Transcription
Recall from our last lecture that the Articles of Confederation created a government that was very weak, and that was by Design. Remember the earliest founding fathers, um, especially, um, John Dickinson, um, the author of The Articles of Confederation, hoped to keep power resting with the states. Okay.
And so under the Articles of Confederation, the central government was very weak, and because it was very weak, remember that it wasn't able to even, uh, perform many of its basic and essential duties. And that became especially apparent, um, during, uh, Shay's Rebellion. Remember that during Shay's Rebellion, the government couldn't even, um, tend to its own facilities. Okay. There was an AR Arsenal, a federal Arsenal in Massachusetts, that the government couldn't even oversee; it couldn't protect it; it couldn't manage it, in part because it didn't have the resources to do it, and in part because the Articles of Confederation created such a clunky system of representation and decision-making.
By 1786, then, it was very clear to many, um, that the Articles of Confederation simply was not an adequate document, um, for the needs of the country. And so by 1786, there was a growing movement in the direction of a new Constitution. Okay.
In fact, as early as, um, September of 1786, a group of men met, um, in Annapolis, Maryland, and it was there they began to talk about, um, at the very least fixing the Articles of Confederation, doing something to strengthen, um, the federal government. Well, unfortunately, the Annapolis convention only drew a handful of Representatives, but they decided that they would go back to their states; representatives from these five states, and they would begin to plan for a new convention. And that new convention, they were going to try and draw, um, representatives from all 13 of the states; they scheduled it for May of 1787.
And in May of 1787, representatives from 12 of the 13 states—only Rhode Island did not send Representatives—okay, 12 of the 13 represent States, excuse me, arrived in Philadelphia, um, to begin talking about, um, the Constitution.
Now, when they arrived, um, James Madison, the man pictured on the left here, James Madison introdu or or began to introduce and develop, actually, the the the the so-called Virginia Plan. It was actually introduced by the governor of, um, Virginia, um, his name was Edmond Randolph, uh, but the Virginia Plan was largely the brainchild of James Madison. Okay. James Madison had ideas about how to improve government, um, and these came out in this plan called the Virginia Plan. Okay.
So, for example, he believed that, um, it would be better to have not a unicameral legislature, but a bicameral legislature—that is, two houses of Congress—kind of like the House of Parliament, how the Houses of Parliament, where you have two houses, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. In State legislatures, you typically had two, um, legislatures that way—one house can deal with certain business, especially the business of the people, and the upper house, the other house, can deal with more with the important business, um, and economic issues. And so these were the thinking of James Madison: we need to have a bicameral legislature. Okay.
And as part of this, um, legislature, then he called not for equal representation. Remember, under the Articles of Confederation, representation in Congress was equal; every state had one vote. But he's going to say, no, that voting power should be proportional to population. In other words, there should be proportional representation in both houses: the more people in a state, the more power a state should have. His argument, his reasoning was quite simple: in the Articles of Confederation, little tiny States, states like Rhode Island and Delaware that had very few people, they had as much power as very large states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts. These were big States with lots of people, and they should have more power by virtue of the fact that they affect more people. All right.
So James Madison began to argue that in in both of these houses of Congress we should have representation that is proportional to the population, and in order to give that government, um, more power, um, and and the ability to do its job, um, the the central government, the federal government should have the power to levy taxes. Right, didn't wasn't real specific on what kind of taxes there would be, but if the federal government had the ability to tax, then it would have the ability to perform its basic duties. And he then proposed the idea that the president, the president could and should be an independent office. Okay.
Now remember, under the Articles of Confederation, the president simply presided over Congress as a member of Congress. But under the Virginia Plan, Madison's proposing that the president could be an independent branch of government, a separate Branch, completely separate from Congress, and that that President could have the power to veto an act of Congress. Now that's going to give this President a tremendous amount of power; some people are going to say, well, that doesn't that start making the president more like a king, and do we want a King here in the United States? And there are going to be some who start to criticize Madison's idea of an independent president with the power, um, to veto. Okay. And it's going to lead to all kinds of extensive debate in in years to come, and we're debating it right up to the present day. Okay.
