Federalist 16
In Federalist 16, Hamilton continued the argument he made in 15 and raises the stakes. He introduced what will be the topic for the next number of essays: how well have confederacies similar to the one under the Articles of Confederation fared? He suggested history was not kind to such experiments, while also turning his attention to the military implications of confederation.
To repeat: the big mistake of the regnant system, Hamilton believed, was that the federal government could only exercise authority over the states and not on individual citizens. This may seem to readers an arcane distinction, but drawing on the analogy I’ve repeated, this would be like saying the United Nations could exercise its authority directly on American citizens rather than on its member nations, including taxing and conscripting them. I doubt a charter of that sort would get public support.
Hamilton’s concern involved the ability to get the states to comply with their obligations. Politics always involves relationships of command and obedience, and Hamilton rightly divined that it would be easier to get individuals, who were comparatively weak and powerless, to comply than it would be independent sovereign entities.
The argument extends beyond relationships of command and obedience, however. Hamilton contended that absent a centralized government that can exercise its authority directly on individuals, the inevitable consequence would be war. In a confederacy, the individual members would always focus on their own interests, portending a state of anarchy, for “delinquencies in the members of the Union are its [a confederacy’s] natural and necessary offspring” and “the only constitutional remedy is force,” which would result in civil war.
Hamilton believed that a confederate system the individual members (the states) would operate primarily in their own interest, meaning that if the general interest ever ran contrary, then the states would become delinquent in their duties to the whole. How could the general government respond to such delinquency unless it had accumulated force superior to the combined forces of the parts? This would mean, Hamilton argued against the Antifederalists, that a confederacy would actually result in a larger military than that under the proposed Constitution.
Further: the looseness of the confederacy would not set the parts against the whole, but the parts against each other. Alliances would be formed between different members, and both in those alliances and in the absence of them, the larger members would prey upon the weaker ones. If any particular state, especially a smaller one, could not find other states to take their side in the conflict, they would surely turn to foreign powers to indulge their interests, thus re-introducing foreign interference, if not control, into American affairs. Hamilton had read his Machiavelli and knew that precisely this problem had torn apart Italian politics in Machiavelli’s time, the city-states having turned against each other and having invited foreign powers on to their peninsula to their mutual disadvantage. Machiavelli, in words that in Hamilton’s mind suggested Washington, had written:
This opportunity, therefore, ought not to be allowed to pass for letting Italy at last see her liberator appear. Nor can one express the love with which he would be received in all those provinces which have suffered so much from these foreign scourings, with what thirst for revenge, with what stubborn faith, with what devotion, with what tears. What door would be closed to him? Who would refuse obedience to him? What envy would hinder him? What Italian would refuse him homage? To all of us this barbarous dominion stinks. Let, therefore, your illustrious house take up this charge with that courage and hope with which all just enterprises are undertaken, so that under its standard our native country may be ennobled….
America, Hamilton believed, without a stronger Union under the Constitution, would increasingly resemble the chaos and internecine battling of 15th and 16th century Italian politics and would thus never achieve the greatness it was capable of.
Civil war, while the worst outcome of confederacy, wasn’t the only possibility. The more likely outcome would result from typical and expected behavior: when motivated only by self-interest, any party in a political system would suspend their obligations when they see others similarly situated suspending their obligations without repercussions. Any state observing the consequence-free delinquency of any other state would soon itself become delinquent (not unlike what happens in confederations such as NATO or the UN when member states realize they can neglect their financial obligations with impunity). States would fall behind in their “pecuniary contribution” and the confederate government would not know if this was due to “disinclination or inability” and would thus, assuming the worst, likely employ the wrong amount of force to rectify the problem. This standard problem of political life — how do we know why subordinate parties act the way they do and what difference does it make? — would become a permanent feature of the confederacy, Hamilton believed. Only if the whole controlled the parts could the confusion caused by non-compliance be resolved.
