Volume I Part 45 (2/2)
rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, ... all pretensions of human rights and privileges” were imperiled if not lost by the change.
It _was_ the ”despised” Confederation that had carried us through the war. Think well, he urged, before you part with it. ”Revolutions like this have happened in almost every country in Europe.” The new Government may prevent ”licentiousness,” but also ”it will oppress and ruin the people,” thundered their champion. The Const.i.tution was clear when it spoke of ”sedition,” but fatally vague when it spoke of ”privileges.” Where, asked Henry, were the dangers the Const.i.tutionalists conjured up? Purely imaginary! If any arose, he depended on ”the American spirit” to defend us.
The method of amendment provided in the Const.i.tution, exclaimed Henry, was a mockery--it shut the door on amendment. ”A contemptible minority can prevent the good of the majority.” ”A standing army” will ”execute the execrable commands of tyranny,” shouted Henry. And who, he asked, will punish them? ”Will your mace-bearer be a match for a disciplined regiment?” If the Const.i.tution is adopted, ”it will be because we like a great splendid” government. ”The ropes and chains of consolidation” were ”about to convert this country into a powerful and mighty empire.” The Const.i.tution's so-called checks and balances, sneered Henry, were ”rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ... contrivances.”
The Const.i.tutionalists talked of danger if the Confederation was continued; yet, under it, declared Henry, ”peace and security, ease and content” were now the real lot of all. Why, then, attempt ”to terrify us into an adoption of this new form of government?... Who knows the dangers this new system may produce? They are out of sight of the common people; they cannot foresee latent consequences.” It was the operation of the proposed National Government ”on the middling and lower cla.s.ses of people” that Henry feared. ”This government” [the Const.i.tution], cried he, ”is not a Virginian but an American government.”
Throughout Henry's speech, in which he voiced, as he never failed to do, the thought of the ma.s.ses, a National Government is held up as a foreign power--even one so restricted as the literal words of the Const.i.tution outlined. Had the Const.i.tutionalists acknowledged those Nationalist opinions which, in later years, were to fall from the lips of a young member of the Convention and become the law of the land, the defeat of the Const.i.tution would have been certain, prompt, and overwhelming.
In the Const.i.tution's chief executive, Henry saw ”a great and mighty President” with ”the powers of a King ... to be supported in extravagant magnificence.” The National Government's tax-gatherers would ”ruin you with impunity,” he warned his fellow members and the people they represented. Did not Virginia's own ”state sheriffs, those unfeeling blood-suckers,” even ”under the watchful eye of our legislature commit the most horrid and barbarous ravages on our people? ... Lands have been sold,” a.s.serted he, ”for 5 s.h.i.+llings which were worth one hundred pounds.” What, then, would happen to the people ”if their master had been at Philadelphia or New York?” asked Henry. ”These harpies may search at any time your houses and most secret recesses.” Its friends talked about the beauty of the Const.i.tution, but to Henry its features were ”horribly frightful. Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints toward monarchy.”
The President, ”your American chief,” can make himself absolute, dramatically exclaimed the great orator. ”If ever he violates the laws ... he will come at the head of his army to carry everything before him; or he will give bail, or do what Mr. Chief Justice will order him.”
But will he submit to punishment? Rather, he will ”make one bold push for the American throne,” prophesied Henry. ”We shall have a king; the army will salute him monarch: your militia will leave you, and a.s.sist in making him king and fight against you.”[1197] It would be infinitely better, he avowed, to have a government like Great Britain with ”King, Lords, and Commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils” as the Const.i.tution contained.
Henry spoke of the danger of the power of Congress over elections, and the treaty-making power. A majority of the people were against the Const.i.tution, he said, and even ”the adopting states have already heart-burnings and animosity and repent their precipitate hurry....
