# Plain, Honest Men
## Metadata
- Author:: [[Richard Beeman]]
- Full Title:: Plain, Honest Men
- Category: #books
## Highlights
> While the officers were at times reduced to making their overcoats out of blankets, they wore those overcoats, as historian Charles Royster has observed, “in the presence of men who had no blankets.” ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=325))
> And the financing of that effort required a measure of sacrifice and a degree of cohesiveness far greater than any the British had ever demanded of them. Securing independence would require Americans to act not as individual states but as “united states.” ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=388))
> John Adams, surveying his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress, exclaimed that “the art and address of Ambassadors from a dozen belligerent Powers of Europe, nay, of a Conclave of Cardinals at the Election of a Pope… would not exceed the Specimens We have seen [in the Congress].”8 ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=394))
> Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The Articles of Confederation, America's first “constitution,” was not really a proper constitution, but rather a peace treaty among thirteen separate and sovereign states. ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=399))
> The Congress went for seventy-two consecutive days between early November of 1786 and mid-January of 1787 without achieving a quorum.30 ([Location 628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=628))
> As Georgia's William Pierce observed, “Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age; all the operations of nature he seems to understand,—the very heavens obey him, and the Clouds yield up their Lightning to be imprisoned in his rod.” ([Location 1706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=1706))
- Tags: [[favorite]]
> In his first speech before the Convention, in which he stated his opposition to direct election of representatives, Gerry argued that “the people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” Surely referring to his experience in Massachusetts, he claimed that “it has been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.”15 ([Location 2308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2308))
> Sherman had cast his vote against Gouverneur Morris's resolution calling for a supreme national government the day before, and on this day he stated flatly that “the people… should have as little to do as may be about the government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled.”17 ([Location 2320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2320))
> Each of those delegates was, to a varying degree, beginning to feel some uneasiness about the “national” rather than the “federal” character of the proposed new government, and by giving each state legislature the right to select senators, they hoped to return at least some measure of power to the states. ([Location 2413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2413))
> Following the logic of that assumption, the delegates seemed to agree that the upper house—or, as it would come to be called, the Senate—should be composed of “gentlemen” elected not directly by the people, but by some other means whereby the best, brightest, and most virtuous could be identified as sufficiently qualified to serve. ([Location 2465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2465))
> In spite of Washington's presence, they issued the dire prediction that a unitary executive would inevitably seek to gather all of the government's power in his hands, thereby transforming the presidency into an “elective monarchy,” a monarchy no less dangerous, in their view, than a hereditary one.17 ([Location 2671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2671))
> Without naming it, Wilson was calling for the creation of an electoral college. ([Location 2698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2698))
> The three-fifths compromise was not proposed because the delegates believed that African slaves were only 60 percent human. Rather, the fraction “three-fifths” was intended as a rough approximation of the measure of wealth that an individual slave contributed to the economy of his or her state. That formula was first proposed in 1783 when the Continental Congress, seeking some means of achieving solvency, proposed a system of requisitions in which a state's contributions would be apportioned according to its ability to pay—in other words, on wealth. ([Location 3040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3040))
> The eighteen days between the introduction of the New Jersey Plan on June 15 and the Convention's temporary recess at the end of the day on July 2 to celebrate the anniversary of independence were the most confusing, contentious, and unproductive of the summer. ([Location 3228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3228))
> The third condition was the “habitual attachment of the people” to that closest to them and “immediately before the[ir] eyes,” an impulse that fostered provincialism and led to the fragmentation, rather than the harmony, of the nation's interest. ([Location 3292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3292))
> Hamilton's focus was to do away with the state governments altogether. “They are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture,” and, he declared, “If they were extinguished, I am persuaded that great economy might be obtained by substituting a general government.”8 ([Location 3304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3304))
> “How has it happened,” Franklin asked, “that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” ([Location 3501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3501))
> Connecticut's William Samuel Johnson, addressing the persistent division between those who wanted to defend state sovereignty at all costs and those who insisted on supremacy for the central government, observed that “in some respect the states are to be considered in their political capacity, and in others as districts of individual citizens.” These two ideas, he contended, “instead of being opposed to each other, ought to be combined: that in one branch, the people ought to be represented; in the other, the states.” ([Location 3580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3580))
