by Bill Bryson
And they were great enough to put aside their differences. In the space of a single uncomfortable summer they created the foundations of American government: the legislature, the presidency, the courts, the system of checks and balances, the whole intricate framework of democracy – a legacy that is all the more arresting when you consider that almost to a man they were against democracy in anything like the modern sense.
For a time they actually considered creating a monarchy, albeit one elected by the legislature. So real did this prospect seem that a rumour – quite without foundation – swept the colonies that the position was to be offered to the Duke of York, George III’s second son. In fact, the idea of a monarch was quickly deemed incompatible with a republic. Alexander Hamilton suggested as an alternative a president and senate elected for life from men of property, with absolute power over the states.19 Edmund Randolph preferred that the presidency be shared among three men, to give the executive office greater collective wisdom and less scope for despotism, sectionalism and corruption.20 (The prospect of corruption worried them mightily.) Almost all envisioned an America ruled by a kind of informal aristocracy of propertied gentlemen – men much like themselves, in fact. So distant from their thinking was the idea of an open democracy that when James Wilson of Pennsylvania moved that the executive be chosen by popular vote, the delegates ‘were entirely dumbfounded’. In the end they threw the matter of electing a President to the states, creating an electoral college and leaving each state to decide whether its collegial delegates would be chosen by the people or by the legislature.
In a spirit of compromise, they decreed that the House of Representatives would be chosen by the people, and the Senate by the states, an arrangement that remained in force until 1912 when senators at last were popularly elected. In the matter of the Vice-Presidency they decided – unwisely with the benefit of hindsight – that the job should fall to whoever came second in the Presidential poll. It seemed the fair thing to do, but it failed to take into account the distinct possibility that the Vice-President might represent a rival faction to that of the President. In 1804 the practice was abandoned and the custom of electing a two-man slate adopted.
When most of the rudiments were agreed, the delegates appointed a Committee of Detail to put their proposals on paper. One of the committee members, John Rutledge, was an admirer of the Iroquois, and recommended that the committee familiarize itself with the treaty of 1520 that had created the Iroquois confederacy. It begins: ‘We, the people, to form a union ...‘21 These were of course essentially the very words they chose:
We, the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
After this simple statement of intent, there follow seven Articles, six of which set out – sometimes sketchily, sometimes with fastidious detail – the mechanisms of government, with a seventh announcing that the document would take effect once it had been ratified by nine states. (A number not chosen lightly; the delegates thought it doubtful that more than nine states would ratify.)
At just twenty-five pages, the Constitution is a model of concision. (The state constitution of Oklahoma, by contrast, is 158 pages long.22 On some matters it was explicit and forthright – on the age and citizenship requirements for senators, representatives and the President, and most especially on the matter of impeachment. The framers seemed cautious almost to the point of paranoia about providing instructions for how to depose those found to be disloyal or corrupt. However, on other matters it was curiously vague. There was no mention of a cabinet, for instance. It mandated the setting up of a Supreme Court, independent from the other branches, but then rather airily decreed that the rest of the judiciary should consist of ‘such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish’. Sometimes this vagueness was a consequence of oversight and sometimes of an inability to arrive at a more specific compromise. Where it was specific, it almost always left room for later change. After decreeing that Congress should assemble at least once a year, beginning on the first Monday in December, it thoughtfully added ‘unless they shall by law appoint a different day’. The upshot is that the Constitution is an extraordinarily adaptable set of ground rules.
In terms of its composition, surprisingly few oddities of spelling and syntax stand out. Three words are spelled in the British style, behaviour, labour and defence, but not tranquillity, which even in 1787 was being given a single l in America. Only once is there an inconsistency of spelling – empeachments in one paragraph and impeachment in the next – and only two other words are spelled in an archaic way: chuse and encreased. The opening sentence contains a double superlative (’more perfect’), which might not survive the editing process today, though it was unexceptionable enough at the time. The occasional appearance of a discordant article and noun combination (’an uniform’), a rather more fastidious use of the subjunctive (’before it become a law’, ‘if he approve he shall sign it’), the occasional capitalization of nouns that would now be lower-cased (’our Posterity’), and the treating of ‘the United States’ as a plural (it would remain so treated until about the time of the Civil War),23 more or less exhaust the list of distinctions.
