These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  There is something heartbreaking in Washington’s Farewell Address, with its faith in reason, experience, and truth. Washington delivered his letter to the People of the United States in much the same spirit as Madison had urged and helped draft the Constitution itself. Washington hoped, he said, that Americans might “control the usual current of the passions.” “Passion” or variants of the word appear seven times in the Farewell; it is the source of every problem; reason is its only remedy. Passion is a river. There would be no changing its course. Nor was George Washington free from its force.

  As George and Martha Washington prepared to leave the capital for Virginia, their slaves made different arrangements. Their enslaved cook, Hercules, escaped to New York, and Martha Washington’s twenty-two-year-old slave seamstress, Ona Judge, escaped by ship to New Hampshire. Judge had learned that Martha Washington intended to give her as a wedding gift to her granddaughter. George Washington sent a slave catcher after her, but when the agent found the seamstress he reported that “popular opinion here is in favor of universal freedom,” and it would create a spectacle if he were to seize her. Judge sent word to Washington that she would return to Mount Vernon only if granted her freedom, since she would “rather suffer death than return to slavery.” Washington refused, on the ground that it would set a “dangerous precedent.”96 What to do about slavery, and precedent, weighed heavily on his mind, and on his conscience.

  On December 12, 1799, after riding his horse through snow that turned to rain, Washington fell ill. Two days later, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in his bedchamber on the second floor of his mansion at Mount Vernon, as he lay dying, he asked his wife, Martha, to bring him two different wills that he had left on his desk. He read them over slowly and carefully and then asked her to burn one of them. Later that day, he breathed his last, surrounded by his wife, his doctor, his secretary, and four of his slaves: Caroline and Molly, housemaids; Christopher, a manservant; and Charlotte; a seamstress. When Washington died, the black people in that room outnumbered the white people.

  During his second term, Washington had written to his secretary that he wished “to liberate a species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.” He had arranged for this to be done, but only after his death. In the will that he did not have his wife burn—a second will that he had prepared only that summer—he had written: “Upon the decease of my wife . . . all the Slaves which I hold in my own right shall receive their freedom.”

  There were more than three hundred people enslaved at Mount Vernon; Washington owned 123; the rest were his wife’s. Washington’s will was published in newspapers from Maine to Georgia, as he knew it would be. Everyone at Mount Vernon knew the terms of his will. His 123 slaves would be freed only upon Martha Washington’s death. His wife, understandably, feared she might be murdered.97

  Harry Washington, who had once been Washington’s property, might have heard the news of his death, an ocean away, in another unruly republic. About half of Sierra Leone’s black settlers rebelled against the colony’s tyrannical government, said to be “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.” In 1799, a group of revolutionaries led by Harry Washington tried to declare independence. The rebellion was swiftly put down, its instigators banished. Months after George Washington died at Mount Vernon, the exiled rebels of Sierra Leone elected, as their leader, Harry Washington.98

  An 1800 print commemorating the life of Washington pictures him holding “The American Constitution,” a tablet etched in stone. At George Washington’s death, the nation fell into mourning, in a torrent of passion. People preached and prayed; they dressed in black and wept. Shops were closed. Funeral orations were delivered. “Mourn, O, Columbia!” declared a newspaper in Baltimore. The Farewell Address was printed and reprinted, read and reread, stitched, even, into pillows.

  “Let it be written in characters of gold and hung up in every house,” one edition of the Address urged. “Let it be engraven on tables of brass and marble and, like the sacred Law of Moses, be placed in every Church and Hall and Senate Chamber.”

  Let it be written. Americans read their Washington. And they looked at him, in prints and portraits. One popular print, Washington Giving the Laws to America, showed the archangel Gabriel in the heavens carrying an American emblem while Washington, dressed in a Roman toga and seated among the gods, holds a stylus in one hand and, in his other hand, a stone tablet engraved with the words, “The American Constitution.”99 It was as if the Constitution had been handed down from the heavens, tablets etched out of stone, sacred and infallible, from God to the first American president. Where were the centuries of ideas and decades of struggle? What of the hardscrabble American people and their fiercely fought debates? What of the near fisticuffs over ratification? What of the feuds and the failures and the compromises, the trials of facts, the battles between reason and passion?

  In the quiet of a room in a house not too far away, James Madison pulled out of a cabinet the notes he had taken down, day after day, at the constitutional convention, that sweltering summer in Philadelphia. He read over them and wondered at them, and then he settled to the work of revision, word by word. He puttered away, in secret, page after page. In his desk, he kept safe, for another day, the story of how the Constitution had been written, and of its fateful compromises.

  Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate’s 1854 canvas Arguing the Point depicts a hunter and a farmer debating an election while reading a paper brought by a townsman, while the farmer’s daughter tries to break in on the conversation.

  Part Two

  THE PEOPLE

  1800–1865

  They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant, and vicious. We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all better, and happier together. We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us.

  —Abraham Lincoln,

  “Fragments on Government,”

  1854

  Five

  A DEMOCRACY OF NUMBERS

  Philadelphians of all ranks celebrate the Fourth of July in 1812 in this watercolor by John Lewis Krimmel, a German immigrant.

  IN 1787, WHILE FEDERALISTS AND ANTI-FEDERALISTS were fighting over the proposed Constitution in the mottled pages of American newspapers and on the creaky floors of convention halls, John Adams, minister to Britain, grumbled at his desk in Grosvenor Square, London, while Thomas Jefferson, minister to France, leaned over a desk of his own, undoubtedly fancier, at the Hôtel de Langeac on Paris’s Champs-Elysées. Far from home, the two men who had together crafted the Declaration of Independence staged an epistolary debate about the Constitution, exchanging letters across the English Channel, as if they were holding a two-man ratifying convention, Adams worrying that the Constitution gave the legislature too much power, Jefferson fearing the same about the presidency. “You are afraid of the one—I, of the few,” Adams wrote Jefferson. “You are Apprehensive of Monarchy; I, of Aristocracy.” Both men agonized about elections, Jefferson fearing there would be too few, Adams that there would be too many. “Elections, my dear sir,” Adams wrote, “I look at with terror.”1

  The debate between Adams and Jefferson hadn’t ended after the Constitution was ratified. It hadn’t ended after Washington was elected in 1788, or during his administration, when Adams served as his vice president, and Jefferson as his secretary of state, and it hadn’t ended after Washington was elected again in 1792. Instead, in 1796, their debate helped establish the nation’s first stable political parties.

  Jefferson had been worried that the Constitution allowed for a president to serve again and again, till his death, like a king. Adams liked that idea. “So much the better,” he’d written in 1787.2 In 1796, when Washington announced that he wouldn’t run for a third term, Adams and Jefferson each sought to replace him. Adams narrowly won. The two men next faced
off in an election Jefferson called “the revolution of 1800.” Whether or not it was a revolution, the election of 1800, the climax of a decades-long debate between Adams and Jefferson, led to a constitutional crisis. The Constitution hadn’t provided for parties, and the method of electing the president could not accommodate them. Nevertheless, Adams ran as a Federalist and Jefferson as a Republican, which meant that, whatever the results of the voting, no one was quite sure of the outcome, especially after the two men received an equal number of votes in the Electoral College, a tie that, under the terms of the Constitution, was to be broken by a vote in the House of Representatives.

  Jefferson heard rumors that if he won, Federalists would “break the Union”; he believed they hoped to change the law to allow for Adams to serve for life. “The enemies of our Constitution are preparing a fearful operation,” he warned. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton sounded an alarm that if Adams were to be reelected, Virginians would “resort to the employment of physical force” to keep Federalists out of office. It was even said that some Federalists in Congress had decided they’d “go without a Constitution and take the risk of a civil war” rather than elect Jefferson. “Who is to be president?” asked one troubled congressman, and “what is to become of our government?”3

  The ongoing argument between Adams and Jefferson was at once a rivalry between two ambitious men, bitter and petty, and a dispute about the nature of the American experiment, philosophical and weighty. In 1800, Adams was sixty-four and even more disputatious, vain, and learned than he’d been as a younger man. A founder of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he’d written a ponderous, three-volume Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, explaining the fragile balance between an aristocracy of the rich and a democracy of the poor, a balance that could only be struck by a well-engineered constitution. “In every society where property exists, there will ever be a struggle between rich and poor,” he wrote. “Mixed in one assembly, equal laws can never be expected. They will either be made by numbers, to plunder the few who are rich, or by influence, to fleece the many who are poor.”4

  Jefferson, fifty-seven, president of the American Philosophical Society, by turns moody and frantic, a searing writer, was no less learned, if far more inconsistent, than Adams. He placed his faith in the rule of the majority. The point of the American experiment, he believed, was “to shew by example the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the Natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.”5 Adams believed in restraining the will of the majority, Jefferson in submitting to it.

  Both men subscribed to the Aristotelian notion that there exist three forms of government, that each could become corrupt, and that the perfect government was the one that best balanced them. Adams believed that the form of government most “susceptible of improvement” was a polity, and that such an improvement could be achieved—and the terrors of democracy avoided—if legislatures were to do a better job of representing the interests of the people by more exactly mirroring them. “The end to be aimed at, in the formation of a representative assembly, seems to be the sense of the people, the public voice,” he wrote. “The perfection of the portrait consists in its likeness.”6

  Yet, for all Adams’s talk of portraits and likenesses, the dispute between the two men turned not on art but on mathematics. Government by the people is, in the end, a math problem: Who votes? How much does each vote count?

  Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress—if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever rising and falling in endless cycles, like the seasons. The idea of progress animated American independence and animated, too, the advance of capitalism. The quantification of time led to the quantification of everything else: the counting of people, the measurement of their labor, and the calculation of profit as a function of time. Keeping time and accumulating wealth earned a certain equivalency. “Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin used to say.7

  Quantification also altered the workings of politics. No matter their differences, Adams and Jefferson agreed that governments rest on mathematical relationships: equations and ratios. “Numbers, or property, or both, should be the rule,” Adams insisted, “and the proportions of electors and members an affair of calculation.”8 Determining what that rule would be had been the work of the constitutional convention; fixing that rule would be the work of the election of 1800, and of the political reforms to follow, each another affair of calculation.

  I.

  KINGS ARE BORN; presidents are elected. But how? In Philadelphia in 1787, James Wilson explained, the delegates had been “perplexed with no part of this plan so much as with the mode of choosing the President.” At the convention, Wilson had proposed that the people elect the president directly. But James Madison had pointed out that since “the right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States . . . the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.” That is, in a direct election, the North, which had more voters, would have more votes. Wilson’s proposal was defeated, 12 states to 1.9 Some delegates to the convention had believed Congress should elect the president. This method, known as indirect election, allowed for popular participation in elections while steering clear of the “excesses of democracy”; it filtered the will of the many through the judgment of the few. The Senate, for instance, was elected indirectly: U.S. senators were chosen not by the people but by state legislatures (direct election of senators was not instituted until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment, in 1913). But, for the office of the presidency, indirect election presented a problem: having Congress choose the president violated the principle of the separation of powers.

  Wilson had come up with another idea. If the people couldn’t elect the president, and Congress couldn’t elect the president, maybe some other body could elect the president. Wilson suggested that the people elect delegates to an Electoral College, a body of worthy men of means and reputation who would do the actual electing. This measure passed. But Wilson’s compromise stood on the back of yet another compromise: the slave ratio. The number of delegates to the Electoral College would be determined not by a state’s population but by the number of its representatives in the House. That is, the size of a state’s representation in the Electoral College was determined by the rule of representation—one member of Congress for every forty thousand people, with people who were enslaved counting as three-fifths of other people.10 The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.

  These calculations required a census, which depended on the very new science of demography (a founding work, the first edition of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, appeared in 1798). Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution calls for the population of the United States to be counted every ten years. Census takers were to count “the whole number of free Persons” and “all other Persons” but to exclude “Indians not taxed,” meaning Indians who lived as independent peoples, even if they lived within territory claimed by the United States. This first federal census, conducted in 1790, counted 3.9 million people, including 700,000 slaves. The three-fifths clause not only granted slave-owning states a disproportionate representation in Congress but amplified their votes in the Electoral College. Virginia and Pennsylvania, for instance, had roughly equivalent free populations but, because of its slave population, Virginia had three more seats in the house and therefore six more electors in the Electoral College, with the result that, for thirty-two of the first thirty-six years of the Republic, the of
fice of the president of the United States was occupied by a slave-owning Virginian, with John Adams the only exception.11

  There remained still more contentious calculations. How delegates to the Electoral College would be chosen had been left to the states. In 1796, in seven out of sixteen states the people elected delegates; in the rest, state legislatures elected delegates. The original idea had been for delegates to use their own judgment in deciding how to cast their votes in the Electoral College, although they hadn’t had to make much of a decision in 1788 and 1792, since Washington ran unopposed. But by 1796, two political parties having emerged and a decision needing to be made, party leaders had come to believe that delegates ought to do the bidding of the men who elected them. One Federalist complained that he hadn’t chosen his elector “to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson is the fittest man for President of these United States . . . No, I chose him to act, not to think.”12

  This ambiguity had resulted in a botched election. Under the Constitution, the candidate with the most Electoral College votes becomes president; the candidate who comes in second becomes vice president. In 1796, Federalists wanted Adams as president and Thomas Pinckney as vice president. But in the Electoral College, Adams got seventy-one votes, Jefferson sixty-eight, and Pinckney only fifty-nine. Federalist electors had been instructed to cast the second of their two votes for Pinckney; instead, many had cast it for Jefferson. Jefferson therefore became Adams’s vice president, to the disappointment of everyone.