> No doubt recalling the way in which Rhode Island had injured the welfare of the country as a whole by its refusal to allow the Confederation government to impose import taxes, he insisted that there was far less danger that the large states would combine to pass laws harmful to the small states than there was in the possibility that the small states, if given equal representation, would combine to “injure the majority of the people.” ([Location 3598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3598))
> “delegates of the several states shall have suffrage in proportion to the sums which their respective states do actually contribute to the treasury.” ([Location 3626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3626))
> Grand Committee's recommendation of one representative for every forty thousand inhabitants. ([Location 4025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4025))
> We have no record of the King committee deliberations, but it is clear they chose to base their recommendations on the formula of one to forty thousand free inhabitants and “three-fifths of all other persons.” ([Location 4076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4076))
> but many Northern delegates were merely uncomfortable with the idea of being associated in any way with slaves. That uneasiness was generated at least as much by a deeply seated racism as by any humanitarian concern about the plight of enslaved Africans. ([Location 4209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4209))
> The very ambiguity of the part-national/part-federal solution the delegates had reached on July 17, together with the cloud of slavery hovering on the far horizon, meant that the Connecticut Compromise may actually have contributed to the war by distorting the sectional balance of power in Congress for decades and by allowing both sides of the war to portray their political claims to sovereignty as legitimate. ([Location 4423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4423))
> “I do not expect to get near the worth of him.” Although he grumbled, his conscience prevented him from shipping Billy back to Virginia, or, worse, selling him to a new master further south, where he could have recouped his investment. Madison, to his credit, concluded that it would be unfair to punish Billy “merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right… of every human being.”4 ([Location 6018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6018))
> At the time of the Constitutional Convention, slaves constituted about 20 percent of the population of the American nation. The slave population was of course not spread evenly either across the nation or, indeed, across the states of the South. ([Location 6028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6028))
> New England, the slave population numbered about 3,700 out of a total population of more than 900,000. ([Location 6030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6030))
> In the Lockean triad of natural rights that served as the bedrock justification for America's leap toward independence, “life, liberty, and property” ([Location 6056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6056))
> Yet even in Virginia, when the Rights of Humanity are defined & understood with precision … we find Men professing a Religion the most humane, mild, meek, gentle, & generous; adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the bible and destructive to Liberty. And then came the punch line. “Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them.” ([Location 6076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6076))
> The first condition was of course economic interest, which operated with ever-greater force as one moved farther south. Yet an even more powerful deterrent was the instinctive, unthinking attachment to a belief in Africans’ fundamental inferiority— to the notion among whites in both the North and South that a people so physically and culturally different from themselves could never function responsibly as equal citizens in a free republic. ([Location 6102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6102))
> By 1787, George Washington had converted much of his acreage at Mount Vernon from tobacco production into a diversified operation involving the cultivation of wheat and the raising of livestock, and he enthusiastically promoted agricultural diversification as a means of freeing Virginians from overreliance on a single staple. ([Location 6121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6121))
> it was also the case that as much as one-third of the wealth of the state was invested in slaves, a fact that made most Virginians reluctant to endorse any scheme of emancipation unless they could be assured of recouping the value of their slaves.13 ([Location 6124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6124))
> South Carolina's first Revolutionary governor, Rawlins Lowndes, remarked on the continuing need for slaves. “Without negroes, this state is the most contemptible in the Union.… Negroes [are] our wealth, our only natural resource.” ([Location 6130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6130))
> It was, Morris declaimed, “a nefarious institution— It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” ([Location 6151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6151))
> The demand to include slaves in the formula for representation, he claimed, came down to a simple fact that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice. ([Location 6154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6154))
> Morris had freed the only slave he had inherited from his family, and in 1776 he argued eloquently for the abolition of slavery in New York, claiming that every human being who breathes the air of this state [should] enjoy the privileges of a freeman.… The rights of human nature and the principles of our holy religion loudly call on us to dispense the blessing of freedom to all mankind. ([Location 6168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6168))
> Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of Whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. I lament that some of our Eastern brethren had from a lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic. As to the states being in possession of the right to import, this was the case with many other rights, now to be properly given up. I hold it essential in every point of view that the general government should have power to prevent the increase of slavery28 This was not the first occasion on which Mason had spoken out against slavery. ([Location 6250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6250))
