The Founders Were Not Just Rich Men Protecting Their Property

If you went to college in the last half century, there is a decent chance someone told you the Constitution was a real-estate closing with a preamble attached. Rich men gathered in Philadelphia, the story goes, locked the doors, protected their bond portfolios and called it liberty. It is a tidy story. It flatters the cynic, and it saves you the trouble of reading the Federalist Papers.

It also comes with a citation. The citation is Charles Beard, a Columbia historian who published An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States in 1913. What the classroom version usually leaves out is what happened next: other historians went back to the same kinds of records Beard used, checked his work delegate by delegate and state by state, and found that his thesis did not survive the audit. So let's do what the cynics rarely do. Let's state Beard's case fairly, then test it.

Beard's thesis, stated fairly

Beard was not a crank. He was a serious, prolific scholar, and his book was a deliberate challenge to an older style of history that treated the Founders as demigods. His argument, put in terms he would recognize, ran like this.

"Every constitution is an economic document. In 1787 the country was divided between two broad interests. On one side were holders of personal property: public securities, money lent at interest, manufacturing, trade and shipping. On the other were small farmers and debtors, whose wealth was in land and who wanted cheap money and debt relief. The holders of personalty were losing under the Articles of Confederation, because the Confederation could not pay its debts and the states were printing paper money and passing debtor-relief laws. The men who wrote the Constitution belonged overwhelmingly to the personalty interest, and many held public securities whose value would rise if a strong national government were created to pay them. The Constitution they wrote gave the new government the power to tax and pay those debts, and barred the states from issuing paper money or impairing contracts. Ratification was pushed through by the same interests, with little direct participation by the mass of ordinary men."

That is a coherent thesis, and it is falsifiable. It makes predictions. If it is true, the delegates who held securities should line up for the Constitution, the delegates who did not should line up against it, and the ratification fight in each state should split along the line between personal and landed wealth. Those are things you can check.

The audit: McDonald and Brown go back to the records

Two books did most of the checking. Robert E. Brown published Charles Beard and the Constitution in 1956, a chapter-by-chapter critique of Beard's evidence and his logic. Forrest McDonald published We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution in 1958, which did something more laborious: he assembled the economic holdings of the delegates and of the members of the state ratifying conventions and compared them with how those men actually voted.

The results, stated without the footnotes, were these.

1. The securities did not predict the votes. McDonald found that holders of public securities appeared on both sides of the fight, both at the Philadelphia convention and in the state conventions. Elbridge Gerry, who held public securities, refused to sign. Many supporters held little or none.

1. Beard's records were the wrong records. Beard relied heavily on Treasury records from the early 1790s, after the new government's funding program, to infer what delegates held in 1787. Holdings changed hands in those years. A ledger from 1791 does not tell you a man's motives in 1787.

1. The farmer-versus-financier split did not hold. In state after state, small farmers supported ratification in large numbers, and in some states the commercial towns and the agricultural regions did not divide the way Beard predicted. Local issues, from western land claims to trade routes to defense against Indian raids on the frontier, mattered as much as any class line.

1. Brown found the electorate broader than Beard claimed. Brown argued that property qualifications for voting in Massachusetts and elsewhere were low enough that a large share of adult white men could vote, which undercuts the picture of a Constitution forced through by a narrow propertied elite.

None of this was a partisan hit job. McDonald was a conservative, yes, but Brown's book and McDonald's research were reviewed and debated across the profession, and by the 1960s most historians no longer accepted Beard's thesis in its strong form. Even scholars on the left who kept economic history at the center of their work moved on to subtler arguments. The strong Beardian claim, that the Framers wrote the Constitution to protect their own personal holdings, lost.

The delegates were not a single class

Look at the men themselves, and the class portrait falls apart further.

Benjamin Franklin started as a printer's apprentice. Roger Sherman of Connecticut began as a shoemaker. Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock in the West Indies and arrived in New York with almost nothing. James Wilson, who did as much as anyone to shape the document, was a Scottish immigrant who died in 1798 hounded by creditors. Robert Morris, the great financier of the Revolution, ended up in debtors' prison a decade after the convention. If the Constitution was a scheme to protect the delegates' fortunes, it was a remarkably poor one for some of its authors.

And the men who refused to sign were not paupers. George Mason was one of the wealthiest planters in Virginia. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts was a prosperous merchant who held public securities. Edmund Randolph was the governor of Virginia. All three declined to sign the finished document on September 17, 1787. Mason's objections helped push the country toward the Bill of Rights, as George Mason Refused to Sign, and His Objections Became the Bill of Rights explains. Wealth was on both sides of the table, and so were ideas.

The ratification votes do not look like a stitch-up

If a propertied clique had the Constitution in the bag, the ratifying conventions should have been easy. They were not. The votes in the key states were close, public and bitterly argued.

Look at New York: three votes. Look at Rhode Island: two. These were elected conventions, chosen specifically to decide one question, and they debated for weeks in public. Massachusetts ratified only after the Federalists agreed to recommend amendments, which is a concession you make to an opposition you cannot steamroll. The details are in Massachusetts Saved the Constitution in 1788 by Ratifying and Asking for More, and the New York fight is in Hamilton at Poughkeepsie, How New York Ratified by Three Votes.

