Federalist 26
If you had asked educated Americans during the Constitutional period when America was “founded,” they likely would have answered “1688.” It’s not a date that means much to contemporary Americans, but it meant an awful lot to our forbearers. 17th Century British politics were dominated by two seemingly irresolvable problems: finding the right balance between the king and parliament (and within parliament, between the House of Lords and the House of Commons), and trying to resolve the violent battles between Protestants and Catholics. Modern Americans, with our emaciated religious commitments, may find those religious debates incomprehensible, unless we remember that most people will have something they’re willing to die for, and God help them if they don’t. If the stakes are eternal, why wouldn’t they affect our conduct in the here and now? Doesn’t the passion generated by presidential elections seem absurd by comparison?
Certain historical events are lines in the sand, clearly demarcating a world before and a world after. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was one such event. Not only did it lead to the following year’s passage of the English Bill of Rights and its establishment of religious toleration, but it also settled the constitutional arrangement concerning Parliament’s supremacy to the crown. From that point forward, the power of the king was limited and conditional. Furthermore, the English Bill of Rights declared standing armies illegal in times of peace. This definitive 17th century British event determined the terms of 18th century American politics, including the status of standing armies.
Hamilton, in Federalist #26, addressed this history directly, suggesting, despite the prevailing consensus, that this history had little to no relevance for American constitutional debates. Granted, the revolution did insure that English liberty was completely "triumphant,” but Hamilton’s close reading of the English Bill of Rights showed that the keeping of a standing army was only a violation of the hard won liberties if it occurred without the consent of Parliament. For that reason, he claimed, the antifederalist argument forbidding a standing army tout court was too extreme.
Both parties, knowing their history and philosophy, understood the Aristotelian problem of the mean and often employed it in their arguments. The concept is fairly simple in theory but difficult in execution: when faced with any challenging situation we have instinctive reactions, and these reactions can display either an absence or an surfeit of the quality needed to respond properly. There is a normal instinct we have when we face danger: some people flee it at all costs and others run headlong into it. The first group are cowards and the second are reckless. Somewhere between an over- and under-abundance of the quality we need to respond to danger is the proper balance, which we call courage, and which Aristotle referred to as the golden mean. Reason will always find the mean and good habit and training will make it our natural reaction.
Hamilton recognized there are dangers attendant to possessing a standing army, but also dangers in not having one. Accusing the antifederalists of going too far in one direction, driven by “a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened,” Hamilton believed that so long as the legislature had complete command concerning the raising and provisioning of the army liberty would be under no threat. Granted, Congress might become excessive in such provisioning, but just as being reckless is closer to courage than cowardice is, so too Congress expanding that power is closer to the mean than the antifederalist view that would “embarrass the government and endanger public safety, by impolitic restrictions on the legislative authority.” For their part, the antifederalists (Brutus 1) argued that history afforded no examples of government handing back a power once taken, but a power once given always expanded. Since that expansion was almost always gradual it was better to prevent the problem at its inception.
Hamilton took the antifederalist argument further than they did themselves, suggesting the internal logic of their position committed them to anarchy, an argument for which one looks in vain in their writings. Washing his hands of any calumnous smear, Hamilton reported that he “affirmed without the imputation of invective” that the “principles they [antifederalists] inculcate on various points” would make the citizens of America unfit “for any species of government whatever.” Fortunately, he claimed, the people engaged in the ratification debates “had too much discernment to be argued into anarchy.”
But that was a canard, as I demonstrated in last week’s essay. The antifederalist concern stemmed from Hamilton’s insistence, repeated here in Federalist #26, that a standing army had to possess sufficient power “equal to every possible contingency.” Hamilton believed the Constitution sufficiently dealt with possible abuses since lodging this power in the legislature “was the ultimate point of precaution, which was reconcilable with the safety of the community.” The antifederalists, he believed, in their overzealous defense of liberty, had raised the heat beyond “the due temperature of the body politic.” Concerns about standing armies, he continued, applied only to the actions of an hereditary monarch and not to “the representatives of the people in their popular assemblies.” The antifederalists thought the Constitution did not do enough to rein in legislative power as regards the formation of armies, and in a rather remarkable passage Hamilton argued that any preemptive restrictions on the legislature’s authority to raise and maintain an army should be regarded as a suggestion rather than a rule.
