Boston 1775: James Wilson

Showing posts with label James Wilson. Show all posts

Friday, July 18, 2025

“Altho’ he made his living by crying, he was always in a most jovial mood”

Last week History.com published Elizabeth Yuko’s article “Town Criers Were the Original Social Media.”

The scope of this survey ranges from medieval period to the early nineteenth century, in Europe and various parts of America. Yuko quoted my observations on the town criers of Boston.

The 1796 Boston directory listed only John Weare as a crier, a post that Laurie Halse Anderson found he’d held since 1782. But Weare died in 1800. The 1809 Boston directory listed James Wilson as the town crier, living “over 23 Cornhill” near the center of town.

In Old Boston Town: Early in This Century (1883), James Hale wrote:

The steps of the Exchange Coffee House were much used by James Wilson, the town crier, to announce the auction sales of Whitwell & Bond, Thomas K. Jones & Co., David Hale (afterwards of N. Y. Journal Commerce), and other auctioneers, who did chiefly congregate in Kilby street, near State.

Jimmy was a great humorist, and altho’ he made his living by crying, he was always in a most jovial mood. He generally closed the formal announcement of an auction by some quizzical remark to a bystander, for he knew everybody, and was on familiar terms with all sorts and conditions of men.

Jimmy Wilson was often at his post about nine o’clock in the evening, ringing his bell loudly for several minutes to collect a large crowd, and then announcing a lost child, or a lost pocket-book. His account of the agony of bereaved parents would be heart-rending, when he would suddenly explode a joke which would start the crowd off, roaring.

In Rambles in Old Boston (1886), Edward Griffin Porter added:

James Wilson…for nearly half a century was better known probably among men, women, and children than any other person in the town. He was a short, thick-set, red-faced man, with keen eyes and a powerful voice. Although commonly known as the crier, he was a brush-maker by trade, and a good one too. The writer has seen a pair of clothes-brushes made by him, which have been in constant use in Boston for over seventy years, and are as good apparently as ever.

Wilson’s shop was in the basement of the Exchange Coffee-House, fronting upon what is now Congress Square. At one period he sold ale, after the English fashion, in pewter mugs, and had a foaming “toby” painted on his door to indicate it; but his chief sign was this bell in hand, said to be a correct copy of the bell he carried so many years.

Wilson’s retailing establishment eventually developed into today’s Bell in Hand tavern.

Saturday, November 02, 2024

“Apprehensive, that the Government of these States, may in future times, end in a Monarchy”

Last month the Journal of the American Revolution published Ray Raphael’s article “A Kingly Government?: Benjamin Franklin’s Great Fear.”

Franklin and James Madison were among the most vocal of the men at the Constitutional Convention wary of assigning too much power to the executive branch, or investing too much of that power in one man.

Ray Raphael writes:

Madison opened the bidding. Wouldn’t it be “proper,” he asked, “before a choice should be made between a unity and plurality in the Executive, to fix the extent of the Executive authority?” Madison proposed minimal powers: “to carry into execution the national laws” and “to appoint offices in cases not otherwise provided for.” With little dissent, state delegations agreed. Executive authority was subservient to legislative demands, save only for some lesser appointments. Most significantly, he/they would not possess the “powers of war and peace.”

Later the debate turned to whether there would be a single executive and how long one man would hold that office:

Franklin stewed over the prospect of a single executive serving for seven years. “Being very sensible of the effect of age on his memory,” he told the Convention the next morning, he carefully wrote down his objections. Saddled with a weakened voice and failing eyes, he would find it difficult to read aloud what he had just penned, so James Wilson offered to read it for him:
It will be said, that we don’t propose to establish Kings. I know it. But there is a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government. It sometimes relieves them from Aristocratic domination. They had rather have one tyrant than five hundred. It gives more of the appearance of equality among Citizens, and that they like. I am apprehensive therefore, perhaps too apprehensive, that the Government of these States, may in future times, end in a Monarchy.

I’d like to refute Franklin’s belief in “a natural inclination in mankind to Kingly Government.” However, too many people speak of U.S. Presidents as solely responsible for laws, court decrees, wars, and other actions that the Constitution explicitly assigns to other branches. And a smaller but still too large number of people are attracted to obvious strongmen.

Back in 1787, as the convention went on, however, most delegates seem to have let those worries subside a bit. The example of George Washington in the chair probably had an influence. No better solutions presented themselves.

We know that Franklin and Mason opposed a single executive, fearing the extent of his powers. They had sounded the alarm at the outset of the convention, and [George] Mason’s opposition to ratification would highlight the dangers of a single executive as well as the absence of a bill of rights. But Madison’s concern has received scant attention. A chief architect of the Constitution’s checks and balances, he failed to gain traction for this protection against an executive who put himself over country. Convention fatigue might well have played a role.

The Constitution did explicitly reserve “powers of war and peace” for the legislature, and limited the single executive to a four-year term. While the British Crown could veto legislation, a U.S. President’s veto could be overridden. Still, the fear of a President taking on monarchical powers and the rest of the government being unable or unwilling to stop it remained.

