Posted on 02/10/2011 7:51:08 AM PST by Publius
Although the debate in Poughkeepsie had been gentlemanly, Melancton Smith’s attack on the character of the wealthy prompted a stout rejoinder from Robert Livingston, patriarch of the Livingston clan, a man who was both wealthy and a member of New York’s leading patroon family. Smith had struck too close to home, Livingston had spoken out, and now Smith was on the defensive, having to explain his words.
1 I did not intend to make any more observations on this article.
2 Indeed, I have heard nothing today which has not been suggested before, except the polite reprimand I have received for my declamation.
3 I should not have risen again but to examine who has proved himself the greatest declaimer.
4 The gentleman [Robert Livingston] wishes me to describe what I meant by representing the feelings of the people.
5 If I recollect right, I said the representative ought to understand and govern his conduct by the true interest of the people.
6 I believe I stated this idea precisely.
7 When he attempts to explain my ideas, he explains them away to nothing, and instead of answering, he distorts and then sports with them.
8 But he may rest assured that in the present spirit of the convention, to irritate is not the way to conciliate.
9 The gentleman, by the false gloss he has given to my argument, makes me an enemy to the rich; this is not true.
10 All I said was that mankind were influenced in a great degree by interests and prejudices, that men in different ranks of life were exposed to different temptations, and that ambition was more peculiarly the passion of the rich and great.
11 The gentleman supposes the poor have less sympathy with the sufferings of their fellow creatures, for that those who feel most distress themselves have the least regard to the misfortunes of others.
12 Whether this be reasoning or declamation, let all who hear us determine.
13 I observed that the rich were more exposed to those temptations which rank and power hold out to view, that they were more luxurious and intemperate because they had more fully the means of enjoyment, that they were more ambitious because more in the hope of success.
14 The gentleman says my principle is not true, for that a poor man will be as ambitious to be a constable as a rich man to be a governor, but he will not injure his country so much by the party he creates to support his ambition.
15 The next object of the gentleman’s ridicule is my idea of an aristocracy, and indeed he has done me the honor to rank me in the order.
16 If then I am an aristocrat, and yet publicly caution my countrymen against the encroachments of the aristocrats, they will surely consider me as one of the most disinterested friends.
17 My idea of aristocracy is not new; it is embraced by many writers on government.
18 I would refer the gentleman for a definition of it to the Honorable John Adams, one of our natural aristocrats.
19 This writer will give him a description the most ample and satisfactory.
20 But I by no means intended to carry my idea of it to such a ridiculous length as the gentleman would have me, nor will any of my expressions warrant the construction he imposes on them.
21 My argument was that in order to have a true and genuine representation, you must receive the middling class of people into your government, such as compose the body of this assembly.
22 I observed that a representation from the United States could not be so constituted as to represent completely the feelings and interests of the people, but that we ought to come as near this object as possible.
23 The gentlemen say that the exactly proper number of representatives is so indeterminate and vague that it is impossible for them to ascertain it with any precision.
24 But surely they are able to see the distinction between twenty and thirty.
25 I acknowledge that a complete representation would make the Legislature too numerous, and therefore it is our duty to limit the powers and form the checks on the government in proportion to the smallness of the number.
26 The honorable gentleman next animadverts on my apprehensions of corruption and instances the present Congress to prove an absurdity in my argument.
27 But is this fair reasoning?
28 There are many material checks to the operations of that body which the future Congress will not have.
29 In the first place, they are chosen annually.
30 What more powerful check?
31 They are subject to recall.
32 Nine states must agree to any important resolution, which will not be carried into execution till it meets the approbation of the people in the state legislatures.
33 Admitting what he says, that they have pledged their faith to support the acts of Congress, yet if these be contrary to the essential interests of the people, they ought not to be acceded to, for they are not bound to obey any law which tends to destroy them.
34 It appears to me that, had economy been a motive for making the representation small, it might have operated more properly in leaving out some of the offices which this Constitution requires.
35 I am sensible that a great many of the common people, who do not reflect, imagine that a numerous representation involves a great expense, but they are not aware of the real security it gives to an economical management in all the departments of government.
36 The gentleman further declared that, as far as his acquaintance extended, the people thought 65 a number fully large enough for our state assembly, and hence inferred that 65 is to 240,000 as 65 is to three millions.
