The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America's Liberties - Softcover

Carol Berkin is the Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY, Emerita, where she taught early American and women’s history. Professor Berkin has worked as a consultant on several PBS and History Channel documentaries, including one on the “Scottsboro Boys,” which was nominated for an Academy Award as the best documentary of 2000.

The Bill of Rights I

On September 12, 1787, Virginian George Mason rose on the floor of what came to be known as the constitutional convention.1 He proposed that the delegates gathered in Independence Hall add a bill of rights to the Constitution they had just created. The response Mason received was a resounding no. Was it possible that the men we call the founding fathers opposed such basic rights as freedom of speech, the press, or conscience? Was their intention to introduce a new tyranny to replace the tyranny of George III and his government? Why was Mason’s request so firmly denied?

The answer is simple. These men were weary on that fateful September day. They had been meeting since mid-May, trudging through the rain on many a morning or wiping the perspiration from their brows on those days when the stifling heat and humidity of an all too typical Philadelphia summer seemed unbearable. Their evenings had been spent in the cramped quarters above the city’s many taverns, in rooms occupied by two and sometimes three men. Most surely slept fitfully, sharing beds in rooms redolent of spittoons and chamber pots, the smells intensified by the need to keep the shutters tightly closed against a summer invasion of bluebottled flies. Far from home, countinghouse, law office, plantation, or farm, they fretted about inventories, clients, and crops, with no choice but to rely on the good sense of family members or employees to ensure that their fortunes did not suffer. As the weeks dragged by, they longed for the comforts of home, the satisfactions of a well-cooked meal, and the companionship of wives and children. Yet they stayed.

They stayed because the business they had come to Philadelphia to do was too important to abandon. They were there, they believed, to save their country. They feared that their experiment in republican government was in danger of invasion or, worse, of internal collapse if a new government was not created to replace the “league of friendship” known as the Confederation, which had proved woefully inadequate to deal with the problems facing America.

The Articles of Confederation, America’s first constitution, did not owe its creation to a lapse of judgment on the part of the Revolutionary generation. To the men who wrote it, this very restricted government seemed to perfectly embody the goals of their Revolution. They did not yet think of themselves as citizens of a unified nation; like their neighbors, they thought of themselves as Marylanders, Virginians, New Yorkers, or Connecticut men. Their history and their historical circumstances made this a reasonable identification. Their newly independent states had once been colonies—colonies with different patterns of settlement, different mixes of ethnic and religious populations, and different internal histories. Virginia did not share New York’s Dutch origins; Connecticut’s lingering Puritan heritage was alien to Pennsylvania’s Quaker roots. And Maryland’s religious wars between Catholics and Protestants had no parallel in Georgia or North Carolina. It was true that by the time the war for independence began, all the rebellious colonies did have some striking political similarities. In each, the local legislature was elected by men whose race and property ownership qualified them to full citizenship. But families who traced their history back to Barbados refugees in South Carolina did not feel a natural affinity for the men and women who fled religious persecution to settle Massachusetts. Thus it was not surprising that, when asked what his country was, a leading revolutionary like Patrick Henry could immediately respond, “Virginia is my country, sir.” In short, the men who represented their rebellious states in the Continental Congress—and later in the Confederation Congress—were loyal not to something so vague as the United States but to their own state.

Travel and communication in the eighteenth century reinforced this loyalty to place that we today might dismiss as provincialism. The great revolutions in transportation and communication lay decades ahead in the nineteenth century. In 1776, when the Articles of Confederation were written, horses and horse-drawn carriages, often moving along little more than Indian paths, were the fastest modes of transportation. Travel from Boston to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia could take weeks if roads were washed out by rain or if rivers had risen too high for a man on horseback to ford. Indeed, to many a Georgian in the late eighteenth century, a trip to Massachusetts might as well have been a voyage to the moon. Ships, it was true, could sail along the coast of these mainland states, but few Georgia farmers were likely to be on board.

