Posted on 05/03/2010 8:37:29 AM PDT by Publius
In his second essay upon the topic, Hamilton dissects the issues of conflict between states versus the federal government, and states versus other states. He addresses the issue of a large standing army and once again looks at how a social contract might function.
1 To the People of the State of New York:
2 The tendency of the principle of legislation for states or communities in their political capacities, as it has been exemplified by the experiment we have made of it, is equally attested by the events which have befallen all other governments of the confederate kind of which we have any account in exact proportion to its prevalence in those systems.
3 The confirmations of this fact will be worthy of a distinct and particular examination.
4 I shall content myself with barely observing here that of all the confederacies of antiquity which history has handed down to us, the Lycian and Achaean leagues, as far as there remain vestiges of them, appear to have been most free from the fetters of that mistaken principle and were accordingly those which have best deserved and have most liberally received the applauding suffrages of political writers.
5 This exceptionable principle may, as truly as emphatically, be styled the parent of anarchy; it has been seen that delinquencies in the members of the Union are its natural and necessary offspring, and that whenever they happen, the only constitutional remedy is force and the immediate effect of the use of it, civil war.
6 It remains to inquire how far so odious an engine of government, in its application to us, would even be capable of answering its end.
7 If there should not be a large army constantly at the disposal of the national government, it would either not be able to employ force at all or, when this could be done, it would amount to a war between parts of the Confederacy concerning the infractions of a league in which the strongest combination would be most likely to prevail whether it consisted of those who supported or of those who resisted the general authority.
8 It would rarely happen that the delinquency to be redressed would be confined to a single member, and if there were more than one who had neglected their duty, similarity of situation would induce them to unite for common defense.
9 Independent of this motive of sympathy, if a large and influential state should happen to be the aggressing member, it would commonly have weight enough with its neighbors to win over some of them as associates to its cause.
10 Specious arguments of danger to the common liberty could easily be contrived; plausible excuses for the deficiencies of the party could without difficulty be invented to alarm the apprehensions, inflame the passions and conciliate the good will, even of those states which were not chargeable with any violation or omission of duty.
11 This would be the more likely to take place, as the delinquencies of the larger members might be expected sometimes to proceed from an ambitious premeditation in their rulers with a view to getting rid of all external control upon their designs of personal aggrandizement, the better to effect which it is presumable they would tamper beforehand with leading individuals in the adjacent states.
12 If associates could not be found at home, recourse would be had to the aid of foreign powers who would seldom be disinclined to encouraging the dissensions of a Confederacy from the firm Union of which they had so much to fear.
13 When the sword is once drawn, the passions of men observe no bounds of moderation.
14 The suggestions of wounded pride, the [instigation] of irritated resentment, would be apt to carry the states against which the arms of the Union were exerted to any extremes necessary to avenge the affront or to avoid the disgrace of submission.
15 The first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union.
16 This may be considered as the violent death of the Confederacy.
17 Its more natural death is what we now seem to be on the point of experiencing if the federal system be not speedily renovated in a more substantial form.
18 It is not probable, considering the genius of this country, that the complying states would often be inclined to support the authority of the Union by engaging in a war against the non-complying states.
19 They would always be more ready to pursue the milder course of putting themselves upon an equal footing with the delinquent members by an imitation of their example.
20 And the guilt of all would thus become the security of all.
21 Our past experience has exhibited the operation of this spirit in its full light.
22 There would in fact be an insuperable difficulty in ascertaining when force could with propriety be employed.
23 In the article of pecuniary contribution, which would be the most usual source of delinquency, it would often be impossible to decide whether it had proceeded from disinclination or inability.
24 The pretense of the latter would always be at hand.
25 And the case must be very flagrant in which its fallacy could be detected with sufficient certainty to justify the harsh expedient of compulsion.
26 It is easy to see that this problem alone, as often as it should occur, would open a wide field for the exercise of factious views, of partiality and of oppression in the majority that happened to prevail in the national council.
27 It seems to require no pains to prove that the states ought not to prefer a national constitution which could only be kept in motion by the instrumentality of a large army continually on foot to execute the ordinary requisitions or decrees of the government.
28 And yet this is the plain alternative involved by those who wish to deny it the power of extending its operations to individuals.
29 Such a scheme, if practicable at all, would instantly degenerate into a military despotism, but it will be found in every light impracticable.
30 The resources of the Union would not be equal to the maintenance of an army considerable enough to confine the larger states within the limits of their duty, nor would the means ever be furnished of forming such an army in the first instance.
31 Whoever considers the populousness and strength of several of these states singly at the present juncture and looks forward to what they will become, even at the distance of half a century, will at once dismiss as idle and visionary any scheme which aims at regulating their movements by laws to operate upon them in their collective capacities and to be executed by a coercion applicable to them in the same capacities.
