Lion of Liberty (34 page)

Randolph ceded the floor to Madison, “but he spoke so low that his exordium could not be heard distinctly,” according to David Robertson, the reporter of the convention. His head all but invisible to most of the delegates, Madison stood barely taller than a dwarf, reading in short feeble bursts from notes inside his hat, which he held like a bucket of water into which he was about to dip his head for apples. His voice was that of cold, albeit dull, reason and logic, arguing simply that the Constitution did not grant the new national government any powers beyond those spelled out in the document.

“The powers of the federal government are enumerated,” he explained. “It has . . . defined and limited objects, beyond which it cannot extend its jurisdiction.” In reasoned, measured tones, he pointed out the contradiction between Henry's demands for American navigation rights on the Mississippi and his opposition to a standing federal army to obtain and ensure those rights.

“Congress ought to have the power to provide for the execution of the laws, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions,” he said simply. “Without a general controlling power to call forth the strength of the Union, to repel invasions, the country might be overrun and conquered by foreign enemies.” He then cited Washington's own argument that Article V gave opponents of the Constitution the right to amend it, and, in a stunning reversal of his previous position, he pledged to work to amend the Constitution with a bill of rights if he won election to the First Congress.
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After Madison had spoken, the Federalists decided to gamble by ceding the floor to the brilliant young attorney Francis Corbin, who had fled to London with his loyalist parents at the beginning of the Revolution. Corbin spent the war years studying at Cambridge University and reading law at London's Inner Temple. He then returned to America to reclaim his vast family properties, claiming he had been but a boy—unable to prevent his family's flight to England and too young to remain behind. His distinct
English accent, regal dress, and aristocratic airs—and his failure to fight in the war—clearly annoyed backcountry delegates, who listened impatiently as he demolished Henry's argument that the government of the Confederation had been adequate to meet the nation's needs.

“The honorable gentleman must be well acquainted with the debts due by the United States and how much is due to foreign nations,” Corbin asked in the same mocking tones that Randolph and Lee had used. “Have not the payment of these been shamefully withheld? . . . No part of the principal is paid to those nations—nor has even the interest been paid as honorably and punctually as it ought. . . . What is to be done? Compel the delinquent states to pay requisitions to Congress? How are they to be compelled?”

Corbin's relentless delineation of the specific deficiencies of the government of the Confederation left Henry uncharacteristically speechless—so much so that he allowed Edmund Randolph to take the floor again—and then Madison—while he let the opposition display all its arguments as he tried to collect his thoughts. Randolph expanded his demonstration of Virginia's inability to survive as an independent state. Her inability to raise an army would leave citizens unprotected from internal seditions and external attacks, and her inability to raise a navy would leave her trade and coastline constantly open to attack.

And before Henry could take a breath, Madison had taken the floor, asking,

The relentless Federalist attack caught Henry unprepared. Isolated in the Piedmont for so many years, with only periodic trips to Richmond to deal with mostly local issues, he had not set foot out of state for more than thirteen years and was less aware than Madison of the national and international problems facing all thirteen states. Even as governor, he tended to ignore the lengthy reports from Virginia's delegates at the Confederation Congress, which was the only mechanism for dealing with collective state problems. Henry now realized that his failure to participate in the Constitutional Convention had cost him the opportunity to contribute to—or even contemplate—a solution. Still a backcountry man at heart, he believed that states could endure like farmers on self-sufficient properties in the Piedmont, independent of their neighbors and united with them for only a handful of collective actions such as barter, defense against intruders, and mutual aid after natural disasters. Still embracing the specious concept of “natural rights,” he had no reasoned answers to Madison's or Randolph's or Corbin's arguments other than an emotional—albeit accurate—argument that ratification of the Constitution would strip states of their sovereignty and inevitably reduce individual liberties.

On June 9, a week after the convention had started, Henry “LightHorse Harry” Lee continued the Federalist attack. Using Henry's opposition to a standing federal army, he questioned Henry's character and failure to fight in the Revolutionary War, then mocked Henry's “rage for democracy and zeal for the rights of the people. . . . He tells us that he is a staunch republican, and that he adores liberty,” Lee said of Henry. “I believe him, and when I do so, I wonder that he should say . . . that militia alone ought to be depended upon for the defense of every free country. . . .

