Constitutional Idolatry

Since its inception in the spring of 2009, the conservative Tea Party movement has generated a torrent of online articles and blog entries - possibly a sentence of text for each of its actual members. Until quite recently, though, I've seen little (virtual) ink spilled on the Tea Partiers' interpretation of the historical era that inspired them, or on their somewhat idolatrous - not to say illiterate - attitude toward the culminating document of that era, the U.S. Constitution. Now, however, several authors and essayists have taken up those subjects. Award-winning historian Jill Lepore has a new book out on the Tea Party movement and the American Revolution, The Whites of Their Eyes, which wryly observes that in "the American political tradition, nothing trumps the Revolution" (p. 14), but notes that those who currently make use of it for political ends have no actual interest in history. History may be summarized as "change through time," and the Tea Partiers don't wish to acknowledge any lapse of time between the Revolutionary Golden Age and our descent into the Dark Age of Obaman Socialism.

Meanwhile, Harvard Law professor Michael Klarman and Economist columnist "Lexington" (alias Peter David) have commented on the Tea Partiers' ahistorical worship of the U.S. Constitution, which the TPers alternately deploy as a political talisman and as an imaginary key to the secrets of the Founding Fathers (and thus to the legitimate origins of the republic). Klarman calls this sort of attitude "Constitutional idolatry," and observes that the original U.S. Constitution contains several provisions that made sense to the Framers, but which modern Americans find repugnant (e.g. its support for slavery and the slave trade) or indefensible (e.g. parity in the Senate, the provision that the president must be a "natural-born citizen"). We might also note, as Woody Holton discovered while polling his students at the University of Richmond, that most modern Americans, when they think of the U.S. Constitution, prefer to associate that document more with the protection of legal, civil and voting rights than with the structure of the federal government. In other words, Americans put more emphasis on the amendments than on the main body of the Constitution. (See Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution [New York, 2007], ix-x.)

Finally, journalist and prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow noted, in a somewhat less acidic op-ed piece for the New York Times, that the Founding Fathers were themselves a pretty disputatious lot, and that several of the first leaders of the federal republic, notably Washington and Hamilton, took an "expansive view of the Constitution" at odds with the modern Tea Partiers' strict-constructionism. Just what you'd expect a font of liberal socialist treason like the Times to print, of course.

Apologies to Tonning

Last year, in my scintillating three-part essay on the Embargo of 1807-09, I wrote dismissively of American commerce with the Danish port of Tonning (or "Tonningen," as my source spelled it), asserting that American merchants falsely listed it as their destination in order to secure clearance for voyages to more lucrative ports in Britain or French-occupied Europe. I have since learned that there was actually quite a bit of American trade with Tonning between 1808 and 1810: 100 ships from the United States dropped anchor there in 1809, drawn there by Tonning's proximity to the French-occupied port of Hamburg. Between the end of the Revolutionary War and the start of the Napoleonic Wars, American merchants had developed a strong presence in Hamburg, where they sold American cotton, tobacco, and rice, as well as Caribbean sugar and tobacco. Hamburg was attractive to U.S. merchants partly because of its population of English-speaking traders - Napoleon would derisively call it "cette ville Anglaise" - and partly because of its accessibility, via the Elbe and associated canals, to the rest of Germany. In 1804, however, a British blockade closed the Elbe to unlicensed shipping, and three years later French occupation authorities began harassing American merchants in the city, suspecting they were actually British smugglers violating the Berlin and Milan decrees. Eager to continue trading with Germany, American merchants began looking for holes in Napoleon's Continental System, and in 1808 they found one in Tonning, located about 25 miles north of the Elbe and 60 miles from Hamburg. By the next year Americans were smuggling sugar and tobacco across the Danish border from Tonning to Hamburg, though they had to pay increasingly heavy bribes to French customs officials to do so. In 1810 a French crackdown on American goods and English-speaking traders in northern German ports effectively closed this "loophole." (See Sam Mustafa, Merchants and Migrations: Germans and Americans in Connection, 1776-1835 [Aldershot, UK, 2001], 119, 126, 206-09; J.J. Oddy, European Commerce, Shewing New and Secure Channels of Trade with the Continent of Europe [2 vols., Philadelphia, 1807] 2:139, 142.)

In any event, I won't be running down small nineteenth-century Danish ports again any time soon.