer value liberty above all else. And if this were not damning enough, Henry concluded by throwing down yet another rhetorical gauntlet. “But, sir” he thus avowed, “A number of the people of this country are weak enough to think these things are too true.” The subtext here would seem at once unflattering and plain: “Those who believe I am a traitor are simply too weak to know otherwise.” Or, to phrase it as a question, “Are you weak, or will you listen?”

  

            It would be difficult to deny that this was manipulative language. In 1788 as in 1775, Henry’s principle tactic was to maneuver those who did not agree with him already into having to succumb to or argue their way out of a particularly unflattering premise. Either they were in favor of the measure which he advocated, in essence, or they were against something – a person, an institution, or an ideal – which enjoyed otherwise universal acclaim. Faced with such a stark dichotomy – contrived though it may have been – it is little wonder that anyone might have preferred simply to bow to Henry’s wishes rather than attempt to bring nuance to bear upon a topic of intense emotional resonance. The person who stood forth during the Second Virginia Convention and claimed that liberty was perhaps not always worth dying for was the person who opened themselves up to immediate castigation. Such was the tone of the occasion, the times, and the crisis at hand. Just so, while it would have been far from unreasonable for one of Henry’s fellow delegates to the Virginia ratifying convention to question whether liberty was all a person really needed – not property, not representative government, not habeas corpus, not trial by jury – the individual that expressed such doubt was liable to be dismissed as a someone fonder of traditions, and customs, and institutions than of the principles from which they sprang. Institutions, the former Governor or Virginia may well have said, were mere artifice if they failed to serve the ideals of those upon whom they acted. The proposed constitution appeared to strike him as just such an arrangement of artificial conventions – serving something less than the majority of the American people – and should thus have been called out as standing in opposition to true liberty.

Again, it would be strictly accurate to say that the base elements of this conviction were not inherently erroneous. For all that anyone knew or could prove, Henry well and truly did believe that liberty was more important than any other right that a person could claim. The trick, such as it was, lay in the manner by which he gave voice to this ostensible truth. It was not enough to simply say, “I believe in so-and-so” and leave it to others to agree or disagree as their convictions allowed. Henry, as ever, was trying to win an argument, and knew that one of the best ways to do so was to make disagreement look as unattractive as possible. Anyone made to listen to one of Patrick Henry’s orations with the expectation that they would act on what he said could have voiced their opposition. They could have said he was being overly simplistic, or creating a false dichotomy, or appealing to sentiment over reason, or doing any number of rhetorically manipulative things. Doubtless some did exactly that. But many, it can be safely assumed, did not, or else Patrick Henry’s career would not have carried him to the heights which he ultimately enjoyed. The person who avowed in 1775 that the phrase “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” represented a gross overreaction to what yet remained a complex, multifaceted issue was perfectly free to do so, of course. But in the midst of a culture which expected men to be brave, and noble, and generous, and direct, such an assertion would surely have appeared undesirable to have associated with one’s name. Better, under the circumstances, to make peace with rank populism than be thought a coward or a sycophant.

Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, Part XII: An American Aristocracy

The disposition of the southern planters was likewise bound to be a source of concern for Henry in light of the concentration of authority which the proposed constitution entailed. Having long since established themselves as the de facto ruling elite in the southern colonies, it would have been entirely natural for the planters to think themselves well-suited to perform the same role within the newly-minted federal government. They were experienced, after all – having many of them served previously as magistrates or legislators – and educated, and possessed of wealth enough not to be tempted to dip into the public coffers. Indeed, they were in some ways the ideal community from which to draw the statesmen and officers that the United States of America would depend on to function. The northern states contained their share of ready public servants, of course, no small number of whom had served in the Continental Congress or in foreign diplomatic posts. And the houses of Congress, as defined by the proposed constitution, were to be allocated by population and by state, respectively. But the office of President, and the executive bureaucracy that was bound to accompany it, might fairly have been expected to devolve upon those best suited to the relevant responsibilities. And who was better suited to such things than the gentlemen of the south? Who was worldlier, nobler, and more genteel than they? Who was more qualified to administer the complex apparatus of state? Could a New England shopkeeper be depended upon to manage the affairs of vast and powerful nation, or was the task more in line with the skills and experiences of a plantation owner, being part farmer, part manager, and part trader? Many among the planter class would doubtless have answered that no one indeed was as aptly credentialed to take on such a role as they were, and that their elevation to national prominence was at once natural and inevitable. Valuable though their skills and education were sure to prove, however, their personal predilections were potentially problematic.