Henry ignored Lee's jab at his failure to fight in the Revolution, but when Randolph resumed the attack, he could no longer contain his bitterness at the governor's betrayal. Henry suspected that Washington had offered the governor an enticement for switching political camps and all but called Randolph a turncoat. “It seems to be very strange and unaccountable,” Henry said of Randolph, “that that which was the object of his execration should now receive his encomium.” Although he stopped short of suggesting bribery, Henry did not stop short enough. He went on to tell the convention that “something extraordinary must have operated so great a change in his opinions.”
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Insulted by Henry's charges, Randolph retorted, “I find myself attacked, in the most illiberal manner by the Honorable Gentleman. I disdain his aspersions and his insinuations. His asperity is warranted by no principle of parliamentary decency, nor compatible with the least shadow of friendship, and if our friendship must fall,
Let it fall like Lucifer, never to rise again
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Randolph's reference to Lucifer's fall set all the delegates—indeed all of Richmond abuzz—with its meaning. Most interpreted the phrase as a challenge to a duel—an interpretation that left the forty-eight-year-old Henry visibly shaken by the prospects of facing the thirty-five-year-old governor with drawn pistols. At the first opportunity, Henry told the convention he had had “no intention of offending anyone”—that he “did not mean to wound the feelings of any Gentleman.” He said he was “sorry if I offended the Honorable Gentleman without intending it.” But Randolph grew only more enraged, saying that “were it not for the concession of the Gentleman, I would have made some men's hair stand on end by the disclosure of certain facts.”
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Now it was Henry's turn to anger, telling Randolph that if he had something to say against him to disclose it. Randolph responded calmly, “I beg the Honorable Gentleman to pardon me for reminding him that his historical references and quotations are not accurate. If he errs so much with respect to his facts, as he has done in history, we cannot depend on his information or assertions.”
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That evening, Henry and his second called on Randolph, and all Richmond jabbered about the prospects of a duel between the two great Virginia governors, with many tavern habitués suggesting small wagers. Although no record exists of their discussion, Henry did not press his challenge and left without provoking violence.

Talk of the duel, however, drew a clear line between Tidewater aristocrats and backcountry delegates—especially Kentuckians and other frontier buckskins—and Henry saw a chance to reply to Madison's attack on his opposition to a standing federal army. He turned the floor over to the young war hero James Monroe, who had served in the Continental Congress when it narrowly rejected John Jay's instructions to forfeit Mississippi River navigation rights to Spain. Monroe described how seven northeastern states had voted to further the interests of their own merchants and shipping companies by sacrificing the interests of the rest of the nation—especially those of westerners and southerners in states like Virginia, whose boundaries lay on the Mississippi River.

“We are told,” Henry smiled, pointing at Madison,

Madison had little choice but to concede the north's treachery, and Henry exploded with rage:

“No constitution under heaven, founded on the principles of justice, can warrant the relinquishment of the most sacred rights of the society to promote the interest of one part of it. . . . Are not the rivers and waters that wash the shores of the country appendages, inseparable from our right of sovereignty? . . . The people of Kentucky, though weak now, will not let the President and Senate take away this right.”
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It was Henry at his best again, and the gallery loved him for it. Madison's dry reasoning had been lost on them; it was Henry they had come to hear, and he used the advantage he had in the gallery to lash out at Madison's—and, indeed, George Washington's—recurring ripostes to opponents of the Constitution—that the document contained “a constitutional door . . . for amendment.”
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“I am constrained to make a few remarks on the absurdity of . . . relying on the chance of getting it amended afterwards,” Henry sneered.

“Human nature,” he roared, “never will part from power!” He noted that nothing in any law forbad the offering of amendments to other states before ratification. “Have we not a right to say, ‘Hear our propositions,'” he asked. “If this moment goes away, we shall never see its return.”
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Henry's evident rhetorical recovery—and Madison's own failure to foresee and head off the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty controversy—left Federalists discouraged. “Appearances are at present less favorable,” Madison wrote to Washington.