Ray Raphael’s article ends with Franklin’s exchange with Elizabeth Powel, as recorded by James McHenry:

Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy. A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.

(I’ve discussed that anecdote at length since 2017.)

Saturday, October 26, 2024

More Misrepresentation of James Wilson

The American Philosophical Society has just shared what might be the best blog posting of the season: Renée Wolcott’s “Spurious Sexploits: The Case of the James Wilson Diary.”

James Wilson was a Pennsylvania jurist who played important roles at the Constitutional Convention and on the first U.S. Supreme Court.

He was also prominent at the Second Continental Congress, though not in the way portrayed in the musical 1776.

The diary in question is a 1773 almanac with notes of various sorts throughout—a common eighteenth-century artifact. Originally written in black ink, those notes have faded to brown.

What makes it interesting is how some of those notes describe sexual exploits. As Wolcott explains:

In the space dedicated to Wednesday, December 4, Wilson wrote “Ludowick Richart’s wife Began to wash for me” in his usual dark brown ink.

In the space immediately below, for Thursday, December 5, the paler ink continued, “Ludowicks wife a nice person – I rolled her over and fuddled her – This p.m – sweet thing – god help me in my wickedness.”

In conserving the diary, Wolcott started with the knowledge that the six diary entries referring to sex are now a lighter brown than the innocuous business entries. She tested a sampling of marks and found that Wilson wrote most of his entries in iron gall black ink, but those remarks about sex are in a different ink.

That raised the possibility that Wilson chose to write those entries in a common red ink of the day, one that didn’t contain iron. Were those his “red letter days”?

Further examination under “a powerful stereomicroscope,” however, showed that the quality of the inks differed in other ways as well. There are also textual clues that the sexual lines weren’t written in 1773: word usage, lack of the long s, &c.

So now the mystery is, as Wolcott writes, “Why this forger wished to present James Wilson as a satyr.”

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “Travels Through Life” Digitized

Here’s another source on the Revolution recently digitized: eight handwritten volumes of Dr. Benjamin Rush’s “Travels Through Life: or Account of Sundry Incidents and Events in the Life of Benjamin Rush…written for the use of his children.”

The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia owns these volumes and has made them perusable over the web.

There’s a ninth and final volume nearby at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

George W. Corner transcribed and edited Rush’s memoir for publication by the A.P.S. in 1948, which was late for the first-person reminiscences of a noted Founder. The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush is still under copyright, therefore, and I haven’t come across any digitized edition on the web.

As a result, some of Rush’s anecdotes aren’t as well known and retold as one might expect. Here from near the start of handwritten volume 6, for example, is the doctor’s recollection of interactions with George Washington on 18 June 1775, right after he agreed to be the Continental Congress’s top general:

A few days after the appointment of General Washington to be commander in chief of the American Armies, I was invited by a party of Delegates and several citizens of Philada. to a dinner which was given to him at a tavern on the Banks of the Skuilkill below the city.

Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, James Wilson, Jno. Langdon of New Hampshire and about a dozen more, constituted the whole company. The first toast that was given after dinner was “The Commander in chief of the American Armies.” General Washington rose from his seat, and with some confusion thanked the company for the honor they did him. The whole company instantly rose, and drank the toast standing.

This scene so unexpected, was a Solemn one. A silence followed it, as if every heart was penetrated with the awful, but great events which were to follow the Use of the Sword of liberty which had just been put into general Washington’s hands by the unanimous voice of his country.

About this time, I saw Patrick Henry at his lodgings, who told me that general Washington had been with him, and informed him, that he was unequal to the station in which his country had placed him, and then added with tears in his eyes “Remember Mr. Henry what I now tell you,- From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, & the ruin of my reputation.”

My transcription differs from Corner’s in tiny details of punctuation and capitalization. But only by looking at the manuscript can we see, for example, that Rush:

added the words “New Hampshire” because, I presume, he didn’t think his readers would remember who John Langdon was.
started to write that Washington thanked his companions with “great confusion” before easing that down to “some confusion.”
first quoted Henry as saying Washington spoke of “what I this day tell you” and changed that to “what I now tell you,” probably because the phrase “the day” appeared in the next clause.

Rush biographer Stephen Fried, whose tweet alerted me to this digital offering, noted that the digitization of Rush’s memoirs “even shows the parts his kids tried to cut out,” and that “his infamous riffs on his fellow signers is in Vol 7.” Have fun.

Wednesday, December 07, 2022

Charles Pinckney in Hindsight and the Supreme Court

Yesterday I was struck by Pema Levy’s article at Mother Jones about a false document being cited to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Levy based her article on September essay at Politico by Ethen Herenstein and Brian Palmer, and by briefs that have been filed with the court since.

Levy writes:

Three decades after the Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams set about assembling the government’s official Journal of the Convention. Missing from the records was the proposal submitted by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina [shown here]. So Adams wrote him to request a copy. Pinckney replied with an extraordinary document: a draft that so closely resembled the final Constitution that he would have to have been clairvoyant to have written it. . . .

