Constitution Day

The following is an excerpt from Melvin Yazawa’s new book, Contested Conventions: The Struggle to Establish the Constitution and save the Union, 1787—1789 in honor of Constitution Day on 17 September.

Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who famously claimed that he always carried a copy of the Constitution with him, amended a federal spending bill in 2004 to include a provision for a national observance of Constitution Day. Among other things, Byrd’s amendment required all schools receiving federal funds annually to “hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17.” In its tribute to Byrd and his fifty-one years of service in the Senate, the New York Times reported that the West Virginian, who won acceptance as the unofficial constitutional scholar of Congress, was “particularly proud” of this 2004 amendment. The Constitution “defines us as Americans,” Byrd reasoned, and to “preserve” it, we must “make it an active part of our lives.”

The mandate and the celebrations that followed were well intentioned, to be sure, but they were fraught with difficulties that rendered them potentially misleading if not downright confusing. At the most basic level, the date itself conceals as much as it commemorates. September 17 was the day on which thirty-nine delegates signed the document they had created at the Federal Convention. It was the capstone event of the business at Philadelphia and therefore perhaps the obvious episode to celebrate. Since World War I, September 17 has been the preferred day for localized public festivities. In 1919, eighty-five years before Byrd introduced his amendment, the National Security League, self-appointed guardians of “100 percent Americanism,” tried to get September 17 declared a national holiday. However, there was nothing magical about the date. The signing of the Constitution on the last day of the convention did not settle its fate. That came nine months later. The delegates themselves said as much. During the debates over the relative merits of the Virginia and New Jersey plans, when proponents of the latter questioned whether the convention was authorized to do more than to revise the Articles of Confederation, James Wilson made what became the standard justification for ignoring Congress’s directive. The convention was merely drafting a proposal, he explained, and was therefore “at liberty to propose any thing” because it could in fact “conclude nothing.” James Madison agreed. What they had written at the Pennsylvania State House, he declared, was “nothing but a dead letter, until life and validity were breathed into it by the voice of the people, speaking through the several state conventions.” In light of sentiments such as these, perhaps June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, thereby formalizing the establishment of the new Union under the Constitution would be more appropriate than September 17, 1787, as the date to memorialize.

A second difficulty with Constitution Day is a consequence of the first. The focus on September 17 privileges the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution, ignoring the contributions of George Mason, Edmund Randolph, and El- bridge Gerry, the three delegates who refused to affix their names to the document on the last day of the convention. It also dismisses the thirteen others who left Philadelphia before September 17. Most of the lesson plans developed by various organizations, public and private, to assist teachers and school administrators in meeting the requirements of the new federal regulation reflect this bias. The best plans, those sponsored by the National Constitution Center at Independence Mall in Philadelphia and the National Archives in Washington, DC, avoid the error by identifying all fifty-five delegates to the Federal Convention as our “founding fathers.” But even this more inclusive list is insufficient. If we are to believe Madison and Wilson, the men who ratified the Constitution deserve at least as much attention as those who drafted the document. In other words, to the roster of thirty-nine or fifty-five “founders,” we should add the names of the more than sixteen hundred delegates to the thirteen state conventions. Surely, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry, all of whom chose not to attend the Federal Convention but who were enormously influential at their respective state conventions, ought to rank higher among the “founders” than Richard Bassett, John Blair, Thomas Fitzsimons, Alexander Martin, Thomas Mifflin, and others who were in attendance at Philadelphia but said little or nothing while there and served on no commit- tees. For the same reasons, Melancton Smith of New York and Willie Jones of North Carolina, whose actions shaped the decisions of their states, should join the first ranks of the “founders.” Ultimately, however, even the designation “founders” may be of questionable utility. The sixteen hundred state convention delegates, after all, were supposed to represent the “voice of the people,” as Madison said. If so, then the influence exerted by the masses of ordinary farmers and tradesmen, the “unruly Americans” who were politicized by the Revolution and remained active in 1787, should not be discounted in favor of the so-called founders.

Finally, Constitution Day festivities, and by extension the popular under- standing of the Philadelphia Convention, take too much for granted. Absent is an appreciation of contingency in these formulaic demonstrations of affection for the “greatest event in our national history.” Progress toward “a more perfect union” under the newly created Constitution seems a foregone conclusion. The Union, already secure, needed only to be perfected. But this was not how the participants themselves viewed their situation. On the contrary, their dominant mood was one of apprehension about the state of the Union. Alexander Hamilton expressed this mood best in an anxious letter he wrote to George Washington in 1783. Anticipating Washington’s resignation as the Continental Army prepared to disband in the wake of the signing of the preliminary articles of peace between Great Britain and the United States, Hamilton beseeched the general to remain active in the public arena. The successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War was not enough to secure the blessings of independence, he said, because the “seeds of disunion” in America were “much more numerous than those of union.” Ahead lay the “arduous work” of establishing the foundations necessary “to perpetuate our union,” and Washington’s continued presence would be indispensable. Only he, already cast in the public’s imagination as the iconic savior of the nation, could pull the people together. Washington’s exertions would be “as essential to accomplish this end as they have been to establish independence,” for, lamentably, “the centrifugal is much stronger than the centripetal force in these states.”

Hamilton’s appeal reflected his core belief that the prevailing situation was unacceptable and that unless it was attended to immediately, it would end tragically for Americans. Centrifugal forces had to be weakened and centripetal strengthened. Otherwise, a fragmentation of the Union must take place, and disunion would be followed by “dissensions between the states themselves.” Past grievances, disputed territorial claims, commercial rivalries, the public debt, and other sources of conflict, rooted in human nature and therefore too numerous to name, would be reinvigorated by the separation into competing entities. Competition, in turn, would breed suspicion, which would lead to dis- cord, then to infractions, next to reprisals, and finally to appeals to the “sword.” And following the first armed engagement, no state could possibly resist popular demands for the establishment of a standing army to repel or deter invasions by rapacious neighbors. “To be more safe,” the people “become willing to run the risk of being less free.” Unfortunately, the necessity of standing armies “enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionately degrades the condition of the citizen,” encouraging the people to consider the “soldiery not only as their protectors” but eventually as their “masters.” This descent from disunion to militarism to despotism was inevitable, Hamilton said, because it traced a “natural and necessary progress of human affairs.”

Melvin Yazawa is professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico. His latest book is Contested Conventions: The Struggle to Establish the Constitution and save the Union, 1787—1789.