We the People

The Economic Origins of the Constitution

Forrest McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351299626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Charles A. Bear's An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution was a work of such powerful persuasiveness as to alter the course of American historiography. No historian who followed in studying the making of the Constitution was entirely free from Beard's radical interpretation of the document as serving the economic interests of the Framers as members of the propertied class. Forrest McDonald's We the People was the first major challenge to Beard's thesis. This superbly researched and documented volume restored the Constitution as the work of principled and prudential men. It did much to invalidate the crude economic determinism that had become endemic in the writing of American history.

We the People fills in the details that Beard had overlooked in his fragmentary book. MacDonald's work is based on an exhaustive comparative examination of the economic biographies of the 55 members of the Constitutional Convention and the 1, 750 members of the state ratifying conventions. His conclusion is that on the basis of evidence, Beard's economic interpretation does not hold. McDonald demonstrates conclusively that the interplay of conditioning or determining factors at work in the making of the Constitution was extremely complex and cannot be rendered intelligible in terms of any single system of interpretation.

McDonald's classic work, while never denying economic motivation as a factor, also demonstrates how the rich cultural and political mosaic of the colonies was an independent and dominant factor in the decision making that led to the first new nation. In its pluralistic approach to economic factors and analytic richness, We the People is both a major work of American history and a significant document in the history of ideas. It continues to be an essential volume for historians, political scientists, economists, and American studies specialists.

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

I

Charles A. Beard’s Pioneer Interpretation of the Making of the Constitution

THE day was Monday, September 17, 1787, the place Philadelphia. The long and, as tradition has it, steaming hot summer was finally ending.¹ Throughout the city, serenely unaware that historians were one day to know this as the Critical Period of American history, Philadelphians were busy preparing a record wheat crop for export. Inside a crowded room in the State House (later to be rechristened Independence Hall) thirty-odd men penned their signatures to a document they had styled a “Constitution for the United States of America.”

There was no exuberance, no display of enthusiasm, and very little reverential solemnity. Fourteen members of the body had previously walked out for one reason or another, most of them because they had personal business they considered more deserving of attention or because the hot clash of personalities had been too much for them. Even now, at the very end, a half dozen men were wrangling about minor details, and three others flatly refused to sign the instrument. Another group was already worrying about and planning for the strenuous campaign for ratification which lay ahead. Mostly, however, the atmosphere pervading the room was one of exhaustion and a sense of relief that the four-month ordeal was over.

The importance of the event insured that the making of the Constitution of the United States would become the subject of debate, study, and writing for many years to come. In addition the actors in the drama helped to fan the flames of debate and to provoke perhaps even more writing than the subject itself warranted. Almost as if to vex future scholars, the members of the Philadelphia Convention kept their proceedings secret and passed down to historians only the most fragmentary of notes; the Constitution was deliberately couched in ambiguous language; the disputants in the contest over ratification clouded both the contest and the conditions that shaped it by publishing reams of misleading, often fantastic propaganda. Partly because of the nature of the event, partly because of the chaotic record left by the participants, the mountains of historical writings on the subject have often been colored by emotionalism and shrouded in confusion. The men in the Convention have been depicted as a group of demigods, a band of ruthless conspirators, and virtually every intermediate brand of humanity. The document has been characterized at one extreme as scarcely less sacred than the Holy Bible, at the other as the greatest single barrier to the progress of social justice. Interpretation of the ratification has run the gamut from the noblest act of a free people under divine guidance to an unprincipled coup d’état.

Early in 1913 there emerged from this historiographical maze a work that was destined to become a classic. In that year Charles A. Beard, then a young professor of politics at Columbia University, published his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, a brilliant, challenging, and provocative study that has towered over everything else written on the subject, before or since. No other work on the making or the nature of the Constitution has been so much debated, so widely known, and ultimately so widely accepted.²

The central points in the thesis advanced by Professor Beard were these: “Large and important groups of economic interests were adversely affected by the system of government under the Articles of Confederation, namely, those of public securities, shipping and manufacturing, money at interest; in short, capital as opposed to land.” After failing to safeguard their rights, “particularly those of the public creditors,” through the regular legal channels, these groups called a convention in the hope of obtaining “the adoption of a revolutionary programme.” (p. 63) In other words, the movement for the Constitution originated with and was pushed through by “a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors…. The propertyless masses were … excluded at the outset from participation (through representatives) in the work of framing the Constitution. The members of the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the Constitution were, with a few exceptions, immediately, directly, and personally interested in, and derived economic advantage from, the establishment of the new system.” (p. 324)

