Constitution Making: Conflict and Consensus in the Federal Convention of 1787, By Calvin C. Jillson
Preface: This study explores both the empirical and the substantive validity of the traditional historical and philosophical interpretations of the creation of the American Constitution. Advocates of differing interpretations of the Constitution’s drafting have taken two distinct views, some arguing that the Convention created the Constitution out of a commitment to ideas and political principles, others arguing that the participants designed the Constitution to aid and protect their social, political, and economic interests. This study looks more closely at the roll-call voting record of the Constitutional Convention than any previous study and concludes that an accurate understanding of the constitution-making process must acknowledge that both philosophical and material concerns were at work in the Federal Convention.
I will demonstrate that constitution making is an elaborate and delicate, yet elegantly simple, process in which the participants refer to distinctly different sources of knowledge and information to reach judgments about two fundamental aspects of constitutional design. Thus, I will show that the Founding Fathers acted out of broad, though distinct and competing, philosophical perspectives concerning the working relationships between human nature, particular political institutions, and the resulting social order, when they struggled to design the general institutional structure for the new national government. On these issues of basic governmental organization and design, the nationalist delegates from the Middle Atlantic states, generally supporting Madison’s vision of an “extended” republic, opposed the delegates from New England and the lower South, who held tenaciously to Montesquieu’s warning that free institutions could survive only in “small” republics.
The delegates, on the other hand, pursued narrow material interests when they voted on specific mechanisms for implementing various aspects of the constitutional design. When debate touched upon the distribution of power and influence within the institutions of the new government, coalitions based upon interest posed the large states against the small, the northern states against the southern, and the states with large claims to the lands in the West against the states that had no such claims to future wealth and power. This movement from the consideration of broad principles to a concern with narrow interests conforms to the general expectation of modern social choice theory, particularly in the work of James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Vincent Ostrom. I will argue, however, that there was more frequent movement back and forth from philosophical principles to material interests than social choice theory would seem to anticipate. Such recurring movement indicates that constitution making is a more delicate and complex process than either the traditional historical analysts or the contemporary social choice theorists have realized. This complexity arises from the broad range of issues raised in constitution making, the lack of a single natural majority coalition across all issues, and the consequent tendency of delegates and state delegations to realign during constitution making as the Convention moved from one set of critical and controversial issues to another set.
Underlying the complexity of the constitution-making process in the Federal Convention of 1787, there nonetheless existed a very simple and widely shared goal. The delegates, though drawn from different cultural and material contexts, sought to create a common constitutional framework through which representative decision-making could resolve their legitimate political differences. They disagreed on the appropriate design of the Constitution, and on the distribution of political power and influence within and across particular institutions, but the general goal of a representative constitution united them and led to a sophisticated and sincere decision process that continues to stand as a model of democratic constitution making.
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In elaborating this thesis, I attempt to accomplish three goals. First, I supply an empirical description of the voting coalitions, the stable patterns of cooperation and conflict among the delegates and their state delegations as voting units, that characterized the Convention’s work. Particular attention is dedicated to changes in voting coalitions and to the implications of these changes for the substantive issues before the Convention. The goal here is to establish the traditional historical and philosophical discussion of the debates and decisions of the Federal Convention on a firm empirical footing.
Second, I advance an explanation of the underlying rationale (philosophical, sociocultural, economic, or regional) for each division of the states. I will describe the Convention chronologically as a series of confrontations between stable coalitions of states and their delegates over the major issues that confronted the Convention from its opening on May 25 to its final adjournment on September 17, 1787. Questions such as the following will be addressed: What were the major issues that spawned each alignment? What were the theoretical justifications and the practical power implications of each of the principal positions adopted by the delegates? Who finally prevailed and why?
Third, I will demonstrate that the long-standing division in the secondary literature on the Convention between those analysts who stress the impact of philosophical principles and those who stress the influence of political and economic interests is misleading. In fact, a dynamic relationship of mutual interdependence existed; and, in fact, had to exist—between philosophical and material influences in the Convention. I will show that the principled or ideological conflicts that arose in the Convention were generated by the clash of regionally based variations in the republican political culture of the new nation, while the conflicts over power and policy were generated by differences in political and economic interests relating to state size and to region.
