Federalist 18-20
by Jeff Polet, director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
The use and interpretation of the historical record presents one of the more interesting aspects of the American Constitutional period. I’ve already discussed the ways in which Publius referred to “the petty republics of the past” with their distressing record of failure. At the end of Federalist 17 Hamilton promised that Publius would turn his attention to these republics in order to enlighten America’s own tenuous moment. In 18-20 Madison looked at a series of historical examples to demonstrate the need for adopting the Constitution.
The specific examples he offers are detailed and I won’t rehearse all the examples and arguments he makes. There are some matters of consequence, however, that are worth drawing the reader’s attention to. In preparation for the Constitutional Convention Madison had immersed himself in reading the histories and constitutions of other countries. Jefferson had sent from Paris a trunkful of books to Madison, which he systematically worked his way through. The books contained not only copious information about constitutions but also the works of classical historians and thinkers such as Plutarch, Polybius, Thucydides, Tacitus, and others.
American writers in the 18th century tended to think of history differently than we do. For one thing, while we tend to see history in a linear fashion that tells a tale of endless progress, Madison and others saw history in terms of its cyclical patterns, the most significant of which involved the ways that human societies mimicked nature’s patterns of birth, growth, decay, and death. This cycle repeated itself in the rise and fall of empires, and the idea of avoiding that fate consumed the writers of the Constitutional era.
In the second place, thinkers at that time were more likely to see history in terms of its continuities rather than its discontinuities. We like to divide history into periods and to dissolve the connections between them, but Madison more likely saw American history as intimately tied to the ancient past, if not a renewed expression of it. For that reason, the successes and failures of the past provided more than just a lesson: they created the framework for action in the present.
Finally, Madison and others thought that the study of history provided a relief from the pressures of the moment. In many ways the study of history released the reader from the “vain and perishing curiosities” of the present to turn their attention to more eternal verities. This squared in general with their conception of what human beings are: finite creatures with a thirst for the infinite.
One of the important lessons we can draw from that period is that, underneath all their disagreements, federalist and anti-federalist alike read the great thinkers and writers of the past, and this shared canon provided not just a ground for unity but also a framework that contained their disagreements. The American “founding” may have created a “new order for the ages,” but those who both created and opposed it drew heavily upon the past.
Note, for example, the use of classical names as pseudonyms. The antifederalist names are especially significant, for they typically chose the names of figures who were protecting the Roman Republic against the imperial designs of Caesar. Their point was clear: the Constitution itself was a long-term recipe for empire, undermining the commitment to republicanism and, more importantly, republican virtue, which alone could anchor a good polity. The federalist emphasis on interest and passion and mechanical balances, they believed, could not possibly result in a well-ordered and virtuous regime.
In her book The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 17870-1810, Caroline Winterer writes that “Next to Christianity, the central intellectual project in America before the late 19th century was classicism.” Of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention 31 of them were college-educated, which meant schooled in the ancient classics. Studying ancient texts, the founders believed, would “form the sentiments and polish the tastes” while it would also “fertilize and enlarge the mind” of those who were to become statesmen.
The importance of the ancient world as a moral example could be clearly seen in the art and architecture of the era and the employment of symbolic forms within even the most quotidian of writings. The neo-classical architectural model, monstrously exaggerated in the fascistic neo-classicism of 20th century monumental architecture, would, in Jefferson’s words, “be more than things of beauty and convenience; above all, they should state a creed.” That creed, of course, related to the moral and intellectual and civic virtues which the ancients had first and clearly articulated. Winterer points out, furthermore, that the Roman gods Minerva, Columbia, Ceres, Mercury, and Hercules were often featured as a shorthand and widely understood way of expressing a respective commitment to liberty, martial valor, agricultural fecundity, commerce, and civic virtue. The neo-classicism of the Constitutional era aimed to elevate our sentiments and ennoble our minds, and thus our politics.
An important related idea of the era was that politics had to be populated and run by “gentlemen” if it was to remain a humane enterprise. The “gentleman” was a man of classical learning who carried and conducted himself with a noble bearing. Constantly attendant to perception and reputation, the gentleman possessed impeccable manners, exhibited self-control, dedicated himself to performing well his duties and obligations, prided himself on his rhetorical skills, modeled civility and charity, and sought to bring out the best in others. A republic required such gentlemen to maintain itself and provide leadership, and classical learning was essential to forming the ethical human beings who could take up and perform well those duties. As Winterer noted, antiquity was not something they simply received or enjoyed, but something they did. The learning made the man.
Antiquity provided the leaders of the fledgling republic with a series of cautionary tales about what happened when liberty became unrestrained and passions unfettered, when ambition increased with power, when checks upon appetite were weakened or removed. The study of the past reminded federalist and anti-federalist alike that “republics were fragile entities suspended perilously in time and that balanced governments depended on the civic virtue of their citizenry to withstand corruption, private ambition, and dependence, the relentless forces of decay.” For the anti-federalists especially, the importance of virtue was the great lesson of the past and the innovations of Publius, suggesting that a good regime could be built by a mechanistic channeling of interest and passion and bypass the need for virtue altogether, would hasten America's demise. History, they believed, was not kind to such novelties.
