Federalist 15
The challenges of a lack of union, especially a problem in trade and commerce and security, occupied Publius in essays 11-14; in the subsequent nine essays thoughts concerning the crisis of union achieve a heightened clarity. Hamilton set the stage in Federalist 15 for what was to follow: the “imbecilic” government under the Articles of Confederation has resulted in an “impending anarchy” that “intelligent friends of the union” realized required the correction of a whole new government.
Hamilton rightly noted that both defenders and critics of the proposed Constitution recognized the extant “material imperfections in our national system” that would require “that something necessary ... be done” to keep “the frail and tottering edifice” from falling “upon our heads” and “crush[ing] us beneath its ruins.” Hamilton advanced this argument in three ways: by focusing on the evidence of imminent ruin, by identifying the causes, and by attributing bad motives to the plan’s critics.
In the process, Hamilton invoked one of the oldest ghosts in political philosophy: the specter of sophism. In ancient Greece, the Sophists were itinerant teachers of rhetoric who, for a fee, would prepare the young men of the city for a life in politics. Their “art” involved dazzling the public with sophisticated sounding arguments that were often short on substance. In Socrates’ words, they would make the lesser seem the greater and the greater the lesser. No doubt their words could impress, but their efforts aimed at securing and exercising power rather than discerning and practicing what is good. As a result, their reputation has lived on as efforts to use arguments to deceive rather than enlighten.
Hamilton drew on this tradition by accusing the Constitution’s detractors as being little more than peddlers of modern sophistry. In his mind, the Antifederalists may have acknowledged the Articles’ weaknesses, but were strenuously “opposed to a remedy, upon the only principles that can give it a chance of success.” They have dangled that “fatal charm” that “seduced” Americans from traversing “the paths of felicity and prosperity.”
The claim has two parts: first, the dangling of the fatal charm; and, second, avoiding the path of happiness. But was it in fact the case that America was in an infelicitous state? What evidence could Hamilton produce?
America had, Hamilton averred, “reached almost the last stage of national humiliation.” “There is scarcely anything that can wound the pride or degrade the character of an independent nation which we do not experience.” He offers up: an inability to uphold obligations; an inability to pay debts; an inability to get foreign powers to turn over lands that properly belong to the US; an inability to engage in self-defense; an inability to hold other parties to the terms of a treaty; lack of control of the Mississippi and thus engage in commerce; a lack of respect from other countries (“our ambassadors abroad are the mere pageants of mimic sovereignty”); economic distress; an inability to allocate capital in such a way that it benefits industry rather than agriculture; and an inability to have a functional currency. “To shorten an enumeration of particulars which can afford neither pleasure nor instruction, it may in general be demanded, what indication is there of national disorder, poverty, and insignificance that could befall a community so peculiarly blessed with natural advantages as we are, which does not form a part of the dark catalogue of our public misfortunes?”
He laid the blame for all this clearly at the feet of the Antifederalists, those “who would now deter us from adopting the proposed Constitution” and who, having brought America to the brink of a precipice, “seem resolved to plunge us into the abyss below.” Should their unenlightened arguments carry the day, America would never recover. For that reason, Hamilton, not without just cause, reminded readers they were considering “information on a subject the most momentous which can engage the attention of a free people.”
One of the big mistakes we make in politics is overstating the importance of a case. Politics requires a sense of proportion. Presidential elections ought to be kept in perspective in terms of their significance. No doubt, it matters who wins, but the likelihood of one candidate’s victory moving us from a democracy to an autocracy are vanishingly small. Only when autocratic conditions are already in place, usually manifesting themselves as a plutocracy, which have nothing to do with either candidate, could that outcome produce that effect. The concentration of rule takes awhile. But sometimes politics does tilt toward existential issues concerning what sort of regime we will be, and these situations are never to be desired. Neither are they to be misconstrued as to the stakes and the conditions that create them. Clearly the adoption of the Constitution was one of those moments, and Hamilton identified the two principles that undegirded the political arguments.
The first instance involved the underlying cultural identification. I already discussed this with regard to Jay’s argument in Federalist 2 concerning the monolithic nature of the supporting culture. Hamilton in 15 referred to “the sacred knot which binds the people of America together” that could only be severed “by ambition or by avarice, by jealousy or by misrepresentation.” The “tedious and irksome” complaints of the naysayers resulted from their unwillingness to recognize the sacrality of the knot.
It was, as we’ve learned, an exercise in question-begging. To what “sacred knot” does Hamilton refer? The word religion, etymologically, means “to bind together,” so was Hamilton referring here to a common religion that binds all Americans together? If so, is it a church religion or a civil religion? I think his answer comes out in bits and pieces, but the short answer is that the experience of the war of independence was the key factor for him. That experience of fighting a common enemy had the effect, in Hamilton’s mind, of creating a permanent tie among Americans that rendered all other allegiances nugatory. It superseded all other differences they had and created a shared identity. One of the mistakes the Antifederalists made, in his estimation, was after the war redounding back to their pre-war ways of living and thinking, thus rejecting the most revolutionary of war’s effects: the ability to change the identities of the combatants.
