Federalist 28
Hamilton’s extended meditation on the importance of a federal army continued in Federalist #28, the penultimate essay on the topic. Readers may recall that Publius had from the beginning argued that American republicanism was an effort to steer a middle path between tyranny and anarchy. This view was itself non-controversial, but much could be discerned by what a particular thinker thought was the greater danger. Having just overthrown a monarch, many Americans were more sensitive to the threats associated with tyranny, and in any case given life in the colonies at that time, being mostly localized and people being mostly civil, the concerns about anarchy seemed overwrought. Most locales and citizens seemed capable of the self-governance necessary to keep life orderly and peaceful.
For those who aspired to a more centralized government, however, Daniel Shays provided a gift. Historians have debated the legitimacy of Shays’ call to arms as well as its actual consequences; indeed, modern revisionist accounts, probably more reliable than previous versions, have emphasized the ways in which the Constitution’s defenders exploited Shays’ Rebellion as an opportunity to secure ratification. Hamilton seldom whiffed on the chance, frequently referring to the trouble in Massachusetts as the kind of national crisis (anyone wanting to increase power will always claim there’s a crisis going on, a sense happily indulged by the chyron writers at our news agencies) that required not only ratification but a standing army. He referred to the rebellion frequently throughout The Federalist, but one of his more pointed uses occured in number 28.
In this paper, Hamilton justified a permanent standing army with reference to the threat of insurrection, for “an insurrection, whatever may be its immediate cause, eventually endangers all government.” The very idea of an insurrection has an interesting history, and typically historical reflection is kind to the insurgents. Literally a “rising up” or an uprising that aspires to overthrow civil authority, insurrections have long been viewed as preludes to rather than threats to democracy. Whether it’s the Athenians overthrowing Hippias or the Maccabeans revolting or the Servile Wars that made Spartacus a hero – for insurrections are often slave revolts, such as that of Nat Turner in the American context – insurrections do in politics what recessions do in economics: they trim bloated power and wealth. It is William Wallace and not Edward I who is the hero of Braveheart. Indeed, the American Revolution itself was an insurrection.
Just as someone who marries the person with whom he cheated on his wife has invited serious trust issues into his second marriage, so too those who have successfully completed a revolution have insured for themselves a permanent legitimacy crisis. One strand of Christian reflection on politics, based on a reading of Romans 13, stressed obedience even to tyrannical governments. Over time, the moral legitimacy of overthrowing an immoral (or tyrannical) government gained traction as political thinkers increasingly argued for the right of revolution. Once that right is conceded, however, any new government is subject to popular whims, the resisters now declaring themselves the true patriots and defenders of freedom. Political philosophers such as John Locke, himself involved in revolutionary activities in England, tried in his Second Treatise on Government, a book quite influential in the period of the American Revolution, to thread the needle when it came to laying down justifications for revolution strict enough that it didn’t permanently destabilize all government. At the same time, the threat of revolution would prove useful for keeping in check the natural tendency of government to increase its power. This is why Thomas Jefferson had noted that “a little revolution now and then is a good thing” and that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.”
Knowing that he was centralizing power and buttressing such power with a standing army, Hamilton couldn’t help but worry that this combination was anything less than an invitation to insurrection, for “seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body.” Experience had long taught that people, when unhappy with their condition, would rise up against their government. So long as those uprisings could remain localized, local forces and hastily organized militias would prove adequate to the task. But once the scale of politics changed, the nature of coercive and suppressive power had to change as well. When it came to preventing the people from taking matters along with pitchforks into their own hands, “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.”
Continuing the medical metaphor, Hamilton noted that insurrection was a “contagion” that would spread throughout the body politic, and the cure often appeared too late to address the disease. Better to act prophylactically and take care of the contagion before it had a chance to spread, and such preventive measures necessarily required blunt applications of power. What Shays had done in Massachusetts portended a general political crisis. Fortunately, in Hamilton’s judgment, forceful and immediate action had stopped the spread.
Economic policies in the mid-1780’s in some states proved quite unfriendly to the farmers who made up the bulk of the American population. Given the currency crisis of the time many farmers were unable to discharge their debts and consequently lost their land and other property to debt collectors. Their unhappiness with the state of affairs began to pick up steam in 1786, the year before the Convention. In September of that year Henry Lee wrote to Washington that the contagion was not confined to small parts of the nation but was already infecting the whole. In August of that year, their numerous petitions to the government having failed, farmers, led by Daniel Shays, organized protests at court hearings and began to block the efforts of debt collectors, leading to skirmishes. By the end of the year the governor of Massachusetts assembled a militia of 1200, and in January of 1787 encountered Shays and his militia as they attempted to take the federal armory in Springfield. Four of the insurgents were killed, many of them captured and imprisoned, although almost all of them later received pardons. Washington himself had commented on “the happy termination of this insurrection” that had threatened “not only the hemisphere of Massachusetts” but had begun to spread “its baneful influence” over “the tranquility of the Union.”