Suggesting that virtue was incidental to public life would also render it increasingly irrelevant in private life, and the excesses and deficiencies in virtue of citizens in their ordinary interactions would soon corrupt the pubic sphere as well. People unrestrained in their private interactions would find their appetites unsatisfied in public life as well, with the clamoring of “more, more” gradually stressing the capacities of government and busting its budgets. A people nurtured on self-interest, ambition, pride, and corrupted by luxury would have little regard for the public good or the welfare of others and would, in the words of one writer of the day, “first make them ripe for, and then compleat their destruction.” Whatever else antiquity taught us, most anti-federalists believed, it was (in the words of Edmund Burke) “written in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds could not be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
Publius drew a slightly different, though also valid, conclusion about the lessons of antiquity. More interested in the lessons drawn from Greece than from Rome, Publius believed the Achaeans displayed the twin problems of mobocracy (as Madison would write later: “if every Athenian were a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still be a mob”) and constant war among the constituent parts of the confederacy. Madison’s ruminations in Federalist 18 revolve completely around the disasters of the Peloponnesian Wars, during which the warring cities could not recognize or act on their common interests and shared culture to stop their bickering long enough to fend off the Persians and the Macedonians.
Madison also drew on the work of contemporary historians of the ancient world, specifically that of the churchmen Claude-François-Xavier Millot and Gabriel Bonnot de Mably. These two French writers and historians wrote works exploring the ancient concepts of liberty and equality, with the latter’s work exercising significant influence on the revolutionaries in France, and who had remained a life-long friend of Rousseau’s after the great French thinker had tutored the Abbe’s nephews. All of which reminds us that the statesmen of our founding era were tremendously learned and well-read individuals, demonstrating in both word and deed the importance of learning and reading to shape the imagination and character of political leaders. A person not well-read was a buffoon and hardly in a position to engage in the politics necessary to sustain republican life, nor would such an untutored person appreciate the relative importance of politics in human affairs. The grasping after power was undignified for it was the blessings of hearth and kin that most deeply stirred republican sentiments.
Madison spent so much time digressing into the history of the Grecian city-states in order to make his central point that the great threat to liberty and good order was not the potential for tyranny by the central government, as the anti-federalists claimed, but rather dissolution and disagreement within the parts. It was by violating the sovereignty of the parts of the Greek federation that foreign powers were able to subdue the whole. Divide and conquer. “The Achaeans were cut to pieces,” Madison wrote, “and Achaia loaded with chains, under which it is groaning at this hour” all while “the last hope of ancient liberty was torn to pieces.”
In Federalist 19 Madison, drawing on the work of the Roman historian Tacitus, turned his attention to the Germanic tribes of the first millennium C.E. and how the gradual union and distribution of powers within their federations would become a model for the creation of an ordered liberty in America’s constitutional system. But the history of Germany also offered a cautionary tale, for it was "a history of wars between the emperor and the princes and states; of wars among the princes and states themselves; of the licentiousness of the strong, and the oppression of the weak; of foreign intrusions, and foreign intrigues; of requisitions of men and money disregarded, or partially complied with; of attempts to enforce them, altogether abortive, or attended with slaughter and desolation, involving the innocent with the guilty; of general imbecility, confusion, and misery.” What was the cause of all this chaos? It rested in the idea of locating sovereignty within the parts rather than yielding all sovereignty to the whole as represented in a central government. That principle of divided sovereignty “renders the empire a nerveless body, incapable of regulating its own members, insecure against external dangers, and agitated with unceasing fermentations in its own bowels.” A confederacy might be able to operate well in normal circumstances, but history seldom provides normal circumstances. When the emergencies arise, and arise they will, that test the strength of confederacy, it would always fail and bring chaos and death and destruction in its wake.
In Federalist 20 Madison continued his historical investigation by looking at the low countries on Europe’s western coast. The story is repeated: the jealous guardianship by the parts of their prerogatives would also work to the disadvantage of the whole, either because of their collective inability to resist the intrusions of foreign powers or because with the confederation itself the stronger members would prey upon the weaker ones. “It has more than once happened, that the deficiencies had to be ultimately collected at the point of the bayonet; a thing practicable, though dreadful, in a confederacy where one of the members exceeds in force all the rest, and where several of them are too small to meditate resistance; but utterly impracticable in one composed of members, several of which are equal to each other in strength and resources, and equal singly to a vigorous and persevering defense.” Madison observed:
This unhappy people seem to be now suffering from popular convulsions, from dissensions among the states, and from the actual invasion of foreign arms, the crisis of their distiny. All nations have their eyes fixed on the awful spectacle. The first wish prompted by humanity is, that this severe trial may issue in such a revolution of their government as will establish their union, and render it the parent of tranquillity, freedom and happiness: The next, that the asylum under which, we trust, the enjoyment of these blessings will speedily be secured in this country, may receive and console them for the catastrophe of their own.
Having wrapped up this overview, Madison explained why he spent so much time on the topic, restating Hamilton’s earlier argument that the key to the new Constitution was that it had to exercise its powers directly over individuals rather than on the otherwise sovereign states as its parts:
I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred. The important truth, which it unequivocally pronounces in the present case, is that a sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislation for communities, as contradistinguished from individuals, as it is a solecism in theory, so in practice it is subversive of the order and ends of civil polity, by substituting VIOLENCE in place of LAW, or the destructive COERCION of the SWORD in place of the mild and salutary COERCION of the MAGISTRACY.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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