> That slow Poison … is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentleman here is born a petty Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes.29 ([Location 6265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6265))
> Indeed, the citizens of the North were no more able to imagine living with large numbers of blacks as equal citizens than were George Mason and Charles Pinckney.32 ([Location 6287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6287))
> Perhaps more than any other provision of the Constitution, it would infect and pollute the document's libertarian purity, giving credence to William Lloyd Garrison's oft-repeated assertion that the Constitution was a “covenant with death.”49 ([Location 6420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6420))
> If we should be reluctant to assign blame to particular individuals, we cannot avert our eyes from the magnitude of the evil sanctioned by the Founding Fathers. If there is a villain in this story it is the collective indifference of the Founding Fathers to the inhumanity of the institution to which they gave sanction. ([Location 6491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6491))
> Virtually none of the delegates in Philadelphia, whether from the North or the South, was prepared to live with the social disruption they saw as inevitable should large numbers of whites and free blacks find themselves living together. Those among our Founding Fathers who later roused themselves to champion some form of gradual emancipation of slaves usually tied their proposals for emancipation with schemes to repatriate the freed slaves back to Africa. ([Location 6508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6508))
> The substitution was made, Lincoln believed, in order that our Constitution… should be read by intelligent and patriotic men, after the institution of slavery had passed from among us—[in a way that] there should be nothing on the face of the great charter of liberty suggesting that such a thing as negro slavery ever existed among us. This is part of the evidence that the fathers of the Government expected and intended the institution of slavery to come to an end.57 ([Location 6524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6524))
> Dr. Franklin's moment—and asked if it might lessen objections to the Constitution if the clause setting the ratio of representation from one to forty thousand was changed to one to thirty thousand. ([Location 7007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7007))
> plan.” Like many in the Convention, he believed that smaller congressional districts would ensure a closer relationship between representatives and their constituents, and he hoped that the proposed change might reduce the number of those opposing the Constitution. ([Location 7014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7014))
> Acknowledging his position at the far right of the political spectrum, he reminded the delegates that “no man's ideas were more remote from the plan than his own were known to be; but it is possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on the one side, and the chance of good to be expected from the plan on the other.”11 ([Location 7040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7040))
> Phrygian Liberty cap on a pike, an ancient Roman symbol of freedom. As the final delegate—Abraham Baldwin of Georgia—added his name to the list of signers, Franklin's attention turned to that sunburst.24 ([Location 7132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7132))
> He began by lamenting the absence of a bill of rights, then moved on to complain that the House of Representatives was too small and would provide “the shadow only of representation.” ([Location 7193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7193))
> He concluded with the gloomy prediction that “this government will set out (commence) a moderate aristocracy; it is at present impossible to foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical (oppressive) aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.” ([Location 7195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7195))
> Richard Henry Lee would become a leader of the still-inchoate group of people who would later become known as Antifederalists. ([Location 7214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7214))
> Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, appearing under the combined pseudonym “Publius” in the New York City newspapers between October 1787 and May 1788. ([Location 7863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7863))
> In the period between 1790 and 1800, when leaders of the new republic were facing the challenge of creating a government that conformed to the precepts of their new Constitution, The Federalist was cited in Supreme Court opinions only once. In the whole of the nineteenth century, the essays were cited 58 times. In the first half of the twentieth century they were cited 38 times, but in the last half of that century they were cited no fewer than 194 times. ([Location 7883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7883))
> Britain had served as the unifying force within thirteen states aspiring to independence. As the immediacy of that common cause faded with time, Americans discovered they needed something other than a common enemy to hold them together. Whatever their differences of opinion on the proper interpretation of the Constitution, Washington and Jefferson had both come to believe that the United States Constitution was the instrument that not only held a political entity—the union—together, but also that which helped define Americans as one people. ([Location 8131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=8131))
> For both Washington and Jefferson, America's experiment in constitutional union was one that needed to be carefully tended. ([Location 8140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=8140))
> But Jefferson stuck to his guns. Writing some twenty-five years later, he reiterated his skepticism about the permanency of constitutions. “Some men,” Jefferson noted, look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country.… But I know, also that laws and institutions must go hand and hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.19 ([Location 8165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=8165))
# Plain, Honest Men
## Metadata
- Author:: [[Richard Beeman]]
- Full Title:: Plain, Honest Men
- Category: #books