“At the distance of nearly thirty two Years it is impossible for me now to say which of the 4 or 5 draughts I have was the one,” he replied to Adams’ request in 1818, “but enclosed I send you the one I believe was it.” Oddly, the document was written on paper with a 1797 watermark, matching his accompanying letter. Nonetheless, Adams published it.

The debunkings came fast. James Madison, the convention’s most meticulous notetaker, soon wrote to friends that the draft was inaccurate. Years later, Madison discredited Pinckney’s fraud in writing, explaining the document contained language that had only been arrived at after weeks of debate and could not have been divined before the convention began. Madison, convinced it was a fake, detailed how Pinckney’s supposed draft contradicted a more contemporaneous account of the South Carolinian’s actual proposal.

Max Farrand included the Pinckney document in his comprehensive twentieth-century compilation of documents related to the U.S. Constitution, but with a note and additional documents making quite clear that it was not a reliable historical source. A genuine contemporaneous copy of Pinckney’s actual plan survived in the papers of James Wilson and was published in 1904.

Advocates for the “Independent State Legislature” theory have seized on one small detail in the post-Constitution Pinckney document, arguing that it shows the Framers (not just Pinckney) planned at the start of the Constitutional Convention (not two to four decades later) to give states unlimited power over federal elections.

Levy says:

there is no evidence that the framers of the Constitution intended to give legislatures such authority over federal elections. Nor is there any record this interpretation was accepted in the republic’s early years. In fact, history shows that the independent state legislature theory is a modern invention. . . .

It’s possible that the lawyers…who cited the version of the document in Farrand’s 1911 compendium, simply failed to read past the plan to the historian’s conclusion that it was a fake, and that they likewise failed to read Madison’s public takedown or his private letters expressing doubts, all of which were included by Farrand. Whether they meant to or not, they hung their argument on a fake document because it offered a glimmer of originalist evidence to back up their case.

Historians and legal scholars, including some on the political right, have filed briefs arguing against reliance on this document in particular and the theory being espoused in general.

The response has been legal tap-dancing:

the lawyers filed a new brief defending their use of the Pinckney plan. They argued that the plan was not technically “a fake” because it is “undisputed” that Pinckney wrote it, and allege that the generations of historians who discredited the document were hoodwinked by Madison’s “campaign to diminish the significance of [Pinckney’s] role at the convention.”

Justices on the Supreme Court today have been willing to deny photographic evidence and ignore decades of legal and historical precedent in order to reach the verdicts they want. In this case, a majority could adopt the “Independent State Legislature” theory without mentioning one problematic document. But if the final decisions do mention Pinckney, that will be yet more evidence that the “originalists” on the court aren’t interested in the original Constitution at all.

Monday, February 19, 2018

Are You Ready for a Cabinet Meeting?

For Presidents Day, we look in on George Washington’s meetings with his cabinet on 1-2 Aug 1793.

The issue on the table was what to do about Edmond-Charles Genet, the French diplomat who was stirring up support of Revolutionary France, resentment of Britain, and friction within the U.S. of A.

The cabinet members—Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph—all agreed to ask France to recall Genet. They differed on how peremptorily to do so. They really differed on whether to report the decision and the reasons for it to the American public.

Hamilton liked the idea of an official “appeal to the people,” despite not usually being interested in public opinion, because it offered an opening for a full-throated critique of Revolutionary France. According to Jefferson’s notes:

Hamilton made a jury speech of 3/4 of an hour as inflammatory and declamatory as if he had been speaking to a jury. E.R. opposed it. I chose to leave the contest between them.

The President adjourned that meeting until the next day. “Hamilton spoke again 3/4 of an hour,” Jefferson wrote then. “I answered on these topics.” He kept minimal notes on Hamilton’s remarks and detailed notes on his own, indicating that he didn’t write those notes at the time but afterwards, and he really didn’t care about Hamilton’s opinion.

Eventually it became clear which way Washington was leaning:

The President manifestly inclined to the appeal to the people. He said that Mr. [Robert] Morris, taking a family dinner with him the other day went largely and of his own accord into this subject, advised this appeal and promised if the Presidt. adopted it that he would support it himself, and engage for all his connections.—The Presidt. repeated this twice, and with an air of importance.—

Now Mr. Morris has no family connections. He engaged then for his political friends.—This shews that the President has not confidence enough in the virtue and good sense of mankind to confide in a government bottomed on them, and thinks other props necessary.

Jefferson distrusted campaigns for public opinion by his political opponents. He was, of course, promoting his own ideas with allies like James Madison. He had also recruited Philip Freneau to come to Philadelphia and start the anti-Federalist National Gazette, giving the writer a sinecure in the State Department.

Then the meeting took an awkward turn.

Knox in a foolish incoherent sort of a speech introduced the Pasquinade lately printed, called the funeral of George W—n and James W[ilso]n, king and judge &c. where the President was placed on a Guillotin.

