The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty » Charles Beard

The Founders, the Constitution, and the Historians

Burton W. Folsom Jr. — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:08:43 +0000

The first step in getting Americans to disregard the Constitution is to get them to distrust the men who wrote it. This assault on the Founders, subtle at first, began in earnest almost 100 years ago. The first historian to challenge the motives of the Founders was Charles Beard in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913).

In this landmark book, Beard, a professor of history at Columbia University, argued that the Constitution was “an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake.” The Founders, then, rather than being patriots, wise lawmakers, or thoughtful students of government, were primarily in the Constitution-writing business to protect their “property interests.”

Conflicts of Interest

The Founders’ economic motives, according to Beard, were straightforward—they were owed money from their support of the Revolution, and those “public securities” (receipts for loans made to support American independence) were not being repaid under the weak Articles of Confederation. A stronger governing document was needed to ease the transfer of tax dollars from ordinary citizens into the pockets of the more affluent Founders.

Thus, according to Beard, the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was promoted by “a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors. . . . The propertyless masses were . . . excluded at the outset from participation. . . .”

Beard, who was among the first generation of professionally trained historians, gathered evidence on the Founders: “Many leaders in the movement for ratification were large [public] security holders,” he argued. Those who opposed the Constitution owned fewer public securities.

Each state had to vote on ratifying the Constitution, and Beard offered evidence that “the leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia convention.” The Founders, Beard conceded, did not write the Constitution merely to make money, but nonetheless, “The Constitution was essentially an economic document.”

Beard’s thesis, seemingly well researched, was presented in a tentative way, but it soon swept the historical profession and became gospel in college classrooms by the 1920s. The Constitution, professors suggested to their students, was not a document worthy of special respect. It was a product of self-interest that should be interpreted loosely and changed as the Progressives saw fit.

The constitutional separation of powers, for example, according to Woodrow Wilson—a friend of Beard’s and a fellow Ph.D. in history—was a “grievous mistake” by the Founders. More centralization of power was needed—especially in the executive branch—to change society through needed reforms, such as the progressive income tax.

Beard made his reputation with his book and went on to an illustrious career: He authored or coauthored 49 books that had sold more than 11 million copies by 1952.

Questionable Scholarship

During the 1950s, historian Forrest McDonald did a more thorough study of the Founders and discovered what can most generously be described as errors in research and, less generously, as fraudulent research. McDonald traveled to archives throughout the original 13 states and meticulously compiled data on thousands of men involved in the debate over the Constitution. After systematically studying the lives of the Founders and the state convention delegates, McDonald wrote We the People, which debunked Beard completely. “No correlation” exists, McDonald discovered, “between their economic interests and their votes on issues in general or on key economic issues.” In fact, McDonald emphasized that in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and New York “most [public] security holders opposed ratification.”

How could Beard have erred so badly? In part Beard missed the mark because he was trying to hit something else—a Progressive agenda for reform, the excuse to transfer wealth from the haves to the have-nots. If the Founders were merely protecting their economic interests, Beard and his progressive friends were justified in supporting the redistribution of wealth.

How can we be sure that Beard was blinded by his ideology? One indication is that he seems to have willfully distorted his evidence to suggest that certain signers of the Constitution owned more public securities (and other forms of wealth) than they actually did. For example, Daniel Jenifer of Maryland, who signed the Constitution in Philadelphia, held no public securities—a point against Beard’s view that the signers were self-interested. But Beard classified Jenifer among the large security holders because his son Daniel Jenifer, Jr., held several thousand dollars’ worth of them.

But alas, as McDonald shows, “Jenifer had no children—at least no legitimate ones—for in both of the sources Beard used to gather data on Jenifer, it is expressly stated that Jenifer was a bachelor.” Beard also classified Gunning Bedford, Jr., a delegate from Delaware, as a security holder, but, as Beard admits, there were two Gunning Bedfords in Delaware, and the one who didn’t sign the Constitution was the one who owned the public securities. Furthermore, Beard places delegates Nicholas Gilman, William Samuel Johnson, Charles Pinckney, and others as holders of public securities, but they did not acquire these securities until long after they signed the Constitution.

Some of Beard’s mistakes are more subtle. He classifies delegate William Few as a security holder because Few funded a “certificate of 1779” with a “nominal” value of $2,170. True, but what Beard neglects to say is that Few’s “nominal” value was scaled down to a mere $114.80, a sum hardly worth motivating Few to sign the Constitution to redeem.

No doubt all the Founders were concerned about their own finances as well as those of the nation. But in writing the Constitution, they were above all trying to apply principles of natural rights and limited government to create a durable nation that would be a bastion of freedom in an unfree world. James Madison and other Founders diligently studied ancient and modern republics to learn from their mistakes what safeguards to employ to protect liberty while allowing elected politicians enough authority to effectively lead the nation.

The Sacrifices Made

What Beard omits from his history is the wisdom and dedication of the Founders in overcoming narrow self-interest to produce a masterful guiding document for the country. The actions of Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, for example, are remarkable. Both men signed the Constitution and supported it vigorously even though they ultimately lost money doing so.

Both men had committed to buy land with public securities—which were trading at only about 15 percent of par value before the Constitution was ratified. When the Constitution was ratified and the public securities were redeemed, both Morris and Gorham had to buy the securities at par value, so they both lost fortunes. Morris, in fact, went from being the wealthiest merchant in the United States in 1787 to being tossed into debtors’ prison in the 1790s. Contrary to Beard, Morris had voted against his own economic self-interest, and for his country’s financial integrity.