Within the sphere of education, for example, the South’s landed elite had shown themselves to be peculiarly attached to the notion that advanced schooling carried with it a quality of social prestige. Not every planter attended Oxford or Cambridge, of course, or even one of the colonial institutions of higher learning. But a great many did, including those lawyers who received their training at the famed Inns of Court. Bearing in mind that such scholarly attainment was patently unnecessary given the likelihood that the individuals in question would ultimately end up running plantations – not an easy task, of course, but not one which required a deep knowledge of Latin or the law – the purpose of receiving advanced instruction was more than likely social in nature rather than practical. Gentlemen were educated, after all, and that is most definitely what the planters aspired to be. Granting that such pursuits were also rather expensive – a quality which seemed often to attract the attention of the southern landed elite – an advanced degree from a well-regarded school would thus mainly seem to have functioned as a kind of stamp of belonging. A graduate of William & Mary could hold himself an equal to the planters who had likewise been taught. A student of Oxford might fairly think himself yet more refined. And as to those who could boast of neither? Well…how big was their house?

The proposed constitution, as it happened, was more or less blind to the social significance of education within the various communities over which it claimed authority. There were qualifications for service in such offices as Representative, Senator, and President, of course, but these had to do exclusively with age, citizenship status, and residency. A person could be illiterate and be elected chief executive, technically speaking, or have a grammar school education and become Speaker of the House. Such outcomes were unlikely to occur, most assuredly, but the text of the Constitution itself wasn’t going to be the cause. That is to say, it wasn’t going to be the direct cause, for there were clauses in each of the relevant sections which more or less made it a given that education would matter a great deal in terms of who got elected and who did the electing. With the House of Representatives, it was the requirement that the individuals permitted to vote in the relevant biennial elections, “Shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” Using Virginia as an example, this would seem to mean that those who were qualified to vote in elections for the House of Delegates would be permitted to elect that state’s Representatives. Considering that the Delegates were also the ones who ultimately wrote the elections laws – thus deciding, in essence, who was going to elect them – this would in turn indicate that the lower house of the state legislature was going to exercise more discretion than any other cohort in that state as to who it ultimate sent to Congress.

The proposed constitution made this arrangement clearer still in terms of the Senate, which, it declared, “Shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof [.]” Taking Virginia, again, as the exemplar, the General Assembly would accordingly be in direct control of who among the citizens of that state represented their interests within the upper house of the national legislature. This grant of responsibility being more or less repeated via the election of the President – “Each State shall appoint,” read Article II, Section 1, “In such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress” – all of the pieces would seem to have been in place for the almost complete domination of national politics by the interests and priorities of officeholders in the states. Since almost every holder of public office in the southern states was also member of the planter class, this would in turn seem to place a very large measure of control over a large portion of the national government in the hands of a single class of people. The planters of the southern states were the legislators whom the proposed constitution mandated would get decide who chose Representatives, would get to choose Senators for themselves, and would get to select – by whatever means they wished – the electors whose responsibility it was to vote for a candidate for President.

