Posted on 07/12/2024 1:36:58 PM PDT by Jacquerie
Riot and mayhem welcomed the draft Constitution when it made the Philadelphia newspapers.
Advocates of the new plan held a majority in the Pennsylvania legislature, then in the last days of its regular session, and they attempted to ram through a statute calling for a ratification convention. To prevent a quorum, some of the Constitution’s opponents, the Anti-Federalists, made themselves scarce. The Assembly sent the sergeant-at-arms to seize enough absent members to establish a quorum, and forcibly kept them on the floor of the chamber.1
It is difficult today to comprehend the apprehension and enormity of the choices set before society in the 1776 – 1788 era.
Under the Articles of Confederation, the US did not have the attributes of nationhood. Among other features, nations have taxing powers, a common currency, and make commercial treaties. To correct these deficiencies and keep the Union, Federalists designed a less federal and more national government.
But, to many people in 1787 the shortcomings of the Articles did not justify the Constitution's mixed democratic/federal structure. Both sides recognized the fundamental feature of the Constitution; it was a government derived from the people rather than one expressly in the hands of the people. The Constitution squinted toward an aristocracy of the nation’s natural aristocrats, a government manned by the leading men of society. It wasn’t as if the Federalists had lost faith in the people; they simply believed a government too close to the people led to ambitious demagogues and dangerous factions.2
Is republican, liberty-preserving government possible across a large territory? Federalists thought it possible; Anti-Federalists were certain it wasn’t.
Anti-Federalists regarded the Constitution as a repudiation, if not betrayal, of the Revolution. Aristocratic government is typically not conducive to liberty. Where the Revolution transferred power from the few to the many, the Constitution, wrote Melancton Smith in Letters from the Federal Farmer, “is a transfer of power from the many to the few.” To the Federalists, the greatest dangers to liberty didn’t arise from society’s natural leaders, but instead from excessive participation of the people in government.3
The Constitution’s initial allotment of only sixty-five congressional seats, and the subsequent limitation of no more than one rep per 30,000, was proof enough to the Anti-Federalists of the denial of representation adequate to reflect the people’s true interests. To reflect the people’s interests, feelings, and opinions, congressional districts must be small, so small that instructions from constituents guided representatives, rather than the Framers’ intent for representatives to use their independent judgement.4
The Anti-Federalists were not alone in their estimate of representation and had a powerful ally. On their side were the writings of the very influential Charles de Montesquieu, who theorized that only small geographic areas with a citizenry of like-minded, if not homogenous people were suitable for republican government. James Winthrop of Massachusetts expressed a common belief when he said, “The idea of an uncompounded republic, on average one thousand miles in length, and eight hundred in breadth, and containing six millions . . . all reduced to the same standard of morals, of habits, and of laws, is in itself an absurdity, and contrary to the whole experience of mankind.”5
While the Federalists explained that their plan did indeed create a compounded republic in which Article I Section 8 left a vast reservoir of state-retained powers, the Anti-Federalists would have none of it. The new government would tax individuals and use the funds to keep standing armies. History, and not distant history, justified their fears. European armies defended monarchs against both external military threats and internal revolts. Where George III didn't dare impose martial law in England, Bostonian’s experience under his martial law was a recent bad memory.6
The power to tax and raise armies, combined with Montesquieu’s theory, convinced the Anti-Federalists that America’s vast expanse made it incompatible with republicanism and guaranteed tyranny.
Unfortunately for the Anti-Federalist cause, opposition to the Constitution was often haphazard and scattershot, which allowed ratification in several states by a whisker. For example, the leading Anti-Federalist of the era, Patrick Henry, raged against the Constitution’s opening, “We the People,” and every subsequent clause. Had the Anti-Federalists focused their opposition on the impossibility of real representation in a distant congress in a future national city, there was every chance of falling short of the requisite nine ratifying states.
The Anti-Federalists lacked all faith in the Constitutional institutions that presumed to speak for the people. The president, standing alone as commander-in-chief of the armed forces was unencumbered by an executive council, and had power over appointments not extended to most state executives. As opposed to the Articles of Confederation in which state delegates were term-limited, all constitutional offices, including the president, were eligible for repeated reelection. In this, they feared an eventual monarchy emboldened by a near-perpetual senate composed of a fixed and unchangeable body of men. They reacted to the combined powers of the President and Senate with horror.7
Together, the president and senate held all of the executive and two-thirds of the legislative powers, and jointly appointed all civil and military officers. Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee, another respected Anti-Federalist, asserted that the combined executive/senate authority was “a most formidable combination of power” that unbalanced the Constitution.