In essence, then, the Constitution was “an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake; and as such it appealed directly and unerringly to identical interests in the country at large.” (p. 188) It was based “upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.” (p. 324)

The system “consisted of two fundamental parts—one positive, the other negative.” The positive part comprised four great powers conferred on the new government: “taxation, war, commercial control, and disposition of western lands.” This meant for the manufacturers a protective tariff; for trade and shipping groups, tariffs and other legislation against foreign shipping; for money interests the prevention of “renewed attempts of ‘desperate debtors’ like Shays”; and for public creditors, ample revenues for the payment of their claims. The negative portion placed restrictions on the states: “Two small clauses embody the chief demands of personalty against agrarianism: the emission of paper money is prohibited and the states are forbidden to impair the obligation of contract.” (pp. 154-179 passim)

In the contest over ratification, Beard concluded, only about a fourth of the adult males were eligible—or interested enough—to vote on the question, and the Constitution was ratified by no more than a sixth of the adult males. In five states it was “questionable whether a majority of the voters participating … actually approved the ratification.” “The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia Convention; and in a large number of instances they were also directly and personally interested in the outcome of their efforts.” (p. 325) Of the voters on ratification, those favoring the Constitution were “centred particularly in the regions in which mercantile, manufacturing, security, and personalty interests generally had their greatest strength.” The holders of public securities “formed a very considerable dynamic element, if not the preponderating element, in bringing about the adoption of the new system.” The opposition, on the other hand, came almost exclusively from the agricultural regions and from the areas in which debtors had been formulating paper-money and other depreciatory schemes, (pp. 290, 291) In short, “the line of cleavage for and against the Constitution was between substantial personalty interests on the one hand and the small farming and debtor interests on the other.” (p. 325)

If from this tightly and skillfully woven system of ideas are extracted those parts which are essentially nonconjectural—which are susceptible, in other words, of a reasonable degree of validation or invalidation as historical facts, and upon which the interpretative superstructure is erected—three propositions come into clear focus, namely that:

1. The Constitution was essentially “an economic document drawn with superb skill” by a consolidated economic group “whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope.”³ (pp. 188, 325)

2. “In the ratification, it became manifest that the line of cleavage for and against the Constitution was between substantial personalty interests [approximately identical to those which had been represented in the Philadelphia Convention] on the one hand and the small farming and debtor interests on the other.” (P. 325)

3. “Inasmuch as so many leaders in the movement for ratification were large [public] security holders [as were most members of the Philadelphia Convention], and inasmuch as securities constituted such a large proportion of personalty, this economic interest must have formed a very considerable dynamic element, if not the preponderating element, in bringing about the adoption of the new system… . Some holders of public securities are found among the opponents of the Constitution, but they are not numerous.” (pp. 290, 291n)

It was perhaps inevitable, in view of the immaturity of American historiography at the time Beard wrote, and the fact that his work was a piece of pioneering, that he should have based his case on an ingenious polarization of facts, assumptions, and inductive and deductive reasoning. Furthermore, while a substantial body of theory of economic interpretation of history had been developed long before Beard’s time, no systematic methodology had yet been formulated by American historians for applying such theory to the analysis of specific historical phenomena. Thus to implement and substantiate his pioneering thesis Beard had to pioneer also in the matter of methodology. If his book is to be fruitfully examined, it is therefore necessary at the outset to analyze it in terms of these components: the facts presented, the assumptions made, the logic employed, and the methodology applied.

The work consists of eleven chapters. The first is a general introduction to the subject by way of an essay on historical interpretation in the United States. At the end of the chapter Beard summarizes the theory of economic determinism and states, as a methodological ideal, the “requirements for an economic interpretation of the formation and adoption of the Constitution.” First it would be necessary to compile economic biographies of all persons connected with the framing and adoption of the document. These data would lay the ground for a consideration of the following proposition:

Suppose it could be shown from the classification of the men who supported and opposed the Constitution that there was no line of property division at all; that is, that men owning substantially the same amounts of the same kinds of property were equally divided on the matter of adoption or rejection—it would then become apparent that the Constitution had no ascertainable relation to economic groups or classes, but was the product of some abstract causes remote from the chief business of life—gaining a livelihood.

