The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America's Liberties - Softcover

Berkin, Carol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476743800 ISBN 13: 9781476743806

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

“Narrative, celebratory history at its purest” (Publishers Weekly)—the real story of how the Bill of Rights came to be: a vivid account of political strategy, big egos, and the partisan interests that set the terms of the ongoing contest between the federal government and the states.

Those who argue that the Bill of Rights reflects the founding fathers’ “original intent” are wrong. The Bill of Rights was actually a brilliant political act executed by James Madison to preserve the Constitution, the federal government, and the latter’s authority over the states. In the skilled hands of award-winning historian Carol Berkin, the story of the founders’ fight over the Bill of Rights comes alive in a drama full of partisanship, clashing egos, and cunning manipulation.

In 1789, the nation faced a great divide around a question still unanswered today: should broad power and authority reside in the federal government or should it reside in state governments? The Bill of Rights, from protecting religious freedom to the people’s right to bear arms, was a political ploy first and a matter of principle second. The truth of how and why Madison came to devise this plan, the debates it caused in the Congress, and its ultimate success is more engrossing than any of the myths that shroud our national beginnings.

The debate over the Bill of Rights still continues through many Supreme Court decisions. By pulling back the curtain on the short-sighted and self-interested intentions of the founding fathers, Berkin reveals the anxiety many felt that the new federal government might not survive—and shows that the true “original intent” of the Bill of Rights was simply to oppose the Antifederalists who hoped to diminish the government’s powers. This book is “a highly readable American history lesson that provides a deeper understanding of the Bill of Rights, the fears that generated it, and the miracle of the amendments” (Kirkus Reviews).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carol Berkin is the Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY, Emerita, where she taught early American and women’s history. Professor Berkin has worked as a consultant on several PBS and History Channel documentaries, including one on the “Scottsboro Boys,” which was nominated for an Academy Award as the best documentary of 2000.

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The Bill of Rights

I

On September 12, 1787, Virginian George Mason rose on the floor of what came to be known as the constitutional convention.1 He proposed that the delegates gathered in Independence Hall add a bill of rights to the Constitution they had just created. The response Mason received was a resounding no. Was it possible that the men we call the founding fathers opposed such basic rights as freedom of speech, the press, or conscience? Was their intention to introduce a new tyranny to replace the tyranny of George III and his government? Why was Mason’s request so firmly denied?

The answer is simple. These men were weary on that fateful September day. They had been meeting since mid-May, trudging through the rain on many a morning or wiping the perspiration from their brows on those days when the stifling heat and humidity of an all too typical Philadelphia summer seemed unbearable. Their evenings had been spent in the cramped quarters above the city’s many taverns, in rooms occupied by two and sometimes three men. Most surely slept fitfully, sharing beds in rooms redolent of spittoons and chamber pots, the smells intensified by the need to keep the shutters tightly closed against a summer invasion of bluebottled flies. Far from home, countinghouse, law office, plantation, or farm, they fretted about inventories, clients, and crops, with no choice but to rely on the good sense of family members or employees to ensure that their fortunes did not suffer. As the weeks dragged by, they longed for the comforts of home, the satisfactions of a well-cooked meal, and the companionship of wives and children. Yet they stayed.

They stayed because the business they had come to Philadelphia to do was too important to abandon. They were there, they believed, to save their country. They feared that their experiment in republican government was in danger of invasion or, worse, of internal collapse if a new government was not created to replace the “league of friendship” known as the Confederation, which had proved woefully inadequate to deal with the problems facing America.

The Articles of Confederation, America’s first constitution, did not owe its creation to a lapse of judgment on the part of the Revolutionary generation. To the men who wrote it, this very restricted government seemed to perfectly embody the goals of their Revolution. They did not yet think of themselves as citizens of a unified nation; like their neighbors, they thought of themselves as Marylanders, Virginians, New Yorkers, or Connecticut men. Their history and their historical circumstances made this a reasonable identification. Their newly independent states had once been colonies—colonies with different patterns of settlement, different mixes of ethnic and religious populations, and different internal histories. Virginia did not share New York’s Dutch origins; Connecticut’s lingering Puritan heritage was alien to Pennsylvania’s Quaker roots. And Maryland’s religious wars between Catholics and Protestants had no parallel in Georgia or North Carolina. It was true that by the time the war for independence began, all the rebellious colonies did have some striking political similarities. In each, the local legislature was elected by men whose race and property ownership qualified them to full citizenship. But families who traced their history back to Barbados refugees in South Carolina did not feel a natural affinity for the men and women who fled religious persecution to settle Massachusetts. Thus it was not surprising that, when asked what his country was, a leading revolutionary like Patrick Henry could immediately respond, “Virginia is my country, sir.” In short, the men who represented their rebellious states in the Continental Congress—and later in the Confederation Congress—were loyal not to something so vague as the United States but to their own state.

Travel and communication in the eighteenth century reinforced this loyalty to place that we today might dismiss as provincialism. The great revolutions in transportation and communication lay decades ahead in the nineteenth century. In 1776, when the Articles of Confederation were written, horses and horse-drawn carriages, often moving along little more than Indian paths, were the fastest modes of transportation. Travel from Boston to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia could take weeks if roads were washed out by rain or if rivers had risen too high for a man on horseback to ford. Indeed, to many a Georgian in the late eighteenth century, a trip to Massachusetts might as well have been a voyage to the moon. Ships, it was true, could sail along the coast of these mainland states, but few Georgia farmers were likely to be on board.

Communication was unpredictable and cumbersome. Letters often found their way to their intended recipients through elaborate relays: entrusted first to friends heading to port cities, then passed on to ship captains heading in the right direction, and finally turned over to local residents who promised to deliver them to the addressee. Much depended on whether any link in this chain failed; and even when the system worked, it could take months for a letter to find its way from writer to reader. News traveled just as slowly in a world where not every household had access to a daily newspaper. Often the best source of news was travelers, especially ship captains, who brought with them newspapers already several months old.

Under these circumstances, provincialism or localism was reasonable, even among men more privileged, better traveled, and more sophisticated than their neighbors. But ideology, as much as circumstances, played a critical role in the belief that a “league of friendship” among thirteen separate and sovereign nation-states fulfilled the goals of the Revolution.

The men who fought for independence had rallied to the cry “No taxation without representation.” And to them, this meant no taxation by any legislature other than their local assembly. The Lockean contract—that a legitimate government must represent the interests and protect the liberties of those it governed—had been reinterpreted by free Americans; it meant that only a government composed of men you knew, men who lived among you and shared your interests, deserved your obedience, your loyalty—and your taxes. As they began a war for independence against a distant government, made up of men who would not suffer the consequences of the taxes they imposed, Americans believed the only safeguard against such tyranny was to put power in the hands of local legislatures.

Thus the Continental Congress produced a constitution that preserved the sovereignty of the states and restricted the powers of the national government to the barest essentials: to coordinate the military and diplomatic war effort against Great Britain.2 Even this was miraculous, because the colonies had never before cooperated. But, as they prepared to wage a war against the most powerful army and navy in the world, American leaders recognized the need for unity.

The constitution they drafted was, in many ways, a defense against a new tyranny. Their enemy had taxed them from afar, and had regulated their trade and commerce; they would avoid creating another government with such powers. They would avoid suffering under a new tyrant by refusing to create a separate executive branch. They would deprive the government of the power to tax or dictate trade policy. They would not...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1476743800
• ISBN 13: 9781476743806
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar