Volume I Part 21 (1/2)
THE THIRD CONSt.i.tUTIONAL CONVENTION
1821
New England people, pa.s.sing through the Mohawk Valley into the rich country beyond Seneca Lake, found many reasons for settling in central and western New York. Out of this section the Legislature organised twelve new counties in 1812. The sixteen counties that existed in the State, in 1790, had increased to fifty-five in 1820. Settlers had rapidly filled up the whole region. New York City, according to the third census, had 123,706 inhabitants, and, of these, only 5390 were unnaturalised foreigners. Indeed, the population of the State, in 1820, was made up largely of native Americans; and the descendants of English families outnumbered those of the Dutch.
Administrative reform had not, however, kept pace with the increase in population. The number of freeholders qualified to vote for senator and governor, was, relatively, no larger; the power of the Council of Appointment had become odious; the veto of the Council of Revision distasteful; and the sittings of the Supreme Court infrequent. It was said that the members of the Council of Revision, secure from removal, had resisted the creation of additional judges, until the speedy administration of justice was a lost art. Gradually, the spirit that demanded independence, in 1776, began to insist upon a broader suffrage and additional rights. The New Englanders in the central, western, and northern parts of the State had very p.r.o.nounced sentiments upon the subject of reform. They sympathised little with the views of the landowning and conservative cla.s.ses that largely controlled the making of the Const.i.tution of 1777. The people of New York City, as well, who had increased over fifty per cent. in twelve years, clamoured for a radical change in conditions that seemed to them to have no application to life in a republic.
Nevertheless, the politicians were slow in recognising the necessity of amending the State Const.i.tution. Although trouble increased from year to year, governors avoided recommendations; and legislators hesitated to put in motion the machinery for correcting abuses. After Clinton had defeated Tompkins for governor, in 1820, however, the agitation suddenly blazed into a flame. Tammany resolved in favour of a convention having unlimited powers to amend the Const.i.tution.
Following this suggestion, Governor Clinton, in his speech to the Legislature in November, 1820, recommended that the question be submitted to the people. But the Bucktails, indifferent to the views of their opponents, pushed through a bill calling for a convention with unlimited powers, whose work should subsequently be submitted in gross to the people for ratification or rejection.
Governor Clinton preferred a convention of limited powers, a convention that could not abolish the judiciary or turn out of office the only friends left him. Nevertheless, it was not easy for a governor, who loved popularity, to take a position against the Bucktail bill; for the popular mind, if it had not yet formally expressed itself on the subject, was well understood to favour a convention. When, therefore, the bill came before the Council of Revision, Clinton thought he had taken good care to have a majority present to disapprove it, without his a.s.sistance. Van Ness and Platt were absent holding court; but, of the others, Joseph C. Yates, the only Bucktail on the bench, was presumably the only one likely to favour it. Chancellor Kent, in giving his reasons for disapproving the measure, contended that the Legislature had no const.i.tutional authority to create a convention of unlimited powers, and, if it did, it should require the convention to submit its amendments to the people separately and not in gross. Spencer agreed with the Chancellor. Yates, as expected, approved the bill, but there was consternation in the Council when Woodworth agreed with Yates.
Woodworth was the creature of Clinton. He had made him a judge, and, having done so, the Governor relied with confidence upon his support, in preference to that of either Van Ness or Jonas Platt. It recalls the mistake of the historic conclave which elected a Pope whom the cardinals believed too feeble to have any will of his own, but who suddenly became their master. One can easily understand Clinton's dilemma. He wanted the bill disapproved without his aid; Woodworth's action compelled him to do the very thing he had planned to avoid. To the day of his death, Clinton never got over the affront. ”Yates and Woodworth were both frightened and have d.a.m.ned themselves,” he wrote Henry Post, on the 27th of November, 1820. ”The latter supposed also that he would distinguish himself by his independence. I don't know a fellow more intrinsically despicable. I intend the first convenient opportunity to cut him to the quick. Y---- is a miserable fellow--the dupe of his own vanity and the tool of bad principles!”[218]
Woodworth's action was severely criticised; and when, shortly afterward, the Bucktails in the Senate sitting as a Court of Errors, reversed a judgment against him for several thousand dollars, overruling the opinion of Chancellor Kent, it seemed to impeach the purity of his motives.
