On Independence Day, my thoughts are unfocused and generally entangled with the whole Revolutionary War thing, one event competing with another for quality time in an attention span that was never any great shakes to begin with and isn’t getting any better with age.
I think of rabble-rousing pamphleteer Thomas Paine of “Common Sense” fame goading the colonists into demanding a divorce from Mother England; the legal separation in the form of a resolution of independence approved by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776; the actual document as drafted by a committee headed by Thomas Jefferson and its adoption on July 4, even though most delegates reportedly didn’t sign it until nearly a month later.
I ponder also the saga of Valley Forge. Brutal winters. Dark times when all seemed lost. British redcoats at Lexington and Concord. Minutemen and musketry, village greens and a plethora of patriots. Ben Franklin being Ben Franklin and George Washington being in the right place at the right time. Betsy Ross and the flag. Eloquent statements of principle that begin with enduring phrases such as “When in the course of human events …” and “We hold these truths to be self-evident …”
Today that ball of disparate thoughts fast-forwards to post-Revolutionary War 1787, when framers of a national constitution necessitated by the newly won independence finished their handiwork and presented the document at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall for delegates’ signatures.
Although most delegates eagerly signed the document, three did not, which is the part of the story that seduces a formerly ink-stained wretch in search of a different news angle.
“Despite the momentousness, despite the pressure and even the pleading of their peers, despite the opportunity to be remembered among that small number of America’s Founding Fathers who composed and offered the Constitution to their countrymen, three men obstinately held out,” author Charles L. Mee Jr., wrote in American Heritage magazine on the 200th anniversary of the event.
Mee, author of “The Genius of the People: The Story of the Constitutional Convention,” published by Harper and Row, explored the reasons that George Mason and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts gave for detesting the finished product. His article can be viewed on the Americanheritage.com Web site.
Gerry saw the document as dangerous in granting Congress authority to make whatever laws it “may please to call necessary and proper.” Since that didn’t seem a whole lot better to him than the lousy deal the colonies had gotten from the King of England — the catalyst that had started all this independence business — he refused to sign on.
Randolph, likewise believing that the proposed Constitution gave “indefinite and dangerous power” to the central government, argued that the states should be allowed to amend the document at their ratifying conventions. When his suggestion was rejected, he told delegates they could kiss his vote goodbye.
Mason was simply dumbfounded that the Constitution contained no declaration of rights for citizens of the fledgling republic. He offered to draw up a bill of rights based on one he had written for Virginia, but the convention said “No, thanks,” and there went Mason’s vote.
Mason’s concerns and those of his fellow dissenters were echoed by others soon after the convention adjourned, though. The states in their ratifying conventions demanded that a bill of rights be included, prevailing where Mason had not, and vindicating the Virginian.
Mason also believed the House of Representatives had too few members to properly represent the people. Because there was “not the substance, but the shadow only of representation,” he worried that laws would be generally made “by men little concerned in, and unacquainted with their effects and consequences.” A prescient man, Mr. Mason.
By refusing to sign on, Gerry, Randolph and Mason earned for themselves “a unique appellation in American history,” Mee wrote. “They are the ‘non-signers,’ the ones who didn’t go along, the ones who lost the chance to have their names on one of the great documents of human history.”
But they stuck to their principles. You have to give them that. Mee characterized the trio as “exemplars of crusty, unassimilable individualism, of the right to pursue one’s own, individual way, to expect to have and enjoy the right of free, unfettered dissent.”
On this Independence Day when the Constitution remains prime fodder for debate we should rejoice that we still have that right.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.