The Origins of the Constitutional Convention

Hi, I'm Woody Holton, teach at the University of South Carolina,

And I've done a video called The Origins of

the Constitution and the Philadelphia Convention of 17 87.

So, in it,

I'm first going to talk about why those 55 delegates showed

up at Philadelphia in 17 87 to write the Constitution.

And then I'm gonna compare the Constitution to

what came before the articles of Confederation.

The differences are huge.

And then I'm going to walk you through what I

call the nine big battles of the constitutional Convention.

I want to start this first module on the Constitution with

a brief introduction to the two part sequence on the Constitution,

this one on the adoption of the Constitution itself and then, uh,

second one on the ratification of the Constitution.

So before we get into the Constitutional Convention,

let's do a quick review of why those delegates were there

in Philadelphia in the summer of 17 87 for a meeting.

They didn't call the Constitutional convention because a lot of

people didn't think that's what they were going to do.

They just called it the federal convention. Why were they there?

And we can break that down easily into, uh, internal reasons.

That is things to do it within the states and

and, uh, between the states and then external reasons.

The one that involved external actors from

Native Americans to pirates in the Mediterranean.

So let's talk about internal, uh, causes.

First, the, uh,

states were kind of at war with each other in a

in a trade war as they would compete with each other,

uh, to see who could levy higher tariffs, Pennsylvania versus,

uh, New York or New York versus Connecticut or whatever. So there was that problem.

Um, and they were literal war with each other.

In some cases,

states that bordered each others like New

York and Massachusetts or Virginia and Pennsylvania,

either during the Colonial period of revolution,

had actually come to blows over where to draw the line.

Um,

and so one book about the origin of the

Constitution has kind of an amazing title peace pact.

That is that he the authors of that book argue that the framers of the Constitution

had to do it to keep the 13 states from being at each other's throats.

So those are some a couple of internal reasons. But I would argue that the biggest one

is that the people who wrote the constitution thought

the American revolution had gotten out of hand.

It had gone too far.

That is starting from were part of this limited monarchy in Britain,

and we swing towards the other extreme towards democracy,

and nobody said they were at complete democracy.

Like Athens, Athens wasn't either.

But not that we're talking all the way to too much to complete democracy. But

if you look at what the framers of the Constitution said about why they were there,

the phrase you see, uh,

both Alexander Hamilton who you can expect this from Elbridge Gerry,

from whom gerrymandering is named.

They both used the same phrase to define the problem

that they had come to Philadelphia to solve.

And that phrase was excess of democracy.

That is the American revolution to start off over

here as part of this British limited monarchy,

and it swung way too far into too much democracy and

their concern there was not just theoretical had an economic dimension,

that is, the people who wrote the Constitution

thought that the state legislatures were two Democratic in

that they listen to ordinary farmers too much,

and the farmers wanted feel good legislation like you don't have to

pay your taxes or you don't have to pay your debts.

Now that's an exaggeration. They weren't really that bad.

But in the eyes of Madison and Hamilton, the others who wrote the Constitution,

the state Legislature just were that bad because

they listened too much to the people.

And so they were there,

partly to design a federal government that would be less democratic,

less beholden to the voters.

So internal impetus is for the Constitution, our problems among the states,

like border wars and even much more fundamentally,

the concern on the part of people like Madison and Hamilton

that the country had gotten to Democratic.

But I promise you external factors as well. And here's where the pirates come in.

Uh,

there were lots of of state sponsored pirates operating

in the Mediterranean off the North African coast,

and other countries were powerful enough to either smash those pirates and

make a peace treaty with them or or pay them off.

The US couldn't afford to do either of

those things under the Articles of Confederation,

because Congress had no to

power to levy taxes.

Didn't have enough money to send a navy

over there to deal with the Mediterranean pirates.

Um, so you've got that you've got the British. Hey, they might want to come back.

They still got all these colonies in the Caribbean, for instance.

They still got Canada.

Um, and of course, you and I know that the British did come back in 18. 12.

They didn't know that, but they knew there was a possibility.

So the British are still threat.

The Spanish,

who had been basically informally allies of the

American columnist in their revolution against Britain,

the Spanish are still are now themselves a threat from their base in Florida.

And what what's, uh, now Mexico and all the way up to Texas? Uh, and and, uh,

and generally in the West. So, for instance, they control the Mississippi River.

Wouldn't allow, uh, the Americans, that is the people from the U. S.

To take their goods through New Orleans.

The Spanish were happy to buy those goods, and then they sell them to somebody else.

But that's, uh, that's an extra layer of middlemen that the the U. S.

People didn't want to deal with. So the Spanish are a problem.

But here is the biggest external threat you need to

know about is the one that I'm sorry to say.

The textbooks talk about the least, and that is Native Americans.

You'll recall that the Revolutionary War against Britain

was also a frontier war against Native Americans,

and there's a real sense in which the Indians won that war.

The number one objective of the United States

in the West in the Revolutionary War was to capture Detroit,

then just a big fort with a bunch over the small town around it.

But it was where the British armed the Indians coordinated their efforts and the U.

S got convinced that they had to capture Detroit.

And they've made about seven or eight different plans to capture Detroit,

none of which even got within, uh, spitting difference distance of, uh, Detroit.

So the the Americans failed to capture Detroit.

There was mass murders like a not in hunting

in modern day Ohio in 17 82 of Indians,

but they never managed to drive the Indians away or settle with the U.

S. Was trying to settle west of the Ohio.

They failed to do that during the war,

so the Indians had kind of won the war in the West.

Now the British sold them out and said, Uh,

we're not going to help you defend your land.

That was in the Treaty of 17 83

that made peace between the colonists and their former mother country.

The British told them out,

but the idiots were still determined to fight for their land.

The US tried to use the old divide and conquer strategy by

meeting with one Indian nation in September and another one in November.

That sort of thing. Indians insisted on meeting all at the same time.

They were surprisingly unified, given that these Indian nations had all been

often at odds with each other.

And so so the biggest external threat, I would say, was Native Americans,

and none of these could be solved on the articles of confederation

because the Congress didn't have the ability to levy

taxes to field an army against the Indians,

Navy against the pirates or anything else.

And so so those I think, were the two biggest motives for why the framers came to the,

uh to Philadelphia to write the Constitution.

Notice what I didn't say on that list of motives.

They were not there to protect Americans right

to freedom of religion or from unlawful search

and seizure or against cruel and unusual punishment

or freedom of speech or gun rights.

And they weren't there for any of those things.

And in fact, they didn't do any of those things.

The the clause of the Constitution that most of us

love the most today mentioned a bunch of them.

None of them is in the Constitution.

None of them is in the document that the framers like Madison, Hamilton,

Washington, Franklin that they adopted and signed on September 17th, 17 87.

None of that is in there. It's not that they didn't care about those rights.

It's just that they weren't there to protect rights.

They were there for the external and internal reasons that I mentioned