The Constitution is sent off to the states as the ratification process begins.

Join us on social media!

Threads: https://www.threads.net/@uspoliticalpodcast

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ushistpodcast

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/USPoliticalpodcast/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uspoliticalpodcast/

Website: https://www.uspoliticalpodcast.com/

Bibliography: https://uspoliticalpodcast.com/?page_id=196

Hello, and welcome to the political history of the United States.

Episode 5.16 off to the States with the delegates.

Well, most of the delegates giving their stamp of approval to the Constitution.

It was now time to send the document off to the states to see if it could actually get ratified.

This posed a two pronged problem for the proposed Constitution.

First, it was not exactly clear that nine states were going to get on board.

As we are going to see, there was a significant amount of opposition to the potential new government throughout all of the states.

Second, and making matters more complicated, were there pragmatic considerations that the states were going to have to contend with?

Sure, on paper, all 13 states were equal.

However, in reality, the situation was far more complicated.

Could the young United States survive without, let's say, Rhode island or Georgia?

Realistically, the answer was yes.

Those were not such critical states that the very survival of the Union depended on them.

On the other hand, what would happen if a state like Massachusetts, New York or Virginia balked at ratification?

Especially in the case of the latter two, it was far from a sure thing that they were going to have enough support for ratification.

Could the United States really exist without Virginia or New York?

Regardless of how many other states ratified, such a prospect was distressingly bleak.

This week we are going to begin looking at the ratification process throughout the country and seeing just how the Constitution was going to be greeted by the people.

Throughout all of the states, people were going to be forced to consider both the future of the country and to wrestle exactly with the meaning of the American Revolution.

What had it all meant?

As we are going to see, it was men like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry who would remain amongst the most staunch critics and detractors of the new proposed government.

Both men viewed it as a betrayal of the Revolution and all that it had stood for.

Before we can really consider the ratification of the Constitution, I think it is important that we understand that in all 13 states, with maybe Rhode island being the exception, there were both Federalists, those who supported the ratification, and anti Federalists, those who opposed ratifying the Constitution.

Therefore, what you got was local battles all throughout the country over the Constitution and exactly what it meant.

Before we start looking at the state conventions, however, I do want to take a moment with the terminology.

The term Federalist is something of a misnomer and reflects a really good bit of work by the advertising department of the nationalists.

The term Federalist had never really been synonymous with nationalists.

In fact, the opposite was true.

Men like Sam Adams and Patrick Henry, those who believed that the United States was a federation of sovereign states.

They were the Federalists.

Now, though, suddenly it was the supporters of the Constitution that were calling themselves the Federalists, and as we are going to see later, publishing papers called the Federalist Papers.

At the same time, they turned to all those formerly regarded Federalists and started referring to them as the Anti Federalists.

This begs the question, why was everybody suddenly so concerned with terminology?

The most basic reason why the Nationalists suddenly took over the term Federalist was that they wanted to steal the ability of their opposition to use their own term.

The transformation was quick enough that it left the opponents to the Constitution, the actual Federalists, flat footed when it came to a response, just leaning into the outright theft of the term, the newly minted Federalists then turned around and renamed their opponents the Anti Federalists.

Then, as remains the case now, when you are sitting atop a movement of any kind, the last thing that you really want to be labeled is anti anything.

Think of the modern debate over abortion.

You have those opposed to the practice labeling themselves as being pro life, whereas those who believe abortion should be legalized call themselves pro choice.

There is no anti life or anti choice party because both sides understand that the language matters.

It is always better to stand for something rather than against something, and the language is designed to fit that end.

If you are still scratching your head and wondering exactly how the now named Anti Federalists allowed the Nationalists to get away with this, the answer is largely that the newly minted Federalists were simply better organized.

As we are going to see over the next two episodes.

Although there was a clear group working with a singular goal of ratification, the Anti Federalists failed to bring anything to the table as a cohesive group other than their objections over the new government.

Even among the Anti Federalists, they agreed that the current confederation was in need of significant reform.

However, they lacked anything beyond the most basic understanding of the situation.

The Federalists, well, they were offering a concrete plan of action.

The Anti Federalists were not responding with a viable alternative to the Constitution.

Rather, they just came with objections to the new government and a tacit agreement that reformed to the Articles of Confederation probably was necessary.

On the other hand, the Nationalists, I. I mean the Federalists had that level of organization and coordination that really gave them a very distinct advantage over their anti Federalist counterparts.

This would quickly become abundantly clear when in October, a series of publications would begin appearing in New York.

Published under the name Publius, these essays would lay out the justification behind each article in the Constitution in detail.

