Reviews in American History

This is a propitious time to be studying the U.S. Constitution and its ratification. The invaluable Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, an ongoing, multivolume project based at the University of Wisconsin, makes available to scholars nearly everything published or written, publicly or privately, pertaining to ratification. Pauline Maier’s impressive study, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution (2010), which draws heavily on the Documentary History, provides a solid analytical narrative of the process of ratification focusing on the state conventions. Still other works—some recently published, others in progress—address related constitutional matters and offer additional perspectives. And now comes this book, originally published in German in 1988, its content only partially available until now, and its publication long anticipated by students of the Founding.¹

These newer works are welcome because the ratification debate, despite its significance, has had a spotty and frustrating historiographical record. Robert Rutland’s The Ordeal of the Constitution (1966; rev. ed. 1983) was uneven, extremely quirky and impressionistic, largely undocumented, and it focused mostly on the anti-Federalists. Some of the best work came in a pair of edited collections on ratification in the individual states that appeared around the time of the bicentennial of the Constitution. Both collections contained able treatments but neither offered a larger interpretive overview of ratification. Various articles and dissertations, the fugitive chapter or two in random collections, and some review essays all made contributions here and there, but there was still no comprehensive treatment of ratification until the fortuitous appearance of Maier’s book and of this volume.²

The story of this book’s publication history is marked by both persistence and tragedy. The original work was published in German in 1988 after the author had spent considerable time in Madison in regular contact with the [End Page 213] Documentary History editors, who included John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffler. Following German publication, Heideking again worked with Kaminski and Leffler to revise the work and sought grants to publish in English, originally with Madison House, then Rowman and Littlefield. But, tragically, Heideking was killed in an automobile accident in 2000, and the project stalled until Kaminski and Leffler stepped back in as editors and helped secure funding and then publication from the University of Virginia Press. Heideking’s original efforts, and subsequently those of his Wisconsin friends after his death, have now paid off in this significant work.

With a grasp of the history that is impressive and sure-handed, Heideking locates the debate over the Constitution against the broad sweep of early America from the Revolution through the early republic and is also alert to the place of U.S. history in the grand scheme of world history. His account of ratification connects the debate back in time to the Revolution and then traces its story past ratification into the celebratory festivals of 1788, the first congressional elections, and the debates over amendments.

This book makes a number of specific, contextualized arguments about various aspects of ratification rather than pushing a single overarching thesis. But if there is a larger argument to the work, it is that Heideking casts the Federalists as “the revolutionaries of 1787–88 . . . [who] knew they would have to break with all established modes of thought and political language to succeed” (p. 134). But theirs was a revolution ironically intended (almost conservatively) “to achieve stability, order, security, and predictability” (p. 134). The anti-Federalists, in contrast, were still fastened to an older world-view and were anxious rather than hopeful about change. To their minds, Heideking writes, “America was on the verge of imitating all the mistakes already endured by Europeans” (p. 133), and this drove their opposition to the document. Rather than being a social or a class struggle, ratification “was more a clash between two distinct attitudes, mentalities, and political cultures shaped by the divergent way the opposing groups experienced life” (pp. 425–26). But if the Federalists were the revolutionaries, Heideking sees ratification as a dialectical process in which the innovative Federalists “needed the ideological-political counterweight provided by the Antifederalist party” (p. 429). Their objections ensured that the revolution toward government did not go too far and was accompanied by concessions and safeguards. In the end, ratification—capped off by the celebratory processions and then the adoption of the amendments that came to be known as the Bill of Rights—secured the Revolution and legitimized the new American government.

While the first chapter covers no new ground, it provides a useful, succinct overview of the whole, tracing the process of the newly drafted Constitution’s transmittal to the national congress, then to the state legislatures, and from there to the individual ratifying conventions. Heideking’s brilliant second [End Page 214] chapter is a rich, densely packed explication of the role of newspapers and of private correspondences in the debate. He catalogs the number of newspapers on each side of the debate and details both their circulation patterns and the extent of their impact. This is part of the portion of his work that had been available previously in English translation and had whetted the appetites of specialists for more. Alongside the public newspapers were private webs of correspondence that linked like-minded advocates—and, less frequently, critics—of the new system with one another. At the center of one of the most important of these Federalist “hubs” was George Washington, whose large circle of correspondents exchanged newspapers, behind-the-scenes information, gossip, and speculation. Washington, James Madison, Tench Coxe, and Henry Knox all played the role of clearing houses, “hubs in the news network where information was gathered and disseminated” (p. 102). Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and New York’s John Lamb filled the same role among Constitutional opponents. Far from remaining above the fray, Washington and other prominent and not-so-prominent Americans duked it out in the battle for ratification. The creation of these networks, Heideking argues, not only presaged political party activity still to come, but was also a crucial development toward that end.

