Federalist 85
Federalist #85 concluded Publius’s efforts to convince the citizens of New York to ratify the Constitution. “The plan under consideration” supposedly secured republican government, liberty, and the rights of property, while it at the same time preserved the union. Its greatest benefits, Hamilton argued, resulted from preventing despotism in the states by suppressing “local factions and insurrections” and restraining the “ambition of powerful individuals in single States” determined “to become the despots of the people.” The Constitution, he continued, would also diminish “the opportunities to foreign intrigue” as well as bypass the “extensive military establishments” that would arise from the states going to war with one another.
No one denied that the American political culture of the time required a republican form of government. Denying titles of nobility and Article IV, section 4’s guarantee to the states of a republican government were necessary but not sufficient measures to secure republicanism throughout the land. I say not sufficient because, after all, a federal government with enough power to dictate to the states their form of government might not itself be republican, any more than the United States’ efforts to create a democracy in Iraq provided evidence of the health of our democracy.
Hamilton insisted that the system under The Articles of Confederation had “planted mutual distrust in the breasts of all classes of citizens” and also “occasioned an almost universal prostration of morals.” Well, then: that’s tough talk. It’s the kind of talk one expects when consolidating power: exaggerating the nature of the danger while understating the threats in the solution. What sorts of morals, exactly, had been universally prostrated? And hadn’t Madison, in Federalist #10, taken the increase of distrust as an argument in favor of ratification?
For the Anti-federalists the defense of liberty and property were closely related because they saw the essence of liberty to exist in a kind of self-sufficiency that required the possession of property. Growing your own food and earning your own income without answering to another increased a family’s security. They envisioned a republic of competent citizens who could do things for themselves and, when circumstances and fate required, for their neighbors as well. We connect freedom so much to expression that we lose its inherent connection to action and to attending to the immediate world around us. To be free is to have the authority to care for that which is near-at-hand: our homes, families, friends, and neighbors. A right thus connects directly to our obligations. There can be no obligation to act where there is no capacity to act, and as political life gets rescaled our capacity to act attenuates accordingly. Responsibilities increasingly yield to rights. Our responsibilities as citizens get reduced to occasional and often coerced gestures.
Hamilton’s broadside no doubt resulted from his concern with mid-decade monetary policy, particularly legislation occurring at the state level that reputedly favored debtors over creditors. The Anti-federalists believed that debt should not be discharged through financial machinations (such as inflating the currency) or by leaving it to the next generation, but through communal cooperation and agreement. They opposed not wealth but luxury, the parent of inequality and the foe of social comity.
Hamilton offered his assurance that he had avoided all “asperities” (harshness of tone) that “disgrace political disputants of all parties,” his excepted. The Anti-federalists, on the other hand, were guilty of being “too wanton and too malignant” in their calumnies, forerunners of those populist conspiracies that unjustly bring “perpetual charges” against “the wealthy, the well-born, and the great”; populists were champions of the people that “inspire the disgust of all sensible men.” They sought to “keep the truth from the public eye” and thus deserved “the reprobation of all honest men.” If Publius was on occasion guilty of “intemperances of expression” that was only because he “frequently felt a struggle between sensibility and moderation” where his desire for speaking the truth won out over his gentle soul. But such outbursts, Hamilton assured the readers, had been “neither often nor much.”
The obligations of citizenship, however, came down to a binary choice: approve or disapprove the plan. “Every man,” he wrote, “is bound to answer these questions to himself, according to the best of his conscience and understanding, and to act agreeably to the genuine and sober dictates of his judgment. This is a duty from which nothing can give him a dispensation. This is one that he is called upon, nay, constrained by all the obligations that form the bands of society, to discharge sincerely and honestly. No partial motive, no particular interest, no pride of opinion, no temporary passion or prejudice, will justify to himself, to his country, or to his posterity, an improper election of the part he is to act.” The Constitution, Hamilton insisted, reflected no particular interests or partisan advantage; instead, it alone could insure “the very existence of the nation.” The Constitution had already been ratified by the time New York voted, the question was simply whether it wanted to be part of this new union.
