Archives for March 2018

 

In his majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes attempts to justify a hierarchy of constitutional principles. Specifically, in construing Article VI’s “authority” clause and its “supreme law of the land” clause, he rates explicitly-stated constitutional prohibitions over implicit prohibitions, and he claims that treaty law overrides the unspecified ‘reserve powers’ of the states, mentioned in the Tenth Amendment.

Holmes’s argument regarding the wording of Article VI has been disputed on the grounds that Article VI’s reference to laws made in pursuance of the Constitution and treaties made under the authority of the United States both refer to the obligation to pay debts contracted during the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation, as well as to future debts contracted under the Constitution. But while these debts are specifically mentioned in the Article’s previous clause, there is no need to assume that the language of the clause under scrutiny refers back to obligations undertaken under the Articles of Confederation alone; clearly, the language refers to future treaties, as well. Moreover, the language of the Tenth Amendment does not overturn the treaty power. Holmes could have confined his decision to those points, which would have forced the plaintiffs to narrow the dispute to whether hunting (as opposed to shipping) migratory wildfowl really falls under the interstate commerce clause. (After all, the birds aren’t being shipped across state lines; they are moving on their own.)  He chose not to, but instead took the opportunity to advance a new way of interpreting the Constitution as a whole.

Holmes begins by appearing to have recourse to the ancient Roman principle, ‘the public safety is the supreme law’ or, as his contemporary, John Dewey, might have put it, necessity is as necessity does. But this maxim won’t ‘do’ for Holmes, at least in its naked meaning. It would not restrict a government to its own “authority” any more than it would restrict it to a constitution. “Authority” suggests a distinction between legitimacy and tyranny. Naked necessity could imply an appeal to despotism.

Holmes has almost ventured beyond ‘broad construction’ of the Constitution, into extra-constitutional ground. But he does not want to step too far away from constitutional law. To do so would put at hazard his own authority as a judge. Moreover, he also does not want to step into the extraconstitutional terrain preferred by the Framers, the terrain of natural right, which he regards as a land of myth, a realm harmonized by the mystic chords of memory that Lincoln invoked futilely on the eve of the Civil War.

Holmes makes a different move. He defines the Constitution as “a constituent act” (emphasis added) whereby the Framers “called into life” (note the God-language) a document that is more than a document, more than the sum of its language. The meaning of this document develops, grows, in ways that “could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters.” The Framers hadn’t simply composed a document; they had “had created an organism.”

The Holmesian Constitution is no longer simply a contract, to be construed by careful analysis of its language, whether ‘strict’ or ‘broad.’ Jeffersonian ‘strict construction’ versus Chief Justice John Marshall’s ‘broad construction’ both get brushed aside, as both are bound up in the verbal/contractarian framework. Rather, the new, historicized, ‘living,’ ‘organic’ Constitution must be interpreted historically, by which Holmes does not mean in line with the original intent of the Framers but “in the light of our whole [national] experience and not merely in [the light of] what was said one hundred years ago.” (“In the beginning was the Word? No! In the beginning was the Act!” The new Constitution is Faustian.)

With respect to exegesis, this means that a treaty can only be constitutionally limited if it flatly contradicts some specific “prohibitory words” of the document, some exact ‘Thou shalt not’ of its ‘creators’ or ‘begetters.’ But the vaguer language of the Tenth Amendment is not specifically prohibitory; the meaning of those words is changeable in ‘history,’ meaning in the course of the Constitution’s ‘organic development’ or ‘growth.’ “We must consider what this country [and with it, in the new, organic sense, the Constitution] has become in deciding what [the Tenth Amendment] has reserved [to the states].

Here is Holmes’s exegetical opening. The case now becomes an anticipation of what would be done with the commerce clause in the 1930s. The nation has evolved; corporations transcend state boundaries and so (in the issue before the Court here) do migratory birds. In both instances, social development including technology and commercial industrialism have posed problems in ways the states are no longer competent to solve. The treaty power, suitably ‘misread,’ can be used to solve this problem, reversing the original intent of the framers of the Tenth Amendment. Wedded to a commitment to American nationalism, the hierarchy of explicit over implicit reserved state powers follows from this new, historicist approach to Constitutional interpretation.

What validates this hierarchy? The Framers themselves, as well as Jefferson and even Marshall would reply: Nothing at all. To them, Holmes would be freebooting. ‘This is not constitutional construction at all,’ they would say, ‘except in the sense that Holmes is reconstructing our Constitution. This is not an exercise in contract law, the verbal analysis of a document with a stable meaning delivered by the language of the document itself.’

