Legacy (4 page)

Eight men were on hand, however, whose pres- Franklin, like General Washington, played almost ence gave not only Simon Starr but all the other no role in the deliberations; they were ornaments delegates a sense of awe. These were the men of the most valuable kind, since they reminded the 1 35

other delegates of the grandeur of the Revolution and the gallant acts that led up to it. There was one more delegate who had signed the Declara- tion, and he was to become a major influence on Starr:

I was in the assembly hall one morning when I felt a tug on my arm, and turned to see a man I did not know. He was a short, pudgy fellow in his mid-forties, bald and with heavy eyeglasses. There was nothing about his appearance that was memorable, and when he spoke, it was with a heavy Scottish burr which made his words almost unintelligible. 'Hello, lad,' he said. 'Am I right in thinking you're Jared Starr's boyT When I said I was, he smiled: 'I'm James Wilson, Scotland and Pennsylvania, and I relied upon your father's help at the Declara- tion of Independence. I suppose your father spoke of meT Father had said nothing, and I knew nothing about the man who faced me, but as the weeks and months of our assembly passed, this very ordinary-looking man with no oratorical graces emerged as the great solid rock of the Convention, and I noticed that when he spoke, which he did repeatedly, others stopped to listen, for not only was his knowl- edge encyclopedic but he also talked sense. He was without peer the brains of our effort, for with his merciless logic he killed faulty ideas and with his Scottish enthusiasm he made other men's good ideas palatable. Great orators like Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania and Dr William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut made fiery speeches, half of them wrong, but James Wilson in his quiet way was always right, and

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after he had been knocked down for six days in a row, he rose on the seventh with fresh argu- ments to win the day. If our Constitution is a workable success, it is so largely because Wilson hammered its ideas into shape.

Simon was aware that his journal notes now said that two men were of prime influence on his voting in the Convention, Hamilton and Wilson, so he added a note lest someone judge him to have been fickle in his loyalties:

I am aware that I said Hamilton was my guide, and now I'm saying that Wilson was. The expla- nation is simple. The New York delegation con- sisted of three men, Hamilton and two others, but these two scorned what the convention was struggling to do and after a few days they stalked out in a huff and never returned. That left poor Hamilton high and dry, for as I said, we voted by states, and with two of New York's three delegates gone, the state could never have a quorum. Thus, one of the most brilliant men in the nation was left without a vote, so in disgust he rode back to New York, being absent during the sweltering days when men like Madison, Mason and Wilson hammered out the crucial details. So it's simple. Hamilton was not present, Wilson was, and I followed the won- derfully sane and solid leadership of the latter.

And now we come to a mystery which has given all subsequent Starrs considerable embarrassment. During the entire hundred and sixteen days of the sessions, and some of the debate was so vigor- ous that it became almost violent, Simon Starr uttered not one word. He attended every session,

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following the swing of debate with close attention and discussed the nuances at night in the Indian Queen, but in the hall itself he said nothing. As I sought to know him, over the centuries, I thought: How could an honour graduate from Princeton, a man with his own considerable library, participate at the heart of a world- shattering debate and make no contribution? He himself wondered:

There were eight of us delegates who said noth- ing or little. William Blount of North Carolina, Nicholas Gilman of New Hampshire, Richard Bassett of Delaware, William Few of Georgia, John Blair of Virginia, Thomas Mifflin and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, and me. We kept silent, I think, because we were in the pres- ence of our betters, men who had either wide experience like Dr Franklin or profound intel- lectual insights like Madison and Wilson. We felt no urge to parade our ignorance.

We left the podium open for polished debaters like Gouverneur Morris and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who spoke upwards of a hundred and forty times each. Careful students of his- tory and politics like Madison and Wilson invariably had something cogent to say on every subject. We eight didn't. On the matter of speaking, Simon left one para- graph which has astounded later generations., especially those of us who have gone through pub- lic flagellations such as Watergate and the pre- sent Iranian arms scandal:

One of the first decisions agreed upon when we finally assembled was that our deliberatiom

would be conducted in secrecy. News journals would be allowed no entry to our hall and all members promised to disclose nothing of our debate. So for one hundred and sixteen days, fifty-five men who were among the leaders of our nation met and argued and retired to our inns to continue the debate, and we dealt with the most profound topics that men can deal with, the problems of self-government, and not a single clue as to what we were discussing or how we were dividing was revealed to the out- side world. Thus, delegates were freed from posturing for public acclaim; more important, they were free to change their minds and to retreat from weak positions hastily taken. I once heard Gouverneur Morris argue heatedly on five different sides of a question in four successive days, coming down finally on the correct side.

