I

Charles A. Beard’s Pioneer Interpretation of the Making of the Constitution

THE day was Monday, September 17, 1787, the place Philadelphia. The long and, as tradition has it, steaming hot summer was finally ending.¹ Throughout the city, serenely unaware that historians were one day to know this as the Critical Period of American history, Philadelphians were busy preparing a record wheat crop for export. Inside a crowded room in the State House (later to be rechristened Independence Hall) thirty-odd men penned their signatures to a document they had styled a “Constitution for the United States of America.”

There was no exuberance, no display of enthusiasm, and very little reverential solemnity. Fourteen members of the body had previously walked out for one reason or another, most of them because they had personal business they considered more deserving of attention or because the hot clash of personalities had been too much for them. Even now, at the very end, a half dozen men were wrangling about minor details, and three others flatly refused to sign the instrument. Another group was already worrying about and planning for the strenuous campaign for ratification which lay ahead. Mostly, however, the atmosphere pervading the room was one of exhaustion and a sense of relief that the four-month ordeal was over.

The importance of the event insured that the making of the Constitution of the United States would become the subject of debate, study, and writing for many years to come. In addition the actors in the drama helped to fan the flames of debate and to provoke perhaps even more writing than the subject itself warranted. Almost as if to vex future scholars, the members of the Philadelphia Convention kept their proceedings secret and passed down to historians only the most fragmentary of notes; the Constitution was deliberately couched in ambiguous language; the disputants in the contest over ratification clouded both the contest and the conditions that shaped it by publishing reams of misleading, often fantastic propaganda. Partly because of the nature of the event, partly because of the chaotic record left by the participants, the mountains of historical writings on the subject have often been colored by emotionalism and shrouded in confusion. The men in the Convention have been depicted as a group of demigods, a band of ruthless conspirators, and virtually every intermediate brand of humanity. The document has been characterized at one extreme as scarcely less sacred than the Holy Bible, at the other as the greatest single barrier to the progress of social justice. Interpretation of the ratification has run the gamut from the noblest act of a free people under divine guidance to an unprincipled coup d’état.

Early in 1913 there emerged from this historiographical maze a work that was destined to become a classic. In that year Charles A. Beard, then a young professor of politics at Columbia University, published his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, a brilliant, challenging, and provocative study that has towered over everything else written on the subject, before or since. No other work on the making or the nature of the Constitution has been so much debated, so widely known, and ultimately so widely accepted.²

The central points in the thesis advanced by Professor Beard were these: “Large and important groups of economic interests were adversely affected by the system of government under the Articles of Confederation, namely, those of public securities, shipping and manufacturing, money at interest; in short, capital as opposed to land.” After failing to safeguard their rights, “particularly those of the public creditors,” through the regular legal channels, these groups called a convention in the hope of obtaining “the adoption of a revolutionary programme.” (p. 63) In other words, the movement for the Constitution originated with and was pushed through 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 (through representatives) in the work of framing the Constitution. The members of the Philadelphia Convention which drafted the Constitution were, with a few exceptions, immediately, directly, and personally interested in, and derived economic advantage from, the establishment of the new system.” (p. 324)

In essence, then, the Constitution was “an economic document drawn with superb skill by men whose property interests were immediately at stake; and as such it appealed directly and unerringly to identical interests in the country at large.” (p. 188) It was based “upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities.” (p. 324)

The system “consisted of two fundamental parts—one positive, the other negative.” The positive part comprised four great powers conferred on the new government: “taxation, war, commercial control, and disposition of western lands.” This meant for the manufacturers a protective tariff; for trade and shipping groups, tariffs and other legislation against foreign shipping; for money interests the prevention of “renewed attempts of ‘desperate debtors’ like Shays”; and for public creditors, ample revenues for the payment of their claims. The negative portion placed restrictions on the states: “Two small clauses embody the chief demands of personalty against agrarianism: the emission of paper money is prohibited and the states are forbidden to impair the obligation of contract.” (pp. 154-179 passim)

