Elbridge Gerry: Letter to the Massachusetts Legislature on the U.S. Constitution

About the Author

Elbridge Gerry was a prominent American Revolutionary and politician. In answer to oppressive British policies of colonial government, including special taxes on publications such as newspapers and the infamous tax on tea, he organized passive resistance, such as boycotts of certain British goods. When Great Britain blockaded and even occupied Boston (1775–1776), because the city was considered to be in a state of rebellion, he organized the smuggling of goods into Massachusetts through his hometown of Marblehead. During the privation brought on by the Revolutionary War, he helped provide those most affected with relief supplies.

Gerry was famous for being among the original signers of the Declaration of Independence, as a representative from Massachusetts. He also signed the Articles of Confederation, and he advocated the organization of the American states into a confederacy that would give the individual states wide discretion in the running of local affairs. He believed the U.S. Constitution to be too restrictive of what states could do, which is one reason why he refused to sign the document when he was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. This refusal meant that he was frequently condemned in print as being selfish or otherwise ill-intentioned. His greatest worry about the Constitution was that it gave the new central government too much power and failed to safeguard the civil rights of Americans. He had wanted a bill of rights included in the original Constitution and had spoken to the convention about his desire for explicit protections of civil liberties.

Of greatest concern for Gerry was freedom of the press. It was perhaps because he held high the principle of a press free from government regulation that he wrote as forthrightly as he did, insisting on his rights as a free citizen to speak his mind in public. In his writings he was often sarcastic, a trait that put off some readers, but he nonetheless presented his ideas with a refreshing forthrightness that allowed people to know exactly where he stood on social and political issues, and he was fearless in his expression of even very unpopular points of view. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, there seems no mistaking his views, yet in his own day his very forthrightness made some people suspicious of his motives, apparently in the belief that there had to be opinions he was hiding behind his open facade. Gerry was a significant influence on the Bill of Rights, produced as the first ten amendments to the Constitution. During the period when the states were ratifying the Constitution, he argued vigorously for the states to require as a condition of ratification that a bill of rights be created by the First Congress. His hand can be seen not only in the federal protections of free press and free speech but also in the rights of citizens to bear arms in order to form state militias. He feared that the Senate and the presidency were too powerful and could fall into the hands of tyrants, and he therefore wanted states to be able to protect the rights of their citizens by having militias over which they had control and which could be used to resist an oppressive national army.

Although Gerry had a long career in politics, his writings of the era from the end of the Revolutionary War through the First Congress were his most influential. Throughout his political career, he believed that people were best served by local governments and feared that any federal government could possibly draw all power over people's lives to itself. Thus he advocated states being as independent of the federal government as possible in order to act as shields for their people against federal intrusions into their daily lives. It was his hope that the Bill of Rights would restrict the federal government enough to allow states to be independent in most matters while relying on federal law to protect citizens' freedom of speech, such that individuals could be independent participants in the local governments of towns, cities, and counties.