Legacy: A Novel Page 3

  ‘I rode hard to get here for tomorrow’s opening session,’ Starr said, to which Madison replied, with a touch of asperity: ‘No need. There’ll be no session.’

  ‘Why?’ and young Starr learned the first basic fact about the Convention: ‘Takes seven of the thirteen states to form a legal quorum. Only four are here now.’

  ‘When will the others arrive?’ and Madison said sourly: ‘Who knows?’

  Eleven days were wasted in idleness as delegates straggled in, and each evening Madison informed those already in attendance of the situation: ‘Two more states reported today. Perhaps by the end of next week.’ If the nation was, as the Virginia delegation believed, in peril, the men designated to set it right seemed in no hurry to start.

  And shortly, there was sobering news: ‘Rhode Island has refused to have anything to do with our Convention and will send no delegates.’ This meant that only twelve states would do the work.

  One night during the waiting period Starr returned to the Indian Queen, to see a group of delegates speaking with a newcomer, a slender, handsome, self-contained young man of thirty, so compelling in his manner that Simon whispered to a friend: ‘Who’s that?’ and when the man said: ‘Alexander Hamilton, just in from New York,’ Starr gasped so loudly that the newcomer turned, gazed at him with penetrating eyes, and said, almost grandly: ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Jared Starr’s son.’

  And now the rather icy reserve which Hamilton had been showing melted in the sun of remembered friendship. Elbowing his way out of the crowd, he hurried to Simon, embraced him warmly with both arms, and cried: ‘When I learned of your father’s death I felt mortally stricken. A man rarely finds such a trusted friend.’

  They spent three hours together that first night, with Hamilton probing in a dozen different directions to determine Starr’s attitudes, and as the evening waned, it became clear that the two men had even more in common than Hamilton had had with old Jared Starr. Both believed in a strong kind of central government, in the right of large states to exercise large powers, and particularly in the sanctity of property. But toward the end of that first exploration Simon heard several of Hamilton’s opinions which could be interpreted as an inclination toward a monarchical form of government: ‘Simon, the world is divided into those with power and those without. Control of government must rest with the former, because they have most at hazard. Whatever kind of supreme ruler we devise, he should serve for life and so should the members of the stronger house, if we have more than one. That way we avoid the domination of the better class by the poorer.’

  ‘Poorer? Do you mean money?’

  Hamilton bit on his knuckle: ‘Yes, I suppose I do. But I certainly want those with no money to have an interest in our government. But actually voting? No, no. That should be reserved for those with financial interests to protect.’

  When Simon accompanied Hamilton to the door of the Indian Queen, he experienced a surge of devotion for this brilliant young man, so learned, so sure of himself, so clear-minded in his vision of what his adopted nation needed: ‘Father told me that you were the best man he’d ever met, Colonel Hamilton. Tonight I understand why.’ Then, hesitantly, he added: ‘If I can help you in the days ahead, please let me know. You can depend on my support.’

  In the next week, when the delegates chafed because a quorum had still not reached Philadelphia, Simon remained close to his Virginia delegation and watched with what care they laid their plans to assume intellectual and political control of the Convention. The three awesome minds, Mason, Madison and Wythe, perfected a general plan they had devised for a wholly new government, and it was agreed that at the first opportunity on opening day, the imposing Edmund Randolph would present it as a working paper around which the other delegates would have to frame their arguments. ‘If we put up a good plan,’ Madison said, ‘we’ll probably lose two-thirds of the minor details, but the solid structure will still remain.’

  At the close of the Convention, a hundred and sixteen days later, Simon Starr would draft a perceptive memorandum regarding his major experiences; these notes would not record the great debates or the machinations by which the new government was formed, but they would depict honestly one young man’s reactions to the men who gathered in Philadelphia that hot summer, and no entry was more illuminating than his summary of the people involved:

  Only twelve states nominated delegates and they authorized a total of 74 men to come to Philadelphia. Of these, only 55 bothered to appear for any of the sessions, and of these, only 41 stayed to the bitter end, but of these, only 39 were willing to sign our finished document.

  One of his entries that was widely quoted in later years dealt with the composition of the membership, and although the comments on those who were there could have been provided by other observers, his list of those who were conspicuous by their absence was startling:

  I was surprised at how many delegates had college degrees like my own. Harvard, Yale, King’s College in New York, the College of Philadelphia, and four of us from Princeton were expected, but I was startled to find among them men from Oxford in England, the Inns of Court in London, Utrecht in Holland, and St. Andrews in Scotland. We were not a bunch of illiterate farmers. We were, said some, ‘the pick of the former Colonies.’

  But I was equally impressed by the luminous names I expected to see in our group and didn’t. Patrick Henry was missing and so were the two Adamses from Massachusetts. Tom Jefferson was absent in France. John Marshall wasn’t here, nor James Monroe nor John Jay. John Hancock, my father’s friend, wasn’t here, nor famous Dr. Benjamin Rush. And I expected to see the famous writer and political debater Noah Webster, but he wasn’t here.