In the contest over ratification, Beard concluded, only about a fourth of the adult males were eligible—or interested enough—to vote on the question, and the Constitution was ratified by no more than a sixth of the adult males. In five states it was “questionable whether a majority of the voters participating … actually approved the ratification.” “The leaders who supported the Constitution in the ratifying conventions represented the same economic groups as the members of the Philadelphia Convention; and in a large number of instances they were also directly and personally interested in the outcome of their efforts.” (p. 325) Of the voters on ratification, those favoring the Constitution were “centred particularly in the regions in which mercantile, manufacturing, security, and personalty interests generally had their greatest strength.” The holders of public securities “formed a very considerable dynamic element, if not the preponderating element, in bringing about the adoption of the new system.” The opposition, on the other hand, came almost exclusively from the agricultural regions and from the areas in which debtors had been formulating paper-money and other depreciatory schemes, (pp. 290, 291) In short, “the line of cleavage for and against the Constitution was between substantial personalty interests on the one hand and the small farming and debtor interests on the other.” (p. 325)

If from this tightly and skillfully woven system of ideas are extracted those parts which are essentially nonconjectural—which are susceptible, in other words, of a reasonable degree of validation or invalidation as historical facts, and upon which the interpretative superstructure is erected—three propositions come into clear focus, namely that:

1.  The Constitution was essentially “an economic document drawn with superb skill” by a consolidated economic group “whose interests knew no state boundaries and were truly national in their scope.”³ (pp. 188, 325)

2.  “In the ratification, it became manifest that the line of cleavage for and against the Constitution was between substantial personalty interests [approximately identical to those which had been represented in the Philadelphia Convention] on the one hand and the small farming and debtor interests on the other.” (P. 325)

3.  “Inasmuch as so many leaders in the movement for ratification were large [public] security holders [as were most members of the Philadelphia Convention], and inasmuch as securities constituted such a large proportion of personalty, this economic interest must have formed a very considerable dynamic element, if not the preponderating element, in bringing about the adoption of the new system… . Some holders of public securities are found among the opponents of the Constitution, but they are not numerous.” (pp. 290, 291n)

It was perhaps inevitable, in view of the immaturity of American historiography at the time Beard wrote, and the fact that his work was a piece of pioneering, that he should have based his case on an ingenious polarization of facts, assumptions, and inductive and deductive reasoning. Furthermore, while a substantial body of theory of economic interpretation of history had been developed long before Beard’s time, no systematic methodology had yet been formulated by American historians for applying such theory to the analysis of specific historical phenomena. Thus to implement and substantiate his pioneering thesis Beard had to pioneer also in the matter of methodology. If his book is to be fruitfully examined, it is therefore necessary at the outset to analyze it in terms of these components: the facts presented, the assumptions made, the logic employed, and the methodology applied.

The work consists of eleven chapters. The first is a general introduction to the subject by way of an essay on historical interpretation in the United States. At the end of the chapter Beard summarizes the theory of economic determinism and states, as a methodological ideal, the “requirements for an economic interpretation of the formation and adoption of the Constitution.” First it would be necessary to compile economic biographies of all persons connected with the framing and adoption of the document. These data would lay the ground for a consideration of the following proposition:

Suppose it could be shown from the classification of the men who supported and opposed the Constitution that there was no line of property division at all; that is, that men owning substantially the same amounts of the same kinds of property were equally divided on the matter of adoption or rejection—it would then become apparent that the Constitution had no ascertainable relation to economic groups or classes, but was the product of some abstract causes remote from the chief business of life—gaining a livelihood.

Suppose, on the other hand, that substantially all of the merchants, money lenders, security holders, manufacturers, shippers, capitalists, and financiers and their professional associates are to be found on one side in support of the Constitution and that substantially all or the major portion of the opposition came from the non-slaveholding farmers and the debtors—would it not be pretty conclusively demonstrated that our fundamental law was not the product of an abstraction known as “the whole people,” but of a group of economic interests which must have expected beneficial results from its adoption?

Beard’s second chapter, “A Survey of Economic Interests in 1787,” is the foundation of the entire work. It rests ultimately, as does the work as a whole, on three assumptions. The first, which Beard states explicitly, is that “the whole theory of the economic interpretation of history rests upon the concept that social progress in general is the result of contending [economic] interests in society.” Hence, he states, one must at the outset identify the economic classes and social groups that existed in the United States in 1787 and determine which of them could expect to gain and which to lose from the overthrow or from the maintenance of the legal-political-constitutional arrangements prevailing under the Articles of Confederation. This he proceeds to do, in the form of an admittedly superficial survey. The validity of the survey hinges on the second assumption (one that he makes throughout the work), namely that the economic conditions of the period were reliably depicted, at least in general, in the existing body of historical literature on the subject-most of it in the Fiske “Critical Period” tradition.⁴ The third assumption is less vital to the chapter but basic to the work: that it is valid to formulate categories of economic interests in advance of making the survey.