Heideking’s analysis of newspapers makes it clear what a staggering advantage Federalists had in the dissemination of arguments. Of roughly ninety-two newspapers in the new nation, ten could not be adequately judged as to preference. An additional twenty-one were impartial, remaining open to publications both for and against. But of the remaining sixty-one papers, only eight were strongly or moderately anti-Federalist. By contrast, fifty-three were strongly or moderately Federalist. This created an asymmetric public contest over the Constitution as the nation’s newspaper editors identified strongly with the pro-ratification side and made sure their publications reflected their preferences.

After a solid analytical chapter analyzing the basic principles and core arguments that both sides advanced in the public debate, Heideking delivers two vast, sprawling chapters (each approximately ninety pages) on party formation and convention elections in the states and on the individual ratifying conventions. While the sheer length and bulk of these chapters tax the reader, they repay careful attention as they make many shrewd points along the way. The ratification debate provided a stage for the nation’s political talent and, in New York and Pennsylvania, led to organizations that provided “the nucleus of a permanent party organization” (p. 165). As the debates unfolded, however, and all that political talent found the stage, the contest was more complicated than a binary Federalist vs. anti-Federalist framework might suggest. Heideking argues for seeing a spectrum of views: strong Federalists, who saw the Constitution that came out of the convention as representing, [End Page 215] without any changes, the minimum amount of power necessary for a new central government; moderate Federalists, who understood that the Constitution emerged from a series of compromises in Philadelphia and believed that accepting some amendments during ratification was an acceptable additional compromise; moderate anti-Federalists, who had serious reservations about the Constitution but worried about the effects of forceful opposition or obstructionism; and finally, strong anti-Federalists, whose demands included not only a bill of rights but several structural amendments to the proposed government and who favored ratification only with prior amendments. But neither the process nor these positions were static. During the course of the debate—and because of the course of the debate—fierce critics often moved gradually toward acceptance or a willingness to try the new Constitution without prior amendments or a second convention.

Heideking’s treatment of the state conventions is similarly insightful. Pennsylvania’s strong Federalists overreached, forcing the calling of an early state convention, brutalizing opponents in the press, and then playing hardball with their opponents in the convention, refusing even to allow the minority to publish their objections in the convention’s minutes. Predictably, these tactics backfired. Not only did the emboldened minority publish their famous dissent—widely distributed nationally—but their story of the intimidation and pressure they faced discredited the Federalist cause nationally. “It is quite possible,” Heideking observes, “that the process of adoption would have been smoother and less clamorous if Philadelphia Federalists had been more tactful and conciliatory” (p. 288).

But the Federalists were nothing if not highly skilled politicians, capable of overcoming even self-created trouble. They were extremely adept and talented politically, able “to make the right move at the right time” (p. 307). Their strength came from their ability to improvise new strategies, approaches, and arguments on the fly. When the Massachusetts convention assembled in January 1788, Federalists set out to undo the damage and avoid the mistakes of their colleagues in Pennsylvania. From their courteous and solicitous behavior in the convention, to their careful wooing of Samuel Adams and John Hancock, to their proposal that the convention adopt a set of recommended amendments, Massachusetts Federalists made all the right moves. They not only won ratification without antagonizing their rivals, they created a mechanism of proposed amendments that went a long way toward ensuring the Constitution’s ultimate ratification.

Curiously, as much as Heideking praises the Federalists’ political aptitude, he seems ambivalent—even defensive—about the role those political skills played in winning ratification. While admitting that the Federalists’ tactics in Massachusetts included flattery, cajolery, arm-twisting, unseemly promising, and alleged (though not proven) bribery, he states that we cannot presume “that [End Page 216] the bounds of legitimate political persuasion had been exceeded just because some of the methods employed were of a questionable nature . . . there was nothing out of the ordinary about the Massachusetts convention in terms of the conduct of the participants” (p. 297). Heideking seems embarrassed by the use of political practices that were key parts of the arsenal of Federalist tactics that he generally praises. This is odd because he is so acutely discerning when it comes to recognizing the role played by such political savvy and politicking.