[Footnote 218: DeWitt Clinton's Letters to Henry Post, in _Harper's Magazine_, Vol. 50, p. 415.]
After Clinton had voted in the Council, the convention bill, thus vetoed, did not get the necessary two-thirds support. At the regular session of the Legislature, which began in January, 1821, an amendment was accepted submitting to the people the simple question of a convention or no convention. Of the one hundred and forty-four thousand votes cast, one hundred and nine thousand favoured a convention. Delegates were then elected; and the convention, having been organised, continued in session from August 28 to November 10, 1821.
This convention pa.s.sed into history as a remarkable gathering of distinguished persons. With a few exceptions, all the men then living, whose names have figured in these pages, took an active part in its deliberations; and by their eloquence and ability contributed to a const.i.tution which was to answer the purposes of a rapidly growing State for another quarter of a century. John Jay, the const.i.tution-maker of 1777, then seventy-six years of age, who still lived upon his farm, happy in his rustic tastes and in his simple pleasures, was represented by his gifted son, Peter A. Jay of Westchester; Daniel D.
Tompkins came from Richmond; Rufus King from Queens; Nathan Sanford and Jacob Radcliff from New York; James Kent, Ambrose Spencer, Abraham Van Vechten, and Stephen Van Rensselaer from Albany; Jonas Platt, Ezekiel Bacon, and Nathan Williams from Oneida; William W. Van Ness, Elisha Williams, and Jacob R. Van Rensselaer from Columbia; and James Tallmadge and Peter R. Livingston from Dutchess. There was one new name among them--Samuel Nelson of Cortland, a young man, yet destined to become a well-known and influential chief justice of the State, and an a.s.sociate justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Federalists of Albany did not return Martin Van Buren, who now made his home in their city; but the people of Otsego honoured themselves and greatly strengthened the convention by making him their representative. He was clearly its leader. Root and Young did more talking, but when others had argued until argument seemed hopeless, Van Buren usually spoke the last word with success.
From the first, it was recognised that Clinton's friends were without influence. They could talk and vote, but the convention was a Bucktail body, in which the election of delegates, the choice of a president, the appointment of committees, the selection of chairmen, and the transaction of business were made party questions. The vote of sixteen to ninety-four for Daniel D. Tompkins, for president, showed Bucktail delegates overwhelmingly in the majority. Of the chairmen of the ten standing committees, all were prominent Bucktail leaders, save Rufus King, who had practically ceased to act with the Federalists of his State, and James, Tallmadge, who ended his affection for DeWitt Clinton when the latter preferred Thomas J. Oakley for attorney-general.
The convention's work centred about three great principles--broader suffrage, enlarged local government, and a more popular judiciary system. There was no difficulty in abolis.h.i.+ng the Councils of Appointment and of Revision; in clothing the governor with power of veto; in fixing his term of office at two years instead of three; and in making members of the Legislature ineligible for appointment to office. But, on the questions of suffrage and the judiciary, the convention was thrown into weeks of violent debate, memorable by prophecies never fulfilled, and by criticism that the future quickly disproved. In respect to the suffrage, there were practically three different views. A few members favoured freehold qualifications; a larger number believed in universal suffrage; while others stood between the two, desiring the abolition of a freehold qualification, yet opposing universal suffrage and wis.h.i.+ng to place some restrictions on the right to vote. Erastus Root and Samuel Young ably represented the second cla.s.s; Ambrose Spencer and the Federalists were intensely loyal to a freehold qualification; and Van Buren, backed probably by a majority of the convention, presented the compromise view.
Preliminary to the great debate, a lively skirmish occurred over the limitation of suffrage to the white voter. Strangely enough, this proposition was sustained by Erastus Root, the ardent champion of universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery; and it was opposed with equal warmth by Peter A. Jay and the Federalists, who advocated a freehold qualification. Van Buren did not speak, but he voted for the resolution, to eliminate the word ”white,” which was carried by a close vote--sixty-three to fifty-nine. Then it was proposed that coloured voters should be freeholders. Again the advocates of universal suffrage favoured the proposition, and the friends of a freehold qualification opposed it; but this time the convention decided against the negro, thirty-three to seventy-one. New York was slow to give equal suffrage to the blacks. Nearly three-fourths of the voters of the State withheld it in 1846; and, six years after President Lincoln's emanc.i.p.ation proclamation, when the black soldier had served his country throughout the Civil War with a fidelity and courage that awoke the strongest emotions of a patriotic people, it was again refused.
