Federalist 25
Last week, in discussing Federalist #24, I rehearsed in some detail some of the antifederalist arguments concerning a standing army, the main subject of Hamilton’s essays 24-29. One of the most succinct statements against a standing army was made by the writer using the allonym Brutus in his 10th essay, itself written as a response to Hamilton’s argument in Federalist #25:
“The liberties of the people are in danger from a large standing army, not only because the rulers may employ them for the purposes of supporting themselves in the usurpations of power, which they may see proper to exercise, but there is great hazard, that any army will subverts the forms of government, under whose authority, they are raised, and establish one, according to the pleasure of the leader.”
He went on to observe that “the pages of history” reveal such “events frequently happening” but especially in the histories of Rome and Britain, the two republics cum empires to which Americans most frequently compared themselves. The lesson was clear: if liberty in those republics could be subverted by a standing army, every republic had to be on notice. “You may be told,” Brutus wrote, “these instances will not apply to our case: —But those who would persuade you to believe this, either mean to deceive you, or have not themselves considered the subject.”
America’s war experience at that time, for both Brutus and Hamilton, seemed dispositive, but in completely different ways. For Brutus, the war proved that state militias were adequate to the task of defense, for “no country in the world had ever a more patriotic army.” The fighting spirit of these patriots found its proper champion in General Washington who, not “possessed of the spirit of a Julius Caesar or a Cromwell” resigned his commission, preserving “the liberties of the country” and keeping the infant country from devolving into a civil war that could have “cost more in blood and treasure, than was expended in the conflict with Great-Britain.”
This worry about “Caesarism” — that the Constitutional system would allow for the centralization of power in general and then subsequently its concentration into the hands of ambitious executives hungry for power and thirsty for glory, a charge frequently made against Hamilton — persisted among the antifederalists. Nowhere would this concentration of power prove more dangerous than with regard to the creation of a strong military, over whom the executive exercised command. Brutus reminded his countrymen that we could not always count on someone with Washington’s character being at the helm, that “the allurements of power and greatness” would continue to have an “influence upon men in our country,” and that it was a “delusion” to think that “the passion for pomp, power and greatness” did not “work powerfully in the hearts of many of our better sort, as it did in any country under heaven.”
There were, Brutus continued, two dangers to fear from a standing army: its use by the executive to advance grandiose visions and the “greater danger” of “overturning the constitutional powers of the government” and “assuming the power to dictate in any form they please” — a concern that resonates with certain sectors of our population even today.
Hamilton, too, predicated his argument on a rather darker understanding of human nature, conceding that the lust for power operated constantly, but that its most dangerous manifestations occur at the state level and not the federal one. Once in possession of their own military establishments, the “ambition of the members” of the union, “stimulated by the separate and independent possession of military forces,” would cause them “to make enterprises upon, and finally to subvert, the constitutional authority of the union.” Hamilton may have shared the antifederalist’s concern for liberty, but “the liberty of the people would be less safe in this state of things” for the almost counterintuitive reason that, since the people were less likely to know and trust federal administrators, the central government would be a safer depository of power. “For it is a truth which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are most commonly in danger, when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion” — in this case, friends and neighbors.
Hamilton and Brutus agreed on the need for a military, and agreed that the threat of Indian incursions and foreign invasions warranted some sort of military preparedness, but they disagreed both about the extent of the threat and how it might best be responded to, and consequently on the need to maintain a strong military in times of peace. Brutus conceded that “an absolute prohibition against raising troops” would be “improper” even if it were limited to “cases of actual war,” for the simple reason that a “small number” would be needed to maintain garrisons and arsenals on the geographic fringes of the union. It may also have been the case that a foreign invasion “may be so imminent” as to justify raising and keeping up forces in the instance, but none of this should require “keeping up standing armies in times of peace.”
Hamilton, though writing first, seized upon the apparent contradiction, modestly suggesting “various inconveniences” would attend state control of militias, for “the security of all would thus be subjected to the parsimony, improvidence, or inability of a part.” In other words, collective security would a) be only as good as the weakest or most feckless member state; and, b) have its burdens placed on the most vulnerable but, paradoxically, also most powerful member states, who would in turn use their built-up military strength against their neighbors. The states, now threatened by one another, would respond by building up their military capacity, leading to a Cold War style arms race, but among otherwise friendly states.
