The Lie at the Foundation

A MANIFESTO FOR THE REPUBLIC - ISSUE ONE OF 9

The Constitution was designed to defeat democracy, not create it

“Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.”
— Edmund Randolph, Governor of Virginia, opening the Constitutional Convention, May 29, 1787

There is a sentence that should be in every American history textbook and is in almost none of them. It was spoken by Edmund Randolph, Governor of Virginia, on the opening morning of what we call the Constitutional Convention, on May 29, 1787. He had been asked to explain why the delegates had gathered. His answer was direct.

The danger, he said, was democracy.

Not British tyranny. Not foreign threat. Not the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. Democracy. The problem that needed solving was that ordinary people were gaining too much power, that state legislatures were responding to the demands of workers and farmers and debtors, and that this had to be stopped before it went further.

Alexander Hamilton wrote privately, in notes to himself during the same convention, that they needed to be “rescued from the democracy.” James Madison, in the most famous of the Federalist Papers, celebrated the new Constitution’s power to suppress “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.”

Improper and wicked: the demands of working people for economic fairness. This is the document that Americans are taught to revere as the foundation of their freedom.

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What the state legislatures had been doing that so frightened the founding elites was responding to the democratic movements that had emerged from the Revolution. The colonial period had been marked by the legal disenfranchisement of ordinary people: you needed property to vote, more property to hold office. The Revolution shook this loose. New leaders emerged — not the merchants and planters who fill the textbooks, but self-taught doctors and math teachers and farmers and printers who believed that independence should mean something for the people who fought for it.

In Massachusetts, when veterans of the Revolutionary War — discharged without the back pay they were owed, returning home to find their farms being seized for tax debts earmarked to pay wealthy bondholders — organized Shays’ Rebellion, the state legislature was frightened enough to repeal the taxes and pardon the rebels. Samuel Adams himself — who had once organized the popular resistance to British rule — called for the death penalty for the rebels. The lines of class, blurred by revolution, were being redrawn.

In Philadelphia, the ordinary people were going further. The Pennsylvania assembly had been taken over by representatives of the formerly disenfranchised. It had shut down a city bank for financing only its partners’ speculations. Democratic movements across the country were pushing for paper money, debt relief, and limits on the power of creditors. Nervous elites feared that private property would eventually be seized and redistributed.

The Constitution was not a compromise between democracy and privilege. It was a weapon against democracy, built by people who said so.

The Constitution that emerged from Philadelphia addressed all of these fears with precision. States could no longer issue paper money or make anything but gold and silver legal tender — eliminating the main tool debtors had used. The new federal government could tax citizens across state lines and call out militias to enforce those taxes. A Senate was created, small and not representative, to check the democratic tendencies of the House. The presidency was placed behind an Electoral College buffer. And crucially — as George Washington wrote to Madison — the whole project was designed to ensure that the bondholding class received its promised 6 percent interest, paid by taxing the citizens who held no bonds.

This is the original American class war. It was waged from above, deliberately, by men who knew exactly what they were doing and left extensive records of it. William Hogeland has recovered those records. Howard Zinn spent a career contextualizing them. The documents exist. They have simply been kept out of the story we tell ourselves.

Understanding this does not make the republic worthless. It makes it unfinished. The promise was made — equality, self-governance, the consent of the governed. Every democratic movement in American history has used that promise as a lever against the power that made it. The gap between promise and reality is not a source of despair. It is the ground of every demand ever made on this republic.

The demand is overdue.

NEXT WEEK

Issue 2: The Democrats They Buried — Thomas Young, James Cannon, Herman Husband, Thomas Paine, and the democratic movement that won independence and was then destroyed by the Constitution it made possible.

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