Publius, as it turned out, was not A single individual either, but rather it was the triumvirate of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

The Federalist Papers were initially meant to take an undecided people and explain to them exactly what the thought process for the delegates to the convention had been.

Now, the problem with them in that regard is that at the time of their drafting, the papers actually fell a bit flat.

Although they enjoyed wide distribution throughout the country, their legacy would largely be cemented through their future use of granting legal scholars a peek inside of the Constitutional Convention.

If you are ever just sitting around wondering exactly what the Framers were thinking about when they wrote the Constitution, the Federalist Papers are actually a great place to look.

The papers lay out in detail the struggles that had actually taken place during the drafting and explained many of those practical compromises that were required to make the document a reality.

In this manner, the papers today have become a valuable tool for the courts as they work towards making constitutional interpretations.

Surprisingly, though, at the time, despite that wide distribution, the Federalist Papers were mostly overlooked.

The problem was that if we are really being totally fair here, the papers definitely skew towards the more boring side of the spectrum.

As an informative text that would act as something of a coarse reader for the Constitution, the papers were second to none.

Nobody is going to question the writing chops of Madison, Hamilton or John Jay in a moment.

However, when there was all sorts of debates taking place over the ratification of the new Constitution, people were looking for fiery oratory and pamphlets.

The Federalist Papers were not that.

These were emotionally charged times, and the Federalist Papers are not exactly scathing polemics.

Even as Publius was hammering out his arguments, several states cut right to the chase and started the process.

In fact, one of the hallmarks of this process is going to be the initial speed of all of it.

Just eight days after the convention had adjourned, Congress had voted to send the Constitution to the states so that they could host their own conventions.

Of course, Congress was well aware of what they were doing by sending the Constitution to the states.

The document was essentially a death warrant for that body.

Yet they offered up little in the way of resistance.

Richard Henry Lee would write that the decision to rush the Constitution through was not really meant to be an endorsement.

He was pretty clear that there was anything but universal acclaim for the document in Congress.

The Constitution would be sent to the state ratifying conventions.

However, that was never meant to be an endorsement from the Congress.

In a sign of things to come, Richard Henry Lee was very opposed to the new plan.

Something which is Going to foreshadow the difficulty that was going to arise during the Virginia convention.

Before we can delve into the big battles over ratification, primarily centered around New York, Virginia and although to a somewhat lesser extent New Hampshire.

I want to take some time right now to move through the other states.

The difficulty of ratifying the Constitution was not universal between the states.

It was certainly easier in some places as compared to others.

So to start for today, I want to move through the states where it simply was not much of a battle at all.

To kick things off, let's move to the least dramatic of all of the states.

Rhode island, upon getting their copy of the Constitution and hearing the call for a statewide convention to be called, said, nope, not today.

And that was pretty much the end of it.

Not that this was a surprise to anybody at all.

Rhode island had put its fingers in its ears and pretended that the convention in Philadelphia simply did not exist.

They refused to send a delegation and they surely had no plans to sign anything produced by said convention.

Rhode island, as much as I really do love them, was alone in plugging their ears and pretending that the Constitution was not a thing.

In every other state, those battles between the Federalists and their anti Federalist counterparts was the norm.

This is not necessarily saying that there was a drawn out fight in all of the states, but rather there was at least a level of resistance in all of the other states.

The first state to call for a convention following the delegates signing the Constitution was Pennsylvania.

They featured a unicameral house with a popularly elected executive council.

It even had a separate council which existed primarily to conduct oversight over the rest of the government to ensure that strict adherence to the state's Constitution was being followed.

For a state with such a liberal constitution, it does seem to follow that one would expect the state to shy away from the strong centralizing effect of the proposed national constitution.

There is no debate that the state Constitution was light years more liberal than what was being proposed at a national level.

Yet as we are about to see, Pennsylvania would not prove to be a problem towards the creation of a more centralized national government.

Pennsylvania had broken down into what amounts to two political parties.

You had the Federalists who were actively in control of the state legislatures and represented the commercial interests, and the anti Federalists who represented the rural farmers.

Considering that creditors were that group that Madison was wanting to protect in the first place.

It probably should not come as a big surprise that those representing the urban commercial interests would favor the protections that would come from a more powerful national government.

Now the anti Federalists were busy throwing up their hands and telling everybody that that it was necessary to slow down and actually think about what they were doing.

An argument that the Federalists were completely uninterested in hearing.

They argued that outside of Philadelphia itself, nobody had the slightest clue about the Constitution.

Therefore, how could they make such a huge decision?

Although this is a fair argument, there was a problem.

You see, there were elections coming up in November.

It was not lost on the Federalists that they, at the moment, controlled the wheels of power within the state.