A Reviewers Notebook

John Chamberlain — Wed, 01 Aug 1956 08:00:00 +0000

The late Charles A. Beard was a complex and often contradictory character. While he did not invent the “economic interpretation” of history, he gave it its first great impetus in America by writing his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. That was back in 1913, the lyric year when social change was very much in the air. Two generations of historians were to take their cue from Beard’s book, but in the meantime Beard himself went on to other interests. When totalitarianism appeared on the scene in Europe, he leaped eloquently to the defense of the Founding Fathers. He wrote a book to extol the checks and balances that had been built into the American system at Philadelphia in 1787, and he paid his respects to the Federalist Papers by calling them “enduring.” Although he had called the Constitution an “economic document,” it was quite evident that Beard ultimately came to regard it as a lot more than that.Nevertheless, even though the moral aspects of history bulked larger and larger in his eyes as he grew older, Beard never specifically repudiated his early work. And his “disciples” still went about their business of scoffing at the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention for their allegedly overpowering zeal in defending their own narrow economic interests.

The Beardean thesis, stated briefly, was that the Constitution was written by a group of conspirators who wished to put limits on democracy in order to defend their own property interests in “personalty,” which is the word Beard used to cover money, public securities, manufacturing, shipping, and speculative western lands. According to Beard, the laborer, the small farmer, and the back-country debtor had little voice in the making of the Constitution. Nor did they play any conspicuous part in the ratifying conventions of the eleven states which accepted the reasoning and the handiwork of the Founders.

This “personalty” interpretation of the Constitution was contested by some of the original reviewers of the Beard book. But in 1913 and 1914 dissenters from the Beard thesis were looked upon as prejudiced Tories. Moreover, they could not controvert Beard out of any deep researches of their own, for it was quite obvious that they had not looked into any of the sources which Beard appeared to have mastered.

Since nobody took the trouble to look things up, virtually every scholar in the land came to accept Beard’s evidence as true. It was not until an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, Robert E. Brown, commenced to poke about in the Massachusetts town records of the late eighteenth century that anyone suspected Beard had misused his evidence. Brown discovered that nobody had written the truth about the so-called “debtor farmers” who supported Shays’ Rebellion. In 1787 there was no large disfranchised “mass” in Massachusetts. The freehold voting qualifications were so liberal that practically every adult male could vote. The so-called Shaysites and their sympathizers completely controlled the government of Massachusetts after the election of 1787, yet they did not recall the Massachusetts delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Furthermore, they later ratified the Constitution, on the ground that it was to practically everyone’s interest to do so.

Putting two and two together, Professor Brown began to suspect that if small farmers and debtors had approved the Constitution in Massachusetts, maybe the same thing had happened in other states. Accordingly, he set himself the task of checking all of Beard’s “evidence” that the Constitution was the product of “personalty,” not of the small freeholder.

The result of Professor Brown’s completed labors is a stiff and prickly work called Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution” (Princeton University Press, $3.50). Checking Beard, delegate by delegate, Brown discloses that if any economic interest predominated at Philadelphia in 1787, it was that of the landed proprietor, both small and large. The public securities held by the delegates were negligible in comparison with the good fat acres. “Realty” was the big thing, not “personalty.” And even where men did own “personalty,” t h e y frequently owned even more “realty.”

George Washington, to pick one prominent example, owned 45,000 acres of land in 1799 in addition to real estate in Washington, Alexandria, Winchester, and Bath. His real estate in that year was worth $266,819; his “personalty” was worth only $25,212. Thus Washington had over 90 per cent of his wealth invested in realty and less than 10 per cent in personalty. True, these figures might have to be reduced in order to arrive at Washington’s holdings for 1787, which was twelve years earlier. But even so, it is virtually certain that personalty was never a prime thing in Washington’s estate.

A critic might interrupt at this juncture to argue that since real estate is “economic,” then a Constitution that was written by holders of real estate must ipso facto be an “economic document.” But Beard didn’t rest his “economic interpretation” on anything that could be stretched to include all property owners, the small and middling as well as the great. If he had, he would have been compelled to admit that Jefferson, not Hamilton, prevailed in 1787. He would also have had to admit that the “masses” made the Constitution, for the “masses,” in 1787, owned land.

Where Beard went wrong in the first instance, according to Professor Brown, was in his assumption that the property qualification for voting in 1787 was essentially “undemocratic.” In a frontier country, where land was to be had on the easiest of terms, land ownership was certainly no badge of aristocracy. Anybody could get land M and practically everybody did. As more than one delegate to the Constitutional Convention observed, at least 90 per cent of the adult white males in America were freeholders and hence voters. Moreover, in some places the artisans and mechanics also had the vote. The delegates to the Convention kept the 90 per cent rigorously in mind when they were busy figuring out a system of checks and balances that would appeal to the ratifying conventions in the predominantly agrarian states.

Far from being an “aristocratic” or “antidemocratic” document, the Constitution was a work of common sense that kept the needs of the common man very much in the foreground. A good thesis could be written to prove that the Constitution was rather consciously designed to form a bulwark for a middle class that would always comprise about 90 per cent of the people. If such a thesis would constitute an “economic interpretation,” then there is nothing to be said in derogation of such. Gilbert Chesterton and Hil-aire Belloc, champions of the “distributive State,” would highly approve. Karl Marx, of course, would not.

But beyond all “economics,” whether of the “realty” or the “personalty” brand, the Constitution was designed to form a stable support for the individual’s “inalienable” rights. These rights naturally include the right to property, both real and personal. The Constitution is an “economic document” in the sense that it is designed to protect men in the rights of ownership. Such rights are important to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But Beard only came around to this broader view years after he had written his first controversial book.