Pennsylvania has been tricked into” ratification. ”If other states who have adopted it have not been tricked, still they were too much hurried.[1198] ... I have not said the one hundred thousandth part of what I have on my mind and wish to impart”--with these words of warning to the Const.i.tutionalists, Henry closed by apologizing for the time he had taken. He admitted that he had spoken out of order, but trusted that the Convention would hear him again.[1199]
Studying this attack and defense of master swordsmen, following the tactical maneuvers of America's ablest politicians, a partisan on one side, yet personally friendly with members of the other, John Marshall was waiting for the call that should bring him into the battle and, by the method which he employed throughout his life, preparing to respond when the Const.i.tutionalist managers should give the word. He was listening to the arguments on both sides, a.n.a.lyzing them, and, by that process of absorption with which he was so peculiarly and curiously gifted, mastering the subjects under discussion. Also, although casual, humorous, and apparently indifferent, he nevertheless was busy, we may be sure, with his winning ways among his fellow members.
Patrick Henry's effort was one of the two or three speeches made during the three weeks of debate which actually may have had an effect upon votes.[1200] The Const.i.tutionalists feared that Henry would take the floor next morning to follow up his success and deepen the profound impression he had made. To prevent this and to break the force of Henry's onslaught, they put forward Governor Randolph, who was quickly recognized by the chair. Madison and Nicholas were held in reserve.[1201]
But in vain did Randolph employ his powers of oratory, argument, and persuasion in the great speech beginning ”I am a child of the Revolution,” with which he attempted to answer Henry. There is no peace; ”the tempest growls over you.... Justice is suffocated,” he said; legal proceedings to collect debts are ”obscured by legislative mists.” As an ill.u.s.tration of justice, consider the case of Josiah Philips, executed without trial or witness, on a bill of attainder pa.s.sed without debate on the mere report of a member of the Legislature: ”_This made the deepest impression on my heart and I cannot contemplate it without horror_.”[1202] As to ”the American spirit” expressed through the militia being competent to the defense of the State, Randolph asked: ”Did ever militia defend a country?”
Randolph's speech was exhaustive and reached the heights of real eloquence. It all came to this, he said, Union or Dissolution, thus again repeating the argument Was.h.i.+ngton had urged in his letter to Randolph. ”Let that glorious pride which once defied the British thunder, reanimate you again,” he cried dramatically.[1203] But his fervor, popularity, and influence were not enough.
Marshall, when he came to speak later in the debate, made the same mistake. No more striking ill.u.s.tration exists of how public men, in the hurry and pressure of large affairs, forget the most important events, even when they themselves were princ.i.p.al actors in them.
Although the time had not properly come for the great logician of the Const.i.tution to expound it, the situation now precipitated the psychological hour for him to strike. The chair recognized a slender, short-statured man of thirty-seven, wearing a handsome costume of blue and buff with doubled straight collar and white ruffles on breast and at wrists. His hair, combed forward to conceal baldness, was powdered and fell behind in the long beribboned queue of fas.h.i.+on. He was so small that he could not be seen by all the members; and his voice was so weak that only rarely could he be heard throughout the hall.[1204] Such was James Madison as he stood, hat in hand and his notes in his hat, and began the first of those powerful speeches, the strength of which, in spite of poor reporting, has projected itself through more than a hundred years.
At first he spoke so low that even the reporter could not catch what he said.[1205] He would not, remarked Madison, attempt to impress anybody by ”ardent professions of zeal for the public welfare.” Men should be judged by deeds and not by words. The real point was whether the Const.i.tution would be a good thing or a bad thing for the country. Henry had mentioned the dangers concealed in the Const.i.tution; let him specify and prove them. One by one he caught and crushed Henry's points in the jaws of merciless logic.
