John R. Vile - The Men Who Made the Constitution: Lives of the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention

The Men Who Made the Constitution

Lives of the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention

John R. Vile

THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Lanham Toronto Plymouth, UK

2013

Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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www.rowman.com

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Copyright 2013 by John R. Vile

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vile, John R.

The men who made the Constitution : lives of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention / John R. Vile.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8108-8864-7 (cloth : alkaline paper) ISBN 978-0-8108-8865-4 (ebook)

1. United States ConstitutionSignersBiography. 2. United States Constitutional Convention (1787). 3. United StatesPolitics and government17831789. 4. Constitutional historyUnited States. 5. Constitutional conventionsUnited StatesHistory18th century. 6. +Founding Fathers of the United StatesBiography. I. Title.

E302.5.V55 2013

973.3092'2dc23 2013014081

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America.

To my mother, Joanna Virginia Vile; to the memory of my father, Ralph Vile; and to the memory of my parents-in-law, C. D. and Frances Christensen. Thanks for all the trips to historical sites!

Introduction

I often joke that it was not until my daughters got married and began taking vacations with their husbands that my wife and I realized that other families vacationed at the beach! As I think back on our most meaningful vacations other than trips to visit family, both when I was a child and when my wife and I took our own children on vacation, I realize that most were to historical sites. In part because I grew up in Virginia, I especially remember visits to Mt. Vernon, Monticello, Jamestown, Yorktown, Williamsburg, and to museums, monuments, and historic sites in Washington, D.C.

My wife had similar experiences when she was growing up in New Jersey, so it was not surprising that we met at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, or that during the summers when I went to graduate school at Mr. Jeffersons University and she began her career teaching elementary school, we both ended up working at James Monroes house outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. We took our honeymoon on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, but even on this romantic occasion, it did not seem odd to stop by Williamsburg on the way and spend as much time visiting the historic sites in New Bern or going to the campus of Duke University than spending time at the beach. Our mutual interest in history has been one of the loves that we continue to share. One sign of my wifes enduring devotion was her willingness both to visit a presidents house and to spend the evening of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in a university library as I gathered information for a book on presidential victory and concession speeches!

Such interests have led me to write and edit numerous books on the Founding Fathers, the U.S. Constitution, and related issues. I am particularly proud of my two-volume, alphabetically arranged reference work, The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Americas Founding, published in 2005. The two volumes are so capacious that at least one reviewer erroneously assumed that I must have been the editor, rather than the author, of the volumes. More recently, I have authored a more accessible narrative entitled The Writing and Ratification of the U.S. Constitution: Practical Virtue in Action , which allowed me to revisit the proceedings. While writing that book I came to have even greater appreciation not only of the Constitution that the delegates produced, but also of the delegates themselves. This book is thus designed to highlight their role.

Events Leading to the U.S. Revolution

Readers who are chiefly seeking a blow-by-blow account of the Constitutional Convention and its ratification should consult my earlier book or other narratives for a more detailed understanding of these proceedings, but this is certainly a propitious place to detail some of the central events in this chronicle. Spread up and down the east coast of North America, the residents of the 13 colonies that provided the foundation for the United States of America only gradually came to see themselves, not simply as citizens of a particular colony, but as members of a nation in their opposition to perceived oppression by their English overlords. Believing that they had brought their rights as Englishmen with them to the North American continent, the colonists were particularly insistent that the British legislature, or Parliament, was notas it claimedlegally all-powerful, or sovereign. Under the principle of no taxation without representation that the colonists traced back to the Magna Carta of 1215, they asserted that Parliament could not tax colonists, who did not send representatives to that body and were therefore unrepresented in its councils. Although the colonists initially retained their loyalty to the English king, immigrant Thomas Paine published an influential essay titled Common Sense in January, 1776, in which he questioned the doctrine of hereditary succession by which monarchs ascended to office and argued that continuing association with the British king would involve the colonies in continuing oppression and unnecessary wars.

The colonists had met together to protest British taxes and other grievances in the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and later in the First and Second Continental Congresses that began in 1774 and 1775. The latter Congress issued the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, which fifty-six members of Congress signed. Chiefly authored by Thomas Jefferson, and extensively revised by the Congress, this document asserted the colonists right to separate from Great Britain and govern themselves, and it articulated a laundry list of colonial grievances against the English king and Parliament. Appealing to wider philosophical principles, the colonists proclaimed that all men are created equal; that they were entitled to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that they had the right to overthrow and replace a government that was not securing such rights. In time, they did this by successfully winning the Revolutionary War.

Events Leading up to the Constitutional Convention

During this conflict, in 1777 the Continental Congress drafted a document, initially authored by John Dickinson, known as the Articles of Confederation, which was ratified by the last state (Maryland) in 1781. With each of the former colonies seeking to protect its own prerogatives, Article II of the Articles specifically vested primary sovereignty in the states. The weak central government centered on a unicameral (one house or chamber) congress, in which states were represented by two to seven delegates with one-year terms that were renewable up to three years, but in which each state cast a single vote. The Articles did not create an independent executive or national judiciary. The Articles required the consent of nine of the thirteen states on most key matters and required unanimous state consent for constitutional amendments, many of which were proposed but none of which ever succeeded in being unanimously ratified.