Thus Holmes abandons natural right, natural law, and contractarianism for natural history or evolutionary organicism. As it plays out in constitutional exegesis, this approach enables him to supersede the Framers intentions in a limited way: Where the Framers explicitly prohibit, he must still respect their intention. But where they are vague, or leave things unstated, he can silently contravene their intention.

What justifies this, in Holmes’s mind? “[W]hat was said a hundred years ago” most emphatically justifies nothing, he contends. But what was said at that time? Exactly one hundred years before 1920, the Missouri Compromised saved the old Constitution, the Constitution as understood by the Framers and by Jefferson and Marshall. But this salvation was only temporary. As Civil War veteran Oliver Wendell Holmes learned in his life’s formative experience, the old way of understanding the Constitution could not save the union the Constitution was intended to solemnize and reinforce. Holmes believes that organicism will better meld ‘nation’ and ‘Constitution’ to ensure an ever-strengthening Union, one that will never again disintegrate into the carnage of modern, techno-industrial war.

The old Constitutional order at best permitted only a temporary Missouri Compromise. Holmes’s new Constitutional order (enunciated, appropriately enough, in a case called MISSOURI v. Holland) brings forth what he hopes will be a permanent Missouri Synthesis, whereby a states-rights challenge to the national government is dialectically and ‘organically’ subsumed, not patched over. The past—the Constitution of “one hundred years ago”—is not authoritative. The true authority of the United States government is now and in the future, as America has grown and will grow.

It may seem faintly comic to load such weighty matters into a dispute over migratory birds. But Holmes might not have thought so. As any resident of Washington, D. C. would have known, in 1914 the last passenger pigeon died in its cage at the Washington Zoo. A major food source for earlier Americans, the seemingly numberless flocks of passenger pigeons had provided food for the burgeoning American populace as it extended its rule from one end of the continent to the other. The pigeon was a victim of precisely the same commercial-industrial economy that called for a rethinking of the commerce clause. This was also the political economy that had helped the United States to win the Civil War against the States-Righters of the Confederacy. How could a thoughtful man of Holmes’s generation not see these linkages: Union and the need for increased power over often-recalcitrant states; but, at the same time, the vast increase and then displacement of rural folk (simultaneous with the very destruction of one of their principal foods) in an industrializing economy, and the consequent need for the national management, the federally supervised conservation, of natural resources that know no conventional, ‘contractual’ state boundaries. Migratory Americans had extinguished a huge population of migratory birds; without nationwide governance from a centralized state, Americans themselves might eventually become extinct.

Quite apart from the question of the legitimacy of Holmes’s constitutional jurisprudence, however, the problem will be this: If you replace the deductive logic of the old constitutionalism with the dialectical logic of ‘growth,’ will not this Hegelian means result in the Hegelian end, a worldwide bureaucratic state? Where does that leave the self-government of “We the People”?

 

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American saw political transformations that were to have (as Hegel might have put it) ‘world-historical’ significance. Americans framed the first government that was republican—based on representation—in all three branches. As The Federalist observes, previous republics had been ‘mixed’ regimes, exemplified in antiquity by Rome and in modernity by Britain and the Netherlands: regimes in which various social orders—monarch, aristocrats, commoners—each controlled one branch of government. The American Founders established the first unmixed republic; moreover, the new regime was designed to falsify the Montesquieuian truism that republics could only exist on small territories, and could survive only in loose confederations. In the United States, however, a moderate centralization of governmental authority occurred, as the Articles of Confederation were replaced by the Constitution of 1787. This vindication of popular sovereignty led to the increasing democratization of the regime throughout the early nineteenth century, culminating in the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

European regimes experienced considerably longer transformations to republicanism. What was it about the political, economic, social, and ideational preconditions of the American founding that lent themselves to the success of the Founders’ political experiment? The question matters now as much as it did then, as peoples around the world struggle for and against the founding of democratic and commercial republican regimes in their own countries.

 

Military and Political conditions

The English colonists in America exercised considerable self-government before the Seven Years’ War. British interests thereafter required a better-integrated empire in order to raise taxes needed to pay the war debt and to enhance military preparedness, but Americans, relieved of the bothersome French, needed British protection must less, and needed the empire not at all. They were sitting on territory big enough for their own empire, even if it were to be an ’empire of liberty.’ Foreseeably, the empire of liberty would need only local militias as land forces for Indian ‘removal.’ For national defense, it would need not so much an army as a navy; this circumstance favored republicanism, inasmuch as navies seldom threaten civilian rule.

