Dissolution From Within: Federalist 6 - 8
John Jay fell ill after he completed the fifth Federalist, contributing only one more to the series (No. 64). Readers should know there is some dispute over the authorship of the rest of the papers. Hamilton, not long before his death at the hands of Aaron Burr, claimed authorship of 63 of the essays, while Madison provided a list that identified himself as the author of 29 of them. Scholars and language analysis have generally taken Madison’s side in the dispute, attributing papers 49-58 to Madison and identifying three of the essays as jointly authored.
With Jay out of commission, Hamilton remained the sole New Yorker writing to “the people of the state of New York” under the pseudonym Publius. One remarkable feature of The Federalist is the alacrity with which the essays were produced, particularly since the remaining authors had little opportunity for correspondence or refining their arguments in conversation. If one reads the essays carefully enough, one can detect the inconsistencies and contradictions contained therein.
These inconsistencies result in part from multiple authors not coordinating their essays, but also from the essays' polemical purpose The authors, Hamilton especially, would readily seize on the most readily available argument that served his purpose along the lines of the particular topic at hand, fitting into the overall organization of the essays. One example involves the references to commerce, which come into play in essays 6-8, written by Hamilton and the subject of today’s essay.
Debates around the Constitution reflected, in part, larger debates concerning the role of commerce in any well-ordered society. Human beings had long used markets as a means for exchanging goods and services, but a “commercial society” made such transactions the essential characteristic of a “good” polity, and further believed that such transactions could be recast on a much larger scale and made impersonal. (It also required the development of the cash nexus and all it brought with it.) That re-scaling and impersonal aspect would require some sort of central government to regulate – and encourage – commercial affairs, as well as to monopolize the coining of money. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, whose writings deeply influenced many of the Constitution’s defenders, particularly James Madison, had argued that commerce would refine the morals of a people and make gentle their interactions with one another. It would also, he believed, weaken the power of government.
Critics of the Constitution were, many of them, also critics of this expansion of the role of commerce (and thus the Commerce Clause of the Constitution). Having government be “the friend of commerce” meant that government would favor the interests of one class of society over another, in this case the losers would be the yeoman farmers who formed the backbone of America’s republican system. Furthermore, they thought, commerce tended to coarsen human affairs by a) making everything transactional rather than relational (scholars have determined that in the pre-Constitutional era there were high levels of debt forgiveness, in no small part because of the personal relationships between debtors and creditors; for sometimes farmers, through no fault of their own, just had bad years); and b)by commerce's tendency to commodify everything. A commercial society, the Anti-federalists claimed, contrary to Hume, had greater levels of material inequality and encouraged the bane of “luxury,” long a target of philosophers' ire. Hume had defended the idea of luxury, arguing it was “a word of an uncertain signification” that could be “taken in a good as well as a bad sense.” Rather than seeing luxury as a form of decadence he saw it, in its “proper” sense, as a refining of people’s tastes and a strengthening of their morals, for “the ages of refinement are both the happiest and most virtuous.” Luxury, Hume continued, allowed for the development of the “refined arts” that allow men to become “more sociable,” flocking into cities so they can “show their wit or their breeding” and “display their taste in conversation or living.” Contrary to this view, the Anti-federalist writer Cato had worried “that the progress of a commercial society begets luxury, the parent of inequality, the foe to virtue, and the enemy to restraint.”
Critics expressed concern that commerce was a zero-sum competitive game that would divide people along the lines of winners and losers. In many ways, this view was taken up by Tocqueville in his observations concerning America, arguing that Americans were consumed by a “restless [and relentless] desire for money-making” as a way of elevating themselves above their compatriots. Many of the Anti-federalists celebrated the charms of a simple and modest life of co-dependent neighborliness against the avaricious desire for MORE that marked the competitive and deracinated world of commerce and money.
It’s a truism in politics that republics tend to die of one of two causes: attack from without, dissolution from within. Democratic republics, the thinking goes, lack the will and unified effort needed to fend off foreign foes, and domestically they tend to be rent apart by party strife and faction. After Jay commented, in papers 2-5, on the dangers of foreign powers, Hamilton turned his attention in 6-8 on the problem of dissension among and between the states. His message was clear: without a strong union with an energetic central government, the states would soon be at war with each other.
“A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations” Hamilton wrote, “who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.” Men, being “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” would find no shortage of motives to go to war with one another. The love of power, the desire for security, attachment to person and place, offended honor, personal enmity, getting jilted in commerce, the meddling influence of religious leaders, and “the influence which the bigotry of one female, the petulance of another, and the cabals of a third” could all result in armed conflict.
Many of the Anti-federalists, Hamilton claimed, somewhat disingenuously, had argued that commerce would “soften the manners of men,” insuring they would “never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other. They [would] be governed by mutual interest, and [would] cultivate a spirit of mutual amity and concord.” Hamilton spent much of Federalist 6 debunking that theory, and providing ample counter-examples. But the argument that commercial republics were unlikely to go to war with one another was an argument far more likely to be made by a Federalist than an Anti-federalist, including, in a later essay, Hamilton himself. Still, here he argued that commerce was frequently a cause of war.