Furthermore: the tendency of each state to build up its military would intensify the feelings of citizens toward their state governments, thus weakening any attachment they had to the national government, resulting in the complete subordination of patriotic attachment to the nation. State militias, themselves a result of the love for power, would “naturally be prone to a rivalship with that of the union” that would allow the states “to make enterprises upon, and finally to subvert, the constitutional authority of the union.” Without brinigng up the issue of sovereignty and the solecism of a divided one, Hamilton drew attention to a principle of sovereignty that would bedevil the nation until it resolved it by arms: the impulse to having a final decision-maker and placing a monopoly on force in its hands.
This transferring of power and the monopoly on force from the states to the federal government, Hamilton realized, could not be accomplished without the raising and maintaining of a federal military force. Anticipating Brutus’s objection, Hamilton noted that once the possibility of danger was conceded, the propriety of a national army was as well, for only the national government had sufficient interest and vision to “judge of the continuance of the danger” posed by both Native tribes and foreign powers. For that reason, Hamilton continued, should it “be resolved to to extend the prohibition to the raising of armies in times of peace, the United States would then exhibit the most extraordinary spectacle, which the world has yet seen … that of a nation incapacitated by its constitution to prepare for defence, before it was actually invaded.” Congress, moving too deliberately to prepare a formal declaration of war, would leave us in the vulnerable state whereby “we must receive the blow, before we could begin to prepare to return it.” In order to “meet the gathering storm,” Congress must have the power to raise a military that the executive could then command, the dangers mitigated, Hamilton argued, by the unlikelihood that the executive and the legislature would ever cooperate “in some scheme of usurpation.” We have a choice, Hamilton said: we can either be “naked and defenceless prey” for foreign powers, or we can cower to our ill-founded fear that the leaders we choose might somehow use their power to subvert our freedoms. Put that way, the decision seemed obvious.
Then, too, Hamilton was not as impressed as was Brutus with the performance of the state militias during the revolutionary war. Hamilton claimed that a professional, standing army would have saved the country “millions of dollars,” while “the liberty of their country could not have been established by their efforts alone” — meaning the Americans required the kind of foreign help that could only get them further entangled in European affairs. In any case, war, as with all human endeavors, was better done by professionals and experts than by poorly organized and disciplined citizens. Then, too, Hamilton worried that the antifederalists traded off too much on the relative peace experienced in the years subsequent to the end of the war. The fact was that once people are under threat they will give little notice to rules and principles, all of their high-minded ideas yielding to the instinct for survival, so it would be best to prepare for the worst. Better to compromise on some principles now than all of them later, for all maxims yield to necessity, which creates breaches in the law that will undermine reverence and respect for the rule of law altogether.
Hamilton was not a transpicuous writer, a point Brutus made when referring to Hamilton’s “abundant verbages.” For Brutus, the question was one of scale. Granting that the federal government had to have some military capacity didn’t necessitate granting that power without restraints. Brutus argued that Hamilton’s granting of unlimited power to Congress to raise an army on the possibility of a foreign invasion was far different than giving Congress that power when the danger was imminent. Hamilton had not, as far as Brutus was concerned, demonstrated that political exigencies that could be handled with a limited force in a timely manner must result in Congress having unrestrained discretionary power in raising armies.
Like many of the antifederalist writers, Brutus believed that the best security against the potential abuses of power resided in the actions of a supermajority. Requiring a ⅔ majority for peacetime military build-ups would make the dangers of a standing army far less pronounced. One can’t help but wonder how American history might have been different — perhaps more prey to foreign invasion but perhaps also less likely to prey on others — had this ⅔ requirement carried the day. In any case, the suggestion seems a prudent response to the dilemma articulated: how best to provide for defense without such provisions resulting in abuse of power. It is also evidence contrary to a commonplace canard: that the antifederalists had no actual plan for governing.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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