The Revolutionary War helped to establish popular sovereignty because the American gentry needed soldiers who would fight the British. As political sociologist Michael Mann remarks, “the first mass mobilization war of modern times” contributed to the first popular-sovereignty republic, as the petite bourgeoisie and small farmers organized into militias (Mann 152). “Self-government and the militia went together” (Hintze 196). In Europe warfare had led to aristocracy, but in America there was no aristocracy, and the gentry could not win without the ‘commons’ (Hintze 168). Thus the American Whigs in a sense reversed the Whiggish account of political development, which held that war breeds despotism. A militia isn’t a standing army; it empowers a vigilant, arms-bearing citizenry, not social and political elites. (Future American state-builders, from the old Federalists to Theodore Roosevelt to the New Dealers who established the ‘national security state,’ advocated a standing army, professional and/or conscript.) A democratic military structure enhanced the chances for a Jeffersonian, and then a Jacksonian America. Washington’s policy of disentanglement from European affairs minimized the need for a larger-scale land force, thus combining political liberty with geopolitical Realpolitik.

Civilian politics in the colonies featured local self-government; the New England townships are best-remembered, but in one form or another, colonial governments mostly made their own laws. American colonies saw more political participation as measured in terms of suffrage than England had; much of colonial government was republican, forming the civilian basis of popular sovereignty once the king’s men were pushed out (Huntington 94). Huntington claims that American colonial institutions were Tudor leftovers that the English immigrants had brought with them and never ‘updated’: balance of powers, decentralization, subordination of governments to fundamental law—all guards against statism (96) and, particularly, against modern English-style parliamentary sovereignty (105). He contends that the Tudor conception of the constitutional monarch, as distinct from the modern-European absolute monarch, was transferred to the office of the presidency (107). On the other hand, as Huntington also sees, the Americans did not exalt the state over the churches or empower a real, hereditary monarch; they were decidedly selective, republican ‘Tudors.’

 

Economic conditions

The political economies of the American colonies were local and mostly regional. There was no national political economy, a fact the Constitution’s commerce clause was intended to alter. Although broadly commercial/capitalist, they came in four varieties: state-patronage, slave-based agricultural, free commercial agricultural (Mann calls this “agrarian petty commodity capitalism”), and commercial-landed (Mann 142-143). These economies were 90% agricultural, but this was commercial agriculture, not feudal, ‘manor-and-peasant’ agriculture, as still seen in Europe.

Crucially, the colonists did not need the British imperial system for trading; indeed, that system only impeded them, preventing free markets for American goods in the Caribbean. Smuggling ensued. The colonial system also inhibited the development of local manufactures, much to the displeasure of northern and middle-Atlantic colonists; fortunately, slavery was not much used in the manufacturing industries, else its abolition in the North might have been delayed. For their part, the colonists’ slogan, ‘No taxation without representation,’ was not only a statement of moral-political principle but an economic threat: Let us participate in the governance of the Empire or we will cut off the lifeblood of Leviathan.

The war got rid of the American Tories and much of the state-patronage capitalism, which would appear, under republican auspices, in the move for ‘internal improvements’ in the nineteenth century. This left a rivalry between slave-based agriculture and free agriculture, which became entwined in the catastrophic, near-fatal military/political conflict, four generations later. But the 1787 Constitutional Convention avoided a serious split between the northern and southern states with the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave importation clause. Instead of a truly virulent regime division among states, north and south, the ratification debate resolves into intrastate debates between eastern and western interests. The Middle Atlantic states ratified quickly; they were already full-fledged commercial republics. A strong, well-coordinated national state would protect their coastlines and thereby protect their international trade. Southern and northern states were more reluctant, but in each case, a state-by-state examination of the ratification debates shows that the eastern, coastal areas supported the new constitution, with its promise of interstate commercial regulation, resistance to debtors’ demands, and coordinated national systems of military defense and (at least in some, Hamiltonian, minds) of modern finance.

The commercial economy begun by the colonies and reinforced by the Constitution played out politically in the formation of mass, competitive parties in the early nineteenth century. The Madisonian policy of giving ‘factions’ or interests their play within a legal framework gave considerable leeway to party organizing. The commercial economy, undermining the planter gentry, induced the gentry to appeal to the democratic/republican people in order to defend their own way of life, even as they had had to appeal to the people for military support during the war. This led to a synergism of republicanism and commerce, each side dissolving the elitism of the other. Thus ‘gentry’ politicians like Jefferson and Madison laid the groundwork for the organization of parties, an act followed by the recognizable, and much democratized, parties of the 1830s. Alternatively, America might have developed long the lines Jefferson professed to fear: a high-toned Federalist state with a quasi-monarchic president in alliance with a strong bureaucracy and  standing army, eliciting sharper, more politicized class struggles. America might then have come to look more like Europe.