The Presidt. was much inflamed, got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself. Run on much on the personal abuse which had been bestowed on him. Defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives. That he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office, and that was every moment since. That by god he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation. That he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world and yet that they were charging him with wanting to be a king. That that rascal Freneau sent him 3. of his papers every day, as if he thought he would become the distributor of his papers, that he could see in this nothing but an impudent design to insult him. He ended in this high tone.

There was a pause. Some difficulty in resuming our question—it was however after a little while presented again, and he said there seemed to be no necessity for deciding it now: the propositions before agreed on might be put into a train of execution, and perhaps events would shew whether the appeal would be necessary or not.

It took another three weeks for the cabinet to complete their dispatch to the American minister in Paris, Gouverneur Morris, telling him to ask the French government to withdraw Genet. Meanwhile, it became clear to Washington that most informed Americans disapproved of the French diplomat’s behavior, so he no longer saw any need for a public appeal.

Thursday, August 25, 2016

A James Wilson Memorial Award for Gen. Charles Lee

When I saw the movie musical 1776 during the Bicentennial, it left me with a strong impression of James Wilson. He was the Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress shown casting the decisive vote for independence. In the movie Wilson, played by Emory Bass, is a dithering, insecure man who finally chooses sides because he prefers to be in the crowd rather than be remembered for standing up to it.

In real life, Wilson was a highly respected Pennsylvania judge who in 1774 published an important pamphlet on the limits of Parliament’s authority over the colonies. In the Congress he advocated independence early on, withholding his vote only until he felt sure the people of Pennsylvania were behind it.

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Wilson was one of the leading theorists of government and a member of the committee of detail, which produced the first draft. After the federal government was in place, President George Washington nominated him to be one of the first Associate Justices of the Supreme Court.

None of those contributions to the country are in 1776. The movie Wilson is simply a pawn in the dramatic conflict between the hard-driving John Adams and the more reluctant revolutionary John Dickinson. I knew that the real Wilson wasn’t part of a singing chorus, of course, and that the conversations in the Congress didn’t proceed precisely as shown. But I didn’t expect the creators of 1776 would distort a historical figure so much.

How did Wilson become vulnerable to such distortion? He had stopped being a household name, even in Pennsylvania. That allowed the playwright Peter Stone to sacrifice Wilson’s real career for the cause of drama.

In the twenty-first century, the Revolutionary figure most deserving of a James Wilson Memorial Award for being misrepresented in historical drama seems to be Gen. Charles Lee. Versions of Lee are supporting characters in both the first two seasons of the television series Turn: Washington’s Spies and the Broadway musical Hamilton. But both stories bend the facts of Lee’s life.

Turn depicts Lee’s capture at the end of 1776, portraying him (played by Brian T. Finney) as caught during a sex game. That’s not so far off as there have been rumors that Lee was visiting a mistress at the New Jersey tavern where British dragoons found him.

In the second season Lee becomes a British secret agent, trying to throw the Battle of Monmouth. Again, there’s a historical inspiration for that plot twist—the captive general did offer Gen. Sir William Howe ideas on how to defeat the colonists—but Lee never tried to undermine the Americans as Turn shows. Instead, as the book discussed yesterday argues, he performed well on the battlefield, causing trouble off of it, mostly for himself.

Even so, that depiction of Lee as a treacherous villain is nothing compared to how he appears as an incompetent buffoon in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. That show features the duel between Lee and Col. John Laurens, with Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton as their seconds. (Burr gets inserted into a number of events to increase dramatic unity.) That scene serves to set up the duel everyone knows is coming at the end.

In the play Hamilton refers to Lee as a Virginian, classifying him with his adversaries Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. While Lee did buy land on the Virginian frontier in 1775, he was English by birth and upbringing.

In the musical number “Stay Alive,” Hamilton complains of Washington, “Instead of me, he promotes Charles Lee, makes him second-in-command.” To which Lee, most often played by Jon Rua, memorably responds, “I’m a general. Whee!”

Lee could have responded that the Continental Congress had made him its third-ranking general in June 1775, when Hamilton was still a private in his college militia company. The next spring, with Artemas Ward staying in Massachusetts, Lee became second-in-command. He and Hamilton were never up for the same job.

Later, Hamilton asks, “How many died because Lee was inexperienced and ruinous?"

Lee was the Continental general with the widest military experience when the war began. He had been a professional soldier since his teens and actually studied military science. He had fought in major campaigns and sieges, in the American wilderness and on European plains. Americans were delighted that Lee brought all that experience to their army.

As with Judge Wilson, not many people know about Gen. Lee these days. That’s left dramatists free to reshape the details of his career to serve their stories. Given Hamilton’s popularity, a generation of young people is being introduced to Charles Lee as an inexperienced rival to Hamilton from Virginia.

The irony is that there’s no need to change anything about Charles Lee to create drama. He was drama on horseback, roving restlessly through the nascent U.S. of A. with his Italian manservant and his portable Shakespeare and his dogs. The man was a larger-than-life character: smart, slovenly, hot-tempered, witty, eccentric, and self-defeating. Someday I hope we’ll see a more accurate representation of Lee, writing political pamphlets and military plans and indiscreet letters, Washington’s most experienced officer and his biggest headache. Now that would be a show.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Real Lessons of the Three-Fifths Compromise

American historians’ Twitter feeds lit up yesterday with links and responses to an essay from James Wagner, the president of Emory University, extolling the value of compromise. Though the essay started talking about national politics, by the end it was clear that Wagner was also addressing the opposition to his program to change the university.