  Eight men were on hand, however, whose presence gave not only Simon Starr but all the other delegates a sense of awe. These were the men who, eleven years before, had dared to sign the Declaration of Independence: these were the men who along with Simon’s father had placed their lives in jeopardy to defend the principle of freedom. One by one, these eight introduced themselves to Simon, reminding him of the high esteem in which his father had been held, and he was deeply moved by the experience. Two of the veterans earned a special place in his affections:

  I was disappointed on opening day to find that Benjamin Franklin was not present, but on the morning of the second day I heard a commotion in the street outside our meeting hall and some cheering. Running to glimpse what might be happening, I saw coming down the middle of the street an amazing sight, a glassed-in ornate sedan chair of the kind used by European kings. It hung suspended from two massive poles which rested on the shoulders of eight huge prisoners from the local jail. Inside, perched on pillows, rode an old, baldheaded man who looked like a jolly bullfrog. It was Dr. Franklin, most eminent of the delegates, and the oldest at eighty-one. Gout, obesity and creaking joints made it impossible for him to walk, hence the sedan chair. When the prisoners carried him into the hall, someone alerted him that I was present. Calling ‘Halt!’ to the prisoners, he beckoned me to approach, and when I did he reached out with both hands to embrace me, and tears came into his eyes: ‘Son of a brave man, be like him.’

  Franklin, like General Washington, played almost no role in the deliberations; they were ornaments of the most valuable kind, since they reminded the other delegates of the grandeur of the Revolution and the gallant acts that led up to it. There was one more delegate who had signed the Declaration, and he was to become a major influence on Starr:

  I was in the assembly hall one morning when I felt a tug on my arm, and turned to see a man I did not know. He was a short, pudgy fellow in his mid-forties, bald and with heavy eyeglasses. There was nothing about his appearance that was memorable, and when he spoke, it was with a heavy Scottish burr which made his words almost unintelligible. ‘Hello, lad,’ he said. ‘Am I right in thinking you’re Jared Starr’s boy?’ When I said I was, he smiled: ‘I’m James Wilson, Scotland and Pennsylvania, and I relied upon your father’s help at the Declaration of Ind
ependence. I suppose your father spoke of me?’ Father had said nothing, and I knew nothing about the man who faced me, but as the weeks and months of our assembly passed, this very ordinary-looking man with no oratorical graces emerged as the great solid rock of the Convention, and I noticed that when he spoke, which he did repeatedly, others stopped to listen, for not only was his knowledge encyclopedic but he also talked sense. He was without peer the brains of our effort, for with his merciless logic he killed faulty ideas and with his Scottish enthusiasm he made other men’s good ideas palatable. Great orators like Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania and Dr. William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut made fiery speeches, half of them wrong, but James Wilson in his quiet way was always right, and after he had been knocked down for six days in a row, he rose on the seventh with fresh arguments to win the day. If our Constitution is a workable success, it is so largely because Wilson hammered its ideas into shape.

  Simon was aware that his journal notes now said that two men were of prime influence on his voting in the Convention, Hamilton and Wilson, so he added a note lest someone judge him to have been fickle in his loyalties:

  I am aware that I said Hamilton was my guide, and now I’m saying that Wilson was. The explanation is simple. The New York delegation consisted of three men, Hamilton and two others, but these two scorned what the Convention was struggling to do and after a few days they stalked out in a huff and never returned. That left poor Hamilton high and dry, for as I said, we voted by states, and with two of New York’s three delegates gone, the state could never have a quorum. Thus, one of the most brilliant men in the nation was left without a vote, so in disgust he rode back to New York, being absent during the sweltering days when men like Madison, Mason and Wilson hammered out the crucial details. So it’s simple. Hamilton was not present, Wilson was, and I followed the wonderfully sane and solid leadership of the latter.

  And now we come to a mystery which has given all subsequent Starrs considerable embarrassment. During the entire hundred and sixteen days of the sessions, and some of the debate was so vigorous that it became almost violent, Simon Starr uttered not one word. He attended every session, followed the swing of debate with close attention, and discussed the nuances at night in the Indian Queen, but in the hall itself he said nothing.

  As I sought to know him, over the centuries, I thought: How could an honor graduate from Princeton, a man with his own considerable library, participate at the heart of a world-shattering debate and make no contribution? He himself wondered:

  There were eight of us delegates who said nothing or little. William Blount of North Carolina, Nicholas Gilman of New Hampshire, Richard Bassett of Delaware, William Few of Georgia, John Blair of Virginia, Thomas Mifflin and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, and me. We kept silent, I think, because we were in the presence of our betters, men who had either wide experience like Dr. Franklin or profound intellectual insights like Madison and Wilson. We felt no urge to parade our ignorance.

  We left the podium open for polished debaters like Gouverneur Morris and Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who spoke upwards of a hundred and forty times each. Careful students of history and politics like Madison and Wilson invariably had something cogent to say on every subject. We eight didn’t.

