Novus Ordo Seclorum--A New Order for the Ages

"We have only finished the first act of the great drama," Benjamin Rush wrote in 1786. "We have changed our . . . government, but it remains yet to effect a Revolution in our principles . . . and . . . to accommodate them to [new] forms of government." ² The constitutional convention that met the following year in Philadelphia began that process of accommodation, although it took almost three decades to complete it.

The Constitution broke from both the principles and the form of government embodied in the Articles of Confederation. The framers authored a "novus ordo seclorum" (a new order for the ages) not just for America but for the world. ³ The framers were already experienced in fashioning organic laws, and many of the seeming innovations in the federal document, such as separation of powers and popular sovereignty, derived from state constitutional practices. The Constitution was nonetheless ingenious (even revolutionary) because it extended these principles over a vast geographic area with a diverse population, and it divided authority between a central government and the states. In 1787 the United States became the world's largest constitutional republic ever.

Divisions in the Convention

The delegates to the Philadelphia convention were a mixed lot. All of them were nationalists in the narrow sense of that term, accepting the necessity of some new arrangement to strengthen central authority. They differed, however, over the scope of that reformation and, in every case, they remained deeply attached to their respective states. Public creditors and representatives of commercial interests were overrepresented (there were only four farmers), but many small farmers and large slaveholders were also dissatisfied with the Articles. Above all, the delegates thought of themselves as patriots.

Divisions existed among these patriots, and reconciling these political divisions ultimately affected the character of the nation's new fundamental law. George Washington, the convention's presiding officer, led the nationalist proponents of a strong central government. Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, James Wilson, and (to a lesser extent) James Madison joined him. These nationalists, or Federalists as they came to be known, were drawn from the big states; they came from areas of good communications and commercial activity. They were cosmopolitan in outlook and education, admiring of the English system, elitist in social views, and experienced in the Revolution, as military or high civilian officials.

The Federalists assumed that, on balance, passions of self-interest drove humanity. The purpose of public law was to harness this passion for self-promotion to the common good through an active government, one capable of representing domestic interests abroad and stimulating the development of trade, commerce, and manufactur

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ing at home. Federalists proposed, in sum, to place the new land in the mainstream of acquisitive capitalism.

Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and George Mason of Virginia led the convention's other major division, the republican ideologues. Although called Antifederalists by convention's end, they recognized that something had to be done to strengthen national authority. They were supporters of regional interests and were not necessarily democrats. Gerry explained to the delegates that "the evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy." ⁴ They uniformly believed that concerns for public welfare rather than the baser passions of self-interest guided human behavior, and that this quality should be depended on as the operating principle for the new government.

The Antifederalists came from areas away from the seaboard, where agriculture was more important than commerce and where lines of communication were often weak. They wanted authority to be exercised on the local level, believing as they did that a republican form of government could succeed only in a small geographic area. They were older, less well organized, and less imaginative than the Federalists; yet they were capitalists just the same, frequently pursuing their economic fortunes through agriculture rather than commerce.

The delegates also differed over the relationship between power (the ability to bring about change) and liberty (freedom from restraint). The Federalists were young, ambitious men of the Revolution, who (though fearful that power might overwhelm liberty) were so certain in their own abilities that they believed a new national government would succeed if it were under their control. The Antifederalists, on the other hand, were "men of little faith," who worried that power would obliterate liberty and did not trust themselves completely to exercise it through republican government. ⁵ Therefore, they did not trust it to any other hands.

Other issues cut across these major factions. Delegates from the small states worried that their large-state counterparts would give them short shrift. Northern and southern delegates also disagreed, first about the extent to which the national government should support commercial over agricultural capitalism and, second, about the future of slavery. Southerners, while often uncomfortable with their ro + ̍le as masters, recognized that their slaves and the wealth produced from slave labor constituted an important property right that required protection from a potentially encroaching national government. They feared, as well, the social consequences of freeing the slaves--not to mention the economic costs.

These ideological, social, and economic divisions necessitated compromise. The Federalists, who largely dominated the proceedings, relied on compromise and innovation--the basic arts of the political process--to mold a new scheme of public law and, with it, a new form of government.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 683