32 A project of this kind is little less romantic than the monster-taming spirit which is attributed to the fabulous heroes and demigods of antiquity.
33 Even in those confederacies which have been composed of members smaller than many of our counties, the principle of legislation for sovereign states, supported by military coercion, has never been found effectual.
34 It has rarely been attempted to be employed but against the weaker members, and in most instances attempts to coerce the refractory and disobedient have been the signals of bloody wars in which one half of the confederacy has displayed its banners against the other half.
35 The result of these observations to an intelligent mind must be clearly this: that if it be possible at any rate to construct a federal government capable of regulating the common concerns and preserving the general tranquillity, it must be founded, as to the objects committed to its care, upon the reverse of the principle contended for by the opponents of the proposed Constitution.
36 It must carry its agency to the persons of the citizens.
37 It must stand in need of no intermediate [legislation] but must itself be empowered to employ the arm of the ordinary magistrate to execute its own resolutions.
38 The majesty of the national authority must be manifested through the medium of the courts of justice.
39 The government of the Union, like that of each state, must be able to address itself immediately to the hopes and fears of individuals and to attract to its support those passions which have the strongest influence upon the human heart.
40 It must, in short, possess all the means and have aright to resort to all the methods of executing the powers with which it is intrusted that are possessed and exercised by the government of the particular states.
41 To this reasoning it may perhaps be objected that if any state should be disaffected to the authority of the Union, it could at any time obstruct the execution of its laws and bring the matter to the same issue of force with the necessity of which the opposite scheme is reproached.
42 The plausibility of this objection will vanish the moment we advert to the essential difference between a mere non-compliance and a direct and active resistance.
43 If the interposition of the state legislatures be necessary to give effect to a measure of the Union, they have only not to act or to act evasively, and the measure is defeated.
44 This neglect of duty may be disguised under affected but unsubstantial provisions so as not to appear and of course not to excite any alarm in the people for the safety of the Constitution.
45 The state leaders may even make a merit of their surreptitious invasions of it on the ground of some temporary convenience, exemption, or advantage.
46 But if the execution of the laws of the national government should not require the intervention of the state legislatures, if they were to pass into immediate operation upon the citizens themselves, the particular governments could not interrupt their progress without an open and violent exertion of an unconstitutional power.
47 No omissions nor evasions would answer the end.
48 They would be obliged to act and in such a manner as would leave no doubt that they had encroached on the national rights.
49 An experiment of this nature would always be hazardous in the face of a constitution in any degree competent to its own defense and of a people enlightened enough to distinguish between a legal exercise and an illegal usurpation of authority.
50 The success of it would require not merely a factious majority in the legislature but the concurrence of the courts of justice and of the body of the people.
51 If the judges were not embarked in a conspiracy with the legislature, they would pronounce the resolutions of such a majority to be contrary to the supreme law of the land, unconstitutional and void.
52 If the people were not tainted with the spirit of their state representatives, they, as the natural guardians of the Constitution, would throw their weight into the national scale and give it a decided preponderancy in the contest.
53 Attempts of this kind would not often be made with levity or rashness because they could seldom be made without danger to the authors, unless in cases of a tyrannical exercise of the federal authority.
54 If opposition to the national government should arise from the disorderly conduct of refractory or seditious individuals, it could be overcome by the same means which are daily employed against the same evil under the state governments.
55 The magistracy, being equally the ministers of the law of the land, from whatever source it might emanate, would doubtless be as ready to guard the national as the local regulations from the inroads of private licentiousness.
56 As to those partial commotions and insurrections, which sometimes disquiet society, from the intrigues of an inconsiderable faction or from sudden or occasional ill humors that do not infect the great body of the community, the general government could command more extensive resources for the suppression of disturbances of that kind than would be in the power of any single member.
57 And as to those mortal feuds which in certain conjunctures spread a conflagration through a whole nation or through a very large proportion of it proceeding either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, they do not fall within any ordinary rules of calculation.
58 When they happen, they commonly amount to revolutions and dismemberments of empire.
59 No form of government can always either avoid or control them.
60 It is in vain to hope to guard against events too mighty for human foresight or precaution, and it would be idle to object to a government because it could not perform impossibilities.
Hamilton’s Critique
The first few opaque lines remind the reader that this is not a free-standing essay but the second in a series, published three days after Federalist #15, and a continuation of the thought Hamilton had severed due to constraints in length and the deadline of the newspaper in which these essays appeared. The reader of 1787 who had missed the opening essay must have been as confused as the modern reader, dropped abruptly into the flow with such reference-less lines as:
2 The tendency of the principle of legislation for states or communities in their political capacities, as it has been exemplified by the experiment we have made of it, is equally attested by the events which have befallen all other governments of the confederate kind of which we have any account in exact proportion to its prevalence in those systems.