37 This is curious reasoning.
38 I feel that I have troubled the committee too long.
39 I should not have risen again upon this subject had not my ideas been grossly misrepresented.
The Patroons of New York
The word patroon is Dutch, meaning “owner”, as in owner of a company. While feudalism was on its last legs in Europe, a feudal system was alive and well in the Hudson River Valley. Great families of Dutch ancestry owned vast tracts of land along the Hudson populated by tenant farmers. Because the tenant farmers didn’t own the land and pay the property tax, they were not allowed to vote, and the franchise in the Hudson River Valley belonged mostly to the men of great wealth.
Men who wished to rise in life could be assured a position of comfort were they to marry into a great family. Despite his own humble beginnings, Alexander Hamilton had served ably in the Revolution, read law and served in the Confederation Congress. But his rise in New York social circles came from the fact that he had married a Schuyler, not any of his personal achievements. Such was life in late 18th Century New York.
In the debate over the Constitution, the great families fragmented. The Livingston clan formed the center of the faction supporting the Constitution, Hamilton and the Federalist cause. Their opponents were centered around the Clinton clan.
The abolition of property requirements for voting ended the patroon system. However, one family from that lineage survived into the 20th Century and left its mark on that era. The family’s name was Roosevelt.
Smith’s Critique
On 7 June 1776, at the Second Continental Congress, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee proposed what is now known as the Lee Resolution, calling for the independence of the United Colonies from Great Britain. In pursuit of this proposal, a Committee of Five was nominated to formalize the proposition into a Declaration of Independence. The five members were:
Livingston, the scion of a wealthy family, was the very personification of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” all of which were at risk by the act of rebellion against the Crown. He would later be the Minister to France who would negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, and later still Robert Fulton’s partner in the first successful commercial steamboat. Even by the standards of the other Founders that is a remarkable resume.
At the New York ratifying convention in 1788 he listened to the characteristically temperate Melancton Smith depart from his usual closely reasoned arguments into a speculation on class theory, a departure from reason into rhetoric, or “declamation” as that word was used at the time. It would be too much for the man who had risked all for the independence of his country to listen to the implication that the wealthy had ulterior motives for advancing the proposed Constitution, and his reply to Smith was hot and not without justification.
The honorable gentleman from Duchess, [Mr. Smith,] who has so copiously declaimed against all declamation, has pointed his artillery against the rich and the great...If he will look round among the rich men of his acquaintance, I fancy he will find them as honest and virtuous as any class in the community...The gentleman further observes, that ambition is peculiarly the vice of the wealthy. But have not all classes of men their objects of ambition? 1
There was a good deal more of this, including a sharp reminder that Smith’s dark prediction that a mere 24 men could dictate law to the nation under the Constitution was not only even more the case under the Articles of Confederation, but also predicated under the most wildly unlikely of circumstances.
The gentlemanly Smith was taken aback by the anger in the reply and more so for the suspicion that some of it might be justified. But it went too far, for Smith had been careful to point out that the wealthy had their own rights just as anyone else, and that his own criticism of the Constitution on this point was based on his fear that the number of members of government was insufficient to prevent an over-representation of the wealthy. Smith now rose to reply. He had been misunderstood, he stated, and misrepresented as well.
9 The gentleman, by the false gloss he has given to my argument, makes me an enemy to the rich; this is not true.
10 All I said was that mankind were influenced in a great degree by interests and prejudices, that men in different ranks of life were exposed to different temptations, and that ambition was more peculiarly the passion of the rich and great.
That was more declamation than reason, but his opponent was equally guilty.
11 The gentleman supposes the poor have less sympathy with the sufferings of their fellow creatures, for that those who feel most distress themselves have the least regard to the misfortunes of others.
12 Whether this be reasoning or declamation, let all who hear us determine.
A strong riposte – Livingston’s point as much as Smith’s was declamation, not reason. Nearly all class theory suffers from this defect. That it attained an undeserved theoretical respectability in the 20th Century argues more for a loosening of intellectual standards over the ensuing 200 years than it does its development as a science.
In fact, Smith states, he did not suggest that the wealthy were uniquely subject to ambition, but that the potential harm to the country was greater on that account because they were wealthy (14). He bridles at Livingston’s criticism of his own use of the term “aristocracy” as being so ill-defined as to be meaningless. Livingston had described it this way.