But the Virginia Plan, it was, um, introduced early on and among the big States, and in fact, it became very popularly known as the big-state plan among representatives from the big States; it was very popular because it gave more power to those big States. But in the little States, well, the man pictured in the upper right here, James, uh, excuse me, William Patterson, they had a very different view. Okay. William Patterson came from New Jersey, uh, and representatives from New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, and the small states looked at this Virginia Plan and they said, this is not good; this is going to give the big states too much power. What we really want to do, according to William Patterson, is just keep the Articles of Confederation; the Articles of Confederation are working fine. Okay. One state, one vote, unicameral legislature—that all works fine. All we need to do, according to Patterson, is give the central government some limited power to tax so that it can perform the duties that it needs to perform; then we can avoid the kind of chaos that we had with, um, Shay's Rebellion, and we leave the power with the states themselves. All right.
So the New Jersey Plan, it became popularly known as the small-state plan because, um, it was so popular with the smaller States who didn't want to surrender power. All right.
So by the middle of June, this Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan, they were being voted back and forth, debated back and forth, and finally on June 19th, William Patterson was able to force, to bring about a vote on the New Jersey Plan, and he hoped that this vote on the New Jersey Plan would settle the matter altogether, that the Articles of Confederation would survive as our as our working Constitution. So it was put to a vote, and on June 19th, 1787, the New Jersey Plan was voted down; it was defeated. And when it was defeated, then that was effectively a voting down of the Articles of Confederation. And so now in June of 1787, the Virginia Plan is going to become the working model for a new government. Okay. The Virginia Plan is going to become the foundation for a new constitution. Okay.
Now, if we're going to have proportional representation, okay, that raises a couple of of issues because the small states don't like proportional representation, and they're going to begin demanding a compromise. Okay. Compromise is critical; this is all going to be about compromise. If it doesn't get, if we're going to have a new constitution, it's going to require compromise. So let's talk a little bit about some of the issues, um, and the compromise that came about. Okay. How to apportion power? Well, the first thing that they decided, and it doesn't appear on this slide but I'm going to explain, okay, first thing that they're going to decide is since there's two two houses, since this is going to be a bicameral legislature, we're going to have proportional representation in the lower house and equal representation in the Upper House. Okay. In other words, in the House of Representatives, and this is how it exists today, in the House of Representatives, the number of Representatives that a state has is going to be directly a result of the proportion of the population their state is to to the entire country's population. In other words, the more people, the more representation. Okay. On the other hand, the Upper House, the Senate, we have equal representation; every state has two senators. Okay. So on the question of of how to apportion power, we're going to have, um, proportional representation in the lower house; we're going to have equal representation in the Upper House, and that was a compromise. Okay.
Now, if we're going to have proportional representation in the lower house, then the next big question is how do you count the slave population? And this is where things get really, really, um, mixed up, convoluted, even, okay, because in the South they've always argued that slaves are property, okay, and if slaves are property, then you don't count them as people. Okay. That's what they're going to say. In the North, if you're going to have slavery in the South, and if you are going to enslave these people, you can't count them as part of the population; you have to count them as property. And in the South they're saying, no, you can't do that; they're people; they're people; you got to count them as as as as part of the population. And of course, the argument in the South is the more population you have, the more representation you're going to have. So now Southerners who never wanted to count slaves as Pe slaves as people before, now they want to count them as people so that they can increase their representation. And in the in the North, where they're starting to abolish slavery, get away get away from slavery altogether, they're now starting to argue, nope, you got to count them as property; slaves are property; they're not, um, they're not people. Okay. So it's one of the the the really ironic kind of twist that that surround slavery, of course. Okay. How, especially in the South, they wanted to count slaves as people, even though in a legal sense they were considered property.
So they finally struck a compromise, and it was the notorious 3/5ths Compromise. When determining representation in the House of Pop House of Representatives, then, um, the founding fathers decided that the, um, that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted, okay, which effectively meant that a Slave equals 3/5ths of a person. Okay. Again, notorious, demeaning, one of the inhumane, of course, elements, aspects of slavery, which, um, survived from from that time period, but it was a compromise that allowed the founding fathers then to go on and talk about other issues. Okay.
And the other really important issue that they had to tackle was this question of the rights of the people, okay, the rights of the citizens. There was especially a man from Virginia, a man by the name of George Mason, who, along with Patrick Henry, uh, and others, were insistent that the Constitution must include an articulated list of the rights of the people, a Bill of Rights. Okay. A Bill of Rights; the rights of the people must be in the Constitution; that's what Mason argued, and in fact, refused to sign any document until it did include a Bill of Rights. Absence of a Bill a Bill of Rights, George Mason, um, wasn't going to sign anything; Patrick Henry wasn't going to sign anything; there were others who were simply not going to sign anything. And though compromise had allowed to, um, to overcome differences in the cases of of apportioning power, now in the case of this Bill of Rights, compromise was really becoming impossible. Okay.