What can Hamilton possibly be talking about? Even with reference to its predecessor, this is somewhat difficult. The issue at hand is the deep structure of a republican form of government and whether its legislation is to be directed strictly at its constituent collectives – the states – or toward the individual citizen in a parallel track to that of the states. The latter method holds the danger that it will subordinate, marginalize and eventually discard the state governments, a point the anti-Federalists had hammered home quite effectively up to this point. Hamilton's reply is that there is an even more immediate danger of ineffectiveness should this ability to deal directly with the citizens not be enacted, and worse, that there is a danger of internal war as well. That ineffectiveness Hamilton has already addressed with his litany of complaints in Federalist #15. This business of war, however, was advanced in that essay but left without either detail or justification. In this particular essay it is the latter that is his main concern.
5 This exceptionable principle may, as truly as emphatically, be styled the parent of anarchy; it has been seen that delinquencies in the members of the Union are its natural and necessary offspring, and that whenever they happen, the only constitutional remedy is force and the immediate effect of the use of it, civil war.
Hamilton holds that a federal government unable to address the citizen directly leaves that citizen unable to effect remediation through courts of law, leaving open violence as the only alternative, in the form of the federal government's control of the militia or the citizen's participation in either a state or a local military confrontation. The latter had already been evidenced in Shays’ Rebellion. It is Hamilton's opinion that the reason for this was the inability of the existing Confederation government to deal directly with the citizen, particularly through the vehicle of taxation.
27 It seems to require no pains to prove that the states ought not to prefer a national constitution which could only be kept in motion by the instrumentality of a large army continually on foot to execute the ordinary requisitions or decrees of the government.
28 And yet this is the plain alternative involved by those who wish to deny it the power of extending its operations to individuals.
With this point in mind, it is time to backtrack for a moment to consider what sort of government, and what sort of context, Hamilton was envisioning. One clue to this is to be found in a somewhat obscure reference here.
4 I shall content myself with barely observing here that of all the confederacies of antiquity which history has handed down to us, the Lycian and Achaean leagues, as far as there remain vestiges of them, appear to have been most free from the fetters of that mistaken principle and were accordingly those which have best deserved and have most liberally received the applauding suffrages of political writers.
On the face of it these are two rather unhappy examples. The reference is to two meta-governments within the Hellenistic era in Greece, that time between the submission to the Macedonians under Alexander, and the later submission to the Eastern and Western Roman Empires respectively. The Achaean League consisted of some 39 Greek city-states and managed to get the Greek peninsula re-conquered by the Macedonians at first and the Romans later. The Lycian League picked up where they left off after the Third Macedonian War, managing a slowly diminishing independence granted by the Romans in one form or another for an astonishing four centuries.
It was not their results, however, but their structure that had impressed such critics as Montesquieu, and through him Hamilton, especially with reference to the proportional representation within the Lycian League – the number of representatives per city was proportioned by population, echoed by the House of Representatives within the proposed Constitution.
However, another clue to Hamilton's conception of the geopolitical role of the proposed government may be seen in these same examples. Both were confederations whose primary challenge was survival in a world dominated by more powerful neighbors: Macedon, the Seleucid Empire, a reinvigorated Sparta, and Rome herself. Given the fact that Hamilton's America found herself surrounded by three great imperial powers in Britain, France and Spain, it is understandable why Hamilton chose those particular models.
Whether they actually do provide examples of a federal government capable of direct relations with its citizens is, unfortunately, somewhat questionable, but Hamilton's meaning is clear. A government constructed along those lines of which he accuses the anti-Federalists of advocating will fall to civil war through what Marx would call “internal contradictions”.
From 16 through 20, and again from 30 to 32, Hamilton states with eerie prescience the characteristics of such a civil war. The resemblance between that dystopian vision and the real events of the mid-19th Century are truly remarkable. One must be reminded that the triggering events were not, as Hamilton proposed, “pecuniary contribution” (23) but very definitely did involve the federal government attempting to impose its will on a coalition of refractory states. Was this, in fact, a case of the federal government having too little power to deal with the individual citizens, as Hamilton suggests in this essay, or simply a matter of the federal government desiring more power to do so than the constituent states felt was justified under the Constitution? That argument will likely never be settled to satisfaction. Hamilton himself allows for the latter possibility.
53 Attempts of this kind would not often be made with levity or rashness because they could seldom be made without danger to the authors, unless in cases of a tyrannical exercise of the federal authority.