The gentleman, sensible of the weakness of this reasoning, is obliged to fortify it by having recourse to the phantom aristocracy. ..We are told that, in every country, there is a natural aristocracy, and that this aristocracy consists of the rich and the great: nay, the gentleman goes further, and ranks in this class of men the wise, the learned, and those eminent for their talents or great virtues. Does a man possess the confidence of his fellow-citizens for having done them important services? He is an aristocrat. Has he great integrity? ...he is an aristocrat. Indeed, to determine that one is an aristocrat, we need only be assured he is a man of merit. But I hope we have many such. I hope, sir, we are all aristocrats. So sensible am I of that gentleman's talents, integrity, and virtue, that we might at once hail him the first of the nobles, the very prince of the Senate. But whom, in the name of common sense, will we have to represent us? Not the rich, for they are sheer aristocrats. Not the learned, the wise, the virtuous, for they are all aristocrats. Whom then? 2
That is a misrepresentation, replies Smith, not his definition of aristocracy at all. Under this definition, in fact, he embraces aristocracy, giving as his example Livingston’s own colleague on the Committee of Five some twelve years ago, John Adams.
17 My idea of aristocracy is not new; it is embraced by many writers on government.
18 I would refer the gentleman for a definition of it to the Honorable John Adams, one of our natural aristocrats.
20 But I by no means intended to carry my idea of it to such a ridiculous length as the gentleman would have me, nor will any of my expressions warrant the construction he imposes on them.
21 My argument was that in order to have a true and genuine representation, you must receive the middling class of people into your government, such as compose the body of this assembly.
In fact, and due to the rhetorical demands of oratory, Smith actually had said both things, but it is clear from his words here, and a close reading of his previous speech, that his real argument was that too small a House would lead to an effective aristocracy of the wealthy by exclusion of the middle class, and that a larger House might ensure at least a token representation of the latter. His is, in fact, a plea for a middle ground.
25 I acknowledge that a complete representation would make the Legislature too numerous, and therefore it is our duty to limit the powers and form the checks on the government in proportion to the smallness of the number.
Smith does not concede Livingston’s point that the Confederation government suffers worse from small numbers of representatives then the one stipulated in the Constitution. There are, he points out, certain points of superiority in the present system: the current representatives are chosen annually instead of biennially (29) and are subject to recall (31). Moreover, a number considered adequate for representation within New York is not necessarily a number adequate for the entire country (36).
Smith’s is, on the whole, a solid defense against a forceful complaint. It is also a sterling example of the very high quality of debate that characterized the New York ratifying convention. Smith ends in typical, and genuine, modesty.
38 I feel that I have troubled the committee too long.
39 I should not have risen again upon this subject had not my ideas been grossly misrepresented.
Misrepresented, yes; grossly, perhaps not. But Smith’s reservations concerning a small number in the House, tending toward disproportionate membership by the wealthy, are impossible to dismiss given the complexion of Congress some 200 years hence. The compensation of its members – “emoluments” – alone is several times that of the average income within the current American middle class, and a sizable minority of its members are wealthy enough not to require it at all. Whether these, as Livingston held, are of virtue equal to their middle class constituents, or compose a class with its own interests that do not necessarily coincide with those constituents, as Smith feared, remains a topic of controversy today.
1 The Debates in the Convention of the State of New York, on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. In convention, Poughkeepsie, June 17, 1788.
2 ibid.