By September of 1787, George Mason and and Patrick Henry's resistance to, um, the Constitution was starting to threaten the Constitution, um, overall. Okay. By September of 1787, it was harvest time, and there were a lot of farmers at this convention in Philadelphia who needed to leave, who needed to go home, and James Madison was beginning to recognize that unless, you know, the document was signed, then nothing was going to get get done; the whole, um, the whole convention will disintegrate, and we'll get no con, uh, Constitution at all. All right, which many of the small states advocates—that's what they wanted from the from the from the start.
So finally, on September 17th of 1787, the founding fathers basically opted to put their signatures on a new constitution. George Mason and some others never did. Okay. George Mason and some others never did, but certainly James Madison and the majority, um, who were the vast majority of the delegates at Philadelphia, they did; they signed off on the Constitution. Did it include a Bill of Rights? Did it include the basic, um, you know, articulated list of the rights of citizens of the United States? And the answer is no, it did not. Okay. Which raises a question then: did James Madison care about the rights of citizens? Okay. Didn't he care enough about the rights of citizens to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution? And the answer is yes, he did care about the rights of citizens, but he feared that this document would not pass, um, and and it would never become, um, the law of the land, um, if this question of the Bill of Rights continued to block, um, ratification. So he ultimately, he and others ultimately decided that they would sign this document, but most important, this document could be amended, and it would be amended. He pledged, he pledged to George Mason, and he pledged to others, that once this new government was formed, they would begin immediately the process of amending this constitution to fix it and include a Bill of Rights. Okay.
So yes, James Madison did care about a Bill of Rights; he did want to include a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, but most important in his mind was to get the Constitution enacted, get it ratified, and then amend it. Okay. Now that tells you two things about the Constitution, and it's a couple of things that I want you to to to understand. First of all, the Constitution was by De was by Design, excuse me, it was by Design amendable. Okay. It was never conceived as a perfect document. Okay. It was never perfect; it was never complete; it was always a work in progress, and it has always been seen as a work in progress. Okay. So this document, which is survival for 200-plus years, 240 years now, um, this document was from the start, um, designed to be amended. All right. So that, um, it could adapt to changing times and changing circumstances. All right. So if you're inclined to to especially be one of the rigid, um, originalists, okay, there are those who are are constantly wondering what was the intention of The Originators, of the founding fathers, well, I'll tell you what their intention was: their intention was to draft a document that could change, okay, and through the amendment process, we do change it. Okay. It has been amended, um, 30-plus times now. Right. So yes, um, it is considered to be a work in progress. Okay.
The other thing to to to remember about this: there's a tendency to think that the founding fathers were of one voice. Okay. They are of they were of one mind; that they acted in unison; they acted with a common Vision about what to expect, um, in the United States; and that, well, nothing could be further from the truth. Okay. The one thing that we know is that large numbers of the founding fathers opposed the Bill of Rights, and there's a reason why they opposed the Bill of Rights. Okay. Believe it or not, there were large numbers of founding fathers who did not want to give common individuals, the Common Man, the common woman—they didn't want to give that right to freedom of expression, freedom of speech. If you give the Common Man a right to speak freely, the common man will use that right to start revolutions against the government; that's what many, uh, of the founding fathers feared. On the other hand, give the Common Man the right to bear arms, and the common man might take up those arms and launch a revolution against the government. Okay. So there were those many founding fathers who said, no, the right to bear arms should not be protected in the Constitution. So it is critical to understand that the founding fathers were not of one unified voice; they did not want for all Americans to have the freedom to say and do whatever they wanted; they did not want all Americans, um, to to to have the the right to bear arms. Okay. That was not in the Constitution; it's going to be amended. Okay. It's going to be amended, but it was not in the Constitution originally because the founding fathers were not of one unified voice, and that is important to understand. All right.