Now, granting that it was entirely possible for these otherwise superficial and status-obsessed men to embrace such rules and regulations as would place the decisions in question firmly in the hands of the general population, it seems equally likely that they would prejudice their own social class above any and all else. Having secured their control over their local legislatures during the colonial era, and captured the governorships via the drafting of republican constitutions, why should they have flinched from extending their de facto hegemony onto the national stage? Even if they didn’t intend to wholly dominate the nascent federal government, there remained ample reason for them to seek a guiding influence over various aspects thereof. The House of Representatives, the Senate, and the President would belong to the planters just as well as to the yeoman farmers of Western Pennsylvania or the merchants of New England and New York. If a group of Congressmen and Senators were going to speak on behalf of Virginia, North Carolina, or Maryland to the nation at large, and if the President was to perform the same function to the world at large, the same standards that applied among their own number would seem to have applied in the context of federal office. Why, for example, should the planters have allowed just anyone to elect their Representatives if the rabble in question might possibly choose someone who wasn’t a gentleman? Being, as a community, deeply invested in appearance, and performance, and conformity to an established norm of behavior and comportment, why should these pseudo-aristocrats risk having their communities represented in Congress by someone whose only claim to social significance was that they were popular among their neighbors?

By the same token, where their own discretion was directly concerned, why should the planters – as the dominant element of their respective state legislatures –  deign to elect Senators who didn’t go to good schools and belong to good families? According to Article II, Section 2 of the proposed constitution, the Senate was to provide its “advice and consent” to the President – in the form of a two-thirds majority – pursuant to the negotiation and ratification of treaties and the appointment of, “Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law [.]” Bearing the potential magnitude of these responsibilities in mind, it would seem very much a given that the planters should have wanted the views of their particular class represented in the relevant proceedings. For that matter, it seems equally likely that they should have sought to exert their influence on the office of President itself. The northern states, dominated as they tended to be by middling merchants and small-scale farmers, were apt to assign presidential electors on a broadly representative basis. But it doubtless would have seemed unthinkable for the planters who controlled the legislatures of the various southern states to permit anyone but themselves to decide who would cast their votes for President and Vice-President. Why should the Lees and the Carrolls, the Laurens and the Rutledges – among the most prestigious families in the whole of America – have allowed for the election of a man they would not otherwise count among their social equals? The consolidated federal government described in the proposed constitution was going to require the states – of which the planters essentially controlled the southern cohort – to give up some portion of their autonomy. Why, having agreed to submit to the consequent abridgement of their accustomed political influence, should the southern gentry have also permitted the presidency to fall into the hands of just anyone?

The required material accouterments of the planter lifestyle would quite possibly have presented Patrick Henry with similar apprehensions as concerned the potential relationship between that particular class of people and a centralized national government. Having used their domination of the various southern legislatures to monopolize their states’ representation in the Senate, for example, it might fairly be imagined that the expectation of splendor would bleed over from the private realm into the public. Southern senators, having patterned themselves after the landed gentry of old England and now being in possession of an office the functional equivalent to that of a lord at Westminster, might come to think it only appropriate that the quality of their surroundings rise to an appropriate level of grandeur. Rather than conduct their business in the modest chambers befitting of a humble republic, why not fund the construction of a great hall of such soaring dimensions and splendid ornamentation that no one would dare question the importance of those who worked within? This is how the planters tended to think, after all, in terms of their material circumstances and the effects they served to elicit. And why stop at a single edifice? Why not allocate sumptuous carriages for the transportation of senators to and from their place of work? And an honor guard? And an extensive staff? Why should those planters who were granted appointment to the Senate by their peers be forced to part with the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed? On the contrary, having been elevated to a high office of state, why should they not have expected to enjoy even greater prestige? 
         

