That being the case, it seems silly to ask, “Which came first, the states or the federal government?” Abraham Lincoln asked this question and answered, “the federal government”; and McDonald skewers him. Members of the Continental Congress “were there as agents of existing political societies, and in the nature of things, agents cannot authorize their principals to do anything.”

For a while, the original vision held true, and the size and power of the federal government was restrained. Yes, there was that pesky Federalist era, but when they took power in 1801, the radical Republicans did “strive to strip down the machinery that Hamilton and the Federalists had put in place, and to some extent they succeeded.” Taxes were axed. The Alien and Sedition Acts expired and pardons were issued. They reduced the army to a mere 3,350 men.

When war with England came in 1812, the United States was unprepared with its small army and small treasury. Although President Madison called up the militias of the states, New England refused to comply. McDonald believes this war showed the defects in the militia system. However, militias are designed to defend the homeland, not to attack foreign countries. Thus, foreign countries do not feel threatened by them.

Paradoxically, McDonald cites New England’s reaction to the War of 1812 as evidence of the weakness of the Jeffersonian system. That region sat on its hands during the war in a virtual state of secession, if not treason. The Yankees “conducted a lucrative trade with the enemy.” Lincoln’s hero, Daniel Webster, decried conscription proposals. Sounding like Jefferson, he asked, “Where is [conscription] written in the constitution?” The New England states met in convention to discuss secession. That talk fizzled, but the resolution they passed avowed that state governments may interpose themselves between their own citizens and arbitrary federal power.

Before the Civil War, the states’ rights faction was “triumphant.” Andrew Jackson “resisted efforts by Congress to extend the scope of the federal government and worked diligently to reduce the activities in which it was already engaged.” He cut the national debt and eliminated the Bank of the United States. By the time Jackson left office, the federal government had become “virtually nonfunctional.”

With sectional differences acute, old debates about the nature of the Republic were revived. William H. Seward countered the states’ rights view with his own: the union was of the whole people, not of the states. If true, this would make the right of secession implausible. Southerners did not agree. They were too busy reading Thomas Prentice Long’s analysis of the disparate impact of the federal tariff. He concluded that the North took about $250 million from the South as the result of the tariff and other federal fees. Whether the ultimate cause of the war was the tariff, slavery, or the preservation of the union, McDonald does not purport to resolve.

Without opposition from the South, Lincoln enacted Henry Clay’s American System: high tariff, internal improvements, and inflation. McDonald graciously describes Lincoln’s attitude on civil liberties this way: he went “beyond the bounds of the Constitution as it had been understood.” Lincoln’s people hijacked an election in Maryland. Over 13,000 political prisoners were taken, and newspapers were suppressed. He resorted to conscription to fight a war retroactively defined as against slavery. The citizens of the North and border states had to be forced to force the South to have a “new birth of freedom.”

Strangely, McDonald does not view the New Deal as an all-out assault on state prerogatives. The measures were mostly “economic” in nature and did not interfere with traditional state “police powers.” To justify this, however, we must follow McDonald’s use of the term “property relations” as not involving “economic” activity, which is a stretch. He is on sounder ground in describing World War II as involving an “expansion of government [that] dwarfed any that had taken place before.” The postwar years were not good ones for the cause of states’ rights, associated as that concept was at the time with racial segregation by law. And under Lyndon Johnson, federalism completely collapsed. His “Great Society” destroyed the notion that there were certain areas of policy reserved to the states.

It is not always apparent where Professor McDonald stands on the battle between the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians, between the proponents of states’ rights and the nationalists. That may be due to his evenhandedness as a scholar. Or maybe his view lies in the middle.

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.