So much for the chitchat. It is valuable in that it throws a warm, illuminating light on the delegates and the soul-shattering work they were engaged in, but it is more important that we see how these powerful men grappled with the great problems of their day, and in the Starr family we have always been proud of our ancestor's secret role in the Constitution's greatest victory - ashamed of his part in its most disgraceful defeat. I said there were fifty-five delegates to the Con-

vention; there were actually two additional invis- ible 'members' who cast their silent votes in almost every deliberation. They were Daniel Shays, the Massachusetts revolutionary, and Cudjoe, the unknown black slave from the African coast. Whenever the argument between the three

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big states, who felt entitled to more voice in government, and the several small ones, who demanded protection of their rights, became so heated that compromise became impossible, someone would mention Dan Shays, and the pos- sibility of similar rebellion throughout the states became real. Then tempers subsided, debate con- tinued in a lower key, and men began seriously to reconsider how they could resolve this dilemma of how to allow the big states to exercise the power which they unquestionably had and to which they were entitled without engulfing the small. So Dan Shays, invisible, played a vital role. One June evening, after a steamingly hot day of bitter debate, Simon Starr was quaffing an ale in the Indian Queen when he saw a group of del- egates, some who had spoken on the floor, but most, like himself, silent, and as he started to speak, he drew them about him: 'Let us hoe away all the manure and see what roots grow basically. I'll go first.' Wetting his lips and pushing back his red hair with both hands, he said: 'It is engraved In granite, fused inseparably to the mountains of our land, that the three big states, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, will never again agree to the old pattern of one state, one vote. That is the bedrock from which we start.' But a delegate from Delaware, an inoffensive man who also said nothing in public debate, argued: 'As remorseless as the tides of the ocean which no power on earth can halt, the small states will never agree to a legislation in which we do not have equal representation with the big states, and that means one state, one vote.' 'But if you small states persist,' Simon warned, 'we, the more populous states, will simply go

home, form a kind of union of our own, and let you small ones join up later when you come to your senses.' The Delaware man and his supporters did not tremble at the threat: 'If we are denied justice, we'll march out and build an alliance with some European nation.' Such terrible words, words which shook the soul and made it cringe in despair, could not have been offered in the general assembly, but they deserved airing, and in Simon Starr's informal group, there they stood in naked force, big and little both threatening: Do it my way or we'll go home. It was beyond the power of young Starr to engi- neer a compromise between these two adamant positions, but he had sense enough to appreciate the gravity of the impasse faced by the nation. So he sought out delegates from the middle-sized states, and this threw him into the arms of men from Connecticut and South Carolina, who lis- tened attentively as he reported the iron-hard determination of each side not to yield. In the next days the argument reached the floor of the con- vention, where tempers were guarded but conces- sions nonexistent. Finally, a committee was appointed whose members were dedicated to finding a compromise between large and small, and under the lead- ership of Roger Sherman, a plan was devised unlike any other that had ever been in existence:

the powerful legislature would be divided into two houses, an upper whose members would be appointed by state legislatures, with each state regardless of size having one member, and a lower elected by the general population, with

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each state entitled to a varying number of mem.. bers depending on an index of population and wealth, or taxes paid. Some wanted the upper house to be appointed for life, all agreed that the lower house should enjoy certain unique privi- leges. It was as delicate a balance as could have been devised, and Simon Starr, silent by day, had been a chief instigator by night. Of course, details had to be perfected slowly and in heated debate. For example, the member- ,ship of the lower house was set arbitrarily at fifty- six seats: Virginia would have nine; Pennsylvania, eight; Massachusetts, seven. New Hampshire would have two, and Delaware and Rhode Island, one each. Few delegates liked the distribution, but after protracted discussion a clever correction was proposed which seemed to make everyone happy: the number of seats in the lower house was raised from fifty-six to sixty-five, so distributed as to minimize the strength of the big states and increase the middle group. The Great Compromise was in order, the best that could have been devised, and on Monday, 16 July 1787, came the crucial vote, and it was terrifyingly close, as Simon remembered in his memorandum:

