Posted on 07/22/2010 8:12:41 AM PDT by Publius
Finished with his responses to Brutus on the issue of taxation, Hamilton now takes his final thoughts on the militia out of his desk drawer and sends it off to the newspaper for publication.
1 To the People of the State of New York:
2 The power of regulating the militia and of commanding its services in times of insurrection and invasion are natural incidents to the duties of superintending the common defense and of watching over the internal peace of the Confederacy.
3 It requires no skill in the science of war to discern that uniformity in the organization and discipline of the militia would be attended with the most beneficial effects whenever they were called into service for the public defense.
4 It would enable them to discharge the duties of the camp and of the field with mutual intelligence, and concert an advantage of peculiar moment in the operations of an army, and it would fit them much sooner to acquire the degree of proficiency in military functions which would be essential to their usefulness.
5 This desirable uniformity can only be accomplished by confiding the regulation of the militia to the direction of the national authority.
6 It is, therefore, with the most evident propriety that the plan of the Convention proposes to empower the Union “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”
7 Of the different grounds which have been taken in opposition to the plan of the Convention, there is none that was so little to have been expected or is so untenable in itself as the one from which this particular provision has been attacked.
8 If a well-regulated militia be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian of the national security.
9 If standing armies are dangerous to liberty, an efficacious power over the militia, in the body to whose care the protection of the state is committed, ought as far as possible to take away the inducement and the pretext to such unfriendly institutions.
10 If the federal government can command the aid of the militia in those emergencies which call for the military arm in support of the civil magistrate, it can the better dispense with the employment of a different kind of force.
11 If it cannot avail itself of the former, it will be obliged to recur to the latter.
12 To render an army unnecessary will be a more certain method of preventing its existence than a thousand prohibitions upon paper.
13 In order to cast an odium upon the power of calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, it has been remarked that there is nowhere any provision in the proposed Constitution for calling out the posse comitatus to assist the magistrate in the execution of his duty, whence it has been inferred that military force was intended to be his only auxiliary.
14 There is a striking incoherence in the objections which have appeared, and sometimes even from the same quarter, not much calculated to inspire a very favorable opinion of the sincerity or fair dealing of their authors.
15 The same persons who tell us in one breath that the powers of the federal government will be despotic and unlimited inform us in the next that it has not authority sufficient even to call out the posse comitatus.
16 The latter, fortunately, is as much short of the truth as the former exceeds it.
17 It would be as absurd to doubt that a right to pass all laws necessary and proper to execute its declared powers would include that of requiring the assistance of the citizens to the officers who may be entrusted with the execution of those laws as it would be to believe that a right to enact laws necessary and proper for the imposition and collection of taxes would involve that of varying the rules of descent and of the alienation of landed property or of abolishing the trial by jury in cases relating to it.
18 It being therefore evident that the supposition of a want of power to require the aid of the posse comitatus is entirely destitute of color, it will follow that the conclusion which has been drawn from it in its application to the authority of the federal government over the militia is as uncandid as it is illogical.
19 What reason could there be to infer that force was intended to be the sole instrument of authority merely because there is a power to make use of it when necessary?
20 What shall we think of the motives which could induce men of sense to reason in this manner?
21 How shall we prevent a conflict between charity and judgment?
22 By a curious refinement upon the spirit of republican jealousy, we are even taught to apprehend danger from the militia itself in the hands of the federal government.
23 It is observed that select corps may be formed, composed of the young and ardent, who may be rendered subservient to the views of arbitrary power.
24 What plan for the regulation of the militia may be pursued by the national government is impossible to be foreseen.
25 But so far from viewing the matter in the same light with those who object to select corps as dangerous, were the Constitution ratified, and were I to deliver my sentiments to a member of the Federal Legislature from this state on the subject of a militia establishment, I should hold to him in substance the following discourse:
38 Thus differently from the adversaries of the proposed Constitution should I reason on the same subject, deducing arguments of safety from the very sources which they represent as fraught with danger and perdition.
39 But how the National Legislature may reason on the point is a thing which neither they nor I can foresee.
40 There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery, whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians, as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price, or as the serious offspring of political fanaticism.
41 Where in the name of common sense are our fears to end if we may not trust our sons, our brothers, our neighbors, our fellow citizens?
42 What shadow of danger can there be from men who are daily mingling with the rest of their countrymen and who participate with them in the same feelings, sentiments, habits and interests?