What, for the gentle Madison, was a bold blow at the opposition shows how even he was angered. ”The inflammatory violence wherewith it [the Const.i.tution] was opposed by designing, illiberal, and unthinking minds, begins to subside. I will not enumerate the causes from which, in my conception, the heart-burnings of a majority of its opposers have originated.” His argument was unanswerable as a matter of pure reason and large statesmans.h.i.+p, but it made little headway and had only slight if any influence. ”I am not so sanguine,” reported Was.h.i.+ngton's nephew to the General at Mount Vernon, ”as to ... flatter myself that he made many converts.”[1206]
The third gun of the powerful battery which the Const.i.tutionalists had arranged to batter down the results of Henry's speech was now brought into action. George Nicholas again took the floor. He was surprised that Mason's resolution to debate the Const.i.tution clause by clause had not been followed. But it had not been, and therefore he must speak at large. While Nicholas advanced nothing new, his address was a masterpiece of compact reasoning.[1207]
Age and middle age had spoken for the Const.i.tution; voices from the bench and the camp, from the bar and the seats of the mighty, had pleaded for it; and now the Const.i.tutionalists appealed to the very young men of the Convention through one of the most attractive of their number. The week must not close with Henry's visions of desolation uppermost in the minds of the members. On Sat.u.r.day morning the chair recognized Francis Corbin of Middles.e.x. He was twenty-eight years old and of a family which had lived in Virginia from the early part of the seventeenth century. He had been educated in England at the University of Cambridge, studied law at the Inner Temple, was a trained lawyer, and a polished man of the world.
Corbin made one of the best speeches of the whole debate. On the nonpayment of our debts to foreign nations he was particularly strong.
”What!” said he, ”borrow money to discharge interest on what was borrowed?... Such a plan would destroy the richest country on earth.” As to a Republican Government not being fitted for an extensive country, he asked, ”How small must a country be to suit the genius of Republicanism?” The power of taxation was the ”lungs of the Const.i.tution.” His defense of a standing army was novel and ingenious.
The speech was tactful in the deference paid to older men, and so captivating in the pride it must have aroused in the younger members that it justified the shrewdness of the Const.i.tutionalist generals in putting forward this youthful and charming figure.[1208]
Of course Henry could not follow a mere boy. He cleverly asked that Governor Randolph should finish, as the latter had promised to do.[1209] Randolph could not avoid responding; and his speech, while very able, was nevertheless an attempt to explode powder already burned.[1210] Madison saw this, and getting the eye of the chair delivered the second of those intellectual broadsides, which, together with his other mental efforts during the Const.i.tutional period, mark him as almost the first, if not indeed the very first, mind of his time.[1211] The philosophy and method of taxation, the history and reason of government, the whole range of the vast subject were discussed,[1212] or rather begun; for Madison did not finish, and took up the subject four days later. His effort so exhausted him physically that he was ill for three days.[1213]
Thus fortune favored Henry. The day, Sat.u.r.day, was not yet spent. After all, he could leave the last impression on the members and spectators, could apply fresh color to the picture he wished his hearers to have before their eyes until the next week renewed the conflict. And he could retain the floor so as to open again when Monday came. The art of Henry in this speech was supreme. He began by stating the substance of Thomas Paine's terrific sentence about government being, at best, ”a necessary evil”; and aroused anew that repugnance to any st.u.r.dy rule which was a general feeling in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the ma.s.ses.
Both the Confederation and the proposed Const.i.tution were ”evils,”
a.s.serted Henry, and the only question was which was the less. Randolph and Madison incautiously had referred to maxims. Henry seized the word with infinite skill. ”It is impiously irritating the avenging hand of Heaven ... to desert those maxims which alone can preserve liberty,” he thundered. They were lowly maxims, to be sure, ”poor little, humble republican maxims”; but ”humble as they are” they alone could make a nation safe or formidable. He rang the changes on the catchwords of liberty.
Then Henry spoke of Randolph's change of front. The Const.i.tution ”was once execrated” by Randolph. ”It seems to me very strange and unaccountable that that which was the object of his execration should now receive his encomiums. Something extraordinary must have operated so great a change in his opinion.” Randolph had said that it was too late to oppose the ”New Plan”; but, answered Henry, ”I can never believe that it is too late to save all that is precious.” Henry denied the woeful state of the country which the Const.i.tutionalist speakers had pictured.
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