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America | Fable 5
The screen said the Constitution was still in force, and Thomas Jefferson took that personally.
He sat in his own parlor at Monticello with the July heat pressing through the shutters, a laptop humming on the marble table between a snuffbox and a bundle of quills. The machine had announced the republic’s two hundred fiftieth birthday that morning with small exploding illuminations. Hamilton had taken to the machines with unsettling speed and scrolled with two fingers, the way he had once flicked through ledgers. Washington sat apart, coat on despite the swelter, watching the quarrel form.
“Say it, Thomas,” Hamilton said. “The day wounds you.”
“The nation is two hundred fifty. The instrument is a boy of two hundred thirty-seven, and I gave it nineteen. The earth belongs in usufruct to the living. I sent Madison a whole arithmetic on the point.”
“You sent it from Paris, between wine purchases, while the rest of us sweated in Philadelphia with the windows shut fast.” Hamilton turned the laptop around. “Twenty-seven amendments since. The living have been editing, sir. Consider the second article of your cherished Bill. I argued the whole Bill superfluous in the eighty-fourth Federalist; enumerate a right and you summon a century of lawyers to survey its borders. They have quarreled two hundred years over one comma.”
“No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms,” Jefferson said. “I set that down for Virginia without a comma in sight.”
Washington spoke from his corner. “I marched thirteen thousand militia against freemen bearing arms toward the Colonel’s excise. The right reads simpler than it lives. Their courts now weigh weapons we could never have dreamed. I do not envy them the comma.”
Hamilton pulled up the Fourteenth, and the room changed. Jefferson read the first line, all persons born, and felt his own preamble looking back at him with interest accrued.
“Equal protection of the laws.” Hamilton had lowered his voice. “National citizenship. The states brought to heel. It reads like my hand, though I never dared write it.”
“It was ratified at bayonet point,” Jefferson said. “Three-quarters of a million dead to collect on our deferral.”
“On our compromise,” Washington said. “I freed mine by will and told myself it sufficed. It did not suffice.”
Jefferson looked at the quills, the snuffbox, the furniture of a life six hundred human beings had been made to underwrite. “I trembled for my country when I reflected that God is just. Justice arrived without consulting my trembling. It is my sentence, finished by better men.”
Hamilton restored the mood by scrolling on. “The Sixteenth, now. A permanent national revenue! I called money the vital principle of the body politic and was burned in effigy for less.”
“I repealed your internal taxes the moment I had the power,” Jefferson said. “They returned, I see, with compounding. Your word, Colonel.”
Washington poured his coffee into the saucer, an old habit, and watched the steam rise off it.
“The Seventeenth melted my filter,” Hamilton said. “A Senate chosen by the very crowd it was built to cool.”
“The crowd is the country.”
Washington sipped from the saucer. “Some cooling survives. They still require sixty of a hundred to agree on dinner.”
Jefferson rose. “The next pair wants illustration. Come.”
The cellar beneath the dining room held the day’s only cool air, and bottles enough to scandalize a Volstead man. Jefferson walked the racks with a candle, past a machine someone had left blinking on a barrel head.
“They amended the Constitution to prohibit this,” he said. “Franklin’s instrument, aimed at the vine. I have written that no nation is drunken where wine is cheap.”
“They would have made a felon of me,” Washington said. “Eleven thousand gallons of rye the year I died. Mount Vernon’s best enterprise.”
“You both rebel prettily,” Hamilton said. “The republic’s first insurrection was over my whiskey tax. A century on, they banned the whiskey outright, then spent thirteen dry years repenting. And mark the manner of repentance: ratification by conventions of the people, the Twenty-first alone among the amendments. The correction came home through the very door we built.”
They carried a bottle up to the west portico, where the light was going amber over the Blue Ridge and Charlottesville below was assembling its fireworks.
“One more,” Washington said. “The Twenty-fifth. I resigned a commission and declined a crown so the chair would never need prying from a man’s hands. Eight of my successors died in it before anyone wrote the manual. Now the cabinet itself may declare a president unfit, on paper, with signatures. Hinges, gentlemen. They fitted the chair with hinges.”
“An energetic executive, safely removable,” Hamilton said. “I spent eleven Federalist papers wishing for exactly that and lacked the nerve to draft it.”
Jefferson drew the cork. The first rocket went up over the town, its soft concussion arriving a second behind the light.
“I called it a frail and worthless fabric,” Hamilton said. “I have rarely enjoyed an error. I enjoy this one.”
“I feared faction would devour it inside a generation,” Washington said. “Faction has dined nightly for two and a half centuries. The table stands.”
Jefferson filled three glasses and considered the arithmetic he had sent Madison. “I mistook the remedy. Article Five was my nineteen years all along, standing perpetual. Seven and twenty times the living have signed the lease afresh. It belongs to them still. They keep choosing it.”
Washington raised his glass toward the fireworks.
“To the living.”