43 What reasonable cause of apprehension can be inferred from a power in the Union to prescribe regulations for the militia and to command its services when necessary while the particular states are to have the sole and exclusive appointment of the officers?
44 If it were possible seriously to indulge a jealousy of the militia upon any conceivable establishment under the federal government, the circumstance of the officers being in the appointment of the states ought at once to extinguish it.
45 There can be no doubt that this circumstance will always secure to them a preponderating influence over the militia.
46 In reading many of the publications against the Constitution, a man is apt to imagine that he is perusing some ill-written tale or romance, which instead of natural and agreeable images, exhibits to the mind nothing but frightful and distorted shapes, “gorgons, hydras and chimeras dire'', discoloring and disfiguring whatever it represents and transforming everything it touches into a monster.
47 A sample of this is to be observed in the exaggerated and improbable suggestions which have taken place respecting the power of calling for the services of the militia.
48 That of New Hampshire is to be marched to Georgia, of Georgia to New Hampshire, of New York to Kentucky, and of Kentucky to Lake Champlain.
49 Nay, the debts due to the French and Dutch are to be paid in militiamen instead of louis d'ors and ducats.
50 At one moment there is to be a large army to lay prostrate the liberties of the people, at another moment the militia of Virginia are to be dragged from their homes five or six hundred miles to tame the republican contumacy of Massachusetts, and that of Massachusetts is to be transported an equal distance to subdue the refractory haughtiness of the aristocratic Virginians.
51 Do the persons who rave at this rate imagine that their art or their eloquence can impose any conceits or absurdities upon the people of America for infallible truths?
52 If there should be an army to be made use of as the engine of despotism, what need of the militia?
53 If there should be no army, whither would the militia, irritated by being called upon to undertake a distant and hopeless expedition for the purpose of riveting the chains of slavery upon a part of their countrymen, direct their course but to the seat of the tyrants who had meditated so foolish as well as so wicked a project, to crush them in their imagined entrenchments of power and to make them an example of the just vengeance of an abused and incensed people?
54 Is this the way in which usurpers stride to dominion over a numerous and enlightened nation?
55 Do they begin by exciting the detestation of the very instruments of their intended usurpations?
56 Do they usually commence their career by wanton and disgustful acts of power, calculated to answer no end but to draw upon themselves universal hatred and execration?
57 Are suppositions of this sort the sober admonitions of discerning patriots to a discerning people?
58 Or are they the inflammatory ravings of incendiaries or distempered enthusiasts?
59 If we were even to suppose the national rulers actuated by the most ungovernable ambition, it is impossible to believe that they would employ such preposterous means to accomplish their designs.
60 In times of insurrection or invasion, it would be natural and proper that the militia of a neighboring state should be marched into another to resist a common enemy or to guard the Republic against the violence of faction or sedition.
61 This was frequently the case in respect to the first object in the course of the late war, and this mutual succor is indeed a principal end of our political association.
62 If the power of affording it be placed under the direction of the Union, there will be no danger of a supine and listless inattention to the dangers of a neighbor till its near approach had [added] the incitements of self preservation to the too feeble impulses of duty and sympathy.
Hamilton’s Critique
It is occasionally difficult for the modern reader, accustomed to the norm of standing armies throughout the nations of the world, to grasp clearly what the issue really was in the numerous debates over the topic of militias and standing armies that pepper the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers during this crucial period. This particular essay appears in media res, and it may be illuminating to take a moment to explore precisely what it was that caused the issue to be of such controversy.
Citizen-soldiers as the first line of defense against invasion are as old as warfare, as is the recurring fantasy that they are adequate to the task in and of themselves. It was a romantic, idealistic hope rooted in the practical fact that standing armies tended to be, since feudal times, ruinously expensive. Even those nominally in the private pay of a noble must, in the end, be funded either through plunder or taxation, generally the former in times of war and in times of peace, the latter.
A militia, that is, a part-time military manned by citizens, was a recourse common to the republics of the Italian Renaissance for this reason, patterned after a somewhat imprecise appreciation of warfare in ancient Greece and a convenient amnesia concerning their fate at the hands of the professionals of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great. It was that sort of romanticism that informed one of the principal political theorists of the time, Niccolo Machiavelli, who depended on it to defend Florence during its days as a republic and his as Minister of Defense. His somewhat imprudent statement of that principle was one thing that placed him on a torture rack when the Medici demonstrated that it was flawed, but his theory remained an important influence on 18th Century Enlightenment thought which in turn informed the Founders and the debates over the proposed Constitution.