 

Social structure

Tocquevillian moeurs or habits of the heart include a democratic/republican religion (Protestantism), a love of orderly home life carried into public affairs, a separation of church and state that makes religion more, not less, powerful because it is now fully consensual, and widespread literacy, encouraged by the Bible-based, democratized religion of Protestantism. All of these social features existed in the colonies; although of course the Puritans were not exemplars of church-state separation, they did have a democratized and above all individualized religiosity; further, the Middle Atlantic states contained many of the English and other European ‘dissenting’ sects, which did insist on church-state separation. The very diversity of sects in colonial America lent itself to the Madisonian solution, identical to his solution of factionalism: Increase the number of sects and you decrease religious intolerance. The political payoff was that the First Amendment had civil-social reinforcemtn; George Washington could do what no state had ever done—tell Jews, Catholics, and Quakers that they were not merely to be tolerated but must be allowed free exercise of religion as a matter of natural and civil right—and expect the American people to redeem his promise.

On the more sinister side, the colonial implantation of slavery had the social consequence (cited by Tocqueville) of allowing southern whites to scorn labor. Commercial republicanism stands on the labor theory of value; Tocqueville rightly concludes that slavery attacks the American Union indirectly, through its moeurs, by enabling the whites of one region to imagine themselves aristocrats, living off slaves and reading altogether too many novels by Sir Walter Scott. Modern or race-based slavery, supporting an honor-bound, warlike, high-spirited class of whites, yielded the series of Southerners’ miscalculations of Northern commercial-republican willingness and ability to fight, miscalculations that eventuated in the Civil War.

The major colonial social condition with political consequences was the lack of a titled nobility. Without this, an unmixed republic was possible; without a titled nobility, a thoroughly commercial republicanism was possible; without a titled nobility, a very strong central state is unnecessary and Hobbes’s argument that such a state, with a monarchic regime is the best rode to ‘modernization’ falls flat. A relatively egalitarian, consensual society needs no central government to dislodge an anti-modern aristocracy (Huntington 126). The political principles of self-government and equal civil rights for citizens were socially reinforced by fluid, diverse English America, in sharp contrast with both French Canada and Latin America (Hartz 74-75). Gianfranco Poggi observes that in Europe concrete standestaat claims were not easily translated into the more abstract terms of natural and legal right (Poggi 87); Americans did not have this impediment to popular sovereignty or to the understanding of government as security for natural rights via the rule of law.

 

Ideas

There is a limit to Huntington’s hypothesis. He rightly says that ideational modernism means the Machiavellian-Baconian project of conquering fortune and nature. But he does not say that ‘Tudor’ America limited that project. American obviously partook of what Harvey Mansfield calls the modern-liberal ‘taming’ of the Machiavellian project.

Hartz describes seventeenth-century Americans as individualistic; their Christianity did not include acquiescence to the doctrine of the divine right of kings to rule, for example (73). He concedes that those Americans were not secularists (nor, he should add, did their asceticism comport with profit-maximizing) but claims, Weber-like, that their ‘Protestant ethic’ lent itself to subsequent secularization of Lockean-liberalization. As for the South (which Hartz does not much discuss), although it is true that the planters resisted Lockean principles with respect to their families and slaves, white men there very much wanted to apply them to themselves, leading to tensions visible as late as the post-Civil War self-defense of Jefferson Davis.

Although much ink as spilled over the alleged contradiction between a ‘liberal’ and ‘republican’ tradition in America, the writings of the principal Founders show no such thing. Colonists and Founders alike associated the principles later labeled as ‘liberal’ with republicanism. While there were anti-Federalists who disliked any thoroughgoing commercial ethos, their sentiments were fatally compromised by Lockean elements, as Herbert J. Storing has demonstrated.