In view of the critical importance to Beard’s work, and to the present one, of his survey of economic interests, it will be useful to outline his findings briefly. He first divides all property into two major classes, realty and personalty. Owners of realty he subdivides into three subgroups of farmers. The largest agrarian group consists of the small farmers, who, for working purposes, are substantially all assumed to have lived in inland, frontier areas, and who are identified in general as the “debtor class,” responsible for the insurrections of the period and the “innumerable schemes for the relief of debtors.” A smaller group of farmers consists of the wealthy manor lords of the Hudson, whom Beard classifies as persons fundamentally anti-personalty and politically in sympathy with the small “farmer-debtor” hordes. The third agrarian element comprises the slaveholding planters of the South, a group which, says Beard, differed from its New York counterpart in two respects: first, it included “many who were rich in personalty, other than slaves,” and thus had greater “identity of interest” with northern merchants than with other farmers; secondly, it was in fear of slave revolts.

The small farmer-debtors, Beard continues, were adversely affected by the Constitution, immediately and directly, in that it expressly closed the avenues of escape from debt through state legislation, and established a general government strong enough to prevent them from ever rising again in armed insurrections. The Hudson valley manor lords were likewise adversely affected by the Constitution, but for more complex reasons. This class had taken “advantage of its predominance to shift the burden of taxation from the land to imports.” The Constitution deprived states of the power to levy import duties, which meant that its adoption would again place the burden of state taxes on the land owned by the manor lords.⁵ The slave-holders in the South, where no such shift in the basis of taxation had taken place, were not, according to Beard, adversely affected. Though the new Constitution “subjected them to regulation devised immediately in behalf of northern interests,” it contained several “overbalancing compensations” for the southern planters.

Beard now turns his attention to personal property interests. These he divides into four major classes: money, public securities, “manufacturing and shipping,” and western lands held for speculation.⁶ All four groups, he asserts, were suffering from the conditions prevailing under the Articles of Confederation—indirectly from the lack of an effective general government, directly from the attacks the state legislatures made on personalty. The Constitution was designed for the relief of these suffering economic interests.

In Chapter Three, “The Movement for the Constitution,” Professor Beard asks two questions: Were any interests adversely affected by existing legal-economic conditions? Were the leaders in the movement for the Constitution so affected? The first of these questions he assumes to have been answered with reasonable accuracy by his previous survey of interests. A reasonably accurate answer to the second he assumes could be derived from a study of the correlation between the activities and the economic interests of the leaders in the several attempts made between 1781 and 1786 to amend the Articles of Confederation. Assuming further 1) that the economic interests of such leaders remained substantially the same throughout these years and 2) that given individuals were consistent in their advocacy of change, Beard then makes a sketchy correlation survey. Quoting from primary sources in six instances and from secondary sources in six others, he cites three petitions for change that were presumably sponsored by persons whose chief economic interests were among the adversely affected forms of personalty, and names twenty-one individuals presumably having such interests who on one occasion or another advocated an amendment to the Articles of Confederation.⁷

In his fourth chapter Beard considers “Property Safeguards in the Election of Delegates to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.” The point of the chapter is that the delegates were selected indirectly, through state legislatures, rather than directly, by the people. At this stage Beard commits himself to a contradiction in assumptions which he never quite resolves. Whereas he assumed earlier (Chapter Two and elsewhere) that most legislatures were under the domination of agrarian-debtor interests in 1787, he now assumes that the selection of delegates by the legislatures facilitated the choice of persons representing the suffering personalty interests.⁸ Assuming further that legal qualifications for voting in the several states were actually enforced, Beard then makes a state-by-state survey of the property qualifications for voting and officeholding and finds that various such restrictions were in effect, some of them very stringent ones.⁹

Chapter Five, a survey of the “Economic Interests of the Members of the Convention,” is the second vital factual keystone in the edifice Beard constructed. Drawing data from two classes of sources (biographies, both full-length studies and briefer sketches; and primary sources, principally the manuscript records of the Loan of 1790, which show security holdings, and the Census of 1790, which shows slaveholdings), Beard examines the property holdings of each of the fifty-five delegates who attended the Philadelphia Convention. He concludes that forty of them “represented through [their] personal possessions” personalty in the form of public securities, fourteen in the form of lands held for speculation, twenty-four in the form of money at interest, eleven in mercantile, manufacturing, and shipping property, and fifteen in slaves. The significance Beard sees in these facts is closely connected with two assumptions he makes in this chapter. At the outset he reduces his possible findings to an either-or proposition when he states, “The only point here considered is: Did they represent distinct groups whose economic interests they felt in concrete, definite form through their own personal experience with identical property rights, or were they working merely under the guidance of abstract principles of political science?” The conclusion of the chapter is based on the assumption that a quantitative breakdown of such property holdings is unimportant; that is to say, Beard does not take into consideration the relative values of the various forms of property making up the total property holdings of each delegate.¹⁰

