What if, back in 1788, we hadn't ratified Mr. Madison's Constitution?

Smithsonian | June 01, 1988 | Foote, Timothy

Return with us now to the days when the East was young. From out of the past come the thundering hoots and hollers of a great debate, as the raw, under-populated, bitterly divided ex-Colonies wrangle over their future. In the troubled spring of 1788 all the uproar is about whether or not the still-sovereign states will ratify the text of the new Constitution coopered up by delegates in Philadelphia the fall before.

The goings-on in Philadelphia were secret. But the document, so cavalierly ascribed to "We the People," is now out in the open, and each side is busy claiming that if it doesn't get its way, wolves will be running in the streets and life as we know it will shortly come to an end.

Federalists, led by james Madison, declare that nothing less than the complete text of the new Constitution will do. There must be no backsliding to even a modified version of the weak-kneed Articles of Confederation. We need a strong government with broad powers to tax, pay debts, regulate trade and defend the country from foreign enemies. Without it, the brave New World experiment in self-government will founder and split into rival economic confederacies, and soon be gobbled up by the crowned heads of Europe.

Not so, anti-federalists insist. The new Constitution will destroy the very independence for which we fought the British. The President it establishes will be more powerful than any king. The crushing grip of the Executive Congress together will intolerably impinge on the liberties of individual states and citizens. Worse, by stirring regional fears of being steamrollered by rich lawyers and stockjobbers in the populous Northeast, the new Constitution will sap the spirit of cooperation that has thus far held the states together.

History is written by the winners. For the past century or so, Americans have assumed the federalists were right. The Constitution was ratified, after all, even if with some anti-federalist modifications. As for the American Experiment, it has worked so well that a hardheaded operative like Otto von Bismarck could speak of the special Providence that watches over fools, drunkards and the United States of America.

No matter that we owe our Bill of Rights directly to anti-federalists. Today, despite the octopus reach of our federal bureaucracy, we think of the anti-federalists of 1788, when we think of them at all, as obstructionists who read history wrong-and perhaps as racists too, since states' rights eventually became code words for the defense of slavery.

But what if we hadn't ratified the constitution Madison worked so hard for? Would the disaster that federalists predicted have really occurred @ We have long been led to believe that ratification was inevitable, an indispensable step to the triumphal progress democracy was destined to make. In early 1788, though, nobody was sure the Constitution would be ratified in anything like the form Madison wanted. What kind of constitution Union would get very much depended on the big ratification debate. Some states ratified quickly, though in Massachusetts the fight was touch-and-go for awhile, and acceptance came only after the federalists had acquiesced on many "recommendations" for changes to the text. But everyone agreed that without ratification by the two most powerful states in the Union, Virginia and New York, where anti-federalism was rife, those endorsements did not really matter. In neither state did the text that Madison had sweated over in Philadelphia look like a sure thing.

The coastal cities favored the Philadelphia text; farmers and frontiersmen didn't. When delegates specially chosen from all over New York turned up in Poughkeepsie on june 17 for the ratification debate, the count stood at 46 delegates against the Constitution, only 19 for. Down in Richmond, Virginia, where a battle royal was already in progress between Madison and fiery anti-federalist Patrick Henry, just over 80 elected delegates were in favor, with almost the same number staunchly against.

Had television and daily polling existed in 1788, Madison would have been badgered by the 18th-century equivalent of Sam Donaldson, asking him to defend his stand against adding a bill of rights to his constitution. But even without such populist distractions, the Virginia debate was fierce. The issue remained in doubt until Madison finally promised a bill of rights later if only his state would now ratify the text as it was. On June 25, Virginia's exhausted delegates finally approved-by a narrow margin, 89 to 79. Six delegates changing their minds would have defeated Madison and the federalists. New York's anti-federalists held their 46 to 19 edge well into the convention. But when, at the end of june, a messenger reached Poughkeepsie with the surprising news of Virginia's ratification, some anti-federalist delegates began to drift home: their crops needed tending. New York would approve the Constitution by just three votes, 30 to 27.

Clearly the issue could have gone the other way. If the anti-federalists in New York had voted more quickly. If Madison, who was often sickly, had been laid low by one of his bilious attacks and found himself unable to counterbalance the torrent of anti-federalist arguments flowing from Patrick Henry. A total of eight switched votes in the two states would have produced the second convention that Madison rightly feared, and eventually a much different constitution.

And what would have happened to us then?

Scenario 1 essentially plays out the worst fears (or threats) of the federalists. It should probably start with the grim future they predicted in 1788: the disaster we have long been convinced only their skill helped avert.

The plot runs as follows: after a second convention, the constitution finally agreed upon grants less power to the federal judiciary. The President is allowed to serve only one term, his powers severely limited, especially with regard to raising troops and making war. The Congress is weaker, too-its ability to tax and spend limited. The sovereign states forming the Union would remain clearly sovereign. And the young United States of America, freighted with the future hope of democracy around the world, is obliged to launch itself into history with one hand tied behind its back. In Scenario 1, as predicted in Alexander Hamilton's "Federalist Paper 13," the Union soon splits into two confederacies according to economic interests. The business-and-shipping-dominated Northeast turns toward Britain; the agricultural, slave-owning South toward France. The new Northern Confederation includes Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. The Southern Confederation is composed of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.