An important qualification appears in the American version of the debate, “a standing army in time of peace.” Armies had grown over the centuries, and the dictum that they be supported by plunder in time of war had resulted, during the horrific violence of the 17th Century, in a European populace plundered into starvation, disease and depopulation. Wallenstein's innovation during the Thirty Years War was to force the populations of the cities of the victorious armies to support them through taxation as well as by despoiling the population of neutrals and hostiles. It was only a partial solution – the famine and plague still took place, augmented by the abuses of peacetime taxation elsewhere.
One vestige of this practice was the quartering of armies within the population of occupied territories, a practice that infuriated the American colonists of Boston in particular and led to the inception of the now somewhat archaic Third Amendment to the Constitution. It was a practice dated even at the time. During the Seven Years War, Frederick the Great had demonstrated the greater efficiency of keeping troops isolated from the population in their own barracks. That lesson was a half-century late arriving in the British colonies, but arrive it did at last, and one seldom hears of the practice very far into the 19th Century.
But it led to a horror of standing armies, primarily due to the realization that not only were they immense tax drains, but ended up being the primary mechanism through which those taxes were exacted from a resentful public. That also was a vestige of the 17th Century, specifically in the form of the resentment of the British Parliament against the standing army of the King, paid for by the people and used, at least in the view of the Roundheads, exclusively to oppress the taxpayer in the defense of royal interest. The upshot of the English Civil Wars was the decline of that standing army, whose replacement by a standing army belonging to Parliament was, at best, an imperfect solution.
It was that army that had found itself embroiled in the War of Independence in America, facing at first exclusively civilian militias at Concord and Lexington with a success that even revolutionary enthusiasm could not fail to concede. The Continental Army that took shape thereafter was peopled by militia members, to be sure, but after von Steuben's tuition at Valley Forge, it became a professional army in its own right, albeit irregularly paid. But the militias far outnumbered it, filling the roles of surveillance, local intelligence gathering, communications, harassment and occasional guerrilla warfare. Following the victorious conclusion of the War of Independence, it was natural enough for militia members to accord themselves a disproportionate amount of credit for the outcome. That in part explains the reluctance of locals to pay the taxes necessary to remunerate the Continental Army veterans their promised pensions that resulted in Shays' Rebellion – such pensions were not paid to militia veterans.
It is in that atmosphere that the debate took place over the federal control of militias specified in Article I, Section 8, of the proposed Constitution. Like Britain and France, the country was already knee-deep in debts that its Confederation government could not pay and the constituent states would not. The specter of a standing army financing itself through the forcible collection of such debts was a very palpable one.
Enter Hamilton. For him, the specter of a government without the means to defend the country was far more frightening. He opens with a reminder that few of the participants in the recent hostilities would attempt to deny.
3 It requires no skill in the science of war to discern that uniformity in the organization and discipline of the militia would be attended with the most beneficial effects whenever they were called into service for the public defense.
6 It is, therefore, with the most evident propriety that the plan of the Convention proposes to empower the Union “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”
The plan is a clear one: command of the armed forces through the Executive, funding and regulation through Congress, and populating with officers an act reserved to the states. With the exception of the last of these, it is a system that remains in use to this day.
It is the last of these that provides much of the grist for Hamilton's mill, for it is, in his view, a guard against federal control of militia resulting in the forcible subordination of the states. He will return to this point later in the essay.
First, he offers the notion that federal control of the militias is an alternative for, even a preventative against, the inception of a standing army (9). Next, he deals with the objection that there is no provision in the Constitution for the federal government to use it, no posse comitatus (13, 15). That particular usage, the reader is reminded, is an old one in English Common Law that permits the employment of the armed forces to enforce laws if called upon by local authorities. Nonsense, says Hamilton, it does exist under the Necessary and Proper Clause (17).
At 25 through 37 he presents a dialectic with an imaginary representative of his state, in which he develops the argument that requiring the entire body of the citizenry to drill regularly would be disruptive to commerce and a violation of their rights. At 29 he uses the term “yeomanry,” a somewhat antique reference to farmers as a social class that conjures up the Welsh longbow-men of Agincourt. They, too, were tasked beyond the reasonable – archery practice was, after all, the only activity the King permitted them to undertake on a Sunday.
The result is that a smaller number of militia members must be drilled to an exacting set of centrally promulgated standards (34), but not so superior to the citizens as to constitute a danger to the latter's liberty (36) – all this as an alternative to a standing army (37).