 

Conclusion

Karl Polanyi identifies four institutions of the nineteenth-century European states: a balance of power among states; an international financial system based on gold; a self-regulating commercial market leading to industrialism as technology advanced; generally liberal if not yet stable republican regimes. Huntington defines modernization as ‘rationalization’ of authority (in the Weberian, rules-governed-bureaucratic sense of rationality), along with differentiation of social structures and expansion of political participation (93). Colonial America featured the preconditions of liberalism, of democratization/expanded political participation, and the market economy. It had the making of its own balance-of-power system—federalism—which would however prove unstable as it was (mis)conceived by later American politicians. It did not anticipate a modern financial system; that awaited Hamilton and Robert Morris. It did not conceive of bureaucratization at all, and in fact had revolted against the extension of British state bureaucracy to its shores. Such a political society interacted with Europe primarily by trading with it and by proving to Europeans the viability of commercial republicanism. The success of that regime here proved not so easily maintained in Europe, where war, political regimes, and socio-economic conditions all impeded it. Only after commercial/market economies were established there, thanks in large measure to state intervention (Zolberg 87) did commercial republican regimes become increasingly feasible.

 

Works Cited

Hartz, Louis: The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955.

Gilbert, Felix, ed.: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Huntington, Samuel P.: Political Order in Changing Societies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.

Mann, Michael: The Sources of Social Power. Volume II: The Riuse of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Poggi, Gianfranco: The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.

Polanyi, Karl: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963 [1944].

Storing, Herbert J., ed.: The Complete Anti-Federalist. Five volumes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Zolberg, Aristide: “Strategic Interactions and the Formation of Modern States in France and England.” In Eli Kazancigal, ed.: the State in Global Perspective. Paris: Gower/UNESCO, 1986.  See also “International Engagement and American Democracy: A Comparative Perspective.” In Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds.: Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 

Americans ratified the 1787 Constitution because it provided a clearly superior alternative to the existing Articles of Confederation, given the political and economic purposes of the most populous section of the country: the eastern seaboard. Opponents themselves admitted that state governments could be unresponsive to the peoples’ attempts at self-government (Wood, Creation, Chapter 10). They could offer no new, better choice. Further, their own position suffered from internal tensions or contradictions. Many of their concerns had either been addressed at the Philadelphia convention or would be assuaged by the promise of a bill of rights.

The Revolutionary War ended in the expropriation of Tories’ property; many left for Canada—perhaps most of those who had been most influential before the war (Wood, Radicalism, 176). Remaining were two types of commercial republicans: commercial-manufacturing ‘nationalists,’ who envisioned an integrated, mercantile economy, and ‘localists,’ who preferred commercial-agrarian economies operating intrastate. Both sides advocated what amounted to commercial republicanism, as distinguished from the military republicanism of the most celebrated earlier republic, that of ancient Rome. But the commercial republicanism of the Federalists was more thoroughly commercial; the commercial republicanism of the Anti-Federalists included admixtures of ‘ancient’ and Christian principles that could not be sustained as political bonds across large, socially heterogeneous territories. The war itself had given mercantile interests a boost, bringing money transactions in place of barter—accelerating capital accumulation (Radicalism, 248). With the decline of religiosity after the Great Awakening of the 1740s—a decline itself precipitated and sustained by increased social diversity—political societies needed bonds of interest to replace weakened religious ties. “American society could no longer be thought of as either a hierarchy of ranks”—as it had been to some extent under the Tories—”or a homogeneous republican whole” (Radicalism, 258).

There could have been a serious split between northern and southern states—that is, between states leaning away from slavery and states where the peculiar institution was securely ensconced. But this split was averted in Philadelphia, with the several compromises devised by the prudent (and exhausted) delegates: the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave importation clause. Instead of a division between states, northern and southern, the ratification debate resolved into intrastate debates between eastern and western interests. The best way to see this is to look at the way voters in the three regions—North, South, Middle Atlantic—behaved during the ratification period.

The Middle Atlantic states ratified quickly. Their central location would be an advantage under a more centralized government. Moreover, in terms of both population and territory, three of them—Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut (often misclassified as a New England state)—were small states whose worries about being engulfed by their large neighbors had ended with the “Great Compromise” between small states and large states at the Convention. with equal representation in the Senate, they were assured that New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia could not squeeze them with high imposts. A ‘states’ rights’ position cannot be upheld by sovereign states too small to defend themselves; equal representation in the Senate was the best deal for them.

Large or small, the Middle Atlantic states were already full-fledged commercial republics by the 1780s. A stronger national economic and political union was an  obvious advantage for them. A well-organized national military force would protect their coastlines and therefore their international trade. With no Puritan heritage and with religiously diverse populations, no Christian Spartas enlivened their dreams. As for the one large state of the group, Pennsylvanians saw that Philadelphia would remain a major commercial center. Western Pennsylvania, very democratic, localist, and agrarian, opposed the new Constitution and eventually staged the Whiskey Rebellion, but lacked the votes to defeat the Federalists in the eastern section of the state.

