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.