The debate, however, which aroused the greatest interest, and in which members of the convention most generally partic.i.p.ated, sprang from Ambrose Spencer's proposition limiting to freeholders the right to vote for senators. It must have occurred to the Chief Justice that the convention was against him, because its committee had unanimously agreed to abolish the freehold qualification; and, further, because the convention, by its action on the negro question, had demonstrated its purpose to wipe out all property distinctions among white voters; yet Spencer, at this eleventh hour, proposed to re-establish a freehold difference between senators and a.s.semblymen. The Chief Justice, with all his faults, and they were many and grave, had in him the capacity of a statesman; but it was a statesman of fifty years before. He had learned little by experience. The prejudices of Jay and other patriots of the Revolution, still lingered in his mind, arousing painful apprehensions of what would happen if the exclusive privileges of landowners should disappear, and robbing him of that faith in the people which made Erastus Root the forerunner of the broad suffrage that obtains to-day. Chancellor Kent backed Spencer's proposition in an abler speech than that made by the Chief Justice himself. Kent was an honourable, upright statesman, who, unlike Spencer, had never wavered in his fealty to that federalism which had been learned at the feet of John Jay and Alexander Hamilton; but, like Spencer, he had failed to discover that the people, jealous of their rights and liberties, could be trusted regardless of property holdings. ”By the report before us,” he said, ”we propose to annihilate, at one stroke, all property distinctions, and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage. That extreme democratic principle has been regarded with terror by the wise men of every age, because in every European republic, ancient and modern, in which it has been tried, it has terminated disastrously, and been productive of corruption, injustice, violence, and tyranny. And dare we flatter ourselves that we are a peculiar people, who can run the career of history exempted from the pa.s.sions which have disturbed and corrupted the rest of mankind? If we are like other races of men, with similar follies and vices, then I greatly fear that our posterity will have reason to deplore in sackcloth and ashes the delusion of the day.”[219]
[Footnote 219: Jabez D. Hammond, _Political History of New York_, Vol.
2, p. 34.]
Though Erastus Root and Samuel Young employed all their eloquence and all their energy against Spencer's proposition, it was Martin Van Buren's speech which made the deepest impression. It cannot be said that the latter's remarks defeated the amendment, because the vote of nineteen to one hundred, showed no one behind the Chief Justice's proposal save himself and a few Federalists. But Van Buren greatly strengthened the report of the committee, which gave a vote to every male citizen twenty-one years old, who had resided six months in the State and who had within one year paid taxes or a road a.s.sessment, or had been enrolled and served in the militia. Although, said Van Buren, this report is on the verge of universal suffrage, it did not cheapen the invaluable right, by conferring it indiscriminately upon every one, black or white, who would condescend to accept it. He was opposed, he said, to a precipitate and unexpected prostration of all qualifications, and looked with dread upon the great increase of voters in New York City, believing that such an increase would render elections a curse rather than a blessing. But he maintained that the events of the past forty years had discredited the speculative fears of Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison; that venality in voting, in spite of property qualifications, already existed in grossest forms in parliamentary elections in England, and that property had been as safe in those American communities which had given universal suffrage as in the few which retained a freehold qualification. Then, with great earnestness, his eye resting upon the distinguished Chancellor, he declared that whenever the principles of order and good government should yield to principles of anarchy and violence, all const.i.tutional provisions would be idle and unavailing.
It was a captivating speech. There was little rhetoric and less feeling. Van Buren took good care to show his thorough knowledge of the subject, and, without the use of exclamations or interrogations, he pointed out the unwisdom of following the const.i.tution-makers of 1777, and the danger of accepting the dogma of universal suffrage. The impression we get from the declaration of some of those who heard it, is that Van Buren surpa.s.sed himself in this effort. He seems to have made a large majority of the convention happy because he said just what they wanted to know, and said it in just the way they wanted to hear it. It must be admitted, too, that the evils which he prophesied, if universal suffrage were given to New York City, have been too unhappily verified. With the defeat of Spencer's proposition, the suffrage question quickly settled itself along the lines of the committee's report.