Hamilton now throws down his trump card – that the reservation of the appointment of officers to the states will guard against abuse of the militia.
43 What reasonable cause of apprehension can be inferred from a power in the Union to prescribe regulations for the militia and to command its services when necessary while the particular states are to have the sole and exclusive appointment of the officers?
45 There can be no doubt that this circumstance will always secure to them a preponderating influence over the militia.
It did other things as well that were not so benign. One of the principal weaknesses of militias as constituted in the United States at that time was the matter of officers being elected by the body of troops on the basis of popularity – it was one certain avenue to political prominence, as Hamilton knew very well, having used it himself. The concept of a militia revolves around the idea that a citizen will fight more bravely and fiercely on his own doorstep than an invader, an idea which was at least occasionally historically valid. But he did not necessarily fight more effectively. Part of that was his own training; much of it was his leadership, and of trained leadership most of all.
There was nothing to prevent the states from enacting a system of professional qualifications for the officers it nominated, if they so desired, but more significantly, there was no mechanism for the federal government to do so at all even were it empowered, as it eventually would be, to do so. That matter would be taken up in 1802 with the establishment of the nation's first military academy at West Point. To this day the majority of cadets are nominated by their congressmen.
Hamilton indulges himself by heaping ridicule on his opponents in the closing stanzas – for imagining the abusive potential uses of the militias, they are fantasy writers, ravers, incendiaries and distempered enthusiasts. They are also, as a close reading of 60 to 62 reveals, quite correct in the matter of one state militia being marched into another state to “resist a common enemy” or, significantly, “to guard the republic against the violence of faction or sedition.” It is ridiculous to imagine it, says Hamilton, but, well, it's been done before, and under the direction of the federal government it will be done even better. One cannot imagine his opponents finding that anything but vindicating, and far from comforting.
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
4 Dec 1787, Federalist #16
5 Dec 1787, Federalist #17
7 Dec 1787, Federalist #18
8 Dec 1787, Federalist #19
11 Dec 1787, Federalist #20
12 Dec 1787, Federalist #21
14 Dec 1787, Federalist #22
18 Dec 1787, Federalist #23
18 Dec 1787, Address of the Pennsylvania Minority
19 Dec 1787, Federalist #24
21 Dec 1787, Federalist #25
22 Dec 1787, Federalist #26
25 Dec 1787, Federalist #27
26 Dec 1787, Federalist #28
27 Dec 1787, Brutus #6
28 Dec 1787, Federalist #30
1 Jan 1788, Federalist #31
3 Jan 1788, Federalist #32
3 Jan 1788, Federalist #33
3 Jan 1788, Cato #7
4 Jan 1788, Federalist #34
5 Jan 1788, Federalist #35
8 Jan 1788, Federalist #36
Then [sic] same persons who tell us in one breath that the powers of the federal government will be despotic and unlimited inform us in the next that it has not authority sufficient even to call out the posse comitatus.
Since this writing, the authority has increased because part of the judiciary has become the most powerful element at our internal invaders disposal. The invasion is nearing completion within the USSC. When our constitution can be redefined into a tool of socialism or infinite government power, we are only left with one form of defense.
No sic.....typing on my iPad with auto correct adding it’s own letters.
My apologies.
Would you please put me on your ping list?
Would you please put me on your ping list?
You’re now on the list. We’ve been at it for the past 6 months. Click on “FReeper Book Club” on the main page and you’ll see everything we’ve done on this project.
They also overlooked that a virtual traitor could/would be elected President.. making possible the corruption of the entire executive branch of government.. Not just for his administration but flowing into the next administrations.. with career malefactors..
And if the executive branch was corrupted so also the Supreme Court by his selections there.. thus setting up the federal government for machine politics..
When certain amendments(and the case law proscibed by them) and following legislation stand the constitution on its head.. The constitution then gets watered down and eventually becomes irrelevant..
They didn't think of these things because they never believed the voters would become such cowards and corrupt themselves.. Electing a government that would/could do these things.. The truth is America has NOW a government that represents "the people".. Few would admit it tho..
Thanks!
My friend I think you have accurately and neatly placed this in a nutshell!
BRAVO!
Sorry was responding to the Sarah / Gingrich thread...
Hamilton appears to be sarcastic here. Perhaps he never envisioned gargoyle-like progressive totalitarians seizing control of the government and fundamentally transforming it into a monster by discoloring and disfiguring this Constitution.
Thanks for your tremendous work, Publius.
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