The English intellectual historian J.G.A. Pocock wrote a massive tome entitled The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. The “moment” refers to that point in time, usually at the beginning of a new regime, where the republic has to confront the possibility — nay, reality — that it comes with an expiration date, and within that context has to figure out how to remain morally and socially stable in the midst of the flux of events and irrational forces that destroy all systems. This included restraining the forces of corruption —certainly political and personal, but also in the sense that time itself was a corrupting force that could destroy a polity, like rust corrupts the bodily integrity of a car — that would cause the regime to fall apart. About Hamilton, Pocock wrote:
Lastly, Hamilton’s known desire to build up the republic’s permanent military strength, and the widespread suspicion that he hoped to head that strength himself, were all that was needed confirm his critics in their inherited belief that rule by a strong executive, wielding influence and supported by a monied interest, led logically to rule, at once corruptive and dictatorial, by a standing army.
These suspicions typically attended anti-federalist claims, often spurred by Hamilton's rhetoric, that Hamilton was a closet Caesar, even if Hamilton argued that his envisioned commercial empire was directed more by the structures of government than by an imperious dictator. Hamilton’s assurances that a standing army posed no real danger because its abuse would require collaboration between the legislative and executive branches rang hollow to the critics. Why wouldn’t such a correspondence occur if interests dictated? And here was the real difference between the parties: as Montesquieu observed, republics run on virtue and empires on interest. The real fault line between the federalists and antifederalists was over whether interest or virtue would ground the regime. Hamilton clearly took the side of interest and empire, while Madison believed he could use the principles of federalism to steer a middle path.
Hamilton could still trade on Madison’s ideas that competing interests within the governmental structures could provide sufficient checks against the abuse of power. Within Congress, the idea of a strong military force would always face resistance, and this resistance would be sufficient to avoid the dangers attendant to a standing army. Representative government insured opposition to any impulse to military build-up.
As often as the question comes forward, the public attention will be roused and attracted to the subject, by the party in opposition: and if the majority should be really disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.
Hamilton took the argument even further, in what for him was a rather unusual direction: by allowing that the states might with their own militias provide a counter-balance to an increasingly oppressive federal military. Americans citizens could count on the state legislatures “who will not only be vigilant, but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of citizen” to sound the alarm any time an abuse or expansion of power took place, and thus not only be the voice of the people but, “if necessary, the ARM of their discontent.”
In both instances one can’t help but wonder exactly how the opposition party and the states might take these measures other than in a purely rhetorical sense. Indeed, one of the great difficulties concerning the problem of sovereignty involved determining what tools, if any, states had at their disposal to resist federal encroachments. If, indeed, the states were to be the ARM of public resistance, then the employment of arms seems logically required. In that case, the use of arms to defend a state’s interest as it exercised its modes of resistance, which would almost certainly have to include secession, seemed reasonable, even if this conclusion went against all the other aspects of Hamilton’s arguments.
Hamilton’s lack of concern stemmed mainly from his seeming confidence in the vigilance of citizens as they supervised their government. An excessive military build-up would take time, and would also require collaboration between the executive and the legislature, and both these abuses of power would raise enough public concern that they could be stopped in their tracks. In any case, Congress as a representative body would never allow such problems to occur, the elected members remaining steadfast guardians of liberty who would also seem themselves as rivals to the executive, thus not likely to collaborate. “Is it presumable,” Hamilton asked, “that every man, the instant he took his seat in the national senate or house of representatives, would commence a traitor to his constituents and his country? Can it be supposed that there would not be found one man, discerning enough to detect so atrocious a conspiracy, or bold or honest enough to apprize his constituents of their danger?” It would only take one whistleblower to rally the people against their own government and, Hamilton continued, if we couldn’t assume that a) the whistleblowers exist, and b) that people would voice their outrage and thus stop the military expansion, then we should give up on the Constitution altogether, and “there ought to at once … be an end of all delegated authority” so that the people “could divide themselves into as many states as there are counties, in order that they may be able to manage their own concerns in person.” The debate concerning whether America was to be a democracy or a republic, with the theory of representation the hinge on which it all turned, now reveals itself on this most portentous issue: were the people close enough to a national government to be able to espy its expansions of power and respond accordingly? Anti-federalists doubted it.
Note the subtle shift in Hamilton’s argument from whether there ought to be a standing army to what the size of the standing army should be. The Machiavellian moment proved determinative for Hamilton: a stable regime required the proper application of force and the limits of such application could never be determined in advance. Granted, exigencies might require an expansion of force such that concentrated power did present a genuine threat to liberty, but this too was “one of those calamities for which there is neither preventative nor cure.” The threat is in the nature of the thing, and if the only alternative is anarchy, then the threat has regrettably to be embraced. Hamilton argued that union mitigated the threat, an optimism not shared by all.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
Related Essays