Upon election to the office of President – largely at the behest of their peers in the various legislatures of the southern states – a given member of the southern gentry might likewise expect that their surroundings should reflect the importance of their position. The Continental Congress, as of the late 1780s, held session in New York City, with delegates not native to the surrounding area taking lodging wherever they could find it. And while the proposed constitution made no mention of how the President was to be housed or maintained – at what cost, at what distance from Congress, etc. – it would doubtless have appeared unseemly to a certain class of American citizen for their newly-minted chief executive to likewise take up residence in a boarding house or a rented chamber above a city hostelry. The President was to be the equivalent to a king, was he not? Perhaps not in formal authority or pretension, but in dignity, surely? Did the President not rate a house of his own? Indeed, did he not rate the most splendid house in America, befitting an office which had no peer in the land? At that, why not a palace to rival those European monarchs who would dare look upon the American republic with disdain? The planters had style, and knew architecture, and furniture, and fittings, and art. Not only might they expect, upon one of their number gaining the highest office in America, for the individual in question to bring their collective sense of panache to the national stage, but they knew the architects, and the stonemason, and the carpenters to see it done. And the slaves, of course; they had the slaves to see it done cheaply.

The potential result of all this authority being doled out among a class of people already accustomed to holding and displaying the power of their supposed birthright would seem to be, in a social sense, something of a closed loop. Having already assured their ongoing possession of the legislatures of the states in which they resided, it would seem entirely likely that they would thereafter proceed to use the associated privileges and powers to accomplish the same end on the level of the proposed national government. Planter assemblymen in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Maryland would ensure the election of planter Congressmen, and vote for planter Senators, and ensure that the person most likely to receive the electoral votes of their state was a member of this same class of privileged quasi-nobility. Over time, provided that the resulting monopoly on federal office is consistently maintained, it may be entirely taken for granted that the southern gentry were entitled by right to the possession of the same. Seats in the Senate and the House allocated to the southern states may become like the “rotten boroughs” of Britain’s unreformed House of Commons, to be traded and passed down among an insular group of wealthy landowners for the sole purpose of bestowing an added source of prestige upon some member or other of an already prestigious family. And why not? Why should the planters have allowed anyone but themselves to speak on their behalf? Why should they have allowed someone to be raised above them in dignity and in power whose family was unknown, un-landed, and inglorious? Rather than serve the needs of the American people as they were ostensibly designed to do, such federal offices may therefore have come to serve no one but those who had the means to possess them.

        

None of these scenarios ultimately came to pass, of course. George Washington, as seemed to be his custom, behaved with a degree of humility, prudence, and restraint upon his election to the office of President in 1789 that belied his status as one of the wealthiest members of the southern planter elite. Though he reportedly comported himself in what might fairly be described as a stiffly formal manner during the eight years that followed, he made no demands upon the federal treasury for the purpose of fulfilling the material expectations of the social class to which he belonged. Indeed, though his successors down to the present day would each of them occupy the executive mansion now known as the White House – the style and dimensions of which were easily on par with those of some of the more splendid estates of the southern planter elite – Washington resided in a series of rented or donated homes in New York City (belonging to Samuel Osgood (1747-1813) and Alexander Macomb (1748-1831), respectively) and Philadelphia (being the property of Robert Morris (1734-1806). While each of these dwellings was fairly impressive in its own right – with Macomb’s in particular being a full four stories tall and possessed of a purportedly magnificent view of the Hudson River – they nevertheless paled in ornamentation and layout to the typical plantation estate of the contemporary southern gentry. Perhaps conscious of this customary taste for ostentation, the government of Pennsylvania funded the construction of a purpose-built presidential mansion – an impressive, four-story affair in red brick and plaster with a raised front entrance and a cupola crowning the roof – some blocks away from the aforementioned Morris home in Philadelphia. True to form, however – though not necessarily to the norms of his class – Washington declined to occupy it.
      

