Abstract
Charles Beard ([1913] 2004) argued that the U.S. Constitution was created to advance the interests of people who owned personalty, particularly those at the Constitutional Convention. Because delegate votes on individual clauses at the Constitutional Convention were not publicly recorded, prior empirical analyses have been limited to inferred votes on a specific set of unrelated clauses. We extend this inquiry by inferring votes related to currency and debt issues which Beard put forth as the prime issues for those who owned personalty. Our analysis on these votes generates little support for a narrow version of the Beard thesis, which states that all personalty groups voted in a unified coalition at the Convention and supported the Constitution. Our analysis provides some support, however, for a broader interpretation that personalty and realty interests affected delegate voting behavior at the margin.
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Notes
The authoritative source on the Constitutional Convention is Max Farrand’s Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (1966). This four volume set contains a complete record of the Convention, including a copy of the official journal, James Madison’s notes on the debates, the notes of other delegates, personal correspondences and other manuscripts related to the Convention, and Farrand’s assessment of daily attendance, among other items. See Farrand (1966, vol. 3, pp. 586–590) for more precise claims about when various delegates attended.
Controversy remains about how to properly interpret Beard’s thesis. We do not directly address this point, but instead refer readers to Gibson (2007), chap. 1, who presents an excellent discussion on the seemingly contradictory statements in Beard’s analysis and the various ways scholars have interpreted Beard’s arguments.
Indeed, in a new introduction to the 1935 reprinted edition, which was otherwise left unchanged, Beard specifically acknowledged he should have considered this issue in the original text (pp. xv–xvi).
Also see Beard ([1913] 2004, pp. 169–183).
Heckelman and Dougherty (2007) were able to infer votes for many of the Pennsylvania delegates individually and found they were not always in agreement with each other. Dougherty and Heckelman (2008) also revealed some disagreement among these delegates on votes related to slavery issues. As shown in Table 2 below, we also found some disagreement among the Pennsylvania delegates on the votes analyzed here.
The only econometric study on delegate votes which considers an alternate sample of voting issues is Dougherty and Heckelman (2008). They analyze nine votes related to slavery to determine how likely a delegate was to support slave-related institutions. They found that personal delegate factors were more important in explaining voting behavior for measures of apportionment than for regulation of the slave trade. Thus the importance of personal interests does not appear to be consistent even across votes of a similar nature. Moreover, their study greatly deviates from the original Beard thesis because personalty and realty interests are not central to their analysis.
McGuire presents a concise description of the issues pertaining to each of the 16 votes in several of his studies, the most recent of which is McGuire (2003), p. 57.
Also see Wittman’s (1995, p. 148) concise description of the primary issues that comprise Beard’s thesis.
During the Revolutionary War, all of the states issued their own paper currencies (known as bills of credit) to help cover wartime expenses, but afterwards only seven states continued to issue bills of credit with three additional states debating the issue at the time of the Constitutional Convention (Grubb 2003). Several of the colonies had issued bills of credit while under British rule. These bills were used to pay taxes and debts to the colonial governments at which point they were retired and destroyed. Additional currency required a legislative act. Starting in 1775, the Continental Congress issued its own bills of credit as well. Its first currency, often referred to as the Continental, was not adequately taxed and soon became worthless (Ferguson 1961). The extent to which colonial/state currencies depreciated has been recently debated (Grubb 2003, 2005; Michener and Wright 2005).
The issue was first raised when King motioned that, in the ordinance for admitting new states, states should be prohibited from interfering with private contracts (Farrand, 2:439-40). However, this proposal was never voted on. Instead a proposal to “prohibit bills of attainder and retrospective laws” was voted on in its place. The clause then appears again in the report of the Committee of Style (Farrand 2: 597). Article 1, Sect. 10, of this report, is voted upon in its entirety on September 14 (Farrand 2: 619), but the state votes are not recorded and the vote is actually over acceptance of a large package of various prohibitions on the states. More importantly, it is not a vote on the issue itself, rather it is a vote on altering the wording of that section. Therefore, a delegate vote on that clause is not indicative of whether the delegate supported or opposed prohibiting the states from impairing contracts.
