The “Mutinous Insult”
Unnecessary changes of the seat of government would be indicative of instability in the national councils, and therefore highly injurious to the interests as well as derogatory to the dignity of the United States.
—Journals of the Continental Congress, 1788
By September 1783, James Madison had had enough—enough of living in the North; enough of the turmoil in his personal life; enough of the political impasse in Congress. The small house on Market Street in Philadelphia where he boarded was a very different place from Montpelier, the wealthiest tobacco plantation on the Piedmont in Virginia. Montpelier’s one hundred slaves supported an ordered life; its symmetrical brick Georgian house offered calm; its view took in the thin line of the Blue Ridge Mountains on the western horizon. Life in a city dominated by Quaker merchants who condemned slavery was awkward at best. That spring, Madison’s body slave, Billey, had run away. Billey had been captured and returned to his master, but Madison had to sell him, and at a loss, because his mind had been “too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virga.”
Worse still were Madison’s personal trials. That August he had learned from his father that his mother lay gravely ill. And just that month Madison had been spurned in love. Catherine Floyd, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a New York delegate who was boarding at the same lodging house, had accepted Madison’s proposal for marriage; but by August “Miss Kitty” expressed “indifference” for her thirty-one-year-old fiancé and accepted instead the proposal of another boarder, a nineteen-year-old medical student. The Continental Congress, which he had served so faithfully since 1780, was also in trouble. The Articles of Confederation did not empower Congress to impose taxes to pay for the recent war, so Madison and his fellow delegates could only request support from the states, not demand it. The debts mounted.
The issue of money, specifically the payment of troops, had forced Congress to flee Philadelphia. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 21, a group of Pennsylvania soldiers had surrounded the statehouse where the delegates were meeting on the ground floor. Expecting to be furloughed now that the war with the British was drawing to a close, the men demanded their back pay and a settling of their accounts. Although they had come to make their demands not to the Continental Congress, but to the Pennsylvania Executive Council, which was meeting on the floor above, the effect the soldiers had upon Madison and his fellow delegates was clear. Some were drunk, some were cursing, and some pointed their bayoneted muskets at the first-floor windows. “At one moment the Mutineers were penitent and preparing submissions; the next they were meditating more violent measures,” Madison recorded in his notes. “Sometimes the Bank was their object; at other times the Seizure of the members of Congress.” It was, he said, a “mutinous insult.”
Now Madison and his fellow delegates were cramped in the town of Princeton, New Jersey. He had to share a small room “scarcely ten feet square” and a bed with his fellow Virginia delegate Joseph Jones. “I am obliged to write in a position that scarcely admits the use of any of my limbs, he complained to Thomas Jefferson, “and without a single accommodation for writing.” It’s hard to imagine worse conditions—especially in this time of quill, inkwell, and sand—for the delegate who took copious notes of the proceedings and maintained a voluminous correspondence. Madison’s room was small, his bed was narrow, his slave was gone, his mother was ill, his fiancée had flown, his thoughts were bleak.
Madison knew the town of Princeton well. A dozen years earlier he had attended the College of New Jersey, today’s Princeton University, and had actually shared a bedroom (about twenty feet square) in the college’s Nassau Hall, where Congress was meeting. He dreaded the prospect of spending the winter “in this village where the public business can neither be conveniently done,” he told Jefferson, “[nor] the members of Congress decently provided for nor those connected with Congress provided for at all.” Yet Madison stayed. Several “measures on foot,” as he wrote to Jefferson, demanded he remain. Among the most important was the question of a “permanent seat of Congress.” It was an issue that excited sectional interests, challenged the philosophy of many of the founders, and threatened the fragile union of thirteen states.
The divisions were sectional, between North and South; commercial, between city and country; and philosophical, between central government and state sovereignty. The issue traded on the fear that the seat of the democratic government might soon resemble one of the corrupt large European capitals, such as London. A number of delegates believed that a peripatetic Congress continually changing its meeting place from one town or city to another would insulate its members from dishonorable actions and keep their nascent democracy pure. In late November, the delegates moved to Annapolis, Maryland; the following November found them in Trenton, New Jersey; and in early January 1785, they decamped yet again to New York City. By this time the realities of trying to run a sovereign government whose capital was in perpetual motion had cooled the ardor for movement; they would remain at the mouth of the Hudson for four years.