More significantly, despite Jay’s earlier claim that Americans were already formed into one people, Hamilton assumed in these papers that Americans really weren’t that united, that jealousy and resentment and, most importantly, proximity, would surely result in conflict. “Vicinity or nearness of situation,” he wrote, “constitutes … natural enemies.” The shared borders would become sources of conflict, for “territorial disputes have at all times been found one of the most fertile sources of hostility.” In Federalist 7, Hamilton provided example after example of states engaging in territorial disputes with one another, such disputes requiring an independent judge with sufficient power to impose a resolution. Furthermore, he believed, the states would become pawns for European powers in their disputes with one another, for it would be in the interests of those powers to turn the American states against each other. Thus, no mere confederation would suffice, for without a strong union the “conclusion is to be drawn, that America, if not connected at all, or only by the feeble tie of a simple league, offensive and defensive, would, by the operation of such jarring alliances, be gradually entangled in all the pernicious labyrinths of European politics and wars.”
The larger states, he claimed, would predate upon the smaller ones. The domestic peace and wealth of each state would be wasted on constant preparation for and engagement in war against its neighbors. Standing armies would become the rule of the day, as would increasingly strong executives. “These are not,” he continued, “vague inferences drawn from supposed or speculative defects in a Constitution, the whole power of which is lodged in the hands of a people, or their representatives and delegates, but they are solid conclusions, drawn from the natural and necessary progress of human affairs.” But a united country, enjoying a capacious ocean between it and its enemies, would have little need for a standing army or a strong executive. So he argued in these early essays.
The consolidation of power and its expansive exercise often results from perceived threats; the greater the desire to consolidate power, the more likely those of ambition will exaggerate the nature of the threat. The US, for example, spent the 50-plus years of the Cold War exaggerating the nature of the Soviet threat. Also, it is given in the nature of our politics that the exercise of war power is always accompanied by a diminishment of liberty. Be it Bush’s War on Terror or Wilson’s or Adam’s Alien and Sedition Acts, government uses its war-making authority to silence dissent and impose uniformity.
The idea that foreign powers were laying in wait was dismissed by some of the Anti-federalist writers. The writer who went by the pseudonym “Montezuma” (William Grayson) warned that “We have been told of phantoms and ideal dangers to lead us into measures which will, in my opinion, be the ruin of our country. If the existence of those dangers cannot be proved, if there be no apprehension of wars, if there be no rumors of wars, it will place the subject in a different light, and plainly evince to the world that there cannot be any reason for adopting measures which we apprehend to be ruinous and destructive.” Spain, he averred, was “friendly in a high degree” and “we have nothing to fear from Spain." France “will not quarrel with us.” The Dutch “have a fellow-feeling for us.” Even the British, he believed, were not particularly eager to return to war against us.
The writer simply known as “A Farmer” detected sinister motives behind the fearful predictions of the Federalist. Not doubting that a stronger central government would “add to the dignity and increase the splendor of the United States abroad,” or that it would render “government, and officers of government, more dignified at home,” he nonetheless denied that a stronger government was required “in order to keep peace among ourselves.” Furthermore, that a strong central government was “necessary to prevent foreigners from dividing us, or interfering in our government, I deny positively.” The most suspect motive among the Constitution’s defenders, he thought, was the bugaboo of vanity.
We are vain, like other nations. We wish to make a noise in the world; and feel hurt that Europeans are not so attentive to America in peace, as they were to America in war. We are also, no doubt, desirous of cutting a figure in history. Should we not reflect that quiet is happiness? That content and pomp are incompatible? … The silence of historians is the surest record of the happiness of a people. [emphasis added]Let’s assume, the Farmer continued, that neighboring states do go to war with one another. These will likely, he believed, “be disputes of levity and passion, which would subside before injury”; but in a national government with centralized power, disputes with other nations “will be deep-rooted differences of interest, where part of the empire must be injured by the operation of a general law; and then should the sword of government be once drawn (which Heaven avert) I fear it will not be sheathed.” The idea “that a national government will prevent the influence or danger of foreign intrigue, or secure us from invasion,” he thought, “is in my judgement directly the reverse of the truth” for “the facility of corruption is increased in proportion as power tend[s] … to a concentration in the hands of a few.” Being more powerful doesn’t make you less attractive, it simply makes you more of a threat.
One of the most important rights people possess is the right of exit. If you don’t like what Ohio is doing, come to Michigan (and leave your scarlet and gray behind). But centralizing power leaves no out. A “government pervading a vast extent of territory, terrifies the minds of individuals.” Government, perhaps more than any other human affair, no matter how well designed, still “must have confined limits, or insolence and oppression will prove the offspring of its grandeur.” People in a smaller republic with its limited aspirations have a natural sense of moderation that happily leaves “despotism to reek its vengeance on itself.”
We do not possess in our history the counter-factual. Would the states have gone to war with each other, and would those wars collectively have been as bloody as our Civil War turned out to be? Would the fledgling American nation have been target practice for European powers? Had the arguments of the Anti-federalists carried the day, would the United States have enjoyed a more irenic existence than it has? (Good luck finding a five-year period in American history where we have not been at war with someone). To be trite, we can’t possibly know the answers to these questions, but our forefathers enjoyed a time when the questions were at least being raised.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
Related Essays