Suppose, on the other hand, that substantially all of the merchants, money lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, and financiers and their professional associates are to be found on one side in support of the Constitution and that substantially all or the major portion of the opposition came from the non-slaveholding farmers and the debtors—would it not be pretty conclusively demonstrated that our fundamental law was not the product of an abstraction known as “the whole people,” but of a group of economic interests which must have expected beneficial results from its adoption?

Beard’s second chapter, “A Survey of Economic Interests in 1787,” is the foundation of the entire work. It rests ultimately, as does the work as a whole, on three assumptions. The first, which Beard states explicitly, is that “the whole theory of the economic interpretation of history rests upon the concept that social progress in general is the result of contending [economic] interests in society.” Hence, he states, one must at the outset identify the economic classes and social groups that existed in the United States in 1787 and determine which of them could expect to gain and which to lose from the overthrow or from the maintenance of the legal-political-constitutional arrangements prevailing under the Articles of Confederation. This he proceeds to do, in the form of an admittedly superficial survey. The validity of the survey hinges on the second assumption (one that he makes throughout the work), namely that the economic conditions of the period were reliably depicted, at least in general, in the existing body of historical literature on the subject-most of it in the Fiske “Critical Period” tradition.⁴ The third assumption is less vital to the chapter but basic to the work: that it is valid to formulate categories of economic interests in advance of making the survey.

In view of the critical importance to Beard’s work, and to the present one, of his survey of economic interests, it will be useful to outline his findings briefly. He first divides all property into two major classes, realty and personalty. Owners of realty he subdivides into three subgroups of farmers. The largest agrarian group consists of the small farmers, who, for working purposes, are substantially all assumed to have lived in inland, frontier areas, and who are identified in general as the “debtor class,” responsible for the insurrections of the period and the “innumerable schemes for the relief of debtors.” A smaller group of farmers consists of the wealthy manor lords of the Hudson, whom Beard classifies as persons fundamentally anti-personalty and politically in sympathy with the small “farmer-debtor” hordes. The third agrarian element comprises the slaveholding planters of the South, a group which, says Beard, differed from its New York counterpart in two respects: first, it included “many who were rich in personalty, other than slaves,” and thus had greater “identity of interest” with northern merchants than with other farmers; secondly, it was in fear of slave revolts.

The small farmer-debtors, Beard continues, were adversely affected by the Constitution, immediately and directly, in that it expressly closed the avenues of escape from debt through state legislation, and established a general government strong enough to prevent them from ever rising again in armed insurrections. The Hudson valley manor lords were likewise adversely affected by the Constitution, but for more complex reasons. This class had taken “advantage of its predominance to shift the burden of taxation from the land to imports.” The Constitution deprived states of the power to levy import duties, which meant that its adoption would again place the burden of state taxes on the land owned by the manor lords.⁵ The slave-holders in the South, where no such shift in the basis of taxation had taken place, were not, according to Beard, adversely affected. Though the new Constitution “subjected them to regulation devised immediately in behalf of northern interests,” it contained several “overbalancing compensations” for the southern planters.

Beard now turns his attention to personal property interests. These he divides into four major classes: money, public securities, “manufacturing and shipping,” and western lands held for speculation.⁶ All four groups, he asserts, were suffering from the conditions prevailing under the Articles of Confederation—indirectly from the lack of an effective general government, directly from the attacks the state legislatures made on personalty. The Constitution was designed for the relief of these suffering economic interests.

In Chapter Three, “The Movement for the Constitution,” Professor Beard asks two questions: Were any interests adversely affected by existing legal-economic conditions? Were the leaders in the movement for the Constitution so affected? The first of these questions he assumes to have been answered with reasonable accuracy by his previous survey of interests. A reasonably accurate answer to the second he assumes could be derived from a study of the correlation between the activities and the economic interests of the leaders in the several attempts made between 1781 and 1786 to amend the Articles of Confederation. Assuming further 1) that the economic interests of such leaders remained substantially the same throughout these years and 2) that given individuals were consistent in their advocacy of change, Beard then makes a sketchy correlation survey. Quoting from primary sources in six instances and from secondary sources in six others, he cites three petitions for change that were presumably sponsored by persons whose chief economic interests were among the adversely affected forms of personalty, and names twenty-one individuals presumably having such interests who on one occasion or another advocated an amendment to the Ar...