Among those votes, only vote 387 has been previously analyzed by McDonald, and subsequently by McGuire and Ohsfeldt, and Heckelman and Dougherty. Our inference on this vote is taken from Heckelman and Dougherty (2007). For consistency, the other votes are inferred using the same methodology. Our method of inference is explained in detail in the next section.
The one exception is for delegates from Pennsylvania for whom McDonald made no inferences. Instead, he simply used the vote recorded for Pennsylvania as a point of comparison.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we assume no delegate abstained from voting when Farrand’s (1966, vol. 3, pp. 586–590) records indicate they were present.
As described in the appendix, limiting the study to primary source information has little effect on the results.
According to Farrand’s records, Ellsworth was not in attendance but McDonald coded him as voting yea. We also code Jenifer, McHenry, and Madison, opposite from McDonald.
Beard presents three lists when describing delegates with securities interests: major security holders (at least $5000), minor securities holders, and those who held “more than a negligible amount of securities.” We chose the major securities holders as our group because Beard listed them first, and presented them in the same style as the other four personalty groups. The other two lists of securities interests appear to be de-emphasized.
Beard was somewhat inconsistent in identifying the relevant sub-categories of personalty. At one point he mentions only the first four sub-categories and also leaves merchants out of the fourth sub-category (Beard [1913] 2004, 31-51). At another point, he fails to include land speculators as well, leaving only three distinct personalty categories (Ibid., 63). In light of these ambiguities, we consider each sub-category separately.
Securities holders and money lenders should have the greatest appreciation for the importance of limiting inflation through strict controls on currency production and specie requirements. Merchants and manufactures were also strongly opposed to paper currency (Ferguson 1961). In contrast, land speculators often relied on state bills of credit to finance their mortgages and thus were borrowers rather than lenders. Increased inflation would reduce the real value of their debts which is consistent with a realty interest.
This also underscores the importance of the voting rule to final passage of various clauses. In addition, if it were known that votes would be popularly determined by majority rule rather than by a majority of state votes, the states may have sent additional delegates to the Convention or required an equal number from every state to keep the weights equal. Any of these changes could have affected passage, or the debates and motions themselves.
Of the 41 delegates present on the final day of the Convention, all but three (Gerry, Mason, and Randolph) signed the Constitution—with Read signing for Dickinson. Farrand lists six of the remaining delegates as supportive of the final Constitution, and four as opposed.
The uncoded delegates are Houston (New Jersey), Houstoun (Georgia), and A. Martin (North Carolina).
While most of the statements are easily interpretable, there are a few that are less clear and required additional discussion among the authors and other coders. In the appendix, we describe these inferences and summarize additional regression results obtained by dropping the inferences individually or collectively. The findings largely corroborate the results reported in the text.
We thank Robert McGuire for sharing his data.
Riker (1987, p. 14) includes Mason and Randolph among the other Federalists, because “their Antifederalism was entirely ex-post”.
These figures are based on the Loan Office Certificates, IOUs used for conscription, and debts owed to veterans, as reported in the American State Papers (United States Treasury Department 1832) Volume 1 (Finance), p 231.
See Heckelman and Dougherty (2007) for a more extensive examination of this distinction. Our primary regression results are not affected by using white population in place of total population, or by using white population as designated by the 1790 census without the combined areas.
New England includes New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. The South includes Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The remaining states comprise the Middle Atlantic.
Lack of significance for private securities is unlikely to be due to multicollinearity with public securities. The two variables are correlated at only 0.24.
Although McGuire and Ohsfeldt also test a variant of Beard’s thesis, they use a different set of votes than the ones included here. Thus, their results are not directly comparable to ours.
The same result is found if we change Ellsworth’s vote to “yea” on vote 365.
These include Washington on vote 365, Dickinson, Jenifer, and G. Morris on vote 387, and Dickinson and 390. Because we had already inferred Martin’s vote as “nay” on vote 387 and Maryland’s state vote was divided, coding Jenifer as “nay” required Carroll and McHenry to be “yeas”.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this research was supported by the National Science Foundation, SES-0418254. We thank Robert McGuire for providing some of the data, and Robi Regan and Claudine Smith for research assistance. We also appreciate comments from participants at the Cliometric session on “Crises in Early American History” at the 2009 Allied Social Science Association conference, San Francisco.