As time for voting approached, those of us in favour of a strong, new government grew fright- fully nervous, because only a few states were eligible to vote and we knew that the two big states, Virginia and Pennsylvania, were against us, while the third big one, Massa- chusetts, could not vote at all, since its delega- tion was evenly split. New York, of course, had no vote during most of the Convention because

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two of its three delegates had left early in a huff. Think of it! Alexander Hamilton, one of the architects of our nation, had no vote in its building, because New York could never provide a quorum of its delegates! Rhode Island had refused from the first to participate in any way, and poor New Hampshire never collected enough money to send us its two dele- gates till the summer was waning and our work nearly done.

So, in what might be called the most important vote in the history of our nation, only nine states took part, and in the counting I felt sick when the first three votes were negative. Then it was tied, then it was four against and one more negative would doom us, but the last two votes were ayes. The nation was saved by a vote of five of the little states out of thirteen, and that night I got drunk.

After he sobered up, Simon reflected first on the great moral victory of that day, when delegates submerged their regional prejudices to form a union, and then on to the moral cowardice of those same delegates, including himself:

We have refused like cravens to even mention the word that haunts our nation. We delay and avoid and postpone, and if we continue to ignore our. responsibilities, this problem will

stay with us and worsen until it destroys this nation.

He was speaking, of course, of slavery, that dark and brooding presence which haunted all discus- sion and lurked in each meeting corner. Cudjoe the slave emerged everywhere, and the sullen 43

problems he represented were discussed, solved, rejected, and discussed again, the second or third solution being little better than the first in techni- cal terms and usually worse where the moral pos- ture of a great nation was concerned. Of the original fifty-five delegates, some eight- een owned slaves, and of the signers, a dozen did. Some had only a few; others like George Mason, who abhorred slavery and favoured manumission, had many. Washington was a slave owner, as were the two Pinckneys, Charles and Charles Cotesworth, and John Rutledge of South Carolina. Starr, whose family had always owned slaves and who had inherited seventeen prime hands, had inherited also a strong Virginia prejudice in favour of the institution, but his experiences at Princeton as a student and now in Philadelphia as a delegate had begun to make him insecure as to the future. Also, he found it both fascinating and perplexing that Washington had freed some of his slaves and that Mason looked upon slavery as a curse, despite his many slaves. 'I'd be ready to free my slaves,' he told his Southern friends at the Indian 'Queen, 'if only some way could be worked out to Have them keep tending the cotton,' but as soon as he said this, his friends started to argue. One said, in sharp com- ment: 'There are really three Americans; our problem is to keep them all happy. The North, without slaves; the Deep South, which needs them for cotton and sugar; and lucky states like North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland, which have them but whose climates are so kind you could manage without them.' A clever man from Georgia pointed out some- thing Simon had not considered before; 'In

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Georgia and the hot lands west we must continue to import slaves. We'd be strangled if their importation was ended, as you suggested last night. But in Virginia? You'd make money if the importation was halted, because then you could ship the slaves you no longer need down to Georgia and sell them at great profit. As far as we're concerned, you Virginians are as bad as the New Englanders.' As the debate, formal and informal, continued, Simon learned that the Convention could not escape dealing with four difficult slavery prob- lems: Should it be outlawed altogether? if it was allowed to continue, should further importation from Africa be permitted? If a slave ran away from a plantation in the South to freedom in the North, would the federal government be obligated to return him to his rightful owner? And, most perplexing of all, should the slave be counted as the equal -of the white man in allocating taxes and awarding seats in Congress? Debate on these inflammable questions produced some appalling statements. John Rutledge argued that religion and human- ity had nothing, to do with the importation oi slaves. Financial interest alone was the governin~ principle with nations. And if the Northern state,, considered this carefully, they would not opposc the bringing in of more slaves, because the morE slaves in the South, the more goods Northern trad ers would sell. Pierce Butler of South Carolina wanted th( Constitution to state that fugitive slaves wh( sought freedom in the North were to be deliverec like criminals to their owners in the South. And speaker after speaker hammered home th(