So in September of 1787, the uh the uh Constitution, um, was signed, and after it was signed, now it's going to go out to the states for ratification. What does this document provide for? Well, we're going to now, under this new constitution, very quickly, we're going to have three branches of government. Okay. We're going to have an executive branch, the president; we're going to have a legislative branch, the Congress; and we're going to have a Judiciary, a judicial branch, the courts. And under this constitution, these three branches of Government act independent of one another, at least in theory, and they have the powers to check and balance one another. Okay. Three branches of government, independent with powers to check and balance one another. Okay. You'll learn about those Powers if you take a when you take your government classes. Okay. Article One of the legislature creates a bicameral Congress. Okay. Two houses, House of Representatives and a house or excuse me, an upper house, um, the Senate. Okay. So Article One basically outlines the powers of Congress. Article Two, Article Two, uh, outlines, um, the powers of an independent executive. Okay. Again, I stress, originally under the Articles of Confederation, the president was not independent of Congress. Now, under Article Two, the executive, the president, is going to be a separate branch of government, and one of the powers that he has to check, um, Congress, uh, is the power to veto, okay, a law that is passed or a bill, I should say, that is passed by Congress and sent to the president for his signature can be vetoed by the president; it doesn't he doesn't have to sign it; it doesn't have to become law. All right. So the president has veto power over the over the Congress. At the same time, um, a Congress, um, has the power to override vetos. Right. If if the if they can muster a two-thirds majority, um, Congress can override a veto. Right. So those are the checks and balances of the Congress, uh, and the executive. Okay. Article Three, uh, outlines the powers of the federal Judiciary, the third branch of government; this is the courts. We'll talk later on, um, about, uh, John Marshall, the the the father of the Supreme Court and the man who especially helped build the federal Judiciary in in this country. Okay. Remember, prior to our Constitution, under the Articles of Confederation, there was no federal court; all courts were state courts, um, prior to, um, the Artic prior to the, um, Constitution. All right. So the federal Judiciary. Okay.
Last point I want to make about the Constitution itself, um, concerns Article Seven, which specifically addresses ratification and how this document would become the the government of of the land. Okay. It is important to remember: 55 men arrived in Philadelphia Adelphia and signed this constitution. If you think about this, what gave these 55 men the power to create a new government? And the reality is nothing did. Okay. All these men did in drafting this document was basically propose that this should be our new, um, government; this should be the Constitution of the United States of America. Then, once they drafted the document, they had to basically operationalize it; they had to find a way to validate it and make it become the law of the land, and that's what Article Seven did; it outlined the ratification process. So once nine out of 13 states, and they're going to have state constitutional conventions now, once nine of the 13 states, um, approve or ratify this document, then the the Constitution would be the law of the land. Okay. But that process of ratifying, um, was going to was going to be dicey; it was going to be troublesome, all right, because there was much opposition to, um, the Constitution. Okay. Those that opposed the Constitution, the ratification, they became known as Anti-Federalists. Anti-Federalists were those who tended to favor the states; they wanted to keep power with the states; they favored a decentralized, weak government like we had under the Articles of Confederation; they feared that if the federal government, um, became strong, if the central government became strong, then ultimately what that would mean is that you would set the stage, um, for a monarchy. Okay. You would have a president who was a king, and and and and our government would start to look like that of of England. And and there were those who said, no, we don't want that kind of of a of a strong central government; we want a weak central government, and we want to keep power with the states. Those were the Anti-Federalists. On the other hand, small-f Federalists were those that favored a stronger central government; they supported the Constitution; they wanted, um, to increase the power of the central government; they wanted a strong president who was who had powers, various Powers, including the power to veto. All right. So theirs was a quest to ratify the Constitution of 1787. All right.
So Anti-Federalists and Federalists, they debated back and forth on whether or not to ratify this Constitution, and these debates were going on in all 13 states, um, at one time. All right. So what happened? Well, in order to bolster, um, the cause of the Constitution, John Jay, the man pictured in this slide, along with Alexander Hamilton, who we'll talk more about later, and James Madison, the author of the The Constitution, these three men became the most active proponents and supporters of the Constitution, and they began to author and publish a whole series of of papers, um, that were known as the, um, Federalist Papers. There were actually 85 total papers; they were actually all signed anonymously. Okay. They were signed Publius, which is Latin for the public. Okay. So nobody at the time knew for certain who was writing these, but we know from the original documents and based on the pen the penmanship of each of these, we know who the three authors were: Jay, Hamilton, uh, and Madison. And probably the most important of these Federalists was, um, Federalist number 10, because it was in Federalist 10 that that that Alexander ham sorry, James Madison, um, was especially, um, vocal in kind of dismissing, um, the the fear, one of the biggest fears, um, that Anti-Federalists had. Okay. And that was the idea that a strong centralist government would be taken over by powerful interests, and those powerful interests would use the government, um, to promote their own interests; they wouldn't promote the interests of the General Public; they would just promote, um, their own private interests. Okay. And so, for example, you might have a group of merchants, um, from New York, um, and those New York Merchants would use their power, um, to seize control of the government, and they would govern, um, for the goodness of themselves, not for the benefit of the people, or it could be a group of Southern Planters who might do the same thing. Okay. Well, in Federalist 10, James Madison responded to that criticism, and he effectively argued that there can be no doubt but that different interest groups will try to influence the central government; make no mistake, because that's how government works. Okay. When you have, um, even in monarchies, you will have different interest groups that are trying to influence, um, the the government. Okay. So interest politics, influential politics—that's the nature of government. Okay. But the beauty of this system, according to Madison, is that it allows for the different factions, the different interests, to actually check and balance against one another. Okay. So for for example, um, if you had a monarchy, the king might favor one interest over another. Okay. But in this case, you're not going to have that that kind of kind of a situation because we're going to vote presidents out of office, and new presidents will be coming into office, and the point then is that the different factions will be competing against one another, and because they compete against one another, none of them will gain an upper hand. Right. So it's going to be hard, they claim, for any single interest group to to take over and dominate the government; that's what James Madison argued in Federalist 10, and it was a very persuasive argument that in many ways now is going to help lay the foundation for the ratification.
