The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

7. Constitutions Construed

7 22 CONSTITUTIONS CONSTRUED View from Gamble’s Hill, by Edward Beyer (courtesy of the Library of Virginia), depicts part of the city of Richmond in the mid-1850s. The scene is filled with industry, including railroads, a section of the James River and Kanawha Canal, and very large factories and mills on the banks of the James River. The political rhetoric of antebellum Virginia emphasized limited, representative government and grew out of opposition to the federal government’s early attempts to stimulate manufacturing and transportation . At the same time, Virginians employed the almost unlimited power of the state government to form joint-stock companies for constructing turnpikes, canals, and railroads to carry agricultural products to market. They also erected large mills and manufacturing establishments and created banks and other institutions of nineteenth-century capitalism that made this scene possible. The political rhetoric ignored the commercial and industrial realities of Virginia as well as the undemocratic political institutions and practices that persisted from the colonial period through the age of Jacksonian Democracy. Representative James Madison was engaged during the winter months of 1791–92 composing newspaper essays to explain the opposition that he and other members of Congress were mounting to the policies that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton proposed and that President George Washington endorsed. Madison and his friend and political ally Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson feared that Hamilton’s policies would place Virginia farmers and other Southerners at political and economic disadvantages in the new nation and also enlarge the powers of the national government too much and at the expense of the state governments. As Madison often did prior to composing essays on public affairs, he made notes from his wide-ranging reading in history and political economy. One day or night when he was making notes, Madison wrote, “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part instead of the whole; in the hands of property, not numbers. All the antient popular governments, were for this reason aristocracies. The majority were slaves,” and here he cited the authority of Aristotle. “The Southern States of America, are on the same principle aristocracies. In Virginia the aristocratic character is increased by the rule of suffrage, which requiring a freehold in land excludes nearly half the free inhabitants, and must exclude a greater proportion, as the population increases. At present the slaves and non-freeholders amount to nearly ¾ of the State. The power is therefore in about ¼. Were the slaves freed and the right of suffrage extended to all, the operation of the Government might be very different . The slavery of the Southern States, throws the power much more into the hands of property, than in the Northern States.”1 Madison did not employ his note about slavery and aristocracy when composing his articles in opposition to Hamilton’s political proposals. He laid it aside because the discussion of slavery and aristocracy in the South (and by implication the more fertile soil for the growth of democracy in the North) would not have advanced Madison’s cause an inch. He was not concealing a secret. A few years later a young attorney named William Wirt moved to Virginia from neighboring Maryland, and as he traversed the Northern Neck en route to his new home, he could see on the face of the landscape precisely what Madison had written about. In the first of his 1803 essays published anonymously in a Richmond newspaper and then collected into a small book entitled The Letters of the British Spy, Wirt wrote about how different the Vir- 166 the grandees of government ginia counties on the south side of the Potomac River were from the Maryland counties on the north side. “I am in Virginia,” he wrote, “that state, which, of all the rest, plumes herself most highly on the democratic spirit of her principles . Her political principles are, indeed, democratic enough in all conscience. Rights and privileges, as regulated by the constitution of the state, belong in equal degree to all the citizens.” But, “however, they may vaunt of ‘equal liberty in church and state,’ they have but little to boast on the subject of equal property. Indeed there is no country, I believe, where property is more unequally distributed than in Virginia. This inequality struck me with peculiar force in riding...