Given a weaker central government, a Scenario I map as of, say, 1794 would show the original Thirteen Colonies considerably reduced from the turf-as far west as the Mississippi-acquired under the 1783 peace treaty with Britain. The British, in fact, steadily refused to honor the clauses of the treaty dealing with the Great Lakes and what was called the Northwest Territory, so that by 1794, according to Scenario 1, they would have completed plans for dropping the Canadian border south to Penobscot Bay in the East and acquiring Vermont as a dependent state, a possibility which in fact many Vermonters flirted with. They would also have separated most of the Northwest Territory from the United States as a British-controlled Indian nation. In short, for want of a strong constitution, the weak ex-Colonles have lost control of their claim to all the land west to the Mississippi. Their hope of future expansion toward the Pacific is blocked off, perhaps forever.

West of the Appalachians the British have it all their own way, continuing with plans to support separatist elements in Kentucky and Tennessee. These frontier folk distrusted Easterners. The new and distant federal government, they correctly felt, had neither the power to protect them from Indian raids nor the will to look out for their right to trade freely down the Mississippi and through Spanish-held New Orleans.

And so it goes, until one can imagine the United States maturing over the decades into a largely coastal nation, surrounded by vast territories linked to the British Empire.

To ask any "What if?" questions of any moment in history is to head down the slippery slope of what many modern historians deplore as "counterfactual speculation." Yet anybody over 40 knows that one way of assessing your life is to look back on roads not taken. And there is something to be said for historian Oscar Handlin's notion that you can't fully understand history, or at least really enjoy it, unless you can see the past as a line made up of millions of points, with every point a turning point that could have gone the other way.

Playing with those turning points, one soon learns the powerful, sly truth embedded in the celebrated story about a question once put by President Nixon to Soviet Premier Brezhnev. "What would have happened if Lee Harvey Oswald had shot Nikita Khrushchev instead of Jack Kennedy?" Nixon is supposed to have asked. And Brezhnev, after a desperate pause, replied, "Well, Mr. President, Aristotle Onassis wouldn't have married Mrs. Khrushchev."

As the Soviet Premier ungallantly perceived, personal character and background circumstances are likely to survive even dramatic, short-term zigzags due to chance, choice or sudden tragedy. And in such terms, the federalists' 1788 scare-the-delegates forecast, though a version of it has been taken as gospel for ages, seems fairly shaky.

Between us and what Jefferson described as the "exterminating havoc of one-quarter of the globe" lay that blessed, great ocean, customarily and correctly credited as a source of our salvation, which until the 1840s often took many weeks to cross. Perhaps it is true, as we still like to think, that America's success may be attributed to some Divine approval of our democratic vision. It was certainly true that beginning only a year after ratification, during the crucial 25-year period of our formative growth under the new Constitution, European threats to the young nation were distracted. Spain was heading into what turned out to be permanent decline. Britain and France, meanwhile, were largely deterred from sustained efforts in the New World by a war that ended only when Napoleon was shipped off to St. Helena in 1815.

By then, French global ambition was temporarily eclipsed. As for the British, who handily burned Washington in 1814 and emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the most powerful country in the world and our main fear, they had learned the tactical limits of trans-Atlantic warfare. During the American Revolution they realized how difficult and costly it could be to try establishing control over unruly Yankees. Their foreign policies and economic strategies were also in the process of change. They would maneuver and poke at us along the frontiers, of course, but essentially aimed to use force and diplomacy to create a worldwide system of commercial advantage, rather than outright colonial control.

As late as 1789 Sir Guy Carleton, Governor General of Canada, did propose creating a British colony called Kentucky, at a time when Kentucky had not yet entered the Union. But he was swiftly rebuked by London. Again, at the armistice negotiations in Ghent during the War of 1812, ambitious Britons expected to snap up territory in the West and North in return for peace, but were not supported by the Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh, who instructed them to settle for the status quo antebellum.

The British, the French and the Spanish all had designs upon the infant nation, and no doubt would have been encouraged had the new federal government been less muscular. But whatever constitution was adopted, it was bound to be stronger than the Articles of Confederation, since the country had already agreed that they needed improving. More important, Americans would have remained the people so often proudly described in high school history texts. We were a practical, mostly egalitarian people, possessing a common language, a tradition of British justice, a remarkable political dream of self-government, a seedling sense of continental mission and a deep distaste for being messed with. Despite bitter state rivalries and a patchwork constitution that provided no executive leadership whatsoever, we had broken free of the British Empire. In 1789, no matter how much a compromised constitution had weakened the new government, the men running it-Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson-would have been the same who fought the British and founded the Union in the first place.

Recent scholarship makes clear how much the federalists exaggerated the divisive economic woes of the Union in 1787-88. Their claims were repeated through the years until, as historian Merrill Jensen puts it, "partisan argument became 'history."' In fact, by 1787 the ex-Colonies were coming out of the postwar depression. Trade was rapidly improving. Contrary to federalist claims, relatively few serious trade barriers existed between the states. Even under the admittedly inadequate Articles of Confederation some of the war debts had been paid. The states were cooperating in the use of the Delaware, the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay. They had even hammered out the Ordinance of 1787, a difficult plan for the Northwest Territory, which included progressive machinery for the region to sort itself out into states and be admitted to the Union. Significantly, that required states like Virginia to cede vast tracts of long-claimed Western lands to the new United States.

Threats and overstatements seem to have been bred into the bone of American politics, and threats of secession were part of the hard political bargaining of the 1780s. But Americans were immensely proud of the Union, and a weaker central government wouldn't have dampened that pride. So federalist claims that without the Philadelphia constitution the seaboard states would quickly divide into two (or three) confederacies don't make much sense. The economy was growing. Though cash poor, the country was clearly land rich with opportunities that would eventually bring immigrants by the millions from all over the world. (The federal government began selling land for a few cents an acre in 1787, and went on selling it, for a total revenue of $44 million by the 1830s.) It seems reasonable that even under a far weaker government, the states would have found a way to go on doing at least the necessary minimum about finance, taxes and internal trade.