This evident tendency towards moderation on the part of George Washington was arguably replicated in his approach to creating and filling what would become the cabinet offices and the federal bureaucracy of the United States of America. Though his fellow planters most definitely ended up dominating their respective states’ delegations in the House and the Senate – with such familiar figures as Daniel Carroll, Richard Bland Lee, and James Madison serving in the former while Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Richard Henry Lee, and Pierce Butler served in the latter – at the same time that they came out in force to deliver him their assigned electoral votes, Washington’s behavior in office was markedly evenhanded. Though he could have attempted to make use of the influence which his fellow planters possessed in Congress to authorize and staff an extensive swath of executive departments for the purpose of further aggrandizing himself and his associates in the eyes of their countrymen and the world, he opted instead to only slightly enlarge the number of offices that had existed under the Articles of Confederation and to staff them with ministers drawn from across the nascent American republic. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs became the Department of State, headed by newly-returned Virginia diplomat Thomas Jefferson, the Department of the Treasury (formerly the Finance Office) was given over to the leadership of New Yorker Alexander Hamilton, and the Department of War was placed in the hands of Massachusetts-born Henry Knox. Washington added to this trio of key advisors the office of Attorney General – which, absent the Department of Justice (first established in 1870) functioned as a legal counselor to the office of President – and proceeded to bestow it upon fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph. In light of the near-universal popularity which the former Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army enjoyed at the end of the 1780s, it would seem conceivable that he might have asked for a received a great deal more. That he did not, and further attempted to strike a sectional balance with his appointments, is a testament to his individual sense of prudence. Most definitely, it was not a reflection of his class predilections.

Granting that the atmosphere of non-partisanship which Washington attempted to cultivate as President was somewhat at odds with the often intense conflicts that were roiling contemporary American political culture, the southern planter class nevertheless generally refrained from abusing the various federal offices they ultimately came to possess in the years immediately following the implementation of the United States Constitution. The reason for this was arguably as much tactical as it was moral or ethical. The partisan divide which spiraled out of the ratification debate in the late 1780s – between supporters and detractors of a powerful, centralized national government – did not always break along neatly sectional lines, though the increasingly organized opposition to a further transfer of power away from the states was unquestionably dominated by statesmen and professionals from southern jurisdictions. The logic behind this tendency stemmed from the shifting power dynamics that accompanied the consolidation of the first centralized federal government and its accompanying departments and functionaries. Power in the southern states tended to flow out of inherited wealth and familial influence, to the point that formal authority was often passed from one generation to the next within the same handful of long-established families. The adoption of a national debt proposed by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton conversely envisioned – to the thinking of many of these selfsame southern elites – a power structure in which influence flowed out of the pockets of bankers, speculators, and financiers without regard to tradition, or character, or breeding, or really any of the things that the planter class seemed to think were important. Along with the need to protect the institution of slavery – whose importance was rapidly diminishing in the northern states – the planters sought solace and protection from the resulting loss of influence within an ideological framework that championed the rights and powers of the individual states over and above those of the national government. 

            Though the next member of the planter class to occupy the presidency – the aforementioned Thomas Jefferson, who did so in 1800 by forging an alliance between his landed southern supporters and a cohort of small-scale yeoman farmers, urban merchants, and artisans from New York and Pennsylvania – inaugurated an administration that was more attentive to the needs of the agrarian South than Washington’s had been previously, the resulting shift in power was not accompanied by a shift in strategy or behavior. Though Jefferson and Madison – landed, well-educated, and cultured planters, both – now between them held the two most powerful offices in the whole of the federal government – as President and Secretary of State, respectively – they nevertheless declined to use that power in service of their class ambitions. Though Jefferson’s own home at Monticello was as splendid as the great majority of southern planters would ever hope to possess for themselves, his behavior as chief executive of the United States of America was decidedly – indeed, self-consciously – humble. Far from employing so extensive a domestic staff as to be at all times insulated from the everyday goings-on of the White House, Jefferson was said to often answer the door himself when visitors came calling. Startling as this reportedly was to at least one foreign ambassador who was accustomed to a courtlier course of etiquette, Jefferson’s personal appearance on these occasions was more shocking still. Possessed though he was of an extensive wardrobe modeled on the latest in Continental fashions, the master of Monticello was said to greet what might otherwise be thought of as particularly distinguished guests in the same robe and bedroom slippers which he donned every day upon waking. Minor though these examples might seem, they nevertheless indicate something very important about the nature of Jefferson’s relationship to power and the steadfastness with which he and his allies adhered to the tactics that had won them control over the federal government.