A fix, to borrow the cynic's word, does not usually come down to three votes in Poughkeepsie.

The clauses a rich men's club would have written, and did not

Here is a test the Beard thesis rarely gets put to. If a class of wealthy men set out to lock in their advantage, what would they write? They would write property qualifications for office, so that only men like them could serve. They would write property qualifications for voting in federal elections. They would make the national legislature hereditary or appointed. They would protect titles and ranks.

The Constitution does none of it. The convention debated property qualifications for members of Congress in the summer of 1787 and left them out. The document sets only age, citizenship and residence requirements for the House, the Senate and the Presidency. It sets no federal property test for voters; Article I, Section 2 ties the House electorate to whoever may vote for the larger branch of each state legislature, which left the question with the states, and the states widened the franchise in the decades that followed. Article I, Section 9 forbids the United States to grant any title of nobility. Article VI bans religious tests for office, which opened federal service to men outside the established churches of several states.

A financier writing a charter for financiers would not have produced that document. A people writing a charter for self-government would.

What the Framers argued about in their own words

The deepest problem with the Beard thesis is not the ledgers. It is that it ignores what the Framers spent the summer of 1787 arguing about, and what the ratifiers spent the following year debating. Read the debates and you find men arguing about representation, the separation of powers, the danger of a standing army, the extent of a republic, the power of the purse, the rights of conscience, the election of the President, the jurisdiction of courts and the relation of the states to the nation. Money comes up, of course. So does nearly everything else.

Beard leaned heavily on Federalist 10, and he was right that Madison talked frankly about property there:

the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property.

But read the rest of the paper. Madison's aim is not to protect one faction's property against another. It is to build a republic large enough that no single faction, rich or poor, creditor or debtor, can easily seize the government and use it against everyone else. He wants to control the effects of faction, all of them. A system designed so that no single interest can capture it is the opposite of a system designed to serve one interest. For more on that argument see Federalist 10 Explains Why a Large Republic Tames Faction Best.

And when the Framers did protect property, they protected it for everyone. The Contract Clause in Article I, Section 10 barred states from impairing the obligation of contracts, which protected a farmer's mortgage terms as much as a merchant's loan. The ban on state paper money protected wage earners and small savers from inflation as much as it protected creditors. The Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause protects the smallholder's lot as much as the planter's estate. A rule of law that keeps the government from rewriting your deals is a protection for anyone who owns anything, and that is most people.

The best version of the critique that survives

Fairness cuts both ways. Here is what remains true after the audit.

The Framers did care about property, openly and without apology. They lived through a decade in which several states passed laws that let debtors pay in depreciated paper and that set aside court judgments, and they saw those laws as injustice. Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787 frightened many of them. The Constitution's grant of a national taxing power and its limits on the states were in part a response to those experiences. That much of Beard's picture is accurate.

But the accurate part is not a scandal. Protecting property is not a betrayal of liberty; it is part of it. Locke placed property among the ends for which governments are instituted, and the colonists' first grievance with Parliament was taxation without consent, which is a property claim. A government that can take what you earn without your consent can take nearly anything else. When the Framers secured property against arbitrary state laws, they were securing the ordinary person's ability to plan, save, contract and keep what he built. Beard treated that concern as a mask over self-interest. The Framers treated it as a principle of justice, and most Americans still do.

Why the myth persists

If the Beard thesis lost the scholarly argument decades ago, why does it keep showing up in classrooms and opinion columns?

Because it is useful. If the Constitution is merely a rich men's contract, then its limits on government are merely obstacles erected by the rich, and anyone who wants a larger state can wave them aside without answering them. The economic interpretation does not engage the separation of powers; it dissolves it. It does not argue with Federalist 51; it psychoanalyzes the author. That is a convenient move for anyone whose program the Constitution blocks, and it is why the thesis lives on long after the evidence moved out.

The honest answer is to read the documents. The founders' page on this site has short profiles of the delegates, and the range of backgrounds is itself an argument. Some were rich. Some were self-made. Some died broke. They disagreed with each other loudly and often. What they shared was not a portfolio. It was a set of convictions about consent, limited power and the rights of the individual, argued in public and ratified by elected conventions in thirteen states.

The case in brief

1. Charles Beard's 1913 thesis said the Framers wrote the Constitution to protect their personal holdings, especially public securities, and it made predictions that could be checked.
2. Robert Brown in 1956 and Forrest McDonald in 1958 checked them and found that securities holders and men of every economic station stood on both sides of the fight.
3. The ratification votes were close and public, with New York ratifying by three votes and Rhode Island by two, which is not how a closed deal looks.
4. The Framers argued mainly about power, representation and rights, and the property protections they wrote served ordinary owners as much as the wealthy.
5. The Beard myth survives because it lets critics dismiss the Constitution's limits without answering them, and the cure is to read what the Framers actually wrote.

What you can do: read Federalist 10 in full, then read the profiles of three delegates you have never heard of on the site's founders page.