American Experiment by James MacGregor Burns Read Free Book Online Page B

or they would not have been chosen by their state legislatures. Most of them were ambitious. Clinton Rossiter estimated that as a group they had had more political experience than any gathering of the leaders of a newly independent nation at any time in history. They were mainly youngish, averaging in their early forties. Almost all were wealthy, or at least comfortably off. Most were from established families. They had the correct formal education: nine were products of (now) Princeton, four each of William and Mary and Yale, three each of Harvard and (now) Columbia.
    At least a dozen were planters or farmers on a big scale; another dozen, lawyers; still another dozen, state officeholders; and some were all three of these. Most had married women of social standing. Over a third owned slaves. They were almost all at least nominally religious, ranging fromrobust Christians to the tolerantly ecumenical or broadly secular. Most were war veterans, or at least had known military life.
    The poor, the back-country people, the agrarian debtors, the uneducated, the non-voters, and of course women, Indians, and blacks were inconspicuously unrepresented.
    So this was a convention of the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed. But the men of Philadelphia were neither solely defined nor wholly confined by these identities. Transcending these interests and occupations and affiliations was their sense of a compelling goal, a strategy to achieve that goal, and a host of notions about how to make that strategy work. The delegates did not see themselves as merely landowners or merchants or lawyers. They conceived of themselves as engaged in a grand “experiment”—a word they often used—the outcome of which would shape their nation’s destiny, and hence their own and their posterity’s, for decades to come. They saw themselves—in a word they would never have used—as pragmatists, as men thinking their way through a thicket of problems, in pursuit of that goal.
    That goal was liberty—liberty with order, liberty with safety and security, liberty of conscience, liberty of property, liberty with a measure of equality, but above all, liberty. They defined this term in many different ways, they had varying expectations of it, they differed over its relationship to other values, and later these differences would help spawn a series of tragedies. But conflict over this supreme goal did not deter the delegates at the time. Rather, liberty served as a unifying symbol and goal around which practical men could rally. Reading the convention debates, some historians have remarked on the absence of ideological conflict. The Framers did not need to argue over ideology; they had their ideology of liberty, with all its kindling power and glowing, confusing, contradictory implications for the future.
    And even as the delegates gathered, further news from Massachusetts caused them to fear all the more for the future of liberty. Beaten on the field of battle in the winter, the rebels in the spring had turned to the state elections despite an act disqualifying former Regulators from voting for a year. The “malcontents” helped defeat Governor Bowdoin for re-election and replaced him with the more populistic John Hancock. “Shaysites” picked up seats in the state senate in April and the lower house in May. Madison warned that the election crisis would bring “wicked measures” from the Massachusetts legislature. To some, the spring news was worse than the winter’s: it was easy to castigate men who took up arms, but what about men who took up ballots ?
    If the Framers by and large were agreed on the goal of liberty and the nature of the threat to it, the strategy of protecting and augmenting it posed a potentially more divisive challenge. Almost all the Framers shared Madison’s crucial premise that liberty and order and property could not be safeguarded by relying on education or religion or the basic goodness of man; liberty