Tea at Trianon: Luther Martin of Maryland & the Constitutional Convention

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 4, 2022

Luther Martin of Maryland & the Constitutional Convention

From The Imaginative Conservative:

This book takes no prisoners. Nor does it gloss the favored actors. It sides with Martin’s stance at the 1787 Convention but does not disregard his faults. As for the usual suspects—Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Morris, Washington et al—Dr. Kauffman simply sets the record clear. The usual nomenclature is proven false. Madison was not the Father of the Constitution. He was severely blunted, just not decisively. Instead, a vaguely nationalist hybrid of Madison and Martin came about, absent all defining nomenclature, e.g. “national” or “federal.” It’s been a battle that in the countering of Time and despite Jefferson’s later intrusion, Madison has won. The inexorable excretions of human nature in the turmoil of political and commercial battle would finally yield what Madison, Wilson, Washington, and Hamilton wanted: A nationalized State dwarfing and dismissing the sovereignty of the individual States. Today’s Constitution, as it runs our government in the hands of national politicians and courts, is decisively Madison’s Constitution. His imperial twin pillars: 1) negating the sovereignty of the States and 2) negating State legislation by the national legislature (or courts, a later addendum), have come true. Only a modicum of sovereignty continues to reside in the States.
Yet Madison has come down to us honored as if he were true to the Virginia School of subsidiarity and personal sovereignty. In fact, he wasn’t. Not in 1787. Nor were many Southern leaders at the ’87 convention. The True Federalists like Martin, Gerry, Mason, and Yates sailed into a gale storm that was prepared to meet them. The 1776 spirit for liberty was waning and an aristocratic yearning for strong government had risen. Washington, presiding as President of the ’87 Convention, wrote to Hamilton on July 10: “The Men who oppose a strong & energetic government are, in my opinion, narrow minded politicians, or are under the influence of local views.” And he was true to his word.

When George Mason refused to sign the Constitution, he became Washington’s “quondam friend” as in “once, long ago and gone”—then he slipped out from history. They never met again. Two years after the Convention, Mason wrote his son John on business in Bordeaux, France, about the loss of Washington’s friendship. “You know the friendship which has so long existed (indeed from our early youth) between General Washington and myself. I believe there are few men in whom he placed greater confidence; but it is possible my opposition to the new government, both as a member of the national and of the Virginia Convention may have altered the case.”

Yet Mason is the friend who lent Washington the cash to attend the Convention to begin with, the friend from childhood who stood by him through the trials of early manhood, the trials of the revolution, who visited with him along the banks of the Potomac to enjoy the Seasons of the year, discuss the newest methods of agriculture and the intricacies of property law since Mason, though untrained as a lawyer, had taught himself those intricacies with such thoroughness that scarcely anyone in the Colonies knew more; he was the friend who planned with him the needed efforts for liberty from the British Crown, who gave to their Virginia its eternal Bill of Rights and through Jefferson, America’s Declaration—that “quondam” friend!

Do we really understand the “Fathers” of today’s nationalized country? Their aristocratic sniff of disdain for those who disagreed and stood firm against their new “union”? (Read more.)