And so ratification starts right in December of 1787, just two months, two and a half months after the, um, ratification of the Constitution; Delaware became the first state to ratify, um, the document. Okay. But remember, under Article Seven, now it's going to require nine states before we have full ratification. Well, in June of 1788, then, in June of 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify. Right. And so by the text of the document itself, that was enough to make it now effectively the law of the land, but that then raised some very important questions. Right. And the biggest question was: does this, um, Constitution now apply to the four states that didn't ratify? And that was especially important because two large states, Virginia and New York, had not yet ratified the document. All right. Did that mean that Virginia and New York were part of the union, or did that mean that J New York and Junior New York and Virginia could still opt out of the Union? Okay. There were all kinds of uncertainties, and Virginia Virginia was stuck. Okay. And it was still that that confounding Bill of Rights issue; it the the state of Virginia simply was not eager to ratify a document that didn't include a Bill of Rights. And again, George Mason was and and Patrick Henry—these were the principal opponents of the Constitution; they were Anti- Anti-Federalists who refused to, uh, embrace this constitution if it did not include a Bill of Rights. All right.
So the Virginia struggle, and I kind of got ahead of myself a little. Okay. Patrick Henry, George Mason—the big obstacle remained the Bill of Rights. Okay. Well, ultimately, James Madison, who was a Virginia, um, Edmund Randolph, and others were able to, um, call and bring about a vote on the Virginia, um, ratification. All right. They would have liked to have, um, um, uh, 100% support, but that wasn't going to happen. On the other hand, Patrick Henry and George Mason, um, no, they did not vote for it; it was a, you know, it was a statewide convention; they didn't vote for it; they tried to block it, uh, but unsuccessfully. All right. Point being, Virginia did ultimately, um, ratify, and in the end, New York followed, and finally, by the end of the summer, all 13 states had ratified. All right. All 13 states had ratified, and we'll talk about, um, George Washington and the new government, um, when we come back, um, in our next lecture. But real quickly, I since we're on the topic of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, I kind of want to follow up on that real quickly. Okay.
Once the new government became seated, uh, and began, uh, you know, in operation and began working, um, James Madison, true to his pledge, did indeed, um, introduce amendments to the Constitution. Okay. And so the first 10 amendments to the constit Constitution were introduced. Okay. And you're probably familiar with them; I'm not going to go all over all of them, but they include like the First Amendment, which is the right of freedom of speech; the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment; um, rights against self-incrimination, um, the the Fifth Amendment. Okay. There are 10 of them, and go to your Constitution and look at them; I'm not going to test you over all 10, but I do want you to remember that collectively those 10 amendments are called The Bill of Rights, and they define and become the basis for defining the rights of individuals in in this country. Okay. And again, I can't stress strongly enough, the debate over those bill of that Bill of Rights, it continued. All right. Just because we have a Bill of Rights does not mean that there was unanimous support for that Bill of Rights. Federalists tended to be skeptical of a Bill of Rights; Anti-Federalists tended to support a a Bill of Rights. Right. But by 1791, then, three-fourths of the states had ratified the first 10 10 Amendments. Okay. And the first 10 amendments came to be known as, and they are known as, the Bill of Rights. Okay. Don't forget that the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. Okay. I'm going to wrap up that dis our discussion of the Constitution here. When we come back in our next, um, lecture, then we're going to start talking about the presidency, uh, of George Washington.