Communication was unpredictable and cumbersome. Letters often found their way to their intended recipients through elaborate relays: entrusted first to friends heading to port cities, then passed on to ship captains heading in the right direction, and finally turned over to local residents who promised to deliver them to the addressee. Much depended on whether any link in this chain failed; and even when the system worked, it could take months for a letter to find its way from writer to reader. News traveled just as slowly in a world where not every household had access to a daily newspaper. Often the best source of news was travelers, especially ship captains, who brought with them newspapers already several months old.

Under these circumstances, provincialism or localism was reasonable, even among men more privileged, better traveled, and more sophisticated than their neighbors. But ideology, as much as circumstances, played a critical role in the belief that a “league of friendship” among thirteen separate and sovereign nation-states fulfilled the goals of the Revolution.

The men who fought for independence had rallied to the cry “No taxation without representation.” And to them, this meant no taxation by any legislature other than their local assembly. The Lockean contract—that a legitimate government must represent the interests and protect the liberties of those it governed—had been reinterpreted by free Americans; it meant that only a government composed of men you knew, men who lived among you and shared your interests, deserved your obedience, your loyalty—and your taxes. As they began a war for independence against a distant government, made up of men who would not suffer the consequences of the taxes they imposed, Americans believed the only safeguard against such tyranny was to put power in the hands of local legislatures.

Thus the Continental Congress produced a constitution that preserved the sovereignty of the states and restricted the powers of the national government to the barest essentials: to coordinate the military and diplomatic war effort against Great Britain.2 Even this was miraculous, because the colonies had never before cooperated. But, as they prepared to wage a war against the most powerful army and navy in the world, American leaders recognized the need for unity.

The constitution they drafted was, in many ways, a defense against a new tyranny. Their enemy had taxed them from afar, and had regulated their trade and commerce; they would avoid creating another government with such powers. They would avoid suffering under a new tyrant by refusing to create a separate executive branch. They would deprive the government of the power to tax or dictate trade policy. They would not allow it to introduce a uniform currency that could prevent each state from providing its own citizens with ready cash. Above all, they would avoid attempts by large states to dominate small ones by ensuring a rule of one state, one vote in the new government.

The Articles of Confederation embodied the hopes and fears of the revolutionaries. They were a culmination of the colonies’ 150 years of history as possessions of a powerful empire. But in the effort to avoid the oppressions of the past, the men who wrote this constitution did not provide for the problems of the future.3

Those problems had emerged even before the ink on the peace treaty was dry in 1783. Peace brought a lingering postwar economic depression, as America adjusted to its independence from Great Britain’s protective, though often smothering, embrace. No longer escorted by Royal Navy vessels, American merchant ships carrying cargoes meant for Mediterranean buyers became easy targets for North African pirates. In New England, shippers discovered how much they had depended on trade with the Caribbean islands that flew the British flag. In Georgia and South Carolina, states that had suffered the devastation of two major British campaigns during the war, planters found themselves scrambling to find new slaves to replace those who had fled to the welcoming arms of the British army.

The new nation faced the embarrassment of debts to European allies that it could not pay. The government, forced to rely on requisitions from the states, found itself helpless to establish its credit, and efforts to borrow more money from Holland and France were futile. To the great embarrassment of the members of the Confederation Congress, the government was also unable to pay military veterans or repay the civilians who had sacrificed crops and livestock to the war effort. Confidence in the government’s ability to honor the promissory notes, called “continentals,” that it had given to farmers, merchants, and artisans could be measured by the popular term for worthlessness—“not worth a continental.”

Four years after the war ended, the new nation’s borders stood virtually undefended against Indians or European powers. Britain still occupied its forts in the Ohio Valley, and alliances forming among displaced or threatened Indian tribes boded ill for eager American settlers.