Anti-Federalist opposition boiled down to fear of losing their liberty. The president and senate were too distant from the people. They scoffed at a hopelessly inadequate House of Representatives. At 1:30,000 it was a mere “shred or rag” of the people’s power and faced certain domination by the monarchal and aristocratic branches.8
“What have you been contending for these ten years past?” the Anti-Federalists asked. Liberty! What is liberty but the power of governing yourselves? If you adopt the Constitution, you give that power to men a thousand miles away.
The Constitution threatened liberty, that circle of freedom in which no free government can intrude. While the Anti-Federalists were aware of democratic excesses and the need for a more vigorous government, the Constitution went too far. It pulled too much power from the states and lodged it in an imperial city. In this isolated city, a part of no state, the Anti-Federalists expected the worst. There, they expected the nation’s criminals and rogues to gather and rule the republics and people like the Tsar and his nobles.
Despite losing the immediate argument, Anti-Federalist influence did not end in 1788. Their criticism of the lack of a bill of Rights led to the adoption of the first ten amendments soon after the new Constitution went into effect, and their general opposition to centralized power passed from generation to generation down to the present time. As opposed to today’s opinion poll and passion-driven congress, societal leaders of the founding/framing generation thought ahead into the future; they constantly considered the effect of contemporary decisions on future generations. And what the Anti-Federalists envisioned horrified them. Since truly representative government across a continent was absurd, the supposed safeguards of enumerated powers in Article I Section 8 were but a smokescreen to hide incipient despotism.9
We would do well to step back from contemporary politics and reflect on James Winthrop’s warning long ago. As modern domestic enemies promote conflict among factions distinct in wealth, race, gender, and sexual proclivities, while simultaneously enforcing nationwide intellectual conformity via repressive scotus decisions and punishment for “hate crimes,” society is lurching toward an authoritarian rule not compatible with liberty, but with a people at constant war amongst themselves.
<>Would you say that the benefit of hindsight is that the continent is better off in the long run being home to one single constitutional nation?<>
The world is fortunate that a Constitutionally governed United States conquered westward to the Pacific Ocean.
Massachusetts and Connecticut talked about doing this very thing during the Hartford convention. (1814 I think.)
As I commented to your link . . . great post.
Should we have added Canada to our system? We actually tried to do that, but failed.
The thought has occurred to me that American involvement in World War I, created the conditions for World War II, Communism, Atom bombs, and a whole host of other unfortunate events.
I suspect that had we remained out of World War I, the world would likely have turned out better than it did. In fact, it is difficult to see how things could have turned out worse, what with 20 million Ukrainians starved to death, 80 million Chinese killed, the millions in Cambodia and all the lives lost to World War II.
So America's entry into WW I seems a juncture in history where the world went down the wrong path.
Would America have entered into World War I, if it were split into a USA and a CSA? Certainly the taxation would have been less, and therefore our ability to project military force would likely have been less.
Would the two sides have cooperated to furnish men to fight in Europe for that war?
It begins to look less likely that America would have gotten involved, or would have been as effective if it had.
So would balkanization have been a bad thing if it avoided all the horrors after WW I?
So much suffering might have been averted.
I'm not so certain. It often seems to me that subsequent history turned out the worst possible way it could have done.
Can you think of another scenario in which over 100 million people were murdered?
The world went down a dark path, and i'm not certain whether or not we caused it.
The capture of the fort was a huge success, but Allen took the credit for it, leaving Arnold bitter and disgruntled. This action put Benedict Arnold on the pathway of becoming America's most infamous traitor, while Ethan Allen is still selling over-priced furniture to this day.
-PJ
What about all the deaths from Egypt's Pharoahs enslavement of the Jews?
How about The Crusades of Europe and northern Africa?
The American colonists were looking to be free from heredity rule and wished to form their own nation based on the rule of law.
The Jews wanted to be free from Egypt and form their own nation based on the laws that God gave them.
The Crusades were the beginnings of the European wars that the American colonists wished to avoid.
The French followed the example of the Americans and threw off the French hereditary monarchy, too.
So the question you are raising is really this:
Is the quest to be a free and independent state, in and of itself, too much to endure if the cost of that freedom is many deaths caused in equal parts by the tyrants who refuse to release the people who are being abused?
Should the American colonists not yearned to be free because of the death that would follow to achieve it?
Should the French citizens not yearned to be free because of the Reign of Terror that followed the death of the monarchy?
Should the American black slaves not yearned to be free because of the civil war that followed?
Should everyone just have accepted their place in the order of things and submitted to their fate forever?
-PJ
-PJ
It takes some effort to locate the Anti-Federalist papers.
It is quite eye-opening to read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers chronologically as they appeared to Americans.