Given that an insurgency anywhere was a threat to order everywhere, and given that, as Hamilton noted, it was “an inevitable consequence of civil society upon an enlarged scale,” the demands of order required a standing army prepared to put down “the unceasing agitations and frequent revolutions which are the continual scourges of petty republics.” Hamilton believed the enlarged scale of the Constitutional system made insurrections more likely to exist and less likely to be successful.
Even if America was not prepared to expand the scale of political life, Hamilton believed, the problem of insurrection would admit of no solution. A permanent feature of all government, insurrections were particularly likely in fragile and unstable republican forms, particularly once the government began to depart from republican principles. Indeed, should the nation fracture into parts, Hamilton claimed, those parts would have the same problem, and would turn on each other as the problem spread across borders. Furthermore, while it may have been the case that local authorities were closer to the problem, it also meant they would be more difficult to overthrow, in part because they could surveil the public more easily. By identifying the connection between government’s power of surveillance and its tendency to having “usurpers” wield unlimited power, Hamilton drew attention to one of the central problems of politics. His argument for a strong federal government and a standing army hinged in large part on his conviction that the federal government would have no capacity to spy on its own citizens. For that reason, in what seems counter-intuitive to us now, it would be a lot easier for citizens to overthrow the national government than it would their local or state government. Of course, should the federal government acquire surveillance capacity, the people were well and truly screwed. Furthermore, the system of representation, Hamilton was convinced, made it less likely that the government would ever abuse power, even if it did have surveillance ability. Then, too, the army proposed remained too weak, given the extent of territory and the size of the population, to deliver on any tyrannical scheme. Granted, that military could gain in power, but only if the nation gained in size and population, magically offsetting the threat of the military. “For a long time to come, it will not be possible to maintain a large army; and as the means of doing this increase, the population and natural strength of the community will proportionably increase,”[1] thus making armed resistance enduringly plausible, but also baked into the republican system.
So what checks were in place to keep the federal army from abusing its power, not only suppressing citizen’s uprisings but also nipping them as seedlings? (We could refer here to arguments concerning the Second Amendment, but they’re not part of Hamilton’s argument.) Hamilton believed the system of congressional representation solved the dilemma. The representatives, drawn from the people, would not only represent the people’s will with regard to keeping the military in check but also in making sure that the government operated solely in the people’s interests, thus abating the need for insurrections, Hamilton’s reading of Shays’ Rebellion notwithstanding. Should the people conclude, however, that their representatives were no longer ruling in the constituent's interests but in a competing set of interests, be it foreign or domestic (such as in the interests of the wealthy), then insurrection would be their natural recourse. And here, too, the relative weakness of the national government became a justification for popular rebellion for the simple reason that it would be easier to overthrow.
“If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state.”
Should the system of representation fail, Hamilton identified one other source of resistance to encroaching federal power, buttressed by its military: the residual power left to the states. The states not only would maintain most of the power in the federalist system, Hamilton argued whenever convenient, but would interpose themselves between the federal government and their citizens. The states, jealous and zealous guardians of their prerogatives and powers, would resist all efforts at federal usurpation. ““It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.” This salutary aspect of federalism also implied a kind of allied solidarity among the states: if one state attempted to resist federal encroachments and ended up in armed conflict with the federal government, it could count on the other (confederated) states to run to its side. “If the federal army should be able to quell the resistance of one State, the distant States would have it in their power to make head with fresh forces.” I note here for the record that Hamilton assumed the states had a legitimate right to arms against the federal government.
Hamilton’s defense of a standing army depended on his conviction or worry that the federal government would be permanently weak. Demography and geography both worked against any consolidation of power. The people through their elected representatives would vigilantly defend their rights against the federal government, “provided the citizens understand their rights and are disposed to defend them.” Hamilton believed the vastness of the land and the distance to the seat of government were securities for liberty, and perhaps so if revolutions in communication and transportation technologies didn’t shrink things, and if that distance and the increased complexity and size of government didn’t make it virtually impossible for people to know what their government was up to nor even really know their representatives. In that case, the system of representation afforded no refuge for liberty, and if the states could no longer offer a resistance, what was left to a people who believed they were ruled by a government that no longer considered their petitions? Hamilton gave us the answer, but it’s one we find hard to bear.
[1] I could get here into arguments concerning the Second Amendment, the ratification of which clearly relates to the problem of a standing army. For the most part, I’ll avoid that, but I do want to note here a frequent criticism I’ve heard of the Second Amendment: given the size and strength of the US military, an armed citizenry poses no effective counter-measure. Perhaps – but I suspect the experience of that same military with the comparatively unarmed citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan offers a counter-argument.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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