The Constitution is more notable for what it does not include. The words nation and national appear nowhere in the document, and not by accident or oversight. The delegates carefully replaced the words wherever they appeared. They feared that national smacked of a system in which power was dangerously centralized. They instead used the more neutral and less emotive federal, derived from the Latin fides, ’faith’, and in the eighteenth century still carrying the sense of a relationship resting on trust.24
The other part of the Constitution with which we are most familiar, the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights, came later. They were not adopted until 1791 (and in the case of Massachusetts not until 150 years later, when it was discovered that their ratification had been accidentally overlooked). These guarantees of basic freedoms were as radical and novel as anything that preceded them – even now Britain has no bill of rights, but then it has no written constitution either – but it is worth bearing in mind that the framers often meant something quite different by them. Consider the wording of the first Amendment: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble ...’ *15 Note in particular those first five words: ‘Congress shall make no law...’ The founders were not trying to free America from such restrictions, but merely endeavouring to ensure that matters of censorship and personal liberty were left to the states.25 And at the risk of exciting correspondence from the National Rifle Association, the much vaunted right of the people to keep and bear arms was never intended as a carte blanche, semi-divine injunction to invest in a private arsenal for purposes of sport and personal defence, as the full sentence makes clear: ‘A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.’ The framers had in mind only the necessity of raising a defence force at short notice. If they did favour the idea of keeping guns for shooting animals and household intruders, they never said so,
Astonishingly, at the time of its adoption almost no one saw the Constitution as a great document. Most of the delegates left Philadelphia feeling that they had created an agreement so riddled with compromise as to be valueless – ‘a weak and worthless fabric’, as Alexander Hamilton dispiritedly described it. Samuel Adams, John Hancock and Patrick Henry were all opposed. Fifteen of the convention delegates refused to sign it, among them George Mason, Elbridge Gerry and even two of the five men who had written it, Edmund Randolph and Oliver Elsworth. (Randolph s
oon showed an even more breathtaking measure of hypocrisy by accepting the post as the nation’s first attorney general, thus becoming the man most directly in charge of upholding the document he had lately disowned.) Even its heartiest proponents hoped for no more than that the Constitution might somehow hold the fragile nation together for a few years until something better could be devised.26
None the less, the document was duly ratified, Washington was selected as the first President, and 4 March 1789 was chosen as the day to begin the new government. Unfortunately, only eight senators and thirteen representatives troubled to show up on the first day. Another twenty-six days would have to pass before the House of Representatives could muster a quorum and even longer before the Senate could find enough willing participants to begin productive work.27
One of the first orders of business was what to call the new Chief Executive. The Constitution had referred to ‘the President of the United States’, but such had been the pomp and costly splendour of Washington’s inauguration and so stately the demeanour of the new office-holder as to encourage Congress to consider a title with a grander ring to it. Among the suggestions were His Highness, His Mightiness, His Magistracy, His Supremacy, and His Highness the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties. This last was the title very nearly chosen before the Congressmen returned to their senses, and the original wording of the Constitution, and settled for the respectful but republican President of the United States. Even so, Martha was often referred to as ‘Lady Washington’.
The Vice-Presidency seems to have caused no such difficulty, though some among the droller elements of Congress joked that the first incumbent, the portly John Adams, should be referred to as ‘His Rotundity’.
Washington was a firm believer in the dignity of his office. Visitors were expected to remain standing in his presence and even his closest associates found him aloof and disquietingly kingly in his deportment (leading one to wonder if America had exchanged George III for George I). To be fair to Washington, he had to establish from the outset that a President should be treated with utmost respect. In the early days of his presidency people would actually wander in off the street, to wish him luck or ask how things were going. (Eventually, he hit on a system whereby twice a week he set aside time during which any ‘respectably dressed person’ could come and see him.) He was acutely aware that he was setting patterns of executive behaviour that would live beyond him. ‘There is scarcely any part of my conduct which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent,’ he wrote a trifle gloomily. After sitting through hours of inconclusive debates in the Senate, he fled, muttering that he ‘would be damned’ if he ever subjected himself to such unproductive tedium again, and since that time no American President has taken part in legislative debates, a striking departure from British practice, though there is nothing in the Constitution to forbid it.28
One of the more intractable myths of this period is that Congress (or the Constitutional Convention itself) considered adopting German as the national language. The story has been repeated so often, by so many respectable writers, that it has nearly attained the status of received wisdom.*16 So let me say this clearly: it is wholly without foundation. In 1789, 90 per cent of America’s four million inhabitants were of English descent. The idea that they would in an act of petulance impose on themselves a foreign tongue is clearly risible. The only known occasion on which German was ever an issue was in 1795 when the House of Representatives briefly considered a proposal to publish federal laws in German as well as in English as a convenience to recent immigrants and the proposal was defeated.29 Indeed, as early as 1778, the Continental Congress decreed that messages to foreign emissaries be issued ‘in the language of the United States’.30
However, considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to US citizens a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternative possibilities were considered – the United States of Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, and Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Fredes) – but none found sufficient support to displace the prevailing title.31
United States of Columbia was a somewhat unexpected choice, since for most of the previous 250 years Christopher Columbus had been virtually forgotten in America. His Spanish associations had made him suspect to the British, who preferred to see the glory of North American discovery go to John Cabot. Not until after the Revolutionary War, when Americans began casting around for heroes unconnected with the British monarchy, was the name Columbus resurrected, generally in the more elegant Latinized form Columbia, and his memory generously imbued with a spirit of grit and independent fortitude that wasn’t altogether merited.