## Highlights
> While the officers were at times reduced to making their overcoats out of blankets, they wore those overcoats, as historian Charles Royster has observed, “in the presence of men who had no blankets.” ([Location 325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=325))
> And the financing of that effort required a measure of sacrifice and a degree of cohesiveness far greater than any the British had ever demanded of them. Securing independence would require Americans to act not as individual states but as “united states.” ([Location 388](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=388))
> John Adams, surveying his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress, exclaimed that “the art and address of Ambassadors from a dozen belligerent Powers of Europe, nay, of a Conclave of Cardinals at the Election of a Pope… would not exceed the Specimens We have seen [in the Congress].”8 ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=394))
> Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The Articles of Confederation, America's first “constitution,” was not really a proper constitution, but rather a peace treaty among thirteen separate and sovereign states. ([Location 399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=399))
> The Congress went for seventy-two consecutive days between early November of 1786 and mid-January of 1787 without achieving a quorum.30 ([Location 628](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=628))
> As Georgia's William Pierce observed, “Dr. Franklin is well known to be the greatest philosopher of the present age; all the operations of nature he seems to understand,—the very heavens obey him, and the Clouds yield up their Lightning to be imprisoned in his rod.” ([Location 1706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=1706))
- Tags: [[favorite]]
> In his first speech before the Convention, in which he stated his opposition to direct election of representatives, Gerry argued that “the people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.” Surely referring to his experience in Massachusetts, he claimed that “it has been fully confirmed by experience that they are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.”15 ([Location 2308](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2308))
> Sherman had cast his vote against Gouverneur Morris's resolution calling for a supreme national government the day before, and on this day he stated flatly that “the people… should have as little to do as may be about the government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled.”17 ([Location 2320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2320))
> Each of those delegates was, to a varying degree, beginning to feel some uneasiness about the “national” rather than the “federal” character of the proposed new government, and by giving each state legislature the right to select senators, they hoped to return at least some measure of power to the states. ([Location 2413](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2413))
> Following the logic of that assumption, the delegates seemed to agree that the upper house—or, as it would come to be called, the Senate—should be composed of “gentlemen” elected not directly by the people, but by some other means whereby the best, brightest, and most virtuous could be identified as sufficiently qualified to serve. ([Location 2465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2465))
> In spite of Washington's presence, they issued the dire prediction that a unitary executive would inevitably seek to gather all of the government's power in his hands, thereby transforming the presidency into an “elective monarchy,” a monarchy no less dangerous, in their view, than a hereditary one.17 ([Location 2671](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2671))
> Without naming it, Wilson was calling for the creation of an electoral college. ([Location 2698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=2698))
> The three-fifths compromise was not proposed because the delegates believed that African slaves were only 60 percent human. Rather, the fraction “three-fifths” was intended as a rough approximation of the measure of wealth that an individual slave contributed to the economy of his or her state. That formula was first proposed in 1783 when the Continental Congress, seeking some means of achieving solvency, proposed a system of requisitions in which a state's contributions would be apportioned according to its ability to pay—in other words, on wealth. ([Location 3040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3040))
> The eighteen days between the introduction of the New Jersey Plan on June 15 and the Convention's temporary recess at the end of the day on July 2 to celebrate the anniversary of independence were the most confusing, contentious, and unproductive of the summer. ([Location 3228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3228))
> The third condition was the “habitual attachment of the people” to that closest to them and “immediately before the[ir] eyes,” an impulse that fostered provincialism and led to the fragmentation, rather than the harmony, of the nation's interest. ([Location 3292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3292))
> Hamilton's focus was to do away with the state governments altogether. “They are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture,” and, he declared, “If they were extinguished, I am persuaded that great economy might be obtained by substituting a general government.”8 ([Location 3304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3304))
> “How has it happened,” Franklin asked, “that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” ([Location 3501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3501))
> Connecticut's William Samuel Johnson, addressing the persistent division between those who wanted to defend state sovereignty at all costs and those who insisted on supremacy for the central government, observed that “in some respect the states are to be considered in their political capacity, and in others as districts of individual citizens.” These two ideas, he contended, “instead of being opposed to each other, ought to be combined: that in one branch, the people ought to be represented; in the other, the states.” ([Location 3580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3580))
