The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley

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      Jefferson was dismayed to find himself surrounded by monarchists in Hamilton’s New York, the new country’s capital. “I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversation filled me. Politics was the chief topic, and a preference for kingly, over republican, government was evidently the favored sentiment.”³ The country was already abandoning the republican principles of its founding, and some people hankered for a return to court government, with its attendant corruption.

      Jefferson also objected to the federal assumption of state public debt, which Hamilton had negotiated in 1790. Southern republicans weren’t happy with how this measure was shifting the locus of financial power from the states to the federal government. Worse, those being paid off weren’t the farmer-patriots who had purchased state-issued bonds during the revolution. These bonds had mostly been sold off to a set of “speculators” and “stock-jobbers” who bought them at deep discount. The federal assumption of the debt was nothing other than a bailout of Hamilton’s friends, a moneyed class of wealthy investors (not unlike the 2008–9 bailout of Wall Street by another treasury secretary). What Hamilton’s scheming came down to, said Jefferson, was monarchism, and not just the desire for a king but “a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”

      Corruption was a favorite topic for Jefferson, and he returned to it at a private dinner with Hamilton and John Adams in 1791. He wasn’t especially inclined to socialize with either of them, but Washington had left for Mount Vernon and had asked his cabinet and his vice president to deal with important matters that might arise during his absence. So the three met over dinner, and after the tablecloth was removed and the port produced, the conversation drifted to general matters. The Anglophile Adams praised the British constitution. Could it only be purged of its corruption, he said, it would be “the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” For Jefferson that was anathema: Britain was so corrupt that nothing could save it. Then Hamilton spoke up. Corruption was inseparable from what he admired in the British constitution. “Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, & it would become an impracticable government,” he said, but “as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.”⁴

      Among the Framers, Hamilton wasn’t alone in his admiration for the British form of government. At the Philadelphia Convention, many of the other delegates had gone out of their way to praise the British constitution. But they had just fought a revolution to free themselves from it, and they wanted something better for America. Theirs would be a different kind of constitution, an anticorruption covenant.

The Constitutional Convention

      The crucial moment in American history was not the Revolutionary War but the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, when fifty-five delegates from twelve states assembled to frame a new constitution for the country. (Rhode Island sent no delegates.) It may now seem inevitable that the delegates would agree on a constitution, but at various points in the proceedings they were at full stop. Several of the delegates threatened to walk out, and not a few thought the country might split into two or three parts.⁵ In that case, said Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, they should prepare for civil war. “The Country must be united,” he warned. “If persuasion does not unite us, the sword will. . . . The stronger party will then make traytors of the weaker; and the Gallows and Halter will finish the work of the sword.” Moreover, foreign powers might have been happy to take advantage of the confusion.⁶ A formal return to the British Empire, with a right of American self-government, was not beyond the realm of possibility, in which case the revolution would have been undone.

      Even after the delegates agreed on the new Constitution, on September 17, it still had to be ratified by the states. But the outcome was then in little doubt, because the Framers presented the states with a take-it-or-leave-it document. It would be this or nothing, and the second option was not in the cards, since remaining under the Articles of Confederation might have resulted in a breakup of the new country. In the end, even corrupt little Rhode Island came around and ratified the Constitution in May 1790, a year after George Washington had been inaugurated as the first president. The state may have earned its label of “Rogue Island” from the convention delegates, but trying to make a country of itself just wouldn’t make sense.

      So we got our Constitution. The debates along the way were filled with high drama and extended argument among an extraordinary group of politically astute leaders. But that isn’t to say they were all high-minded great men. “There is nothing less true,” said George Mason. “From [New England] there were knaves and fools and from the states southward of Virginia they were a parcel of coxcombs and from the middle states office hunters not a few.”⁷ It’s all the more striking, then, to see how often the delegates expressed their concerns about corruption, and some of the strongest voices for virtue came from the strangest places.

      When Mason spoke of the middle-state “office hunters,” he likely let his eye fall upon Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. At the age of eighty-one, Franklin was the oldest person at the convention, and next to Washington he was the most famous, the author of Poor Richard’s Almanac and a member of the Royal Academy. As a politician and a diplomat he had first asked the British to expel the French from North America and then persuaded the French to kick the British out of the United States, a triumph unmatched in U.S. diplomatic history. He was the indispensable American as much as Washington was. And he had built a career by securing lucrative public positions for himself and his family, beginning with his appointment as postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737.

      The delegates may therefore have suspected that Franklin was less than sincere in his statements about the corrupting effects of payment for high office. In proposing that presidents should serve without pay, Franklin argued that men are moved by their passions for money and power, and that the worst candidates will seek office when the two are combined. The result would be British-style corruption, with vast numbers of placemen appointed to government office in reward for services to their party. “The struggles for [government places] are the true sources of all those factions which are perpetually dividing the [British] Nation, distracting its councils, hurrying sometimes into fruitless & mischievous wars, and often compelling a submission to dishonorable terms of peace.”⁸ It would be the same in America if the posts of honor became places of profit.

      When he finished speaking, there was silence among the delegates. Perhaps they were thinking of how effectively Franklin had sought profitable places himself, and how much he had enjoyed the salons of Paris. They may also have been recalling the services he had done for America and wondering if it might be a mistake to discourage people like Franklin from taking public office. Finally, Hamilton seconded the motion for an unpaid presidency. Few delegates had less sympathy for the proposal, but Hamilton did not want to see the older man embarrassed. No one wished to debate Franklin’s proposal, wrote Madison in his convention notes, yet “it was treated with great respect, but rather for the author of it, than from any apparent conviction of its expediency or practicability.”⁹ And so it went nowhere.

      Hamilton wasn’t particularly troubled by corruption, as we have seen, but if any delegate was more cynical still it was Gouverneur Morris. While the story that he owed his peg leg to a jump from a window to escape a jealous husband is probably apocryphal, we do know something of his many affairs, thanks to his candid diary.¹⁰ When he went to Paris on banking business, he quickly adapted to local customs and shared a mistress—the comtesse de Flahaut—with Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun. With a touch of envy, a French diplomat described Morris as a man “without morals and, if one believes his enemies, without principles.”¹¹

      At the convention, Morris was the master of the adroit suggestion, the strategic compromise, the art of the deal. Though he was present at the start, in mid-May, he left after a few days, returning only on July 2, and then he wasted no time СКАЧАТЬ