Discussion Topics
Earlier threads:
FReeper Book Club: The Debate over the Constitution
5 Oct 1787, Centinel #1
6 Oct 1787, James Wilson’s Speech at the State House
8 Oct 1787, Federal Farmer #1
9 Oct 1787, Federal Farmer #2
18 Oct 1787, Brutus #1
22 Oct 1787, John DeWitt #1
27 Oct 1787, John DeWitt #2
27 Oct 1787, Federalist #1
31 Oct 1787, Federalist #2
3 Nov 1787, Federalist #3
5 Nov 1787, John DeWitt #3
7 Nov 1787, Federalist #4
10 Nov 1787, Federalist #5
14 Nov 1787, Federalist #6
15 Nov 1787, Federalist #7
20 Nov 1787, Federalist #8
21 Nov 1787, Federalist #9
23 Nov 1787, Federalist #10
24 Nov 1787, Federalist #11
27 Nov 1787, Federalist #12
27 Nov 1787, Cato #5
28 Nov 1787, Federalist #13
29 Nov 1787, Brutus #4
30 Nov 1787, Federalist #14
1 Dec 1787, Federalist #15
4 Dec 1787, Federalist #16
5 Dec 1787, Federalist #17
7 Dec 1787, Federalist #18
8 Dec 1787, Federalist #19
11 Dec 1787, Federalist #20
12 Dec 1787, Federalist #21
14 Dec 1787, Federalist #22
18 Dec 1787, Federalist #23
18 Dec 1787, Address of the Pennsylvania Minority
19 Dec 1787, Federalist #24
21 Dec 1787, Federalist #25
22 Dec 1787, Federalist #26
25 Dec 1787, Federalist #27
26 Dec 1787, Federalist #28
27 Dec 1787, Brutus #6
28 Dec 1787, Federalist #30
1 Jan 1788, Federalist #31
3 Jan 1788, Federalist #32
3 Jan 1788, Federalist #33
3 Jan 1788, Cato #7
4 Jan 1788, Federalist #34
5 Jan 1788, Federalist #35
8 Jan 1788, Federalist #36
10 Jan 1788, Federalist #29
11 Jan 1788, Federalist #37
15 Jan 1788, Federalist #38
16 Jan 1788, Federalist #39
18 Jan 1788, Federalist #40
19 Jan 1788, Federalist #41
22 Jan 1788, Federalist #42
23 Jan 1788, Federalist #43
24 Jan 1788, Brutus #10
25 Jan 1788, Federalist #44
26 Jan 1788, Federalist #45
29 Jan 1788, Federalist #46
31 Jan 1788, Brutus #11
1 Feb 1788, Federalist #47
1 Feb 1788, Federalist #48
5 Feb 1788, Federalist #49
5 Feb 1788, Federalist #50
7 Feb 1788, Brutus #12, Part 1
8 Feb 1788, Federalist #51
8 Feb 1788, Federalist #52
12 Feb 1788, Federalist #53
12 Feb 1788, Federalist #54
14 Feb 1788, Brutus #12, Part 2
15 Feb 1788, Federalist #55
19 Feb 1788, Federalist #56
19 Feb 1788, Federalist #57
20 Feb 1788, Federalist #58
22 Feb 1788, Federalist #59
26 Feb 1788, Federalist #60
26 Feb 1788, Federalist #61
27 Feb 1788, Federalist #62
1 Mar 1788, Federalist #63
7 Mar 1788, Federalist #64
7 Mar 1788, Federalist #65
11 Mar 1788, Federalist #66
11 Mar 1788, Federalist #67
14 Mar 1788, Federalist #68
14 Mar 1788, Federalist #69
15 Mar 1788, Federalist #70
18 Mar 1788, Federalist #71
20 Mar 1788, Brutus #15
21 Mar 1788, Federalist #72
21 Mar 1788, Federalist #73
25 Mar 1788, Federalist #74
26 Mar 1788, Federalist #75
1 Apr 1788, Federalist #76
4 Apr 1788, Federalist #77
10 Apr 1788, Brutus #16
5 Jun 1788, Patrick Henry’s Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention #1
7 Jun 1788, Patrick Henry’s Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention #2
14 Jun 1788, Federalist #78
18 Jun 1788, Federalist #79
20 Jun 1788, Melancton Smith’s Speech to the New York Ratifying Convention #1
21 Jun 1788, Melancton Smith’s Speech to the New York Ratifying Convention #2
21 Jun 1788, Federalist #80
A BTT for the afternoon crowd.
Any number of people most of whom want nothing at all to do with ANY public office today.
* At 33, Smith alludes to the concept of state nullification without actually mentioning the term. Instead, at 29 and 31 he points out that annual election and the power of recall, present in the Articles of Confederation but not in the Constitution, were sufficient to protect the people. Should the power of state nullification have been inserted into the Constitution as an exception to the Supremacy Clause, and why or why not? Should the Constitution be amended to accept nullification, and why or why not?
No and no! They already have the ability to do this if they had the fortitude to actually exercise it! Some are beginning to find that fortitude!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.