But what really raised eyebrows was the example of compromise Wagner chose to praise:

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

Some might suggest that the constitutional compromise reached for the lowest common denominator—for the barest minimum value on which both sides could agree. I rather think something different happened. Both sides found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared—the aspiration to form a more perfect union.

Wagner in the past has expressed regret about slavery on Emory’s behalf and written of the university’s “elective amnesia.” But he seems to have had a relapse.

Wagner’s new essay expresses an old view of the Constitution, casting the lifelong servitude of generations of Americans as an acceptable price for creating or preserving the U.S. of A. The rich, white politicians who forged this compromise and benefited most from that union didn’t give up much for it. The provision’s burden fell almost entirely on poor black slaves, and to a lesser extent on relatively poor free farmers in other districts and states who lost voting power.

In fact, most of the states had already agreed to a version of the three-fifths compromise proposed by James Madison during a debate over taxation under the Articles of Confederation. Only two states—New Hampshire and New York—objected, but that was enough to kill the provision under that constitution. James Wilson and Charles Pinckney proposed the same ratio at the Constitutional Convention. After debating the idea, applied to both representation and a “direct tax,” off and on for weeks, the convention adopted it in Article One, Section 2. The convention also declared that its document would be adopted even if four states voted no.

Wagner has other historical examples of compromises to point to. The Constitutional Convention also had to work out deals on a bicameral legislature with two forms of apportionment and the overlapping powers of the government’s three branches. (Of course, some might say those decisions led to periodic gridlock in Washington later.) Nineteenth-century politicians hailed legislative compromises like the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—but they, like the three-fifths clause, had the effect of strengthening slavery.

If I had to choose one example of political compromise from early America that eventually brought wide benefits, it would be the agreement during the states’ ratification conventions to make immediate amendments to the Constitution. The result, today called the Bill of Rights, was mostly a statement of individual rights and protections. But that compromise arose out of a much wider public debate than the elite convention. And Americans didn’t fully enjoy those rights until the Fourteenth Amendment and twentieth-century judicial decisions requiring state and local governments to respect them.

In contrast, the three-fifths clause is now inoperative and repudiated by all. Indeed, it’s so far back in our past that most people don’t understand how it operated. The Constitution didn’t define blacks as three-fifths human, as some now interpret that clause. For purposes of calculating representation in Congress, the Constitution counted enslaved people in a district and multiplied by three-fifths before adding that number to the free people (white and black). But for all other purposes, the Constitution defined slaves as no-fifths of humans—they were property without rights.

Enslaved Americans might have been better off not being counted for representation. As it was, their numbers, multiplied by three-fifths, provided more influence for the rich white men in the parts of the country where they were enslaved. Those elite voters wielded disproportionate power in the U.S. Congress, the Electoral College, and state legislatures that followed the same system. Their representatives used that power to maintain their status and their human property for decades.

That’s the real lesson of the three-fifths compromise: decision-making by the elite alone tends to maintain the advantages of that elite at a cost to others. Real compromises require the participation of all the people involved and real sacrifices, even from the top.

Saturday, August 06, 2011

Questions about the “Connecticut Compromise”

The July 2011 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography newly transcribes and reprints James Wilson’s notes from the Constitutional Convention’s Committee of Detail, which transformed six pages of resolutions into a twelve-page first draft of the Constitution ready for further debate and revision. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania also displays images from Wilson’s first and second drafts.

William Ewald and Lorianne Updike Toler of the University of Pennsylvania Law School prepared the new transcription and provided an introductory discussion of how historians of the Constitutional Convention has treated those documents:

Only after the Civil War did the scholarly study of the convention properly commence. In 1882 George Bancroft published the two volumes of his History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America. . . . Bancroft, a passionate defender of the Union, told the story of the convention as a dramatic struggle between the states, pitting the Virginia Plan [representation proportional to population] against the New Jersey Plan [equal representation to each state]. The convention (and, by extension, the nation) almost tore itself apart until [on 16 July 1787], in a very American gesture of reconciliation, a compromise was reached—which Bancroft was the first to call the “Connecticut Compromise.” . . .

The standard historiography, following the footsteps of Bancroft and [Max] Farrand, agrees in seeing the vote of July 16 as the defining moment of the convention and the work of the Committee of Detail as an episode of secondary importance. . . .

It is true that [James] Madison and Wilson both viewed the “Connecticut Compromise” as a major flaw, and many political scientists have criticized it for its violation of the democratic principle of “one-person-one-vote.” But whether one views it as a flaw or as a virtue, it is hard, two centuries after the event, to see it as a major flaw or a major virtue. It has given rise to no substantive litigation; votes in the Senate virtually never pit large states (as such) against small states (as such); and if it were replaced by a more Madisonian principle of representation, the American system of governance would still be recognizably the same. Like the Electoral College or the vice presidency, it is more of a quirk of the system than a central and defining feature.