The constitutional debates highlight a central lesson of politics: that usually good enough is good enough. Perfection, never to be achieved, only creates confusion and dissatisfaction. No constitution can long endure that does not fit the habits and customs and cultures of the people. The fact of imperfection, however, can just as easily be taken as a caution as an endorsement. “You’re not going to get perfection but this is pretty good” must be balanced against “We’re not going to get perfection, but let’s take our time and do better if we can.” Hamilton’s insistence that “upon the whole” the document was not only “a good one” but also “the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit,” left critics unconvinced. There was too much left vague and undefined and too much power concentrated to think that a second convention couldn’t improve upon the efforts of the Philadelphia one.
Hamilton, not unaware of this argument, warned that it would be imprudent “to prolong the precarious state of our national affairs” and would further be the height of foolishness to “expose the Union to the jeopardy of successive experiments, in the chimerical pursuit of a perfect plan”—as if perfection was what the Anti-federalists were after. Undoubtedly it is true that they should “never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man,” but we should of course, try to make things a little less imperfect, particularly at the very beginning of an enterprise.
Along the same lines Hamilton deprecated the idea of a second convention. The Philadelphia convention, he believed, had offered the most propitious circumstances for a happy outcome, one that admitted of no replication. Were any state allowed to amend the plan a whole new document would have to be produced; therefore the amendment process had to be subsequent to and not prior to ratification. Opponents could always change the document after the fact through the amendment process. Rather than involving a series of complex compromises between different parts and competing interests, such as at the convention, the amendment process would once again provide voters only with yay or nay options. The people, Anti-federalists worried, would lose their habits of negotiation and compromise and see politics reduced to a thumbs-up or thumbs-down enterprise, more appropriate to Caesars than to citizens. But Hamilton tried to assure voters that they could always restrain the operations of the federal government through the amendment process, and where that failed “we may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.” How has that worked out for us?
84 of the 85 Federalist essays were written and published at the time New York, by a 30-27 vote, ratified the Constitution, but only after having proposed 31 amendments to it. Hamilton believed he had offered “a lesson of moderation to all the sincere lovers of the Union” that “ought to put them upon their guard against” the Anti-federalist tendency of “hazarding anarchy, civil war, a perpetual alienation of the States from each other, and perhaps the military despotism of a victorious demagoguery, in the pursuit of what they are not likely to obtain.”
The value of The Federalist results not so much from its authoritative status as an interpretation of the Constitution nor from a dogmatic adherence to its prescriptions but from its dramatic engagement with opposing arguments. It reminds us that American republicanism was forged in the heat of intense disagreement and that this heat also generated light. It was in some ways the fate of Americans to answer the question of whether liberty could be preserved when the scale of politics was expanded and the power of a federal government energized. Could the republic in its primitive virtue guard itself against the temptations of empire and ambitions of Caesars? Was the Delaware our Rubicon? The Anti-federalists believed we could be either a republic or an empire; Publius believed we could be both.
I have quoted before the words of Alexis de Tocqueville who, close to fifty years after ratification, saw the question as alive as ever. The constitution, he had observed, had not solved the problems of demagogues, of ambition, of imperial designs, or of centralized bureaucratic power. On the contrary. Tocqueville saw America as in many ways the torch-bearer of the sacred fire of liberty, but only so long as Americans zealously clung to the face-to-face association, the dogged spirit of self-sufficiency, and the religious beliefs that founded the country when the first Puritan set foot on its shore. “Because the civilization of ancient Rome perished in consequence of the invasion of the barbarians,” he wrote, “we are perhaps too apt to think that civilization cannot perish in any other manner. If the light by which we are guided is ever extinguished, it will dwindle by degrees, and expire of itself. By dint of close adherence to mere applications, principles would be lost sight of; and when the principles were wholly forgotten, the methods derived from them would be ill-pursued. New methods could no longer be invented, and men would continue to apply, without intelligence, and without art, scientific processes no longer understood.” We would not have our country torn from our grasp, but neither should we trample it under our own feet.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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