> No doubt recalling the way in which Rhode Island had injured the welfare of the country as a whole by its refusal to allow the Confederation government to impose import taxes, he insisted that there was far less danger that the large states would combine to pass laws harmful to the small states than there was in the possibility that the small states, if given equal representation, would combine to “injure the majority of the people.” ([Location 3598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3598))
> “delegates of the several states shall have suffrage in proportion to the sums which their respective states do actually contribute to the treasury.” ([Location 3626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=3626))
> Grand Committee's recommendation of one representative for every forty thousand inhabitants. ([Location 4025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4025))
> We have no record of the King committee deliberations, but it is clear they chose to base their recommendations on the formula of one to forty thousand free inhabitants and “three-fifths of all other persons.” ([Location 4076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4076))
> but many Northern delegates were merely uncomfortable with the idea of being associated in any way with slaves. That uneasiness was generated at least as much by a deeply seated racism as by any humanitarian concern about the plight of enslaved Africans. ([Location 4209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4209))
> The very ambiguity of the part-national/part-federal solution the delegates had reached on July 17, together with the cloud of slavery hovering on the far horizon, meant that the Connecticut Compromise may actually have contributed to the war by distorting the sectional balance of power in Congress for decades and by allowing both sides of the war to portray their political claims to sovereignty as legitimate. ([Location 4423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=4423))
> “I do not expect to get near the worth of him.” Although he grumbled, his conscience prevented him from shipping Billy back to Virginia, or, worse, selling him to a new master further south, where he could have recouped his investment. Madison, to his credit, concluded that it would be unfair to punish Billy “merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be the right… of every human being.”4 ([Location 6018](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6018))
> At the time of the Constitutional Convention, slaves constituted about 20 percent of the population of the American nation. The slave population was of course not spread evenly either across the nation or, indeed, across the states of the South. ([Location 6028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6028))
> New England, the slave population numbered about 3,700 out of a total population of more than 900,000. ([Location 6030](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6030))
> In the Lockean triad of natural rights that served as the bedrock justification for America's leap toward independence, “life, liberty, and property” ([Location 6056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6056))
> Yet even in Virginia, when the Rights of Humanity are defined & understood with precision … we find Men professing a Religion the most humane, mild, meek, gentle, & generous; adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the bible and destructive to Liberty. And then came the punch line. “Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them.” ([Location 6076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6076))
> The first condition was of course economic interest, which operated with ever-greater force as one moved farther south. Yet an even more powerful deterrent was the instinctive, unthinking attachment to a belief in Africans’ fundamental inferiority— to the notion among whites in both the North and South that a people so physically and culturally different from themselves could never function responsibly as equal citizens in a free republic. ([Location 6102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6102))
> By 1787, George Washington had converted much of his acreage at Mount Vernon from tobacco production into a diversified operation involving the cultivation of wheat and the raising of livestock, and he enthusiastically promoted agricultural diversification as a means of freeing Virginians from overreliance on a single staple. ([Location 6121](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6121))
> it was also the case that as much as one-third of the wealth of the state was invested in slaves, a fact that made most Virginians reluctant to endorse any scheme of emancipation unless they could be assured of recouping the value of their slaves.13 ([Location 6124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6124))
> South Carolina's first Revolutionary governor, Rawlins Lowndes, remarked on the continuing need for slaves. “Without negroes, this state is the most contemptible in the Union.… Negroes [are] our wealth, our only natural resource.” ([Location 6130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6130))
> It was, Morris declaimed, “a nefarious institution— It was the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” ([Location 6151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6151))
> The demand to include slaves in the formula for representation, he claimed, came down to a simple fact that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice. ([Location 6154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6154))
> Morris had freed the only slave he had inherited from his family, and in 1776 he argued eloquently for the abolition of slavery in New York, claiming that every human being who breathes the air of this state [should] enjoy the privileges of a freeman.… The rights of human nature and the principles of our holy religion loudly call on us to dispense the blessing of freedom to all mankind. ([Location 6168](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6168))
> Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the immigration of Whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. I lament that some of our Eastern brethren had from a lust of gain embarked in this nefarious traffic. As to the states being in possession of the right to import, this was the case with many other rights, now to be properly given up. I hold it essential in every point of view that the general government should have power to prevent the increase of slavery28 This was not the first occasion on which Mason had spoken out against slavery. ([Location 6250](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6250))
