Too Dumb to Fail by Matt K. Lewis

Author:Matt K. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2016-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

2. The Death of Compromise

Conservatives rightfully revere the Founders, who faced daunting challenges in framing our Constitution. Most agreed that the Articles of Confederation were too weak, but what should any new government look like? Small states (like New Jersey) might argue that all states deserve to be treated equally, while large states (such as Virginia) might argue that, since they have larger populations, it’s only fair their citizens are represented accordingly. The Connecticut Compromise solved this problem by providing each state with two Senators, but assigning representation in the lower House based on population. Of course, once it became clear that seats in the House of Representatives would be proportional, this created a dilemma for the majority of the South, which had a smaller free population. The answer was to increase the South’s population numbers by counting slaves. The North balked at this. In retrospect, it seems morally repugnant, but a compromise was reached by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person (for the purposes of representation).

Another challenge: Where to locate the nation’s capital? A compromise hatched a couple of years later, in 1790, solved that one. At the time, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume the Revolutionary War debts still owed by the states—a bad deal for the southernmost, more agrarian states, which stood to gain little from the plan. Some Northern states such as Massachusetts owed a lot more money than some Southern states such as Virginia—which had mostly paid off its debt. As Jefferson told it, he organized a dinner attended by Hamilton and Virginia representative James Madison.75 The deal they brokered involved Madison not opposing Hamilton’s financial plan in exchange for placing the nation’s capital (previously in new New York and Philadelphia) in the “south”—a swamp where I sit writing these very words now—which came to be known as Washington, DC.

This tradition continued. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850 helped postpone the Civil War. Some might well argue that these compromises were morally indefensible—or that they merely postponed the inevitable. Others might see them as valiant, if ultimately doomed, attempts to avert a bloody war. Regardless, it is worth noting that the Civil War coincided with the death of three statesmen and compromisers from the various regions in conflict. It is, perhaps, not a coincidence that Henry Clay of Kentucky, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts all died in the 1850s. With the death of compromise, the Civil War was soon to come. After the war, the Compromise of 1877 served to undermine the legacy of Lincoln and preemptively end Reconstruction, thus paving the way for Jim Crow. (Like the 2000 election, the election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was fiercely disputed. Democrats, who controlled the House of Representatives, broke the deadlock by assenting to Hayes becoming president; in return, Hayes pulled federal troops from the South. It’s hard to overstate the harm inflicted by this compromise.

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