Free Andrew Jackson by H.W. Brands Page B

could win was a delayed (and only implicit) ban on the overseas slave trade, by common consent the worst aspect of the slave system.
    But the truly fateful compromise, the one that made the others—especially the slavery finesse—potentially lethal was the waffling on where sovereignty in the new government lay. Were the states supreme, or the national government? Many of the delegates were lawyers, and their lawyerly skill was never more evident than in their ability to cloud this central issue. Readers weren’t nine words into the preamble before they were scratching their heads. “We the people of the United States of America”—how was this to be construed? An emphasis on “people” suggested national primacy. A stress on “States” pointed to the states, as did the facts that the delegates to the convention voted by states and that the proposed constitution was referred to the states for ratification, with equal weight given to every one.
    The waffle didn’t fool opponents of the new constitution, who spied a centralist plot in the Philadelphia proceedings. Many of the old revolutionaries turned away, complaining that the proposed government would deprive them of liberties hard won by war. To replace the grasping authority of Britain, they declared, with that of a central American government would be ironic, tragic, and stupid.
    But the supporters of the constitution were clever. They contended that the new government would be strictly limited to the powers expressly granted it. Where the charter was silent, they said, the states would take precedence. Even as they winked to assure themselves and their friends that the new government would be a signal improvement over the Confederation, they cooed to skeptics that nothing much, really, had changed.
    The compromises contained in the constitution—especially on slavery and sovereignty—would vex America for decades. Andrew Jackson as president would find himself tripping over the loose ends the drafters left lying across the American frame of government. But in the autumn of 1787 another aspect of the constitutional debate drew almost as much attention. For decades political theorists had contended that republics could sustain themselves only in compact geographical areas. Pointing to the city-states of Greece and to preimperial Rome, they argued that compactness created a sense of common purpose and allowed citizens and rulers to know one another well, and that these advantages diminished dangerously over distance. What republic had ever survived being extended over a large geographical area? None the drafters of the constitution could cite. As this reasoning pertained to the American situation, it supported the antifederalists, who contended that New Hampshire could never know Georgia, nor the hamlets on the frontier the cities of the seaboard. Single states stretched the republican principle already; a centralized government would snap it. More prosaically, the long distances in America made centralized government unworkable. If the citizens of Massachusetts or South Carolina had to travel to Philadelphia (or New York or wherever the national capital turned out to be) every time they needed to conduct their government business, they would have no time for more productive activities. One reason America broke away from Britain was that getting decisions out of London took so long.
    The federalists countered this complaint in various ways, but none more ingenious than that devised by James Madison. In the tenth article of the collection that became known as the Federalist Papers , Madison turned the received reasoning about the size of republics on its head. Extensive republics, he asserted, were actually more stable than small ones. In a small republic, one or two factions could easily conspire against the general interest, engineer a majority, and subvert the liberties of the rest. In a large republic, the factions would be more dispersed, rendering