The historical reality of 1787 was nearly the opposite of how today's Right portrays it. The Framers of the Constitution were intent on overthrowing a disastrous system from the Articles of Confederation, which had enshrined the 13 original states as "sovereign" and "independent" with the central government deemed only a "league of friendship" and lacking any significant power.
As the young nation descended into squabbling and insolvency in the mid-1780s, the advocates for a strong central government -- led by Washington, Madison, Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris (who drafted the famous Preamble) -- staged what amounted to a nonviolent coup d'etat against the old structure.
Meeting in secret in Philadelphia -- and then circumventing the state legislatures by arranging special ratification conventions -- the Framers pushed through a system that made federal law supreme and sought to make the states "subordinately useful," in the words of James Madison.
This reality was recognized by political leaders who opposed what the Framers of the Constitution were doing. For instance, Pennsylvania delegates on the losing side of the Philadelphia debate explained their opposition, declaring:
"We dissent ... because the powers vested in Congress by this constitution, must necessarily annihilate and absorb the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the several states, and produce from their ruins one consolidated government. ""The new government will not be a confederacy of states, as it ought, but one consolidated government, founded upon the destruction of the several governments of the states. ... The powers of Congress under the new constitution, are complete and unlimited over the purse and the sword, and are perfectly independent of, and supreme over, the state governments; whose intervention in these great points is entirely destroyed."
The Pennsylvania dissenters noted that the state sovereignty language from the Articles of Confederation was stripped out of the Constitution and that national sovereignty was implicitly transferred to "We the People of the United States" in the Preamble. They pointed out that the Constitution's Article Six made federal statutes and treaties "the supreme law of the land."
"The legislative power vested in Congress ... is so unlimited in its nature; may be so comprehensive and boundless [in] its exercise, that this alone would be amply sufficient to annihilate the state governments, and swallow them up in the grand vortex of general empire," the Pennsylvania dissenters declared.
The Sweeping Powers
Those federal powers, listed in Article One, Section Eight, included "to provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States" and "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States."
In other words, the Framers gave the U.S. Congress broad powers to act on behalf of the American people. But those powers were particularly unnerving to Southern Anti-Federalists, such as Virginia's Patrick Henry, who warned the state's plantation aristocracy that ratification would inexorably lead to the demise of slavery. "They'll free your niggers!" Henry declared.
Despite losing the battle to block ratification, the Anti-Federalists did not go away. Behind the charismatic figure of Thomas Jefferson -- and drawing important support from Southern slaveholders who feared federal encroachment on their investment in human chattel -- the opponents of a strong central government set out to redefine what the Constitution meant. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Rethinking Thomas Jefferson."]
That was a political struggle that Jefferson and other Southern slaveholders won against the Federalists of Washington, Hamilton and Morris by the end of the 1790s, with Jefferson's defeat of John Adams for the presidency in 1800. The victory of Jefferson's Republicans, those supposed advocates of human freedom, relied on the extra votes that the Southern states got by counting their slaves as "three-fifths" of a person for the purpose of representation.
As the bitter political warfare of the 1790s played out, Madison was pulled from his original alliance with the Federalists into the political camp of his Virginia neighbor and fellow slaveholder Jefferson. In doing so -- in becoming a political representative of Virginia's plantation system -- Madison repudiated many of his earlier constitutional positions.
Jefferson called his election a new "revolution" as he reinterpreted the Constitution to afford very limited power to the federal government and expanded authority for states, even to "nullify" federal law. This revisionist approach amounted to a radical change from what Washington, Hamilton, Morris and the earlier Madison had constructed in Philadelphia.
In other words, Jefferson's view was not the "original" understanding of the Constitution. Yet, today's Right pretends it was. Even Jefferson, after becoming the third U.S. President, abandoned his "strict constructionism" when it was useful for him to do so, such as when he and Secretary of State Madison negotiated the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
The Ongoing Struggle
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