Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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two recalcitrants, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, relented in their hostility to the Constitution. Hancock presided over the state constitutional convention and it was suggested that he might be a fine candidate for vice president of the new republic. Samuel Adams, an almost deranged Anglophobe and relentless critic of any authority, even a presumptive one like Washington, agreed to support ratification in exchange for a bill of rights of individuals. This would take the form of a list of amendments to be recommended to the first Congress. On this basis, the new Constitution was adopted by a narrow margin, by 187 to 168 in Massachusetts, and by only 10 votes in New Hampshire and Virginia, despite the support of Washington, the absent Jefferson, the chief framer Madison, the rising James Monroe, and even Patrick Henry. And in New York, prodigies of persuasion by Alexander Hamilton notwithstanding, the Constitution was adopted by three votes in the legislature, over the objections of the four-term governor, General George Clinton (who served five more terms). North Carolina only ratified in 1789 and balky little Rhode Island in 1790, though there was by then no doubt that failure to ratify would have resulted in that little state’s being subsumed into Connecticut and Massachusetts. The Bill of Rights was eventually agreed in 1791, and was adopted in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution.
By a hair’s breadth, the new nation had endowed itself with a Constitution that would serve it well and become one of the most renowned and respected texts in human history. No famous law-giver since Moses (who was, after all, a messenger), from Hammurabi to Justinian to Napoleon, remotely approached the triumph of, principally, James Madison, who devised the system of checks and balances between three co-equal branches of government. So great was Madison’s prestige, he wrote important messages for Washington, and on occasion, when the message was addressed to the House of Representatives, wrote the reply as well. Hamilton opposed a Bill of Rights, on the spurious grounds that it was unnecessary because the Constitution did not authorize the government to violate anyone’s rights, betraying a faith in the benignity of official executive authority that makes it clear that Hamilton had no interest at all in individual rights. Madison himself was lukewarm initially, until Jefferson remonstrated with him and he saw that nothing less would get the Constitution ratified and adopted. Madison’s achievement in producing a Constitution that secured federal authority, balanced the branches of a stable government, and assured individual rights, established him in the front rank of the nation’s founders, and was another immense and fortuitous strategic milestone for the emerging country.
That it was adopted was a felicitous stroke for America, a happy launch that enabled the new nation to assure itself and offer to immigrants a regime of ordered liberty and a society of laws that was slightly less girt about by impediments of tradition and antique formalism than Britain’s. Jefferson’s genius at the propagation of the new American era electrified the world. The words of Gouverneur Morris’s splendid preamble became and remained familiar to virtually every informed person in the world: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Those chiefly responsible for creating the circumstances that permitted, and generated the necessary support for, the promulgation of this document—Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, John Jay, and John Adams—did not doubt that it would guide the new country to glory and preeminence among nations, and that their work would long be discernible among men.
There was never much suspense about who would get the call as the first president; for the last time in the history of the country, someone would truly accept a draft to that office. Washington received the blandishments of Hamilton rather neutrally and expressed no interest in the presidency to anyone, saying only that he would accept it if to decline it would hurt the country. It is believable that he did not especially wish to be president, but not that he did not expect to be president. He was encouraged that supporters of the Constitution, called Federalists, won the congressional elections, and when the Electoral College gave all 69 votes to Washington voluntarily, without his ever having expressed even a private word of desire for the office, he had no choice but to accept, as he had accepted the command of the Continental Army. In what has proved an enduring tradition of using the vice presidency to provide regional balance, it was contested between John Adams and John Hancock. Washington made it known that he would be happy with Adams, a more staunch Federalist than Hancock and a personal loyalist, and Adams was narrowly chosen. George Washington, who in 1785 had described the notion of American unity as “a farce,” was inaugurated the first president of the United States, eight weeks late, on April 30, 1789.23 In the 35 years since the Seven Years’ War effectively began in the backwoods of America (partly because of Washington’s actions)—a war that established Prussia as a Great Power, delivered all of India to Britain, and expelled France from North America—the American colonists had developed a burning, independent patriotism and brilliant national leadership, had outmaneuvered the greatest nations in Europe, had electrified the world, had restored serious republican government to the world after an absence of 17 centuries, had politically formalized the Enlightenment by endowing themselves with novel but instantly respected political institutions, and had set forth in the world, as their greatest subsequent leader famously said, “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” An epochal political and national experiment had been prepared by a brilliant sequence of strategic triumphs.
1. Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 191. It somewhat presaged Abraham Lincoln’s addresses in the late 1850s when he warned the South that if it came to war, the North had too many people not to prevail (Chapter 6). With one as with the other, a knowledge of the demographic trend was a consoling trump card in the struggle both sought to avoid but considered likely.
2. Ibid. p. 203.
3. Ibid. p. 206.
4. Morgan, op. cit., p. 217.
5. James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America, New York, Grove Press, 2001, p. 26.
6. Robert Harvey, A Few Bloody Noses: The American War of Independence, London, John Murray, 2001, p. 428.
7. Morgan, op. cit., p. 223.
8. It was a little like the comparative gentleness that some have claimed limited the German approach at Dunkirk 164 years later (Chapter 9). Both interpretations are improbable.
9. William J. Casey, Where and How the War Was Fought: An Armchair Tour of the American Revolution, New York, Morrow, 1976, p. 91. This may have been the inspiration for Winston Churchill’s comment on the Battle of Britain in 1940: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
10. Casey, op. cit., p. 100.
11. Harvey, op. cit., p. 298.
12. Casey, op. cit., p. 129. As would be the case in reverse between the British and Americans with the Battle of Britain 163 years later (Chapter 10), the argument for assistance was much strengthened by the performance of the petitioner.
13. The arrival of Von Steuben and other swashbucklers such as the Marquis de Lafayette and the Poles, Tadeusz Kosciusko and Casimir Pulaski, presaged the international attraction of future wars of pure popular motive, such as the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939.
14. As General William Westmoreland would ask for 206,000 more men after the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 and would be kicked upstairs to army chief of staff just before the commander-in-chief, President Lyndon Johnson, also withdrew (Chapter 14).
15. Harvey, op. cit., pp. 307–308. Little of this has changed in the intervening centuries, though there were some celebratory moments with the Third Republic, including the one that produced the Statue of Liberty.
16. Harvey, op. cit., p. 334.
17. Harvey, op. cit., p. 346.
18. Harvey, op. cit., p. 391.
19.