But that quirk also has major unintended consequences. That quirky Electoral College was made to reflect the makeup of the Congress, with each state getting the same number of electors as it had representatives in the House and Senate combined. This gives small states disproportionate power in presidential elections. Though small states have never voted en bloc, the result can still skew elections undemocratically. In 1877, 1889, and 2001 a President and Vice President took office without, as the Declaration of Independence called it, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Unfortunately, fixing this flaw requires the support of a significant number of the states who receive disproportionately high power. So the Bancroftian story that the Connecticut Compromise was an American triumph lives.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

A Dinner for General Washington

On 18 June 1775, George Washington wrote in his diary:

Dined at Mullens upon Schoolkill. Spent the Evening at my lodgings.

The next day he recorded dinner at the house of Joseph Reed, soon to be his first military secretary. And then, on the day he received his formal commission as general from the Continental Congress, Washington stopped keeping his diary for a few years.

Years later, Dr. Benjamin Rush described what was probably that dinner at a tavern along the Schuylkill:

A few days after the appointment of General Washington to be commander in chief of the American armies, I was invited by a party of delegates and several citizens of Philadelphia to a dinner which was given to him at a tavern on the banks of the Skuilkill below the city. Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, James Wilson, Jno. Langdon of New Hampshire and about a dozen more constituted the whole company.

The first toast that was given after dinner was “The Commander in chief of the American Armies.” General Washington rose from his seat, and with some confusion thanked the company for the honor they did him. The whole company instantly rose, and drank the toast standing. This scene, so unexpected, was a solemn one. A silence followed it, as if every heart was penetrated with the awful, but great events which were to follow the use of the sword of liberty which had just been put into General Washington’s hands by the unanimous voice of his country.

In his autobiography Rush added another anecdote:

About this time I saw Patrick Henry at his lodgings, who told me that General Washington had been with him, and informed him that he was unequal to the station in which his country had placed him, and then added with tears in his eyes “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you: From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”

That story seems out of character for Washington to me. But of course he worked hard at presenting a certain character to the world, and we’re not privy to many unguarded moments. A slight change in the words Henry remembered—“I fear that from the day I enter…,” or some such—makes it easy to imagine those words from Washington’s mouth.

Monday, February 08, 2010

New Draft of Constitution? Well, Not New. And Not a Real Draft.

Last Tuesday the Philadelphia Inquirer reported about the rediscovery of a document in the holdings of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, said to be a lost “early draft” of the U.S. Constitution by James Wilson (shown at right, courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Law School). The researcher who made the find, and the claim of its importance, is Lorianne Updike Toler, a lawyer pursuing graduate studies at Oxford.

That article quoted one established constitutional scholar on the significance of the discovery: “John P. Kaminski, director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution in the history department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.”

Kaminski is also one of the six directors of ConSource: The Constitutional Source Project, and chair of its Academic Advisory Board. Toler is a co-founder and former executive director of ConSource, which quickly used the news coverage in an appeal for funds.

However, the same Inquirer story also acknowledged: “The document - one of 21 million in the Historical Society's collection - was known to scholars…” On Friday the society showed on its blog how this document was transcribed and published in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, a widely used authority edited by Max Farrand, in 1911.

The H.S.P. contacted other historians who’ve worked on this subject, and their comments on that blog entry indicate that they were underwhelmed. Mark David Hall, author of The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson, 1742-1798:

I was disappointed to find that these documents had long been known to scholars. They were published in the same order suggested by Ms. Toler by Max Farrand in 1911. . . . It seems a stretch to call these notes a “draft” of the Constitution, and labeling them as such adds little to our knowledge of Wilson or the Constitutional Convention.

Richard R. Beeman, University of Pennsylvania, author of Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution:

Max Farrand, in his 1911 edition of The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, reprinted all of the documents discovered by Ms. Toler, and in exactly the order in which they appear in the manuscripts she discovered in the HSP archives. It is also the case that the location of those documents is not at all obvious, so Ms. Toler should be given credit for diligent searching and sleuthing. But the lion’s share of the credit truly does belong to Max Farrand, who long ago not only discovered the documents, but also recognized them for what they were—important contributions by Wilson to the Committee of Detail Report.

William B. Ewald, University of Pennsylvania Law School, author of “James Wilson and the Drafting of the Constitution” (PDF download):

The Wilson drafts are extremely well-known. They were first systematically studied at the end of the nineteenth century by Franklin Jameson, whose monograph appeared in 1902. Jameson did much of the work of piecing together the various drafts of the Constitution. His work was supplemented by Max Farrand, whose magisterial Records of the Constitutional Convention, published in 1911, carefully assembled all the known documents. . . . [This document] is to be found, properly catalogued, in the Wilson collection, exactly as Farrand reported a century ago.