But Hamilton was not speaking of the structure of government as it would be in 1860, but 1787, and to him the extant threat was not too much federal authority but none at all in a world in which that meant disaster. There will be time sufficient to measure the applicability of his words to the ensuing century when he has finished them. It may be, he states, that no government, however constituted, can entirely avoid the risks of such a confrontation.
57 And as to those mortal feuds which in certain conjunctures spread a conflagration through a whole nation or through a very large proportion of it proceeding either from weighty causes of discontent given by the government or from the contagion of some violent popular paroxysm, they do not fall within any ordinary rules of calculation.
59 No form of government can always either avoid or control them.
In the end, it did not. Could an issue such as slavery, already proving a major difficulty for the nascent nation, prove so abhorrent to one side that its means of remediation were insufficiently considered, proving in turn so abhorrent to the other side that the issue itself be marginalized in favor of the resistance to those means? It is that quandary in which Hamilton's federal government would find itself foundering in the space of three-quarters of a century.
15 The first war of this kind would probably terminate in a dissolution of the Union.
That it did not, but the government that came after was certainly to be altered forever by it.
Discussion Topics
Earlier threads:
FReeper Book Club: The Debate over the Constitution
5 Oct 1787, Centinel #1
6 Oct 1787, James Wilson’s Speech at the State House
8 Oct 1787, Federal Farmer #1
9 Oct 1787, Federal Farmer #2
18 Oct 1787, Brutus #1
22 Oct 1787, John DeWitt #1
27 Oct 1787, John DeWitt #2
27 Oct 1787, Federalist #1
31 Oct 1787, Federalist #2
3 Nov 1787, Federalist #3
5 Nov 1787, John DeWitt #3
7 Nov 1787, Federalist #4
10 Nov 1787, Federalist #5
14 Nov 1787, Federalist #6
15 Nov 1787, Federalist #7
20 Nov 1787, Federalist #8
21 Nov 1787, Federalist #9
23 Nov 1787, Federalist #10
24 Nov 1787, Federalist #11
27 Nov 1787, Federalist #12
27 Nov 1787, Cato #5
28 Nov 1787, Federalist #13
29 Nov 1787, Brutus #4
30 Nov 1787, Federalist #14
1 Dec 1787, Federalist #15
5.56mm
This was written back in the times when statehood meant something. We are now a collection of federalized territories - - hopefully this new enforcement of immigration law in Arizona will reverse the decay.
Not completely. To a great extent, that was John Jay's goal.
We dodged a bullet during the Civil War. Sen. Edward Baker of Oregon -- formerly a senator from Illinois -- sat down one night at the White House for dinner with the Lincoln family. "Uncle Ned", as he was called, had joined the Union Army with the rank of brigadier general and was headed off to war.
Baker sounded off against the entire concept of states, telling Lincoln that once the rebellion was quelled, the first thing that needed to be changed in the Constitution was the abolition of the states and their replacement with federal military districts. Lincoln laughed it off and classified his old friend as a Jacobin, the term he used for Northern radicals.
Had Baker survived the Civil War, he would have voted with the most radical of Radical Republicans in the Senate, but he died in a botched retreat at Ball's Bluff.
and time marches on...
For those at this forum with reflexive Hamilton hate-ons, consider the words of Aristotle, "No state can exist not having the necessary offices, and no state can be well administered not having the offices which tend to preserve harmony and good order."
Just the ticket.. Throw off one tyrany to establish a new one.
*deep sigh of satisfaction*
(not because the Brigadier General died, but because it is so satisfying to learn history this way, even if it does come in disjointed bits)
Tasmanian, methinks you’re getting madder and madder. I understand ;-)
I hope you mean mad as in my temper is flaring rather than mad as in my thread of sanity has snapped.
I meant the first. And believe me, I understand completely. I’m starting to think that these papers are negatively impacting my endothelial function.
Do you really think there are any of those?
What I see are a few folks with some understanding as to the TRUE history of our founding vs the government propaganda taught in our public schools these days.
Hamilton was what he was and no amount of revision will ever change that.
Hamilton KNEW from the start, as did John Jay and many other of his High federalist cohorts, that if the Constitution as written were strictly adhered to their dreams of a mercantile empire were doomed!! That is why they never stopped the process of trying to undermine it. There is no hate in that statement simply recognition of the facts.
The states and the feds nearly got into it over the Indian Removals, but the feds backed down. On top of that, slavery gave the north enough of a moral issue to act.
I don’t think that a set of circumstances like that will ever exist again. If there is a next time, the revolution seems likely to be northern city dwellers demanding that the south and the west become community property in order to provide free stuff to Chicago and New York. Such an action will attract its share of adherents. Lenin had plenty of followers. No matter how many fools side with the next incarnation of Mssrs. Lenin and Marx, the resistance will in this country will be people who are familiar with history and have rifles. Another revolution is unlikely.
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