A fact that may not be true.

Following the election, the anti Federalists, of course, argued that they should wait until after the elections.

But the Federalists just had no intentions of allowing that to happen.

The anti Federalists did not have the power to stop a convention from happening.

The state's legislature was controlled by the Federalists interests.

So it was assumed that a convention was pretty much a sure thing.

Except the anti Federalists did have one trick to play.

If the legislature was called to order, then the Federalists would have the votes to force through a convention.

But what if the legislature could not be called to order?

With that idea in mind, the anti Federalists boycotted the vote, thus denying the Federalists a necessary quorum.

Okay, so the convention is dead, or at least delayed in Pennsylvania, right?

No quorum, no ratifying convention?

Well, actually, no.

The issue was not yet settled.

You see, on the night of September 28, a mob of angry Philadelphians went marching through the city until they found two anti Federalist legislators.

The men were attacked and then literally dragged into the session by force.

Everybody agreed that despite them sitting in there with their clothing in tatters from being dragged through the city, it did not really matter how the men got into the room, so long as they got into the room.

A quorum was reached, and a ratifying convention was approved.

With the quorum now forced, the debates opened.

Although the term debate is probably too generous for what actually occurred, anybody who would have meaningfully spoken out against holding a convention was absent from the proceedings.

Although a meaningful strategy existed.

In abstaining from the legislature, the Federalists had managed to not only win the day, but effectively it meant that all dissenting views were now absent.

The Pennsylvania convention, which began at the end of November, would last for five weeks.

Here we see that battle lines were drawn, pitching the urban against the rural interests.

Unsurprisingly, the leader of the Federalists was James Wilson, one of the leaders from the convention itself.

Although the leaders of the anti Federalist party did try to fight back against the Constitution, there was overwhelming support amongst the delegates.

On December 12, Pennsylvania voted to ratify by a vote of 46 to 23.

This was, albeit a victory, not the end of the battles in the state over the document, as four weeks after the ratification, the anti Federalists continued to push back against the new national government that was fundamentally different from their own.

Benjamin Franklin, playing his usually coy role, went ahead and leaked out his closing speech from the summer's convention.

This led many to believe that their very own Franklin was the primary author of the new government, something that Franklin did little to dissuade them from believing.

By this point, Franklin was more or less beyond reproach within the United States, with maybe only Washington himself enjoying more adulation from the public.

Therefore, he was allowed to freely promote the Federalist cause, with the only anti Federalist retort being a reminder to everybody that Franklin was old and maybe had lost just a little bit along the way.

Although Pennsylvania was quick to ratify, it is difficult to say that the Constitution just sailed through.

Pennsylvania was the only example of political violence being used to push through the new pact.

Likewise, although it was a pretty convincing outcome, there was still a legitimate anti Federalist faction present within the state.

Everybody involved seemingly understood that such a new government would likely pose a serious, if not outright existential crisis to their own state's constitution.

Despite being the first state to call for a convention, Pennsylvania was not the first state to ratify, with that distinction going to Delaware, who voted unanimously on December 6th to ratify.

New Jersey would follow suit and would unanimously ratify shortly thereafter.

As historian Katherine Bowen points out in her book Miracle at Philadelphia, with Pennsylvania clearly moving towards ratification, there was never that much of a question over whether or not New Jersey and Delaware would ratify.

Pennsylvania was simply too much of a regional power.

Their move towards ratification therefore, all but guaranteed that her smaller neighbors would be left with little other choice but to ratify.

Down in the South, Georgia would join the Union next.

Much like Delaware and New Jersey, Georgia voted unanimously for ratification.

On one hand, this might seem to be something of a surprising development.

There is an argument to be made that should the situation devolve to regional battles, with the south breaking away from the northern states, Georgia would go the way of the regional leader in Virginia.

However, as George Washington would astutely acknowledge, Georgia had a whole Lot of reasons to vote in favor of ratification.

First, Georgia was under a nearly constant threat along their frontiers from hostile Indian tribes.

If that was not unnerving enough, their southern border saw them rubbing up against the Spanish.

Recall that one of the things that got everybody into this position in the first place was the Spanish trying to keep the Americans from accessing the Mississippi.

For little Georgia, the protection of a powerful national government sounded pretty good to the citizens of Georgia.

So ratification won the day.

The final of the small states to consider the Constitution was Connecticut.

As with the other small states, Connecticut really had very little choice in the matter.

At the end of the day, the small states had won the Constitutional convention so far as there could be a winner.

Roger Sherman, who had done so much to forge the compromises that made the Constitution possible, now set to the task of rallying the necessary votes to pass the new government.

