Crisis of the House Never United: A Novel of Early America, by Chuck DeVore (Independently published, 278 pp., $24.95)
Tuesday marked Constitution Day: the 237th anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution by 39 of the 55 delegates assembled at Philadelphia on the final day of the Constitutional Convention. At least two delegates signed on behalf of each state, except for New York (which was represented at the signing only by Alexander Hamilton) and Rhode Island (which boycotted the convention). The signers included two future presidents (George Washington and James Madison), a future chief justice (John Rutledge), three other future Supreme Court justices (James Wilson, William Patterson, and John Blair), a future speaker of the House (Jonathan Dayton), three future Cabinet secretaries (Madison, Hamilton, and James McHenry), two future Federalist Party presidential nominees (Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Rufus King), and one future Federalist Party vice presidential nominee (Jared Ingersoll) as well as numerous men who would serve as senators, representatives, governors, ambassadors, and university presidents. It was already a distinguished assemblage, and involvement in the convention raised the prestige of the attendees. That included the 16 delegates who left the convention early or refused to sign the finished product; these included future attorney general Edmund Randolph, future chief justice Oliver Ellsworth, and future vice president Elbridge Gerry (who also gave his surname to a new word in the English language). Washington was especially particular about choosing justices who had helped write or ratify the Constitution: Of the ten men he chose for the Supreme Court, half had been delegates to the convention, and four of the other five had been active promoters of ratification, including John Jay (a co-author of the Federalist Papers).
Benjamin Franklin, upon exiting the Convention, was famously asked what form of government the delegates had given the people, and replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” But first, We the People need to ratify it in conventions specially elected in each state to decide whether to do so. Nobody was more sensitive to the challenge than the 81-year-old Franklin, who in his closing remarks inside the hall, cautioned his colleagues that “with so many different and contending interests it is impossible that any one can obtain every object of their wishes,” but despite his own reservations on some points, he intended to support the finished product in public because it was “the best possible, that could have been formed under present circumstances.” Those who would continue their private objections in public he compared with “the French girl who was always quarrelling and finding fault with every one around her, and told her sister that she thought it very extraordinary, but that really she had never found a person who was always in the right but herself.”
The Constitution may have been conceived in September, but it was not delivered until nine months later, when it was ratified by New Hampshire (the required ninth out of thirteen states) on June 21, 1788.
But what if it was never ratified? That’s the provocative question asked by Chuck DeVore of the Texas Public Policy Foundation in his alternative-history novel, Crisis of the House Never United. The book’s episodes cover the tumultuous years that led to the Convention, through the stormy ratification debates and into an America without the Constitution from the failure of ratification in 1788 through 1804 and the Napoleonic Wars. DeVore’s villain, who is instrumental in scheming first to derail ratification in New York and to divide the infant republic into squabbling regional confederacies with their own warring foreign policies, is that scoundrel Aaron Burr. The book opens with the arresting tableau of President Burr, in 1804, presiding in lower Manhattan over the beheading of Hamilton, Jay, and Philip Schuyler with guillotines newly gifted him by his ally Napoleon. If that seems fanciful, DeVore then retraces how it could have gotten to this point, hewing as carefully as possible to historical characters and events. Along the way, we encounter not only Burr, Hamilton, Napoleon, and some fictional characters, but also a rich cast of historical figures including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John and Samuel Adams, Daniel Shays, John Hancock, George Clinton, Albert Gallatin, Andrew Jackson, Benjamin Lincoln, Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, Henry Dearborn, Edmond-Charles Genêt, the vicomte de Rochambeau, and Horatio Nelson.
Alt-history is not really my thing, but it’s a lively read, and DeVore has a serious point to make about the dangers, then and now, of national divorce. As a former California assemblyman, he’s familiar with both the quarrelsome nature of politicians and the contagiousness of the Jacobin spirit. The book’s tale is at least plausible enough to make us appreciate what a near-run thing our national unity was when the Constitution was ratified, and why we should be thankful for its unprecedented durability.