By the end of this chapter one important element of Beard’s technique is clear. In each of these early chapters he begins by stating the ideal procedures for the execution of the tasks he sets for himself, and announces that he intends, for practical reasons, to confine himself to a superficial treatment in search of clues and general outlines. As he proceeds into new areas, chapter by chapter, he summarizes the conditional findings and postulations of preceding chapters and assumes, for working purposes, that such tentative findings are established facts.

The next three chapters rest, in the main, on a single assumption: that the Federalist essays and other contemporary propagandistic documents and expressions of opinion are reliable sources on the nature of the Constitution and the contest over its ratification. In Chapter Six Beard analyzes the Constitution as essentially an economic document. This brilliant essay is replete with subtle assumptions, points of logic, and philosophical abstractions. Chapter Seven surveys the “Political Doctrines of the Members of the Convention,” almost exclusively on the basis of their utterances on the floor of the Convention. The keystone of this chapter is the assumption, partly substantiated by documented facts, that there was in the minds of the individuals concerned a connection between aristocratic or republican or other non- or anti-democratic systems of political philosophy and economic class thinking.

Chapter Eight, which consists of two parts, deals with the problem of ratification. In the first part Beard concludes that the procedure for securing ratification—namely through special conventions rather than by legislative action or popular referendums—was largely a tactical device to facilitate ratification in the face of what promised to be a difficult struggle. In the second part, a running survey of the formal process of ratification, in which he considers the states in a north-to-south geographical order rather than in the order in which they ratified, he concludes that the expectation of difficulty in achieving ratification was well founded: that ratification was accomplished in five states contrary to the will of the people; in one state with unseemly haste, where there were indications that the popular will had been thwarted; in one state where the popular will was doubtful; and in six states without any noteworthy resistance—in four of them quickly, in two slowly.

Chapter Nine, containing much the same methodological and logical assumptions as the earlier chapters, is a survey of the “Popular Vote on the Constitution.” Using ingenious calculations as a means of projecting a paucity of known facts into a larger estimate, Beard conjectures that about 160,000 persons voted in the election of delegates to the several state ratifying conventions, and that of these not more than 100,000 favored ratification.¹¹ The smallness of the vote, he asserts, made it possible for representatives of personalty interests to achieve ratification in the face of the fact that in the general population they were greatly outnumbered by representatives of agrarian interests. This assertion rests upon the assumption that the great majority of the adult males who did not participate in the elections were agrarian in their interests, and that virtually all men having personalty interests did participate.

Chapter Ten is a survey of the “Economics of the Vote on the Constitution,” and it presents the third vital set of facts in the work. Proceeding by states from north to south (but omitting Rhode Island), Beard does four things in this chapter, basing his findings principally on Orin G. Libby’s study of the geographical distribution of the vote,¹² several secondary accounts of ratification, and the manuscript records of the funding of the war debts. First, he shows that the geographical distribution of the vote demonstrates, in general, that the contest was largely one of coastal versus interior sections. Significance is attached to this distribution by the assumption that the coastal regions were dominated by commercial, creditor, and antipaper-money interests, and the interior regions by agrarian, debtor, and paper-money interests. Second, in terms of individuals, he shows that in one state, Pennsylvania, twenty-eight of the forty-six .Federalist delegates owned various forms of personalty other than securities, and that the interests of thirteen of the twenty-three anti-Federalists were primarily agricultural. Except for security holdings he enumerates the economic interests of no other individuals. Third, he lists, but does not tabulate, individual security holders among the proponents of ratification in seven of the thirteen states. His lists, when tabulated, indicate that 167 delegates who voted for ratification—25 per cent of the 667 such delegates in these states, or 15 per cent of the 1,111 such delegates in the thirteen states—were holders of varying amounts (mostly not particularized) of public securities of one form or another. Sixty-six of the 167 delegates listed as security holders lived in Connecticut. Finally, Beard concludes that these data indicate that the contest over ratification was fundamentally a conflict between economic classes.