Note how Hamilton says that the sacred knot binds together not the states, who the Antifederalists consider the proper parties to the Constitution, but “the people of America,” as if they have been coalesced into a monolithic mass with no consideration for the particularities of place, circumstance, culture, and economy. Hamilton makes it clear in Federalist 15 that this residual attachment to one’s state was the atavism that the Constitution was designed to erase. The Constitution was to be regarded as a compact among the American people and not an agreement among the states.
Granted, he acknowledged there are plenty of situations in politics that involve alliances among independent sovereign entities, and these alliances would result in treaties that spell out specific obligations and benefits and depend for their execution on the good will of all the parties. Should one party not live up to those obligations the contract would be rendered void. Hamilton, however, had already in Federalist 11 opined that the union created by the Constitution would create “one great American system” that would be “indissoluble.” Despite his claim about the parties to that union in 11, the indissolubility would only hold if you saw the Constitution not as a contract among the states but among the American people writ large. This debate would not be settled for another 80 years.
Hamilton’s argument proceeded from this stipulation, and not without reason. As he said, the problem with treaties is that they are always broken, so to understand the Constitution simply as a treaty between the states would result in its inevitable failure. If we were to understand the states as only sovereign entities the Constitutional “scheme would indeed be pernicious” and would “place us in a situation to be alternate friends and enemies of each other, as our mutual jealousies and rivalships, nourished by the intrigues of foreign nations, should prescribe to us.” The key was to understand that the states were not simply compacting with each other but were creating a “discretionary superintendence” (central government) that was to rule over them. In other words, the abeyance of state sovereignty was the key to the whole project. Just as nations could back out of an alliance, so too could a state, whenever it experienced an attempt “to restrain or direct its operations,” choose to back out of the compact, placing all states on the edge of a perpetual state of war with one another.
But why would these subordinate authorities choose to retain their rights and privileges? One possibility simply results from the nature of attachment, human beings always having a preference for what is nearest at hand. Another possibility might simply be habit and tradition, and those habits would have to be undone either immediately or gradually. But Hamilton focused cynically on a more base possibility: “It has its origin in the love of power. Power controlled or abridged is always the rival and enemy of that power by which it is controlled or abridged.” For this reason those who currently held the power that mostly resided in the states under the Articles, could not be trusted “with the administration of the affairs” of the community, nor to execute “with perfect good-humour” and “unbiased regard to the public weal” the terms of the Articles. The states would always operate in the interests of the parts and never in the interests of the whole. This problem, according to Hamilton, was more pernicious under the Articles because of the ability of one state to exercise a veritable veto, thus arresting “all the wheels of the national government.”
For that reason, Hamilton continued, debates over the Constitution ultimately resulted from considerations over who the parties were that created it and, in turn, were the parties over whom the new government could exercise some coercive authority. The key was to see the power of the new government, especially its power to “make requisitions for men and money,” as not extending to the states, but to each individual “American” citizen.
The great and radical vice in the construction of the existing Confederation is in the principle of LEGISLATION for STATES or GOVERNMENTS, in their CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES, and as contradistinguished from the INDIVIDUALS of which they consist. Though this principle does not run through all the powers delegated to the Union, yet it pervades and governs those on which the efficacy of the rest depends. [Emphasis in original]
He wasn’t wrong, and neither did many of the Antifederalists disagree with him, but not typically out of a mere love of power. A government which had the ability to exercise its power directly on citizens had to be both transparent and accountable to those citizens, and the proposed government, many critics believed, lacked those qualities. This problem was brought into even greater relief by Hamilton’s insistence in 15 that any government that makes laws had to have the ability to sanction violations of it, to “provide a penalty or punishment for disobedience.” In a twist of his argument, Hamilton argued that viewing the Constitution merely as a treaty would surely result in war, while that same government exercising power over individuals would be a softer and gentler form of coercion – a reality Tocqueville saw playing out, much to his dismay, some fifty years later.
Most importantly, since a sovereign state would have a tendency "to look with an evil eye upon all external attempts to restrain or direct its operations," a central government so constituted would never be able to keep those "eccentric orbs" from "fly[ing] off from the common center." In other words, the most vital function of the central government would be to control its members, and this function would always be tenuous if the members were sovereign states capable of exercising counter-vailing power. How much easier would it be to control weak and powerless individuals as the parties to the union, to hold them close to the bosom of power, particularly if that power was presented as nurturing and life-sustaining? This substitution of a pastoral centralized authority for the makeshift balancing by sovereign power in its own right was not an accidental happenstance that Tocqueville stumbled upon in his journeys; if Hamilton's argument in Federalist 15 is given its due credit, it was the essential feature of the system from the start.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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