Made In America - Bill Bryson [37]
In not quite four months these thirty or so men created a framework for government that has lasted us to this day and was like nothing seen before. From 25 May to 17 September they worked in session five hours a day, six days a week, and often for long hours outside of that. It was, as Page Smith has put it with perhaps no more than a blush of hyperbole, ‘the most remarkable example of sustained intellectual discourse in history’.18 It is certainly no exaggeration to say that never before nor since has any gathering of Americans shown a more dazzling array of talent and of preparedness. Madison’s background reading included the histories of Polybius, the orations of Demosthenes, Plutarch’s Lives, Fortune Barthélemy de Felice’s thirteen-volume Code de I’Humanité in the original French, and much, much else. Alexander Hamilton in a single speech bandied about references to the Amphictyonic Councils of ancient Greece and the Delian Confederacy. These were men who knew their stuff.
And they were great enough to put aside their differences. In the space of a single uncomfortable summer they created the foundations of American government: the legislature, the presidency, the courts, the system of checks and balances, the whole intricate framework of democracy – a legacy that is all the more arresting when you consider that almost to a man they were against democracy in anything like the modern sense.
For a time they actually considered creating a monarchy, albeit one elected by the legislature. So real did this prospect seem that a rumour – quite without foundation – swept the colonies that the position was to be offered to the Duke of York, George III’s second son. In fact, the idea of a monarch was quickly deemed incompatible with a republic. Alexander Hamilton suggested as an alternative a president and senate elected for life from men of property, with absolute power over the states.19 Edmund Randolph preferred that the presidency be shared among three men, to give the executive office greater collective wisdom and less scope for despotism, sectionalism and corruption.20 (The prospect of corruption worried them mightily.) Almost all envisioned an America ruled by a kind of informal aristocracy of propertied gentlemen – men much like themselves, in fact. So distant from their thinking was the idea of an open democracy that when James Wilson of Pennsylvania moved that the executive be chosen by popular vote, the delegates ‘were entirely dumbfounded’. In the end they threw the matter of electing a President to the states, creating an electoral college and leaving each state to decide whether its collegial delegates would be chosen by the people or by the legislature.
In a spirit of compromise, they decreed that the House of Representatives would be chosen by the people, and the Senate by the states, an arrangement that remained in force until 1912 when senators at last were popularly elected. In the matter of the Vice-Presidency they decided – unwisely with the benefit of hindsight – that the job should fall to whoever came second in the Presidential poll. It seemed the fair thing to do, but it failed to take into account the distinct possibility that the Vice-President might represent a rival faction to that of the President. In 1804 the practice was abandoned and the custom of electing a two-man slate adopted.
When most of the rudiments were agreed, the delegates appointed a Committee of Detail to put their proposals on paper. One of the committee members, John Rutledge, was an admirer of the Iroquois, and recommended that the committee familiarize itself with the treaty of 1520 that had