Chaper Eleven is an analysis of various contemporary comments which bear out, at least in part, Beard’s analysis of the nature of the contest over ratification. This chapter rests on the same assumptions as Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight.

One additional observation must be made. As a basic feature of his entire work Beard uses what might be called a presentist frame of reference. That is to say, he assumes, consciously or unconsciously, that various questions, terms, and concepts which were current and had special meaning when he was writing had been current and had had the same meaning in the eighteenth century—such terms, for example, as “masses,” “radicals,” and “conservatives,” and the concepts of urban working classes and modern political parties. To some extent he uses the same frame of reference in analyzing his source materials; for example, he assumes that account books depicting the operations in securities under Hamilton’s funding plan can be interpreted in terms of twentieth-century accounting practices.

In general, historians have concerned themselves with Beard’s assumptions and his logic. Such an approach is inevitably fruitless, for when Beard’s logic is challenged his defenders can always counter by pointing to Beard’s data on the economic interests of the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention and on the distribution of security holdings among the leaders in the contest over ratification. Furthermore, to make Beard’s methods the question of first concern is to obscure and leave unexplored the question of whether a partially or wholly non-Beardian economic interpretation may not be valid.

Beard’s thesis can be tested by two valid procedures. It must be tested by both of them, but care must be taken to keep them separate, for a combination of the two is not logically valid.

1.  One may make the assumptions Beard made and use the methods he prescribed. This means that one asks, and seeks to answer, the questions Beard asked and sought to answer, by operating, so far as possible, within the framework of his own “broad outlines.” His work was “frankly fragmentary,” and he left it for other students to fill in the details. Until this has been done, Beard has not been fully tested, for his array of facts is otherwise inexplicable.¹³

2.  Or one may question the validity of Beard’s assumptions, his methodology, and the questions he posed. This must also be done if, upon testing the Beard thesis inside its own framework, it is found wanting. It must be done in order to answer basic related questions—those pertaining to the possibilities of a more rigorous economic interpretation, non-Beardian, pluralistic rather than monistic.

The first objective of the present work is thus to subject Beard’s thesis to the most careful scrutiny, to fill in the details, on his own terms, in the framework of his own assumptions, methodology, and questions—in short, to discover whether the details are compatible with the broad outlines he sketched.

If under such scrutiny the Beard thesis should prove to be inadequate beyond repair—if the Beardian “old tire” is beyond patching—one can move 1) in the direction of a more tenable economic interpretation and, should this prove partially or wholly inadequate, 2) in other directions. With respect to the latter it is possible only to summarize the verifiable facts brought out in the course of the present study with a view to discovering clues as to the paths that may lead to an understanding of the making of the Constitution.

Now, in exploring the possibility that a different economic interpretation of the Constitution may be valid, it may develop that such economic interpretation is 1) entirely valid, 2) entirely invalid, or 3) partially valid. Should either of the first two possibilities prove to be the case, it would not mean that economic interpretation is or is not universally applicable, but only for this specific series of events. From the point of view of exploring the usefulness of economic interpretation in historical analysis, the period under study could be filed as one in which certain conditions prevailed and which could be compared with other periods whose salient characteristics were similar. If, on the other hand, it should develop that not even the most carefully drawn economic interpretation can “explain” all the circumstances, but that it does seem to “explain” some of them, then one must turn one’s attention to these particular circumstances. By focusing attention upon these and subjecting them to the most rigorous analysis along every reasonable line of investigation it may be possible to learn something fundamental about the economic interpretation of history.

Unless economic interpretation proves entirely valid here, some broader questions about the making of the Constitution will remain unanswered. For suggestions as to the answers to these broader questions one must consider what approaches promise the most fruitful areas for further exploration.

Thus the basic aims of the present work come to focus upon four questions:

1.  Is Beard’s thesis regarding the making of the Constitution compatible with the facts?

2.  If Beard’s thesis is not tenable in the light of the facts and if his assumptions, methods, and the questions he poses are seen to be inadequate, can another economic interpretation of the Constitution be advanced as a tenable thesis or hypothesis?

3.  What conclusions, if any, on methodology and on the entire concept of economic interpretation of historical phenomena can be drawn from this analysis?

4.  If it is found that no economic interpretation explains the historical event under examination here—the making of the United States Constitution—what are the main avenues of investigation that must be followed in order to arrive at a closer approximation of the truth? That is, what positive conclusions can be drawn and where does one go from here?