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Appendix
Appendix
This appendix evaluates the robustness of the regression results when questionable codes for delegate votes are removed from the analysis. Cases with only two delegates in attendance for a particular state can be considered definitive and most of the statements in diaries, speeches, and other sources allowed for a clear code. However, a few exceptions arose.
For vote 365, the only questionable vote is that of Ellsworth. In response to a committee report on August 23, Ellsworth argued that the words giving the federal legislature the power to fulfill previous debts were unnecessary (Farrand 2: 377). As such we coded him as voting nay on vote 365 to make all debts owed by the federal government “valid against the United States under this constitution as under the Confederation” (Farrand 1966, vol. 2, p. 414). Alternatively, since he thought an explicit statement unnecessary but was not opposed to the concept itself, he might have voted in favor of the version presented on August 25. Hence, this inference is not as clear as most of the others. If this observation is left as uncoded, then a new regression reduces the p value on public securities to 0.07, but the levels of significance of the other variables remain the same.Footnote 30
On vote 390, Livingston was assigned a yea because he often championed creditors. Writing under the pseudonym “Primitive Whig,” he launched a major counter assault to a bill emitting paper currency in the state of New Jersey (Prince 1979, vol. 5, p. 152). He claimed that “lazy, lounging, and lubberly fellows” were the type to complain “of the hardness of the times, and the want of a circulating medium” when they paid taxes (Ibid.). Such statements demonstrate Livingston’s opposition to state paper currency and his implicit desire to have state taxes paid in specie, but they do not suggest directly that he felt the same way about the payment of federal debts by the states. When this observation is dropped from the sample, none of the interpretations regarding the significance of any individual variables are altered.
Similarly, Gorham was assigned a nay vote on 390 based on his opposition to a motion to prevent the states from emitting bills of credit and to allow only gold and silver for payment of federal debts. Before the question could be divided, Gorham said he thought the purpose of the motion would be secured by another clause which made acts of the federal legislature the supreme law of the states (Article 8 of the Committee of Detail). Madison records Gorham as stating “in that mode, no opposition would be excited” (Farrand 1966, vol. 2, p. 439). Gorham then continued “whereas an absolute prohibition of paper money would rouse the most desperate opposition from its partizans.” Our coding may be questionable because it is not clear whether Gorham is referring to both clauses (as we interpreted it) or specifically to the prohibition of state currency. Recoding Gorham has a potential effect on his co-delegates Gerry and King because they were coded yea based on Gorham’s nay vote and the yea vote of their state. No independent evidence regarding the positions of Gerry and King could be found for this vote. Thus, leaving Gorham uncoded also requires leaving Gerry and King uncoded. Dropping these three inferences from the sample does not alter the significance of any of the variables.
In a final regression, we drop all five of the questionable codings from the sample. Doing so eliminates the significance of the public securities variable altogether (p value = 0.29) and its estimated marginal impact of each additional dollar is cut in half. However, none of the other variables are significantly affected.
Thus, it appears our results are fairly robust to our inferencing decisions. Only when all five of our less-certain codings are dropped is the estimated importance of any of the variables significantly altered. In particular, the owning of public securities fails to achieve statistical significance at standard levels when these five observations are dropped. This is not too surprising given that the change implies dropping of almost five percent of the total sample. Still, it somewhat lessens our confidence in the contention that owning securities was a primary determinant of voting behavior. However, we do find that realty interests, as measured by owning agricultural land, had a significant marginal impact on every regression.
Additionally, a reviewer questioned the reliability of information from secondary sources. Five of our inferences are based on secondary sources, and from one of these inferences we were able to code two additional votes based on the state vote.Footnote 31 While we believe our inferences are correctly interpreted given the statements contained in these sources, the sources themselves may be somewhat less reliable. As a final robustness test, we dropped all seven of these observations from the sample. Results largely mirror those presented in Table 3, except that the p value on the population variable improves from 0.20 to 0.12 but still remains shy of the 10% level of significance. Thus, we conclude that using secondary sources does not affect our main results.
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Heckelman, J.C., Dougherty, K.L. Personalty interests at the Constitutional Convention: new tests of the Beard thesis. Cliometrica 4, 207–228 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0042-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-009-0042-3