> That slow Poison … is daily contaminating the Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentleman here is born a petty Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes.29 ([Location 6265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6265))
> Indeed, the citizens of the North were no more able to imagine living with large numbers of blacks as equal citizens than were George Mason and Charles Pinckney.32 ([Location 6287](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6287))
> Perhaps more than any other provision of the Constitution, it would infect and pollute the document's libertarian purity, giving credence to William Lloyd Garrison's oft-repeated assertion that the Constitution was a “covenant with death.”49 ([Location 6420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6420))
> If we should be reluctant to assign blame to particular individuals, we cannot avert our eyes from the magnitude of the evil sanctioned by the Founding Fathers. If there is a villain in this story it is the collective indifference of the Founding Fathers to the inhumanity of the institution to which they gave sanction. ([Location 6491](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6491))
> Virtually none of the delegates in Philadelphia, whether from the North or the South, was prepared to live with the social disruption they saw as inevitable should large numbers of whites and free blacks find themselves living together. Those among our Founding Fathers who later roused themselves to champion some form of gradual emancipation of slaves usually tied their proposals for emancipation with schemes to repatriate the freed slaves back to Africa. ([Location 6508](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6508))
> The substitution was made, Lincoln believed, in order that our Constitution… should be read by intelligent and patriotic men, after the institution of slavery had passed from among us—[in a way that] there should be nothing on the face of the great charter of liberty suggesting that such a thing as negro slavery ever existed among us. This is part of the evidence that the fathers of the Government expected and intended the institution of slavery to come to an end.57 ([Location 6524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=6524))
> Dr. Franklin's moment—and asked if it might lessen objections to the Constitution if the clause setting the ratio of representation from one to forty thousand was changed to one to thirty thousand. ([Location 7007](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7007))
> plan.” Like many in the Convention, he believed that smaller congressional districts would ensure a closer relationship between representatives and their constituents, and he hoped that the proposed change might reduce the number of those opposing the Constitution. ([Location 7014](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7014))
> Acknowledging his position at the far right of the political spectrum, he reminded the delegates that “no man's ideas were more remote from the plan than his own were known to be; but it is possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on the one side, and the chance of good to be expected from the plan on the other.”11 ([Location 7040](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7040))
> Phrygian Liberty cap on a pike, an ancient Roman symbol of freedom. As the final delegate—Abraham Baldwin of Georgia—added his name to the list of signers, Franklin's attention turned to that sunburst.24 ([Location 7132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7132))
> He began by lamenting the absence of a bill of rights, then moved on to complain that the House of Representatives was too small and would provide “the shadow only of representation.” ([Location 7193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7193))
> He concluded with the gloomy prediction that “this government will set out (commence) a moderate aristocracy; it is at present impossible to foresee whether it will, in its operation, produce a monarchy, or a corrupt, tyrannical (oppressive) aristocracy; it will most probably vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other.” ([Location 7195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7195))
> Richard Henry Lee would become a leader of the still-inchoate group of people who would later become known as Antifederalists. ([Location 7214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7214))
> Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, appearing under the combined pseudonym “Publius” in the New York City newspapers between October 1787 and May 1788. ([Location 7863](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7863))
> In the period between 1790 and 1800, when leaders of the new republic were facing the challenge of creating a government that conformed to the precepts of their new Constitution, The Federalist was cited in Supreme Court opinions only once. In the whole of the nineteenth century, the essays were cited 58 times. In the first half of the twentieth century they were cited 38 times, but in the last half of that century they were cited no fewer than 194 times. ([Location 7883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=7883))
> Britain had served as the unifying force within thirteen states aspiring to independence. As the immediacy of that common cause faded with time, Americans discovered they needed something other than a common enemy to hold them together. Whatever their differences of opinion on the proper interpretation of the Constitution, Washington and Jefferson had both come to believe that the United States Constitution was the instrument that not only held a political entity—the union—together, but also that which helped define Americans as one people. ([Location 8131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=8131))
> For both Washington and Jefferson, America's experiment in constitutional union was one that needed to be carefully tended. ([Location 8140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=8140))
> But Jefferson stuck to his guns. Writing some twenty-five years later, he reiterated his skepticism about the permanency of constitutions. “Some men,” Jefferson noted, look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country.… But I know, also that laws and institutions must go hand and hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.19 ([Location 8165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B001VT3L6E&location=8165))