Such was the state of affairs in late May 1787 when fifty-five remarkable men assembled at the Pennsylvania statehouse in Philadelphia to remedy, as Madison put it in his introduction to the Debates on the Constitution, “the defects, the deformities, the diseases and the ominous prospects” of the Articles of Confederation. They debated in secret, and remarkably, given today’s customs, there were no pressures from lobbying groups and no leaks to the press. Each delegate’s concerns simply reflected his obvious economic and regional interests. Together they hammered out compromise after compromise on questions of taxes and slavery, federal authority and states’ rights, popular representation and executive powers. On the afternoon of September 17, four months after they began, the delegates agreed to keep the records of their debates secret lest “a bad use would be made of them,” and then affixed their names to the new “Constitution for the United States of America.”
Article I, Section 8, Clause 17, which Madison likely wrote, delegated to Congress the authority “to exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” The debate on the clause was brief, taking up just 4 of the 650 pages of the journals and reports that made up the records of the Constitutional Convention. Several delegates worried that the state that ceded land might gain undue power and influence by placing its own capital in the same city, or that the new federal government might delay erecting its public buildings and use the state’s buildings instead.
Madison argued that a bicameral legislature (rather than the single legislative body of the Articles of Confederation) required more members for the new government, many of whom would come “from the interior parts of the States”; and as the Constitution gave the new government greater power, there would be more business to conduct. It was imperative, then, that the seat of government be located in “that position from which [the legislators] could contemplate with the most equal eye, and sympathize most equally with, every part of the nation.” After the Constitutional Convention agreed upon the clause, Madison defended it in The Federalist. “The indispensable necessity of complete authority at the seat of government, carries its own evidence with it. . . . Without it the public authority might be insulted and its proceedings be interrupted, with impunity,” and the members of the government would become beholden to the state “for protection.”
The debate in the various state ratification conventions, also brief, reflected Madison’s belief that Congress should control the federal district. By focusing on the need to protect the government from “insult,” Madison deflected the question of just where the United States might locate its seat of government. After the ratification of the Constitution, he could influence the new Congress to find a place for the new federal district far away from the subterfuges of the North and as close to his native Virginia as possible.
Madison’s choice of the word “district” was telling, too. Coming through French from medieval Latin, the word originally denoted a territory under a feudal lord, and over time had come to mean a territory marked for some special administrative purpose. Residents of this district would live subordinate to their masters in the Congress of the United States, who would “exercise exclusive Legislation” over them, always. The peculiar status was likely not an oversight on Madison’s part. To suggest that the residents might have rights as voters could raise questions of future statehood and representation in Congress, which in turn might upset his delicate strategy for the adoption of a new governmental compact for the United States. To put the federal government under the aegis of a state would contradict all that federalism might achieve.
In the various state conventions that debated the ratification of the Constitution, only one delegate, Thomas Tredwell, a staunch anti-Federalist from Long Island, New York, spoke of the rights that would be denied to those who would live in the district: “The plan of the federal city, sir, departs from every principle of freedom, as far as the distance of the two polar stars from each other,” said Tredwell, “for, subjecting the inhabitants . . . to the exclusive legislation of Congress, in whose appointment they have no share or vote, is laying a foundation on which may be erected as complete a tyranny as can be found in the Eastern world.” The proposed district would be an “evil,” a “political hive, where all the drones in the society are to be collected to feed on the honey of the land.” And he concluded, “How dangerous this city may be, and what its operation on the general liberties of this country, time alone must discover.” No one answered him, and on July 26, 1788, New York became the eleventh state to ratify the Constitution.
James Madison and his fellow Federalists had given the thirteen states a new covenant. And just thirty-eight words of that covenant, a single clause that originated in part because of a “mutinous insult” in Philadelphia and a cramped bedroom in Princeton, led to the creation of a city unique in the United States, if not the world.