Sherman, along with Oliver Ellsworth, appealed to the very powerful Congregationalist church in the state.

They were quick to point out that right next door was a much larger state in New York, and that it's probably a pretty good idea that the small states band together to ward off the undue subjugation of the big states.

You know, like New York, which, oh yeah, it's right there next door.

This was all the delegates to the state's ratifying convention needed to hear.

The Constitution was ratified by a rather convincing margin of 128 to 42.

Ratification in Connecticut more or less marked the end of what one might consider the easy states.

Sure, there had been bumps in the road, like the anti federalists being dragged through Philadelphia in their pajamas late at night in order to form a quorum.

But other than that one little hiccup, things had mostly gone down exactly as planned.

One had not only rejected the Constitution, but indeed a convention.

Altogether, there were seven states left to go, of which four needed to ratify in order to make the Constitution the law of the land.

Critically of the remaining undecided states were numerous big ones, including Virginia, New York and Massachusetts.

It was difficult to imagine the country being able to function in the event that any one of those states decided to hold out.

So to wrap up our discussion for today, we are going to turn to the first of our undecided states and take a look at the first real challenge that the Constitution would have.

So let's head to Massachusetts.

Before we jump in and begin looking at the convention inside of Massachusetts, I want to move back a bit and consider the political environment inside of the state prior to the convention.

Although I wouldn't blame you if it feels like forever ago that we were talking about Shays Rebellion.

In reality, it had only been a year since Daniel Shays and his army were defeated.

The rebellion wasn't some ancient memory for anybody.

Everybody remembered the uprising quite well.

There were certainly still quite a few people out there who remained very sympathetic to the plight of the Shaysites.

When the election to the convention came, many of those elected to serve in the western part of the state had fought in the rebellion, often as officers.

Like it or not, Shays Rebellion was very much present at the state's ratifying convention in so many ways that it was Massachusetts where all of the battle surrounding the Constitution would come to a head.

We know that Boston was filled to the brim with those wealthy merchants, whereas western Massachusetts was far more rural and filled with farmers.

This dichotomy of urban merchant versus rural farmer was very much on display.

Let us not forget that it was Shay's Rebellion that provided much of the backdrop that Madison needed to argue about the tyranny of the majority, that minority creditor class that was being crippled by the majority debtor class.

One of the main reasons for the rebellion in the first place was from those western farmers seeking debt relief.

The Constitution likewise has strong critics inside of the Massachusetts leadership.

Samuel Adams, for instance, had been vehemently opposed to to the idea of the convention in the first place.

Elbridge Gary likewise would decline to sign the Constitution at the end of the convention, as it was the first of these fiercely contested states.

Citizens in both Virginia and New York were watching with rapt attention to see exactly what Massachusetts was going to do.

Beyond the recent, however, is the fact that Massachusetts had a storied history of distrusting central authority.

It really is no wonder that the British believed that the revolution was being driven forward by a small group of rabble rousers, because so much of the crisis that led to the breakdown in that relationship stemmed out of events in Boston.

Now we all know that this was never actually true and that those fault lines ran throughout the entire country and throughout the classes.

However, it is impossible to overlook the role that Massachusetts played during the imperial crisis.

Among the men who were not present at the ratifying convention was the now staunch anti federalist Elbridge Gary, who A moment ago I mentioned was one of those delegates who had refused to sign the Constitution.

Boston itself was something of a safe harbor for those Federalist ideals where Gary would find few friends.

There is some irony that Gary failed to get himself elected as a delegate because later in life he would show some talents at doing some creative redistricting in order to skew election results.

Hence the term gerrymandering.

However, all of that is in the future and for now, Gary was out as a delegate, although he was still invited by the anti Federalists to come and answer questions as needed.

Initially, things got off to a poor start for the Federalists.

Despite their best efforts to gain control of the delegates being elected to the convention, they came up short with the anti Federalists holding a small majority.

Now this posed a very real problem for the Federalists.

Rather than just trying to ride this thing out to a close finish, but ultimately, ratification.

For the anti Federalists, the biggest problem that they faced was really not much different than the problems that they faced everywhere.

Whereas the Federalists had a thing that they had set out to do specifically secure the ratification of the Constitution, the anti Federalists came into the convention with no specific plan and only general objections.

This took the form of comparing the new Constitution to the British system that so many had fought and died to do away with.

They claimed that the new Constitution was a threat to their liberty.

They attacked the hypocrisy of slavery being virtually ignored within the document.

The process of flipping votes from the anti Federalist camp to the Federalist camp was not always the high minded campaign that you might hope for.

In truth, oftentimes these efforts fell onto the wrong side of shady dealings.

