A History of the American People

These powers were not explored until Andrew Jackson's time, half a century on, when they
astonished and frightened many people; and it is perhaps fortunate that the self-restraint and
common sense of George Washington prevented any display of them in the I790s, when they
would certainly have led to protest and constitutional amendment. As it was, the new republic
got a combined head of state and head of government entrusted with formidable potential
authority.
Although the Convention worked with some speed, which was necessary, and desirable for its
own sake-too long debates on constitutions lead to niggling and confusion of issues-it worked
deliberatively. The making of the United States Constitution ought to be a model to all states
seeking to set up a federal system, or changing their form of government, or beginning
nationhood from nothing. Alas, in the 200 and more years since the US Constitution was drawn
up, the text itself has been studied (often superficially) but the all-important manner in which the
thing was done has been neglected. The French Revolutionaries in the next decade paid little
attention to how the Americans set about constitution-making-what had this semi-barbarous
people to teach Old Europe? was the attitude-and thirty years later the Latin Americans were in
too much of a hurry to set up their new states to learn from the history of their own hemisphere.
So it has gone on. The federal constitutions of the Soviet Union (1921) and of Yugoslavia (1919)
were enacted virtually without reference to the American experience, and both eventually
provided disastrous and bloody failures. It was the same with the Central African Federation, the
Federation of Malaysia, and the West Indies Federation, all of which had to be abandoned. The
federal structure of the European Union is likewise being set up with no attempt to scrutinize and
digest the highly successful American precedent, and attempts to persuade the European
constitution-makers to look at the events of the 1780s are contemptuously dismissed.
Just as important as the process for drawing up the Constitution was the process of ratifying it.
In some ways it was more important because it went further to introduce and habituate the
country to the democratic principle. Article VII of the Constitution provided for the way it was to
be adopted, and resolutions passed by the Convention on September 17, 1787 set out a four-stage
process of ratification. The first was the submission of the document to the Congress of the old
Confederation. This was done on September 25, and, after three days of passionate debate,
federalists (who supported ratification) and anti-federalists (who wanted it rejected) agreed to
send the Constitution to the individual states, the second stage, without endorsing or condemning
it. The third stage was the election of delegates in each state to consider the Constitution, and the
fourth was ratification by these conventions of at least nine of the Thirteen States. When the
ninth state signified its acceptance, the Constitution then became the basic law of the Union,
irrespective of what other states did.
This introduction of the rule of majority, as opposed to unanimity, itself signified the
determination of the federalists to create a forceful and robust government. Majority rule made
fast action possible. It reflected the desire that the ratification process proceed briskly, and the
hope that quick ratification by key states early in the day would stampede the rest into
acquiescence. It was a high-risk strategy, obviously. If any of the four biggest states, Virginia,
Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, let alone all of them, rejected the Constitution,
ratification by all the rest would be meaningless. But the federalists thought they could be pretty
sure of the Big Four. Again, the Constitution took an even bigger risk in insisting ratification had
to be by popular, specially elected conventions rather than by state legislatures. This was to
introduce the people-democracy indeed-with a vengeance. But it was felt that approval by state
legislators was not enough. Here was a fundamental law, affecting everyone in the nation and