Perhaps most troubling of all was that the spirit of cooperation, which had reigned among the states during the struggle for independence, had evaporated. Thirteen separate nation-states now vied with one another for advantages in commerce and trade. Each established trade barriers at its borders and thus duties had to be paid at every state line. Price gouging by New York, whose port city brought in vital foreign goods, enriched New Yorkers and enraged consumers in New Jersey and Connecticut. To the south, Virginia shamelessly exploited the consumer needs of North Carolina. Every state had its own currency, and some of this was worthless paper. Small wonder that interstate trade was in chaos, making recovery from postwar depression even more difficult.

By the time the Philadelphia convention met, the members of the Confederation Congress, sitting in New York City, had thrown up their hands and surrendered any hope of solving these pressing problems. Surveying the situation, the former commander in chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, lamented that the Confederation was a mere shadow of a government. And William Pierce of Georgia described the Confederation as “a ship bearing under the weight of a tempest; it is trembling, and just on the point of sinking.”4

The men who met in Philadelphia agreed with these sentiments. Clearly, something had to be done to save their country. And this was why, by September 1787, the delegates to the convention had put themselves through over four grueling months of debate, discussion, and often heated argument. This is why they endured cramped quarters, dismal weather, and a steady diet of tavern food. Behind locked doors and draped windows, they had undertaken the task of writing a new constitution.

If any group was up to the challenge, these fifty-four delegates were. Gathered in Independence Hall were members of America’s economic and social elite, men far better educated and more widely traveled than their farmer and shopkeeper neighbors. And, in a society that still assumed men of wealth should hold the reins of government, their political leadership experience was broad and deep. They had learned politics at the dinner table, listening to fathers, uncles, cousins, and older brothers. They had studied rhetoric and political philosophy at colleges at home and abroad and most of them were trained in the law. They had served in Continental Congresses, colonial assemblies, and state legislatures. They had overseen trials as justices of the peace and directed state policies as governors. During the Revolution, many had led men into battle as Continental Army officers, and thus they had observed firsthand how that experience had unified men of every region and state. Many, though not all of them, had been born or educated abroad and this background, like their army experience, had given them a less provincial perspective than most of their fellow members of the American elite. They were, in Alexander Hamilton’s apt phrase, men who “thought continentally,” men who wanted to create a nation, not a loosely knit confederation of squabbling states.

The charge they had been given by the Confederation Congress was narrow: propose amendments to strengthen the current constitution. But men like Virginia’s James Madison, New York’s Alexander Hamilton, Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin, and the universally admired George Washington believed the crisis was too serious for mere patchwork. Thus, within the first week of the convention, the delegates had agreed to abandon what they saw as a faulty government and create a new one.

The men who made this decision to abandon one frame of government and create another understood the challenge they faced—and they were uncertain if they were wise enough to meet it. But they knew they had models to guide them. Behind them were two centuries of Anglo-American political culture, with its emphasis on the rule of law, its limitations on the power of the men in office, and its threefold division of government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Their republic would have no king and no legislative branch belonging to the aristocracy, of course—this was one legacy of their Revolution. But whatever form the new framework took, it would draw its authority from the consent of the governed.

Many of the delegates had participated in the arduous process of drafting and seeing ratified their state constitutions. But they knew that the superimposition of what eighteenth-century men called an “energetic” national government on thirteen quarrelsome mini nations, each jealously guarding its sovereignty, would be far more controversial. This is why anxiety, thick as the summer humidity, hung over the convention throughout its months of deliberation.

The delegates knew that the government they designed must have far more power than the one they sought to replace. The question was: how much power? Ardent nationalists like Madison, Hamilton, and Pennsylvania’s brilliant, flamboyant Gouverneur Morris wanted to provide a full panoply of powers: the right to tax, to regulate foreign and interstate trade, to raise an army for defense, and to establish a uniform currency. Above all, they wished to create a truly national government able to win the loyalty of citizens of every state. But this was far from a goal shared outside the convention walls. Many of the political leaders who refused to attend this convention did not wish to see such a transfer of loyalty. Devoted re...