It was quite literally America’s first Flame War...and the topics they discussed made me weigh heavily in favor of the Anti-Federalists.
+1.
My understanding is that the topic was whether or not balkanization of the USA into more than one entity was a good thing or a bad thing.
I have put forth an argument which uses stacks of bodies as an objective standard for determining better or worse, and I have suggested it would have been difficult for the world to take a path through history that was worse than the path it did take.
Splitting the Union might have resulted in a far better future for most of the world.
It's certainly hard to see how the world could have gone down an even worse path than it did.
Any diversion from what actually *DID* happen would likely be an improvement.
It is quite eye-opening to read the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers chronologically as they appeared to Americans.
It was quite literally America’s first Flame War...and the topics they discussed made me weigh heavily in favor of the Anti-Federalists.
Agree on all points. The Anti-Federalists were right. Many of the bad things they predicted, actually happened.
That said, I suppose your interpretation is implied by the question. Balkanization as a term is meant to imply an undesirable result. If the 13 sovereign states had remained as they were, would the United States have eventually collapsed into 13 separate independent nations due to the lack of cooperation amongst themselves?
As future settlements emerged as the continent was explored, there is no telling how large or small those future states would become, if the United States had not collapsed.
The original 13 states are of the size they are because of the very nature of settling a small colony on the other side of an ocean that took six weeks to cross without guarantees that you'd arrive at the intend destination. Expansion growth would not have such constraints put upon them.
I can see a case where Spain explored north from Mexico and settled the American southwest; just imagine a North America where Texas remained a part of Mexico. What if Washington, Idaho, Montana and the Dakotas became Canadian?
Or what if the western states formed as they did but did not unionize with the eastern states and became breakaway territories that chose to adopt the Constitution on their own to form a "Pacifica" nation that stood in contrast to the separate eastern independent states?
I think it was the adoption of the Constitution that drove western expansion to practically require the territories to join the existing nation as states, instead of breaking away themselves to form their own nations. The domination of the continent kept us from having the same kind of intramural wars that Europe's sovereign nations had, and allowed us to focus on other things.
Back to my point...
The United States as the Great Experiment was a new nation formed by the rule of law and the mutual consent of the governed. It was a dangerous idea to the monarchies of Europe where sovereignty meant the divine right from God to rule. France rejected it outright after the American revolution, while the Magna Carta was an English inspiration for the American colonists (starting with the Mayflower Compact).
I think I'm rejecting the notion that forming a free and independent nation by breaking away from England and basing the new government on a bicameral legislature with separation of powers from the executive and judiciary was a harmful thing that never should have happened. The alternative outcomes are unknowable, but stifling the yearning of people to be free because of the future deaths of those who wish to follow is no better than telling people to accept the fate of the lives they were born into, which was the way of the European caste system of civil order that the colonies revolted against.
You are suggesting that the existing system of Nobility for some and domination of the rest was the better way to go because it avoided the bloodshed of going against the status quo. I say the blame for that bloodshed is misplaced; it belongs on the few who wished to retain their status and power, not on the many who wanted to break free from it.
-PJ
Really? Winston Churchill had a similar idea. He thought that if America hadn't entered the war, Britain, France, and Germany would have made peace and Europe would have gone back to normal. It was an obscene idea coming from him: the First World War had been a European production and Churchill and the governments he served in had been doing all they could to drag the US into it.
Churchill believed that if the US hadn't entered the war the Allies and Germany would have made peace in 1917. Not at all. There had been peace attempts in 1915 and 1916. They failed. The French wanted Germany to give up the territory they occupied and the Germans wanted to keep it. Both sides still believed they could win, and even if the US didn't enter the war in the spring of 1917, the British still had hope that America would eventually join in.
Would they have been able to agree in 1917? 1918? 1919? 1920? Soldiers in the trenches thought the war might still be going on forty years later. That was unrealistic, but two years, three years, four years wasn't. And if the war was still going on in 1917, the Russian Revolution and the rise of communism would have happened.
As it happened, one reason the war ended when it did because the German spring 1918 offensive failed. The Germans mounted the offensive because Russia had given up on the war and German troops could be moved to the Western front, and because the Germans wanted to win the war before the US troops arrived in large numbers. If the US hadn't enter the war, perhaps the offensive wouldn't have been launched and wouldn't have failed, or maybe without the morale boost to the allies that American involvement would bring, the offensive would have succeeded.