  On the matter of speaking, Simon left one paragraph which has astounded later generations, especially those of us who have gone through public flagellations such as Watergate and the present Iranian arms scandal:

  One of the first decisions agreed upon when we finally assembled was that our deliberations would be conducted in secrecy. News journals would be allowed no entry to our hall and all members promised to disclose nothing of our debate. So for one hundred and sixteen days, fifty-five men who were among the leaders of our nation met and argued and retired to our inns to continue the debate, and we dealt with the most profound topics that men can deal with, the problems of self-government, and not a single clue as to what we were discussing or how we were dividing was revealed to the outside world. Thus, delegates were freed from posturing for public acclaim; more important, they were free to change their minds and to retreat from weak positions hastily taken. I once heard Gouverneur Morris argue heatedly on five different sides of a question in four successive days, coming down finally on the correct side.

  So much for the chitchat. It is valuable in that it throws a warm, illuminating light on the delegates and the soul-shattering work they were engaged in, but it is more important that we see how these powerful men grappled with the great problems of their day, and in the Starr family we have always been proud of our ancestor’s secret role in the Constitution’s greatest victory—ashamed of his part in its most disgraceful defeat.

  I said there were fifty-five delegates to the Convention; there were actually two additional ‘members,’ shadows who cast their silent votes in almost every deliberation. They were Daniel Shays, the Massachusetts revolutionary, and Cudjoe, the black slave imported from the African coast. Whenever the argument between the three big states, who felt entitled to more voice in government, and the several small ones, who demanded protection of their rights, became so heated that compromise became impossible, someone would mention Dan Shays, and the possibility of similar rebellion throughout the states became real. Then tempers subsided, debate continued in a lower key, and men began seriously to reconsider how they could resolve this dilemma of how to allow the big states to exercise the power which they unquestionably had and to which they were entitled without engulfing the small. So Dan Shays, invisible, played a vital role.

  One June evening, after a steamingly hot day of bitter debate, Simon Starr was quaffing an ale in the Indian Queen when he saw a group of delegates, some who had spoken on the floor, but most, like himself, silent, and as he started to speak, he drew them about him: ‘Let us hoe away all the manure and see what roots grow basically. I’ll go first.’ Wetting his lips and pushing back his red hair with both hands, he said: ‘It is engraved in granite, fused inseparably to the mountains of our land, that the three big states, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia, will never again agree to the old pattern of one state, one vote. That is the bedrock from which we start.’

  But a delegate from Delaware, an inoffensive man who also said nothing in public debate, argued: ‘As remorseless as the tides of the ocean which no power on earth can halt, the small states will never agree to a legislature in which we do not have equal representation with the big states, and that means one state, one vote.’

  ‘But if you small states persist,’ Simon warned, ‘we, the more populous states, will simply go home, form a kind of union of our own, and let you small ones join up later when you come to your senses.’

  The Delaware man and his supporters did not tremble at the threat: ‘If we are denied justice, we’ll march out and build an alliance with some European nation.’

  Such terrible words, words which shook the soul and made it cringe in despair, could not have been offered in the general assembly, but they deserved airing, and in Simon Starr’s informal group, there they stood in naked force, big and little both threatening: Do it my way or we’ll go home.

  It was beyond the power of young Starr to engineer a compromise between these two adamant positions, but he had sense enough to appreciate the gravity of the impasse faced by the nation. So he sought out delegates from the middle-sized states, and this threw him into the arms of men from Connecticut and South Carolina, who listened attentively as he reported the iron-hard determination of each side not to yield. In the next days the argument reached the floor of the Convention, where tempers were guarded but concessions nonexistent.

  Finally, a committee was appointed whose members were dedicated to finding a compromise between large and small, and under the leadership of Roger Sherman, a plan was devised unlike any other that had ever been in existence: the powerful legislature would be divided into two houses, an upper whose members would be appointed by state legislatures, with each state regardless of size having one memb
er, and a lower elected by the general population, with each state entitled to a varying number of members depending on an index of population and wealth, or taxes paid. Some wanted the upper house to be appointed for life, all agreed that the lower house should enjoy certain unique privileges. It was as delicate a balance as could have been devised, and Simon Starr, silent by day, had been a chief instigator by night.

  Of course, details had to be perfected slowly and in heated debate. For example, the membership of the lower house was set arbitrarily at fifty-six seats: Virginia would have nine; Pennsylvania, eight; Massachusetts, seven. New Hampshire would have two, and Delaware and Rhode Island, one each. Few delegates liked the distribution, but after protracted discussion a clever correction was proposed which seemed to make everyone happy: the number of seats in the lower house was raised from fifty-six to sixty-five, so distributed as to minimize the strength of the big states and increase the middle group.

  The great compromise was in order, the best that could have been devised, and on Monday, 16 July 1787, came the crucial vote, and it was terrifyingly close, as Simon remembered in his memorandum:

  As time for voting approached, those of us in favor of a strong, new government grew frightfully nervous, because only a few states were eligible to vote and we knew that the two big states, Virginia and Pennsylvania, were against us, while the third big one, Massachusetts, could not vote at all, since its delegation was evenly split. New York, of course, had no vote during most of the Convention because two of its three delegates had left early in a huff. Think of it! Alexander Hamilton, one of the architects of our nation, had no vote in its building, because New York could never provide a quorum of its delegates! Rhode Island had refused from the first to participate in any way, and poor New Hampshire never collected enough money to send us its two delegates till the summer was waning and our work nearly done.