The Lives of the Constitution

Auteur
Joseph Tartakovsky is the James Wilson Fellow in Constitutional Law at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times, among other publications. As a lawyer, he has served as the Deputy Solicitor General of Nevada, a white-collar criminal litigator at an international law firm, and as a law clerk to a federal appellate judge.

Texte du rabat

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals-some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Tartakovsky brings to life their struggles over our supreme law from its origins in revolutionary America to the era of Obama and Trump. Sweeping from settings as diverse as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and crowded with a vivid Dickensian cast, Tartakovsky shows how America's unique constitutional culture grapples with questions like democracy, racial and sexual equality, free speech, economic liberty, and the role of government.

Joining the ranks of other great American storytellers, Tartakovsky chronicles how Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil War; how Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America; how Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order in the battle against Nazism and Communism; and how Antonin Scalia died warning Americans about the ever-growing reach of the Supreme Court.

From the 1787 Philadelphia Convention to the clash over gay marriage, this is a grand tour through two centuries of constitutional history as never told before, and an education in the principles that sustain America in the most astonishing experiment in government ever undertaken.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1
Alexander Hamilton
A War Ends and a Constitution Begins

In the winter of late 1783 the bells pealing in Albany and Manhattan to celebrate the peace between the renegade colonies and his semi-sane majesty must have sounded, to loyalists, like death knells. A half-million souls across the colonies stayed true to George the Third; in New York alone, in 1776, loyalists had amounted to nearly half the state's population. Alexander Hamilton, a Wall Street lawyer in his late 20s, understood why New York's patriots, a fever for vengeance crackling in their blood, were now robbing, exiling, hamstringing (disabling by cutting that muscle), and murdering those they called traitorous parricides. The war had been fratricidal and eight years long, our longest until Vietnam, and no place was occupied longer than New York City. New Yorkers saw their homes burned, streets denuded of trees, churches used as stables; they saw 11,500 friends and family die on reeking East River prison ships, bones still washing ashore a decade later. It was a time of crisis, and precisely what Hamilton needed to uncoil the powers that would make him loved and feared. He was meddlesome, imaginative, audacious, overbearing, pragmatic, indiscreet, charming, and tireless. He spoke with a confidence so unwavering that one might have supposed he had returned from the future.

Alexander Hamilton was shaken by the cruelties of his countrymen, who had discovered that duly enacted laws could ruin a hated minority faster than street reprisals. A statute from 1784 authorized the sale of seized Tory estates. Philipsburg Manor in Westchester, alone, was parceled out to 287 new landowners, averaging 174 acres apiece. Another law forever disenfranchised most Tories for holding principles inimical to the Constitution, though it mercifully exempted minors and the insane. When the 1783 Trespass Act encouraged patriots to sue Tories who had moved into the houses or used the businesses of patriots, an alarmed Hamilton began taking loyalist cases. Those breathing revenge, he felt, really only coveted a neighbor's house or the chance to eliminate a creditor or business rival, and for these unworthy motives New York was violating the treaty Americans had signed with Great Britain and risking the peace that the nation as a whole had achieved.

But most of all Hamilton feared what New Yorkers' persecutions said about their character. [W]e have taken our station among nations, he wrote, in early 1784, under the pseudonym Phocion, but now behaved like the dishonorable Greek tribe who pledged to return an enemy's prisoners only to execute them and return the corpses. He closed with a warning: The world has its eye upon America, but if our misbehavior showed that the bulk of mankind are not fit to govern themselves, then with the greatest advantages for promoting it, that ever a people had, we shall have betrayed the cause of human nature.

•••

The island of Nevis, a mountainous 36-square-mile speck in the Caribbean where Alexander Hamilton was born in 1755, looks like a jungle paradise. But for inhabitants, the azure waters lapping white sands, the drowsy palms and laughing parrots, probably seemed meager compensation for the earthquakes, hurricanes, pirates, isolation, malaria, and crime. While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, writes Ron Chernow in his 2004 biography of Hamilton, Alexander grew up in a tropical hellhole of dissipated whites and fractious slaves. Hamilton regularly witnessed auctions of sugar-cane slaves, with buyers who arrived with branding irons to sear living skin. He was entrusted at age 14 as a clerk for a local merchant. A letter shows Alexander reporting to his boss in stream-of-consciousness style: I sold all your lumber off immediately at £16 luckily enough, the price of that article being now reduced to £12, as great quantities have been lately imported. Indeed, there must be a vast consumption of this cropwhich makes it probable that the price will again riseunless the crops at windward should fall shortas is said to be the casewhereby we shall stand fair to be overstocked. Alexander managed shipments of mules and codfish, calculated currency exchanges, advised captains to arm against buccaneers. It was an unmatchable apprenticeship in the centrality of trade, credit, and commerce to the fate of nation.

Alexander Hamilton's life had strikingly modern touches. He was the son of a single mother who worked as a shopkeeper. When she died, Alexander, and his older brother James, both teenagers, were left alone and disinherited. The remainder of his Nevis family life was one sad fact after another. The town judge had to buy Alexander shoes for his mother's funeral. Years later, at his wedding to Eliza Schuyler, the daughter of a powerful New York patroon, not a single family member appeared on his side. Hamilton had everything against him, except the prodigious intellect that led a few local merchants to pay his way to King's College in New York City. He arrived on the continent in 1773, said a biographer, slight and slim, with a bright, ruddy complexion; light-colored hair; a mouth infinite in expression, its sweet smile being most observable and most spoken of; eyes lustrous with meaning and reflection, or glancing with quick canny pleasantry, and the whole countenance decidedly Scottish in form and expression.

In 1776 he dropped out of collegeanother admirable modern touchto take command of 68 men as a 21-year-old artillery captain, braving British fire (recklessly, some thought) and supplying his troops at his own expense. He soon became a staff officer to George Washington, the beginning of a historic two-decade alliance. The sonless Washington called the fatherless Hamilton my boy, and fellow officers remembered Call Colonel Hamilton as Washington's instinctive utterance when important news arrived. Hamilton could write…