For example, there were cases where some of the delegates were informed that, and no pressure of course, that if the Constitution was not ratified, well, then their travel expenses probably were not going to be reimbursed.

For the wealthy Boston merchants, such threats would have likely been annoying, but nothing that would have posed that big of a problem.

However, for those poorer Western farmers, those most likely to be staunch anti Federalists not getting reimbursed for their time in travel, well, that was no small matter.

Threats of denying travel reimbursement aside, the real thing that moved the needle towards ratification was the defection of Samuel Adams into the Federalist camp.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the defection of Adams did not come free of charge.

The price of his support was promises that should ratification be agreed to, the Federalists would agree to send a list of proposed amendments onto Congress suggesting the need for there to be a federal Bill of Rights.

Now recall that back in Philadelphia, there had been discussions during the final days of the convention that the Constitution should be sent out to the states, the states should be allowed to make modifications as they saw fit, and then a second convention should be held to address said modifications.

This idea was shot down because realistically, everybody at the convention recognized that that it was now or never.

If the states got to make suggestions, a new constitution would never be agreed upon.

The Massachusetts Federalists, therefore, did not agree to actually include a bill of rights, as that was certainly a mandate outside of their authority.

They knew, as did Adams, that conditional ratification was not going to work.

Therefore, the agreement was that should ratification occur, they would send along a list of suggested amendments.

The Massachusetts Federalists would end up agreeing on nine proposed amendments, which, rather than focusing on personal protections that we know today, largely focused on limiting the power of the government over taxation and the potential for them to provide favoritism to a class of merchants.

With Adams now on board, the next domino that the Federalists knew that they needed to secure was was then governor John Hancock.

Part of the victory of bringing Adams over to the Federalist cause was the hope that he could secure that all important endorsement from Hancock.

The two men had long had their paths linked together.

And while John Hancock mourned over his lost salmon, their place at the center of everything that had happened was pulled sharply into focus.

Hancock still maintained a very considerable amount of power within Massachusetts, and there was little question that his vote was critical to both the Federalists and the anti Federalist cause alike.

Hancock thus far had remained absent from the convention because he was suffering from gout or because he wanted to make sure that he picked the winning horse and didn't want to show up and commit himself before he knew who that was going to be.

Recall that one of Adam's concerns that morning in Lexington was that Hancock's elegantly adorned carriage was not exactly the ride you wanted.

If you needed to get away unnoticed, it would be like robbing a bank using a Lamborghini as your getaway vehicle.

People are probably going to notice.

As it turned out, time had done little to dull Hancock's vanity.

The Federalists, desperate for his support, were okay with the idea of appealing directly to that vanity.

This manifested in a couple of different ways.

First, it was insinuated to Hancock that ratification in Virginia was not exactly a sure thing.

Should Virginia not ratify and thus George Washington not be able to sit as the first president who would have a better shot of the top job than Hancock?

He was the governor of a major state and he had been the President of Congress previously.

More tangibly, the honor of presenting the proposed amendments was given to Hancock.

Finally, Hancock received assurances that in the next gubernatorial election in Massachusetts, several of the supporters of the former Governor Bowden would pledge to support Hancock.

Instead, sufficient flattery and assurances now in place, John Hancock agreed to support ratification.

There would be another week of debate, largely over the convention's right to submit proposed amendments.

Samuel Adams made an ill fated attempt to attach a few more amendments which would have guaranteed, amongst other things, freedom of the press and protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

These amendments actually backfired to a degree and made everybody worry that Adams did not fully believe in the new Constitution, forcing him to withdraw his motion to hold the entire thing together.

Finally, on February 6, the vote was held.

Unlike in the other states, this vote was far from unanimous or one sided.

However, with a Narrow victory of 187 to 168, Massachusetts ratified the Constitution.

With their ratification, they became the sixth state to ratify, leaving just three to go.

It marked a critical moment because Massachusetts was one of those critical states where even if the critical nine votes was reached, it was hard to envision a country without Massachusetts on board.

Ratification in Massachusetts would also lead to another change.

Although the states lacked the actual authority to make ratification conditional upon the passage of amendments, Massachusetts had just set the precedent that it didn't hurt to ask.

It had been decided months before in Philadelphia that a Bill of rights was unnecessary.

However, in short order, the states were going to make clear that such a bill of rights might indeed be a bit more necessary than originally believed.

Next time.

With six states having ratified the Constitution and six remaining states preparing for their own conventions, the most contentious battles of the ratification process would break out.

Getting those final three votes would prove to be anything but an easy task.

Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe.

And I will see you back here next time.

As the biggest battles for ratification take place.