The key to my interpretation of the politics of the Federal Convention is the contention that debate moved between two distinct but interrelated levels of constitutional construction and that the relative influence of the delegates’ political principles and their material interests on the Convention’s debates and decisions was quite different at each level. My thesis is that principles guided action on distinguishable types of questions, while on other sets of questions, personal, state, and regional interests encroached upon, and in some cases overwhelmed and subordinated, the independent impact of ideas. I will argue that questions of each general type dominated the Convention’s attention during particular phases of its work, so that at some stages, the dominant voting coalitions were organized around shared principles, while at other times, the dominant coalitions were organized around conflicting material interests.
In developing this revisionist interpretation, I argue that intellectual divisions in the Convention had their basis in regional variations in the republican political culture of the American founding period. This argument is based on the work of Daniel Elazar, Robert Kelley, and many others. Elazar, for instance, has described three related but distinct political subcultures: moralistic in New England, individualistic in the Middle Atlantic states, and traditionalistic in the South. Kelley, while calling his regional subcultures by different names and finding two distinct subcultures active in the Middle Atlantic states, has provided very similar substantive descriptions of the ideas and values at the center of each regional subculture.
Further, I will support this argument by demonstrating; both empirically, through analysis of roll-call voting data, and substantively, through analysis of the Convention’s voluminous debates; that when the Convention concentrated on “higher” level questions of constitutional design, voting coalitions among the state delegations formed along lines of intellectual cleavage. During these phases of the Convention’s work, the delegates from the more nationally oriented Middle Atlantic states opposed the more locally oriented delegates representing the northern and southern periphery. When the focus shifted to “lower” level choices among specific decision rules, each of which represented an alternative distribution of authority within and over the institutions of government, the states split along lines defined by economic and geographic interest, state size (large versus small), and region (North versus South). But perhaps most importantly, I will show that coalitions, whether based on political principles or on material interests, consistently undercut, disrupted, and weakened one another as debate and decision ranged across the fundamental issues that were the Convention’s daily business. What is more, the interplay between coalitions effectively checked and limited the long-term cohesion that any alignment of states could maintain and resulted in the politics of bargaining, compromise, and accommodation for which the Convention is so justly famous.
The ultimate impact of shifting cleavages generating new patterns of allegiance among the participants was that no major group was radically dissatisfied with the product of the Convention’s long deliberations. In Charles Warren’s words, “One of the most fortunate features of the Constitution was that it was the result of compromises and adjustments and accommodation…. It did not represent the complete supremacy of the views of any particular man or set of men, or of any State or group of States.The claims and interests of neither the North nor the South prevailed…. Moreover, it represented neither an extreme Nationalist point of view nor an extreme States’ Rights doctrine. The adherents of each theory had been obliged to yield” ( Warren, 1928, p. 733). Thus, the delegates, almost to a man, departed the Convention convinced that their constitutional glass was at least half full as opposed to half empty.
The impact of factional politics, political compromises, and shifting coalitions has, however, been less happy for scholars seeking to understand and interpret the Convention. Because no consistent set of political principles, no region, no social or economic class interest dominated the Convention’s business, and though each of these sources of influence was visibly present and was clearly felt, no simple description of divisions in the Convention or of their sources is available. This has greatly embarrassed most of the sweeping dichotomies; nationalists against federalists, large republic men against small republic men, large states against small states, northern states against southern states, commercial interests against agrarian interests, and many others; that have traditionally been used to explain the work of the Convention. Consequently, we have been inundated by a wealth of contradictory claims concerning divisions within the Convention and their effects, with no firm basis for choice among them. I will attempt throughout this book to explain in some detail, both empirically and substantively, who won (in factional terms), when (at what stage in the Convention’s business), and why (in terms of intellectual or practical political advantage) on the major issues faced by the delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787. Ultimately, a conceptually sophisticated and empirically accurate understanding of the politics of constitution making in the Federal Convention will allow us to see the democratic politics of our own age in clearer perspective.
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