An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

Contents

1. Preface 3 min 4

   Beard calls the book frankly fragmentary: a suggestion of new lines of research rather than a finished study. He announces his main source, the records of the Treasury Department, used here for the first time to study the making of the Constitution, and urges historians to turn from “barren” political history to the economic forces behind political movements. He acknowledges his debt to Turner and his students and thanks the archivists who helped him. The preface is dated Washington, February 1913.

2. I Historical Interpretation in the United States 30 min 43

   Beard surveys three schools of American history: Bancroft's providential school, the “Teutonic” school of racial genius, and the school of impartial fact-gathering that refuses interpretation. He finds legal and constitutional scholarship equally abstract, treating the Constitution as the work of “the whole people.” Against this he argues that most law concerns property, and that constitutions are the means by which economic groups secure favourable rules. He finds the theory in Madison's Federalist No. 10. He proposes a test: if security holders, merchants and creditors backed the Constitution and small farmers and debtors opposed it, the Constitution was the work of economic interests.

3. II A Survey of Economic Interests in 1787 1 h 0 min 70

   Beard maps the property interests of 1787. Four groups had no vote: slaves, indentured servants, propertyless men and women. Among the enfranchised he separates realty (small debtor farmers, the Hudson manor lords, southern planters) from personalty: money at interest, public securities, manufacturing and shipping, and western land. Personalty suffered under the Confederation from paper money, stay laws and unpaid debts. He estimates that funding gave security holders a gain of at least $40 million. He cites the 1789 tariff petitions, notes Franklin's doubts about the “critical period”, and concludes that personalty, though smaller than landed wealth, was the dynamic force behind the Constitution.

4. III The Movement for the Constitution 22 min 29

   Beard asks whether the Articles of Confederation hurt these interests and whether the leaders of reform represented them. He describes the weak Confederation: no taxing power, no executive or judiciary, state legislatures passing debtor relief. He traces the failed impost proposals of 1781 and 1783 and the reformers who held securities, such as Schuyler and Bowdoin. Letters by Washington, Knox and Madison show alarm after Shays' Rebellion. Blocked by the amendment process, the nationalists used the Annapolis meeting to obtain a convention to “revise” the Articles, intending to adopt a revolutionary programme outside the existing legal framework.

5. IV Property Safeguards in the Election of Delegates 16 min 24

   Beard examines how delegates to the Convention were chosen: by state legislatures, not by popular vote, and under the property qualifications for voters and legislators then in force. He surveys each state's requirements, from New Jersey's wealth tests to the broad taxpayer suffrage of Pennsylvania and Georgia, and uses New York's 1788 elections to estimate the number excluded. He concedes that the wide ownership of land admitted the small farmers and debtors hostile to personalty. But legislatures elected on other issues chose delegates allied with commercial interests, avoiding popular debate.

6. V The Economic Interests of the Members of the Convention 2 h 27 min 295

   The longest chapter surveys the property of each delegate in alphabetical order, using biographies and the Treasury loan office records. Beard finds security holders, land speculators, merchants, lenders and slaveholders, and examines at length the charges that Hamilton speculated, acquitting him personally while stressing his ties to financiers. He concludes that most delegates were lawyers from coastal towns, none represented small farmers or mechanics, and at least five-sixths stood to gain personally from the Constitution. Forty of the fifty-five appear in the Treasury records. They were practical men who built on “fundamental economic interests.”

7. VI The Constitution as an Economic Document 1 h 9 min 75

   Beard reads the Constitution through The Federalist, which he calls the finest economic interpretation of politics ever written. Madison’s No. 10 makes the regulation of property interests government’s main task, and the separation of powers, staggered terms, indirect elections and judicial review break up majorities that might attack property. Property qualifications were dropped mainly because the delegates could not agree on them. Congress gained powers to tax, to raise armies, to regulate commerce and to dispose of western lands, while the states were forbidden to issue paper money or impair contracts. Even foreign and interstate conflicts are traced to commerce, debt and contracts.

8. VII The Political Doctrines of the Members of the Convention 52 min 119

   Taking the delegates in alphabetical order, Beard collects what each said in the Convention or elsewhere about government and property. Most distrusted democracy: Gerry blamed its “excess,” Hamilton wanted the rich and well-born given a permanent share of power, and Morris, Dickinson and the Pinckneys wanted property qualifications. A few, such as Franklin, Bedford, Wilson and Luther Martin, held more democratic views, and Martin defended debtor-relief laws outright. Beard concludes that The Federalist accurately generalized the political doctrines of the Convention despite its many disagreements.

9. VIII The Process of Ratification 40 min 56

   Ratification by special state conventions broke the Articles’ rule of unanimous consent by the state legislatures, a step Beard, following Burgess, calls revolutionary and which Madison defended in No. 40. Beard then traces how each state called its convention and voted. New Hampshire, Massachusetts and New York ratified narrowly after delegates elected as opponents changed sides; Pennsylvania’s Federalists dragged absent assemblymen to make a quorum; Virginia was doubtful; North Carolina and Rhode Island held out until the new government applied economic pressure.

10. IX The Popular Vote on the Constitution 24 min 55

    No popular vote was taken on calling the Convention or on the Constitution itself. Property qualifications excluded perhaps a fifth to a third of adult men, and apathy and distance kept away far more. Using turnout figures from Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York’s counties, Beard estimates that about 160,000 men voted for convention delegates and that no more than 100,000, about one in six adult males, favoured ratification. The well-organized, town-based Federalists, with money and the press on their side, beat poorer and scattered opponents.

11. X The Economics of the Vote on the Constitution 1 h 16 min 84

    State by state, Beard maps the vote on ratification against economic geography and the records of public securities. Commercial coasts, towns and river valleys voted for the Constitution; interior farming districts, the heartland of Shays’s Rebellion and of paper-money parties, voted against. Tax lists show securities concentrated in Federalist counties, and lists of delegates show many holders among Federalists in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina. He concludes that personalty, and securities above all, was a major driving force behind ratification.

12. XI The Economic Conflict Over Ratification as Viewed by Contemporaries 1 h 5 min 62

    Contemporaries on both sides saw ratification as a conflict between property and debtors. Madison, Marshall, Knox, Hamilton, Ellsworth and Higginson for the Federalists, and Centinel, Cornelius, Luther Martin and Patrick Henry against, described the same division of merchants, creditors and men of property against farmers and debtors. Beard prints Marshall’s history, which admits majorities in some states opposed the Constitution, beside his judicial claim that it came from the whole people. He ends with a list of conclusions: the Constitution was an economic document drafted and ratified by a consolidated group of personalty interests.