Road to the Constitutional Convention | Constitution 101

0:00[Music] thank you let's talk about the road to the Constitutional Convention in 1777 a year after the Declaration of Independence Congress created the Articles of Confederation this was called a league of friendship among the sovereign states the states didn't want to give up their Authority and they wanted to create a weak national government as a result the government that they created had very few Powers there was no ability to raise taxes and as a result Congress couldn't fund the national debt or pay the soldiers in the Revolutionary War and commerce was very difficult because the national government depended on voluntary contributions from state governments many of them just refused to pay their fair share plus individual states were putting up trade barriers to protect their own citizens and

1:00discriminate against other state citizens as a result there's an economic crisis and in addition to all that any proposed amendment to the Articles required unanimous approval from all 13 states and as a result no amendment was ever ratified all these problems were exacerbated by the state constitutions that were created starting in 1776. one really important example is the Pennsylvania Constitution it created a unicameral legislature that's a fancy word for legislature with one house rather than two there was no single president and so there was an executive Council and this one house legislature started printing a lot of money in order to pay debts and as a result there was a lot of inflation all this culminated in mob violence and mob violence and the excesses of democracy are the paradigmatic cases that concentrated the minds of the founders

1:57and led them to call the Constitutional Convention in particular there was an outbreak of mob violence in Western Massachusetts in 1786. it was called Shea's Rebellion because it was led by a farmer called Daniel Shays who'd served in the Revolutionary War and he like the other vets couldn't pay their debts because they themselves weren't getting paid by the government and as a result they stormed the courthouses in Western Massachusetts they wanted to seize the Springfield Armory and they basically shut down the bankruptcy court so they wouldn't go to jail this was so alarming to the founders that they decided to do something about it and they resolved to create a new government strong enough to achieve common purposes like paying debts raising taxes putting down rebellions at the same time the government had to be restrained enough not to threaten individual liberty in particular the

2:49rights of private property as well as the unalienable rights of speech and conscience so these were the main factors that led the founders to call the convention now James Madison one of the most important Founders spent the summer before the Constitutional Convention reading a trunk full of books that Thomas Jefferson had sent over from Paris they included accounts of the failed democracies of Greece and Rome and Madison took careful notes on these books and on The Vices of the ancient confederacies as he called them he also read thinkers like Montesquieu who insisted that in direct democracies like ancient Greece with its large assembly where 6 000 people were required for a quorum demagogues could easily whip up populist Passions in Federal's 55 Madison said in all very numerous Assemblies of whatever character is composed passion never

3:44fails to rest the scepter from reason had every Athenian citizen been Socrates every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob so Madison believed that the Athenian citizens had been swayed by crude and ambitious demagogues politicians who'd played on their emotions the demagogue Cleon was said to have seduced the assembly into being more hawkish toward Athens opponents in the Peloponnesian War even the reformer Solon the great lawgiver canceled deaths and debased the currency in Madison's view history seemed to be repeating itself in America After the Revolutionary War he'd observed in Massachusetts during Shea's Rebellion what he called a rage for paper money for abolition of deaths for an equal division of property and that populist rage had led to shae's Rebellion which pitted debtors against their creditors

4:41Madison defines the central evil that a constitution is supposed to avoid as faction and in Federalist 10 he defines a faction as any group either a majority or a minority animated by Passion rather than reason devoted to self-interest rather than the common good here is Madison's definition he said in Federalist 10 I understand a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest adversed to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community now according to classical Theory republics could only exist in a relatively small territory where citizens knew each other personally and they could assemble face to face Plato wanted to cap the number of citizens capable of self-government at 5040.

5:42Madison though thought Plato's small Republic thesis was wrong he believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities extend the sphere of a territory Madison wrote in Federalist 10 and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens or if such a common motive exists it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength and to act in unison with each other Madison predicted that America's vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing and dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others in other words in a big country with slow Communications technology it'll just be hard for factions or mobs to

6:36discover each other and by the time they do they'll get tired and go home you can't just send off a tweet or an email when you have to send letters and read newspapers and news traveled slowly over the large Republic so given the difficulty of coordinating mob actions Madison was confident that passions would cool and reasons would prevail so for all these reasons Madison came to Philadelphia with his fellow delegates resolved to create a constitution that would avoid the dangers of faction and would protect individual rights and that is what brought them to Philadelphia in 1787.

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