The semi-deification of Columbus began with a few references in epic poems, but soon communities and institutions were falling over themselves to create new names in his honour. In 1784 King’s College in New York became Columbia College and two years later South Carolina chose Columbia as the name for its capital. In 1791 an American captain on a ship named Columbia claimed a vast tract of the north-west for the young country and dubbed it Columbia. (It later became the states of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, though the original name lives on north of the border in British Columbia.) Journals, dubs and institutes (among them the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, better known today as the Smithsonian Institution*17) were named for the great explorer. The song ‘Hail Columbia’ dates from 1798.32
After this encouraging start, Columbus’s life was given a kick into the higher realms of myth by Washington Irving’s ambitious, if resplendently inaccurate, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which came out in 1828 and was a phenomenal best-seller in America, Europe and Latin America throughout the nineteenth century.
Irving later wrote a life of George Washington that was just as successful and no less indebted to his fictive powers. But it is Mason Locke Weems – or Parson Weems as history knows him – to whom we must turn for many of the most treasured misconceptions about the Father of the Country. His hugely successful Life of George Washington: With Curious Anecdotes, Equally Honourable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young Countrymen, first printed in book form in 1806, proved Weems to be not just a fictionalizer of rare gifts but a consummate liar.
Even for the time, the style of the book was more than a little saccharine. Consider the well-known story of Washington cutting down the cherry tree. We join the action at the point where George’s father has asked him if by any chance he can explain how a productive fruit tree has come to be horizontal, and whether the hatchet in his hand might have something to do with it.
‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’
‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports, ‘run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son, is more worth than a thousand trees ...‘34
Weems of course made the whole thing up. Almost everything in the book beyond the hero’s name and place of residence was made up or lavishly embellished. Even the title-page included a brazen falsehood. Weems advertised himself as the former ‘Rector of Mount-Vernon Parish’. There was no such parish and never had been. None the less, the work went through some twenty editions and was the greatest seller of its age.
Washington was in fact more flawed and human than Weems or many subsequent chroniclers would have us believe. He was moody, remote and vain (he encouraged his fellow officers in the Revolutionary War to address him as ‘Your Excellency’), he detested being touched by strangers and had an embarrassing proclivity to weep like a
babe in public – for instance, when things weren’t going well during the Revolution or when parting from his officers at the war’s conclusion. He was not a gifted military commander. Far from being a hero of the French and Indian War, as Weems and others have suggested, he actually helped to provoke it. In 1754, while an inexperienced lieutenant-colonel with the Virginia Regiment, he led an unnecessary and essentially irrational attack on a party of Frenchman encamped in the Ohio valley, killing ten of them. This and other such incidents so outraged the French that they went to war with the British. To compound his haplessness, Washington shortly after was routed in battle and naively signed a document in which he apologized for the ‘assassination’ of the Frenchmen, thereby outraging his own masters.35
But there was about him an unquestionable greatness. He was brave, resolute and absolutely incorruptible. No one gave more time or endured greater risks or hardships to secure America’s independence and democracy. For eight years he doggedly prosecuted a war in which neither the Continental Congress nor the people gave him anything like the support his valour deserved. During one long march across New Jersey, he watched in dismay as his army evaporated from 30,000 men to barely 3,400. To add to his problems, he often discovered he was being served by traitors. Benedict Arnold is the best-known example, but there were others, such as Major General Charles Lee, who while serving as one of Washington’s aides-de-camp was simultaneously supplying the British with advice on how to beat the Americans.36 It is no wonder that Washington sometimes wept.
He genuinely and nobly wanted only what was best for his country. Such was the hysteria that greeted his triumph over the British that he could have had any tribute he cared to ask for – a kingship, a lavish life pension, his own Blenheim Palace on the Potomac. He asked only to be allowed to return to a quiet life at Mount Vernon. When elected President he requested Congress not to pay him a salary, but only to meet his expenses – a position all the more honourable when you consider that he was chronically hard up. ‘My estate for the last 11 years has not been able to make both ends meet,’ he wrote in despair to his cousin shortly before becoming President, and when he made the trip from Mount Vernon to New York to be sworn in, he had to borrow £100 to pay his costs.37 (Financial hardship was a common problem for Virginia planters. Jefferson was so chronically pressed for money that in 1815 he sold his beloved private library to Congress for a much needed $23,950, though he rather undid this achievement by almost immediately beginning to acquire another just as splendid. By the time of his death, he was over $100,000 in debt, and most of the contents of Monticello had to be auctioned off.)