Apparently Toler found a page that got separated from the rest of its original stack, bound with other Wilson papers, and finally acquired by the H.S.P. Following common archival procedures, the library staff did not undo that binding and refile the page with the rest. And the pre-computerized catalogue did not specify what each piece of that volume was, meaning that Toler had the thrill of spotting how it fit with other H.S.P. documents.

The Mormon Times picked up on the story from Philadelphia because Toler is a Provo native and graduate of Brigham Young University. It didn’t do her any favors by quoting her as saying:

“This makes James Wilson very much equal to Thomas Jefferson as a drafter of the Constitution,” she said. “It means to truly understand the Constitution, we need to study James Wilson a whole lot more.”

Jefferson was in Paris as the U.S. minister to France during the constitutional convention, and didn’t see a need for a stronger national government. [ADDENDUM: Toler has told American Creation: “I was misquoted on Jefferson. The Deseret News has apologized individually to me, and I have asked them to officially print an errata. The quote should have been ‘I believe this draft may indicate that James Wilson is to the Constitution what Thomas Jefferson is to the Declaration of Independence.’ Understandable error: it’s hard to type as fast as I talk.”]

Toler’s own comment on the H.S.P. blog acknowledges that she is “currently alone in calling these two disparate pieces a ‘draft’” of the Constitution, rather than notes prepared for the Committee of Detail or even written during that committee’s discussions. But it’s not clear even that interpretation is significant. Historians have long credited Wilson with an important role at the Constitutional Convention, and the final document was truly a group effort—that’s why there was a convention, after all.

This episode does underscore the value of computerizing sources to make them widely available, as ConSource was founded to do—though it may be duplicating other, larger efforts. The H.S.P. can file the original paper document in only one place. However, digital copies of the pages, transcripts, and catalogue entries can be duplicated and linked in many ways, helping to ensure that scholars never lose the trail to all of Wilson’s surviving notes.

Monday, September 07, 2009

A Federalist Picture Book

Jacqueline Jules and Jef Czekaj’s picture book Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation acknowledges Anti-Federalist sentiment in the U.S. of A. in the late 1780s. It describes, for example, how Rhode Island refused to participate in the constitutional convention and stayed out of the new Congress until 1790. (The tiny boy playing Rhode Island in the book’s school pageant gets to have other roles as well.)

Nevertheless, the book is clearly on the side of the Federalists. It presents the country’s needs in their terms, and downplays worries about a too-strong national government or encroachments on traditional rights. Even the title Unite or Die reflects the Federalist view, implying that creating a new constitution was a matter of national life or death.

Benjamin Franklin came up with the “Join, or Die” slogan in 1754, thinking about conflict between British and French colonies. American Whigs revived it, substituting the word “unite,” while organizing against new parliamentary taxes. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union completed that unification process for the thirteen states. Legally, those states had already become a nation, and Anti-Federalists didn’t think the nation needed a stronger central government.

During the debate on ratifying the proposed new constitution of 1787, a couple of Federalists brought out the “Unite, or Die” slogan again. James Wilson quoted it during Pennsylvania’s ratifying convention, and Fisher Ames (shown above) appears to have done the same in Massachusetts. But really the issue of the day wasn’t whether to unite, but what the shape of “a more perfect Union” might be.

The title Unite or Die and the text inside say that the U.S. of A. was not in fact united until after 1787, and was in mortal peril. Though its characters act out arguments among the Federalists, the book doesn’t leave room for argument about the necessity of a new constitution at all. Which isn’t that surprising since the Federalists won.

TOMORROW: Sidestepping awkward subjects.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

New Books on the Early Supreme Court

Recently the New York Times reported on the upcoming final volume of the Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800. Only thirty years ago, the Supreme Court Historical Society conceived of collecting all the disparate sources on the court's first years. The eighth and last volume has now gone to press.

We think of court records as being very complete, but that tradition was just becoming established in the eighteenth century. Josiah Quincy, Jr., took notes on major Massachusetts court cases in the 1760s as part of his own study and to share with colleagues, not as an official record. There's a nearly complete transcript of the trial of soldiers for the Boston Massacre in 1770, but only because a Loyalist printer saw value in it. No one knows the exact date of the Massachusetts Superior Court's ruling in 1783 that slavery was unconstitutional in the state because that isn't part of the legal filings.

The U.S. Supreme Court started out operating on similar rules, this article says. The justices didn't even ask lawyers to submit written arguments at first; after they made that request, it's unclear whether all attorneys complied, or whether the justices simply didn't save all the filings, because many are still missing. An entrepreneurial lawyer started publishing notes on the early sessions, but got at least one decision completely wrong. And in 1814 the British army burned the U.S. Capitol, which housed the court, and that didn’t do its official records any good.

Some curiosities from the Times article:

Justice David H. Souter, who cited “Suits Against States,” the fifth volume, in opinions on the losing side of two federalism cases, is one of the project’s most enthusiastic boosters.

“It’s not just a collection of documents,” Justice Souter said in an interview this month. “It gives us a broader contextual basis for understanding those early cases.”