NOTES

¹ The New York Daily Advertiser reported on July 23, 1787, that “the heat of the weather, on Tuesday the 3d instant, in Philadelphia, was 91 degrees of Fahrenheit’s thermometer in the shade.” In his diary, which is printed in Max Farrand’s The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (3 vols., New Haven, 1911), 3:552–554, William Samuel Johnson made brief daily notations about the weather in Philadelphia during the Convention. More days were described as “hot” or “very hot” than as “cool.” September 17 was described as “cold.”

² The work was published by the Macmillan Company in April, 1913, and was reprinted seven times before August, 1935, when it was reissued with a new Introduction. The text proper is the same in the two editions and the pagination is identical.

³ Beard carefully and explicitly denied that he was charging the members of the Convention with writing the Constitution for their personal benefit. The question, he said, was whether they can be considered, because of their own personal experience with certain forms of property which were adversely affected under existing conditions, as representatives of holders of such property in general. Beard, Economic Interpretation, 73. This is a subtle but valid and important distinction, often overlooked by Beard’s critics.

⁴ Traditional accounts pictured the decade of the 1780’s as a period of great economic depression and commercial stagnation, during which financial chaos had set in, certificates of public debt having become virtually worthless and state legislatures, under the control of demagogues and hordes of dishonest debtors, having inundated the country with millions of dollars of worthless paper money. Most of these evils were assumed to have resulted from the weakness of the Congress under the Articles of Confederation. Beard (pages 47–48) considers the possibility that this picture might be largely the fictitious creation of contemporary propagandists and later historians, but proceeds to accept the picture explicitly as generally sound, and implicitly as a working hypothesis.

⁵ In the introduction to his 1935 edition Beard revises somewhat his position regarding the landed aristocracy of New York. Citing Thomas C. Cochran’s doctoral thesis, Beard says that some of the lords held public securities and were thus in favor of the establishment of adequate federal revenues via the Constitution.

⁶ The classification of manufacturing and shipping as a single interest is Beard’s. He apparently realized later that it was illogical to consider these two quite different interests as one, for later in the book he separates them. That is, in the first five chapters, in which he lays the foundations for his economic interpretation, he classifies the four “suffering personalty interests” as 1) money, 2) securities, 3) shipping and manufacturing, and 4) western lands, but in his final conclusions he shifts and without preparation for the reader describes the four interests as 1) money, 2) securities, 3) manufactures, and 4) trade and shipping. Economic Interpretation, 324.

⁷ About some of the individuals Beard is mistaken. For example, on page 55 he lists King, Ellsworth, and others as public security holders in 1783. As is shown in Chapter 3 below, these men held no securities until later.

⁸ He could have resolved this simply, by assuming further that the state legislatures were at this particular moment temporarily in the hands of men representing personalty interests. Such a theory has been advanced for some states by later students—for example, by Robert L. Brunhouse, in his Counter- Revolution in Pennsylvania, 1776–1790 (Harrisburg, 1942).

⁹ This survey introduces another but quite related contradiction. That is, if only persons with large amounts of property could participate in politics, how could the unpropertied masses be ruling? Beard partially resolves this question when he points out that ownership of real estate was very widely distributed in 1787.

¹⁰ That is, he makes no distinction between, say, a planter who had land and slaves worth $20,000 and incidentally a few dollars in securities, and a financier who had invested most of his resources in securities. Each is classified as a security holder, and no weight is attached to the relative importance of the securities of each. This practice is consistent with Beard’s explicit concentration on the significance of holdings of various forms of property as giving the delegates experience with the tribulations of each, rather than as inspiring them to act in certain ways out of self-interest.

¹¹ After a survey based on tabulations from all discoverable voting records preserved in the archives of the thirteen states and of all votes recorded in extant newspapers of the period, it is my conclusion that Beard’s estimate of the total vote was remarkably accurate.

¹² Orin Grant Libby, Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Ratification of the Federal Constitution, 1787–1788 (Madison, 1894). Apart from interpretation, Beard’s work actually added only two things to this earlier study by Libby: biographical data on the fifty-five delegates to the Philadelphia Convention and information on the public security holdings of various individuals.

¹³ This is not to overlook the fact that data, particularly selected data, can be organized in misleading ways. The point is that until more facts are brought together, no close approximation of their most meaningful order of arrangement is possible.