The solution for Hamilton, again, was to extend the power of the central government not over its member states, but over the individuals of which they were composed. A more fine-grained approach to the exercise of power was required, and in Hamilton’s paradoxical rendering such granularity would insure greater liberty by limiting the central government’s coercive force.
It seems to require no pains to prove that the States ought not to prefer a national Constitution which could only be kept in motion by the instrumentality of a large army continually on foot to execute the ordinary requisitions or decrees of the government. And yet this is the plain alternative involved by those who wish to deny it the power of extending its operations to individuals. Such a scheme, if practicable at all, would instantly degenerate into a military despotism; but it will be found in every light impracticable.
Why "impracticable"? Because the confederate government would never have the resources necessary to exercise the enormous powers required by logical necessity. Legislating over sovereign states required military power, and for this reason confederacies always failed. Only by extending its power to individual citizens could the central government operate in a way both effectual and conducive to liberty. In other words, you don't need a large army to get comparatively weak individuals to comply.
The result of these observations to an intelligent mind must be clearly this, that if it be possible at any rate to construct a federal government capable of regulating the common concerns and preserving the general tranquillity, it must be founded, as to the objects committed to its care, upon the reverse of the principle contended for by the opponents of the proposed Constitution. It must carry its agency to the persons of the citizens.
Hamilton was convinced that this fine-tuning of power would simultaneously control and focus it, much like an old AM radio dial. The Antifederalists were not convinced. Making power precise, they believed, made it both less accountable and less resistible. Consider here, as an example, Brutus’s reflection in his 6th essay on the power to tax (reminder: individual income tax wasn’t permissible until the ratification of the 16th amendment in 1913).
This power, exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every corner of the city, and country--It will wait upon the ladies at their toilett, and will not leave them in any of their domestic concerns; it will accompany them to the ball, the play, and the assembly; it will go with them when they visit, and will, on all occasions, sit beside them in their carriages nor will it desert them even at church; it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlour, preside over the table, and note down all he eats or drinks; it will attend him to his bedchamber, and watch him while he sleeps; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office, or his study; it will watch the merchant in the counting-house, or in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop, and in his work and will haunt him in his family, and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labour, it will be with him in the house, and in the field, observe the toil of his hands, and the sweat of his brow; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally, it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people, and in all these circumstances, in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them, will be GIVE! GIVE!
A power, Brutus argued, that can lay claim to every person in the community and every aspect of that person’s life must, he believed, swallow up every other form of power in the process, including non-governmental forms of power. This absorbing by a central government of other modes of social authority became the centerpiece of Tocqueville’s worries about the emergence of democratic despotism. Hamilton’s dream in Federalist 16 that “the government of the Union” had to have the power “to address itself immediately to the hopes and fears of individuals” and to furthermore “attract to its support those passions which have the strongest influence upon the human heart” was Tocqueville’s nightmare.
Hamilton in this context presciently raised the problem that would emerge not long after the Constitution went into effect and would be a constant bugaboo until the end of the Civil War: the problem of state interposition. Under this theory, states could interpose themselves between the actions of the federal government and the obligations of individual citizens, providing a buffer of sorts from centralized power. At the apogee of the crisis this would mean that states could nullify federal laws. Such interpositions, which according to Hamilton would ultimately lead to civil war, could only be avoided if the federal government’s powers would “pass into immediate operation upon the citizens themselves.” This would also mean that the federal government would have the power to punish “seditious individuals” and would greater ability to put down the “partial commotions and insurrections” that would always arise in any democratic system.
Defenders of Hamilton will claim that if the half-measures adopted under Constitutional compromise had been avoided, so too would have the Civil War that engulfed the country some 75 years later. Detractors will point out that the wiping out of intermediate authorities and the vacating of state power as an institutional counterweight to federal power rendered individual citizens more powerless, helpless, and dependent, thus attenuating the essential virtues of citizenship.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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