When the project got under way in 1977, few would have supposed that some of the court’s earliest cases would gain new relevance. The court began to approach constitutional interpretation with a new interest in the founding generation’s original understanding.

For example, the 11th Amendment, which limits the jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear suits against states, became a hot topic during the 1990s when Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, to Justice Souter’s dismay, dusted it off and invoked it as a bulwark of state sovereignty. The 11th Amendment was adopted to overturn a 1793 Supreme Court decision, and the history project’s fifth volume offers a font of information about that case, Chisholm v. Georgia, and about debates that have not been resolved to this day.

“It never pays to write off an amendment,” Justice Souter said dryly.

So Justice Souter cited the early court’s thinking on lawsuits against states and lost the argument, while Justice Rehnquist, who more often insisted the legal system should follow the founders’ original intent, didn’t use these records, went well beyond the language of the Eleventh Amendment, and won. Hmmmm.

And then there's this tidbit about another book on the court:

While reading letters and diaries, Natalie Wexler, one of the associate editors, became captivated by the relationships among four of the original Supreme Court personalities—Justice James Wilson and his wife, Hannah, whom he married when he was 51 and she was 19; and Justice James Iredell and his wife, also named Hannah.

“I feel I truly know them,” Ms. Wexler wrote in an essay in the Summer 2006 issue of The American Scholar, the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. “But of course,” she added, “what I know is largely what I’ve made of them. They’ve become ghostly emanations, hovering in some limbo between truth and fiction.”

Ms. Wexler, who also has written a historical novel about the Wilsons and the Iredells, imagines illicit passions that would raise plenty of eyebrows around the court today.

Ms. Wexler’s novel, A More Obedient Wife, is available as a free download through Lulu.com.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Sit Down, John! — 1776 Revived

Tomorrow the Lyric Stage Company of Boston opens its season with the musical 1776, the all-singing, rather-little-dancing portrayal of the Second Continental Congress's debate on independence. Songs by Sherman Edwards, book by Peter Stone. (I much enjoyed the Lyric Stage's production of Noises Off a coupla years ago.)

Back in the bicentennial year of 1976, my elementary-school class took a field trip into Boston to see the movie of 1776. We also did a little presentation based on the musical at the end of the year. The part of John Adams was taken by a pretty Japanese-American girl named Karen. Hey, she had the ponytail, and she could carry a tune.

Impressionable youth that I was, I accepted the musical's portrayal of the Contintental Congress debates as basically accurate. Oh, I knew that John Hancock and friends didn't actually sing, and that some important figures (such as Samuel Adams, who actually could sing) got little screen time. But I thought the conflicts dramatized on screen matched the real disagreements over declaring independence.

Oh, what disillusionment lay in store! To start with, 1776 depicts a debate over slavery that never happened at that Congress. It presents Thomas Jefferson as writing an anti-slavery clause into the Declaration and planning to free his own slaves when he returned to Virginia. In fact, Jefferson never suggested concrete steps to end slavery, and freed very few of his slaves.

The language at issue in the draft Declaration was about the transatlantic slave trade—about bringing new enslaved people into the colonies, not about freeing any who were there already. Virginia, Massachusetts, and a couple of other colonies had voted to prohibit slave imports in the decade before 1776. The royal authorities had vetoed those laws. Jefferson and his committee put that grievance into the Declaration, and it was deleted. But their language never objected to the continuance on slavery within the colonies. (In fact, if I wanted to be very cynical, I'd point out that any prohibition on an import benefits the domestic producers—who in this case would be owners of many male and female slaves, like Jefferson.)

SPOILER ALERT

In the end, the plot of 1776 comes down to an argument within the Pennsylvania delegation: Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and James Wilson. Franklin wants the colony to vote for independence, Dickinson against. Throughout the play Wilson has meekly sided with Dickinson. But Wilson doesn't want to be remembered for standing in the way of independence, so at the last moment he chooses to vote with Franklin and the Congress's majority. Meaning that American independence rested on a Profile in Lack of Courage, as it were. This article on EarlyAmerica.com transcribes the crucial dialogue among the three characters, as well as portraying Wilson exactly as the musical does.

In fact, James Wilson was strongly pro-independence all along. He argued that Parliament should have limited authority over the colonies in a pamphlet titled "Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament," published in 1774 but drafted as early as 1768. In Congress, Wilson was among the radicals, noted for his oratory and debating skills. He asked for a delay in voting on independence only to be sure his constituents agreed with him on the need for that drastic step. (Better capsule biographies of Wilson are at USHistory.org and UPenn Law School.)

Furthermore, there were more than three delegates from Pennsylvania at the Second Continental Congress. Look at the Declaration, and you'll see nine signers from that state. (They're the top of the column to the right of Hancock's name.) Pennsylvania credits delegate John Morton with casting the decisive vote among the seven delegates present. Franklin, Wilson, and Morton voted for independence. Two other men voted against. Dickinson and the seventh man, Robert Morris, refused to vote at all. (And yet Morris signed the Declaration.) But that mishmash of politics and egos would have been even harder to put to music.

Boston 1775

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