The judiciary article excited less debate but more feeling. Delegates brooded over the well known fact that judges had become political partisans, opposed to increasing their number to meet the growing demands of business, and anxious to retain the extraordinary power given them under the Const.i.tution of 1777. Whenever a suggestion was made to retain these judges, therefore, it provoked bitter opposition and denunciation. A few men in the convention had very fierce opinions, seasoned with a kind of wit, and of these, the restless energy of Erastus Root soon earned for him considerable notoriety.
Indeed, it pa.s.sed into a sort of proverb that there were three parties in the convention--the Republicans, the Federalists, and Erastus Root.
It is not so clear that he had as much influence as his long prominence in public life would seem to ent.i.tle him; but when he did happen to stand with the majority, he pleased it with his witty vehemence more than Peter R. Livingston did with his coa.r.s.e vituperation. In the debate on the judiciary, however, abuse and invective were not confined to Root and Livingston. Abraham Van Vechten and some of those who acted with him, employed every means in their power to defeat the opponents of the judges, although they scarcely equalled the extra-tribunal methods of their adversaries.
The contest opened as soon as the chairman of the judiciary committee reported in favour of a vice chancellor, from whom appeals should be taken to the chancellor; and of a superior court of common pleas, having practically the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, which should form a part of the Court for the Correction of Errors. This meant the continuation of the old judges. Immediately, Erastus Root offered a subst.i.tute, abolis.h.i.+ng the existing courts, and creating a new Supreme Court, with a corps of _nisi prius_ district judges. Root's plan also provided for the transfer of the equitable powers of the Court of Chancery to the courts of common law. This was the extreme view.
Although the convention, or at least a majority of it, might wish to get rid of the old Supreme Court judges, it was plainly unwilling to let go the Court of Chancery. So it rejected the Root subst.i.tute by a vote of seventy-three to thirty-six, and the report of the judiciary committee by seventy-nine ayes to thirty-three noes. But the attack thus daringly begun by Root, was steadily maintained. Martin Van Buren, who figured as a sort of peacemaker, proposed the retention of the Chancery and Supreme Courts, and the creation of circuit judges.
This proposition went to a special committee, which presented two reports--one for the preservation of the Court of Chancery and the Supreme Court, the other for the creation of a Court of Chancery, a Supreme Court, and courts of common pleas. It was plain that the second of these was Root's former subst.i.tute, with the Court of Chancery continued, and, in support of it, he now arraigned the political conduct of the judges with a severity that was speedily rebuked. Root was radical or nothing. He hated Spencer, he despised Van Ness, and he disliked James Kent and Jonas Platt; and with an exuberance of apparent anger he demanded the abolition of their courts and the creation of others in no wise different.
In replying to Root, Van Buren again discovered his kindliness of heart. The only question, he said, was whether the convention would insert an article in the Const.i.tution for the sole purpose of vacating the offices of the present chancellor, and Supreme Court judges, and thus apply a rule which had not yet been applied in a single instance.
There could be no public reason for the measure and personal feeling should not control. Referring to William W. Van Ness, he declared that he could with truth say that, throughout his whole life, he had been a.s.sailed by him with hostility--political, professional and personal--hostility which had been keen, active, and unyielding. ”But, sir, am I on that account to indulge my individual resentment in the prostration of my private and political adversary? If I could be capable of such conduct I should forever despise myself.” In conclusion, he expressed the hope that the convention would not ruin its character and credit by proceeding to such extremities. Van Buren struck hard, and for the time had routed the judges' opponents by a vote of sixty-four to forty-four. But if the delegates hesitated to back Root, they did not propose to follow Van Buren, and they crushed the first report under the unexpected vote of eighty-six to twenty-five.
The convention had now been in session over two months, and this most troublesome question seemed no nearer settlement than on the opening day. As in the suffrage debate, there were three factions--one determined to get rid of Chancellor Kent and the five Supreme Court judges; another, less numerous, desirous of continuing them all in office, and a third, probably composed of a majority of the convention, who wished to save the chancellor and lose the others.