Heideking extends the story of ratification to include both the celebrations of the Constitution and their republican festive culture and also the process of securing the amendments to the document subsequently known as the Bill of Rights. Heideking argues that Americans, in staging frequent and extended celebrations of the Constitution, publicly reenacted the act of ratification, underscoring the work of the ratifying conventions and reinforcing their verdicts. In short, the celebrations not only advanced the festive culture of the early republic, they also entrenched the Constitution’s legitimacy.

This volume reads like a series of closely connected thematic essays. The chapters are generally chronological, but loosely so, with some tracking backwards and forwards in development of a particular theme. As a result, Heideking often draws quotations variously from 1787 and 1788, interspersing the two in his text without specific reference to the context of those writings. While this approach allows a comprehensive analysis of particular themes and while all his chapters and their subsections cohere, the cherry-picking of quotations from different times and states hinders the effort to understand ratification as a process that unfolded in stages and according to certain rhythms and patterns.

Similarly, the depth of Heideking’s thematic analysis of the debates is breathtaking in its comprehensiveness. He distills decades of study into a handful of compact paragraphs on his selected topics. But this analysis also illustrates one of the perils facing a historian of ratification. By pulling back so far to glimpse this overview, we sometimes lose sight of the contest itself, of the rhythms and developments that made each state’s ratification process unique, and of the patterns and the chronology of the unfolding debate. Too great a level of distant analysis (no matter how brilliant) can obscure events and actions that both shape, and are shaped by, the flow, pace, and momentum of the ratification process.

Inevitably, this book will (and should) be compared to Pauline Maier’s recent work. Taken together, the two books illustrate the challenges presented by organizing and writing a history of ratification. Both books cover largely the same material and reach some of the same conclusions. But their differences are revealing. Heideking provides a big-picture, broad-gauge view from a high altitude and a distant level of analysis. Maier sticks pretty close to the ground in her coverage, focusing at great length on the debates in the successive state [End Page 217] conventions. Heideking offers a superb generalized study, Maier gives us a fine particularized examination. Put most reductively, Heideking is stronger on analysis and Maier is better at narrative.

These differences in perspectives and points of view are reinforced by different authorial strategies. Heideking seeks to place the debate over the Constitution into a broad framework and offer big-picture analytical conclusions drawn from the debate as a whole. As a result, his book—written with exceptional clarity if not felicity or gracefulness of expression—stands back a good ways from the debate to provide a clinical and detached analysis. Maier, by contrast, states at the outset of her book that she is trying to tell the story of ratification without revealing the ending until it comes chronologically in the narrative. That way we see the story of ratification as it unfolded in 1787–88, and she builds suspense and emphasizes the drama as it occurs in the narrative. Although she does not neglect to provide analysis as she goes, Maier made very different decisions as a writer about the writing of her book than Heideking made about his. Eschewing any efforts to sustain the drama of the debates, Heideking dissects the contest with clinical precision, identifying patterns and themes that emerge as the work of the historian-as-interpreter rather than the historian-as-storyteller. Heideking excels at showing and analyzing the finished product of ratification, how it was achieved, and what it meant. But Maier is better at showing how the process of ratification developed in historical time. It is important not to overstate this distinction, but it glosses the dominant methodologies of these two books, which collectively teach us a great deal about ratification, each in its own idiosyncratic way.

After the considerable contributions of Heideking and Maier, is there anything still left to be said about ratification? Surprisingly, yes. Heideking’s big picture, bird’s-eye-view, synthetic treatment may obscure the process of ratification, but Maier’s finely grained narrative might not do enough to draw larger interpretive conclusions. There may be a middle ground of narrative analysis: a “just right” or “goldilocks” position. Then, too, Maier’s book is still primarily an analysis of the state conventions and not the newspaper debates. Heideking, too, is brief (if perspicacious) on the newspapers, but his work is concerned more with locating the debate in the broader swath of American political development—not primarily with either the papers or the conventions. The work that still needs to be done is to use the volumes of the Documentary History to trace the ebb and flow of arguments in the press and then to locate the interplay between those arguments and the stages and larger patterns of ratification. These two books, destined to become historiographical twins, are foundational springboards for the next studies of ratification, a topic capacious enough to yield continual study. [End Page 218]