Granting that the Jefferson Administration was not above making use of federal power in order to serve the needs of the southern landed elite – by purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France in 1805, for example, to the benefit of land-hungry slave holders, or by imposing an embargo on all foreign trade in 1807 as a means of securing freedom of shipping for southern agriculturalists – the net effect of the efforts of the government in question was to drastically reduce the size and scale of the federal administration. Having settled upon opposition to a centralized national power structure and support for continued state autonomy during their years as the de facto opposition to the Washington and Adams administrations, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans – of which the planters were a principle element – remained admirably consistent upon assuming the reins of government themselves. Jefferson’s personal comportment while in office was arguably a symptom of this very conviction. While still dedicated as a culture to the enhancement and exhibition of individual and familial prestige, he and his fellow southern gentry pointedly restrained themselves from extending these preferences into the national political sphere. Within the confines of their respective home states, of course, they remained the dominant social class and the unchallenged holders of paramount political authority. But to the nation at large, the planters were nothing more than simple farmers who detested things like standing armies, banks, and bureaucracy, and who were accordingly dedicated to keeping the federal government as small and as modest as possible. It was a strategy that had served their interests well through the turn of the 19^th century, and one which they accordingly had no particular cause to abandon.

Patrick Henry, of course, could not have predicted this outcome in 1788. Indeed, no one could have. To be sure, Washington had demonstrated during his service as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army that he was capable of remarkable gestures of humility and self-sacrifice. And the degree to which the ratification of the proposed constitution was a topic of serious debate in states like Maryland (63 to 11 in favor) and South Carolina (149 to 73 in favor) – as opposed to Connecticut, say, where it was approved by a vote of 128 to 40, or Georgia, where the vote was 26 to 0 in favor – certainly hinted at the possibility of further opposition to the resulting national government originating in southern jurisdictions. But the document in question had also been written in part by members of the southern planter elite and was submitted to Congress and to the states bearing the signatures of the same. Virginia’s John Blair, and James Madison, South Carolina’s John Rutledge and Charles Cotesworth Pinkney, North Carolina’s William Blount, and Maryland’s Daniel Carroll had all of them signed their names to what was shortly to become the United States Constitution, signifying, if not their unqualified approbation of the government it described then at least their agreement that its creation had become necessary. Knowing what he did about how the class to which these men belonged tended to think about power, wealth, and influence, it stands to reason that Henry would have been concerned by their involvement. With few exceptions, the planters were not particularly selfless or humble. Though they certainly prided themselves on being genteel, to the extent that they considered hospitality to be a desirable practice, this was arguably as much performative as it was compassionate. In almost every aspect of the way they lived, the purpose of their behavior was to impress upon others the quality of their character and the superiority of their taste.

The fact that men of such quality had supported the creation of something as potentially dangerous as a centralized national government was not an occurrence to be weighed very lightly. They may have been acting selflessly, of course. Washington was living proof of the possibility, just as he also served to demonstrate that men possessed of military ambitions could conceivably be trusted with almost unlimited military power. But it doubtless would have appeared to Henry to be equally likely that the planters in question had come out in favor of the proposed constitution because they felt that they had something specific to gain. Wealth? Prestige? Dignity? Honor? It wasn’t possible to say, exactly. Probably, it didn’t matter. The mere possibility that the American people were on the cusp of authorizing the creation of a government as powerful as that which they’d recently fought a war to be rid of in any sense for the personal benefit of a particular class or cohort thereof was reason enough to call the whole enterprise into question. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps Henry was being overly sensitive based on personal experience with those of his countrymen who appeared to value their own perceived glory over the promotion of the public good. Then again, perhaps he wasn’t, and there was a great deal more at stake than one man’s reputation. Caution was all that was asked for, and liberty the only reward. Such was the terms of battle that Patrick Henry had staked out for himself at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in the summer of 1788.