Other reasons the war ended when it did were the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the hunger on the German home front, and the mutiny of German sailors. Maybe these things would have happened as they did. Germany would be forced to surrender. The allies would have imposed a harsh peace on them. It's likely that the Kaiser could have kept his throne, but Germany would still feel cheated out of its victory and oppressed by the victors. In the event that Germany won, they certainly would have imposed a harsh peace on France. A negotiated settlement would leave no one happy. Whatever happened, the seeds would be planted for another war. Europe hadn't given up its warlike ways yet. And this time Soviet Russia would be poised to pick up the pieces afterwards.
It's probable that there would have been no Hitler and likely that there would have been no Holocaust, but 1) nobody forsaw that happening in the 1910s, and 2) the rise of Hitler wasn't inevitable. It wasn't an unavoidable result of America's entering the war. Wiser and cooler heads and the avoidance of a global depression might have prevented the rise of Nazism. Third world independence movements and communist revolutions likely would have come at some point, and they can't be blamed on the US either.
“Splitting the Union might have resulted in a far better future for most of the world.”
I dealt with that above. What about on this continent? There was a continent to be won. Various states or collections of states would have fought each other and fought the British and Mexicans and Indians and possibly the French and the Spanish for control of the West. Settlers from different states or regions would have fought each other for control, since there would be no sense that “we are all Americans.”
Foreign powers would make compacts with different states or alliances of states, and meddle in their internal politics. Standing armies and fortified borders in each independent state or federation weren’t out of the question either, nor were slave revolutions and race wars. Industry, infrastructure, education and technology would have been much slower to develop in a “balkanized” America. Your version of North America might be better for the Indians. They might actually have been able to have a country, or more than just one, but it would not be good news for the rest of us.
I am pleased to hear that Churchill and I thought alike. He was brilliant.
I think without American entry into the war, the whole thing grinds down to a stalemate, and the Germans don't send Lenin to Russia.
the First World War had been a European production and Churchill and the governments he served in had been doing all they could to drag the US into it.
Well of course he did. He had a duty to his country to do anything of which he could think to win the war. I don't blame him, and where I him, I would have done the same.
But it may have been better for world peace if we hadn't gotten involved. Certainly the Germans would have ended up with better treaty terms than they did.
France and England were just as culpable in triggering that war as were the Germans.
There had been peace attempts in 1915 and 1916. They failed. The French wanted Germany to give up the territory they occupied and the Germans wanted to keep it.
Real? Or just a negotiating tactic?
Whatever happened, the seeds would be planted for another war. Europe hadn't given up its warlike ways yet. And this time Soviet Russia would be poised to pick up the pieces afterwards. It's probable that there would have been no Hitler and likely that there would have been no Holocaust, but 1) nobody forsaw that happening in the 1910s, and 2) the rise of Hitler wasn't inevitable. It wasn't an unavoidable result of America's entering the war. Wiser and cooler heads and the avoidance of a global depression might have prevented the rise of Nazism. Third world independence movements and communist revolutions likely would have come at some point, and they can't be blamed on the US either.
It's all probabilities. Certainly without the rise of Hitler, WW II becomes unlikely. Certainly without the harsh imposition of penalties on Germany, Hitler likely doesn't rise to power.
That it wasn't predictable at the time, doesn't mean we can't see how it all worked out. We know certain things caused certain other things, and it certainly looks like if we had just minded our own business, WW II likely wouldn't have happened.
The Communism thing is iffy. We don't know for sure that the Germans sent Lenin to Russia just because the US entered the war, they probably would have done that anyway.
But wouldn't it have been nice to stop it before it ever happened?
That is speculation. You see them as fighting each other, and I see them as getting along. Did we fight the Canadians much? Yeah, we fought a little bit, but not a whole lot.
No. There could have been a Second World War without Hitler. There would likely have been another war between Germany and France or Germany and Russia. Europe hadn’t gotten war out of its system yet. Yes, if Germany defeated France, France would have been the bitter party and could have started a war.
Germany would have every reason to send Lenin to Russia. They were out to win the war and that was not dependent on whether the US entered the war or not. The rise of Communism wasn’t dependent on whether the US entered the war or not. It wasn’t us to prevent that. It was up to the Russians, Germans, British, and French to stop the war, which they weren’t going to do.
The US and Canada have been at peace because war with Canada meant war with Britain, the most powerful country in the world. For the British and Canadians, they had all they wanted on this continent, so they weren’t going to war with us. It’s likely, that just as independent African and Latin American countries fought wars with each other, a Balkanized America would see wars between states and alliances and federations.
-PJ
Ask the Texas Ranger Division conduct the investigation.Article IV Section 4 expected the states to look out for each other to quell domestic violence.
Yes, through the United States a state could expect assistance to quell, for instance, a Shays type of Rebellion or a BLM rampage, etc.
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