The South viewed the Constitution with more suspicion, worrying that western expansion might be sacrificed to trans-Atlantic trade. In 1780 and throughout the first half of the century to come, southerners hoped to consolidate the dominance of commercial agrarianim over the North’s commercial manufacturing and finance by pushing into the west and driving the Amerindians out. They regarded the Jay-Gardoqui treaty with Spain as a sellout of southern interests, putting the right to navigate the Mississippi River at hazard. Would the new, stronger federal government spend money to defend north-Atlantic shipping instead of frontier defense (and offense?) Nonetheless, in the end the east-coast southerners prevailed over the less numerous westerners. In South Carolina, Charleston was a major international shipping point, and its interests carried the day. Virginia had a tradition of self-government, but it was also militarily vulnerable, with its long seacoast and rivers leading deep into the interior. Virginians knew they needed northern help for defense not only from the British and the French navies but from potential rivals in other states, if the Union dissolved. Further, Madison could argue that the Jay-Gardoqui treaty was actually the result of the weakness of the Articles of Confederation government. For defense, a an energetic, strong central government would be indispensable. In the South, Federalists could turn the Anti-Federalist argument on its head. If you really want self-government, independence from foreign nd domestic military threats, your best bet is a strong federal union, especially if you have the guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Union by definition discourages depredations by neighbors; union also makes Americans much more formidable to European powers. For self-government, for the practical enjoyment of states’ rights, a stronger federal union makes more sense than a weak confederation.

New England posed a somewhat different, but still soluble, problem for Federalists. Massachusetts and New Hampshire were as ardent devotees of localism as were the southern states. In addition, they had religious reasons for local self-government. The small republic, they saw, was indispensable in order to maintain the homogeneity needed for the public promotion of personal and civic virtue. The Christian Sparta cannot tolerate ‘Athenian’ laxness. In New Hampshire, for example, religious toleration meant personal freedom of conscience, but decidedly not disestablishmentarianism. The new federal constitution required no religious test for officeholders and in addition countenanced slavery; then as later, muscular Protestantism and anti-slavery moralism were tightly linked. But yet again, eastern, commercial interests prevailed. In Massachusetts, the port city of Boston was heavily Federalist. The central part of the state was just as heavily anti-Federalist, consisting of agrarian democrats in search of debt relief. The far west also wanted debt relief, but had suffered the effects of Shays Rebellion and by now wanted law and order as well. Result: ratification (narrowly) but with support for a Bill of Rights entailing state sovereignty over internal affairs.

New York as usual was in something of a class by itself, with one foot in the Middle Atlantic region, the other in New England. New York experienced some of the tensions of Massachusetts, albeit without the Puritan ethico-religious elevation. Upstate Clintonites—Jeffersonians of the future—opposed downstate Hamiltonians. Hamilton won the debate, narrowly, by arguing for the need for self-defense, still keenly felt after the British occupation of New York City during the war. Absent the mountains of Switzerland, how is the small, virtuous republic to defend itself? Hamilton had the answer: the extended republic of The Federalist, numbers 1-10. And even if the Adirondacks may have seemed a fair equivalent of the Alps, why would downstaters not secede from New York and join the Union, leaving upstaters virtuous and isolated, with British Canada along their border?

Rhode Island too was sui generis. It was a state full of debtors and democrats eyeing a proposed federal Constitution designed to moderate democracy and to prevent debtors from welshing on loans. And so it refused to ratify for several years. Eventually, its good citizens realized (to steal a mot later applied to the sovereign state of South Carolina) that it was too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum.

Virtuous but isolated: What is wrong with that? A real Spartan (over even Christian-Spartan, or if you prefer desert-Spartan) might very well ask that question. But most Americans found isolation undesirable because even the sternest Anti-Federalists were finally commercial republicans or what would come to be called ‘liberals.’ They lived in societies that were bigger and more diverse, religiously and economically, than the original Sparta ever was. A glance at Fustel de Coulanges’s La Cité Antique suffices to show the harsh measures needed to sustain a truly ‘virtuous republic.’ Anti-Federalists never had any real intention of taking such measures. There cannot really be a Christian Sparta—at least, not in a community much bigger than a monastery, as the American Puritans learned. Protestants put a premium on the individual conscience. And if you conceive of Christianity in a manner ‘tamed’ if not compromised by Lockeanism, as so many new England and other Protestant clergy had been by the latter half of the eighteenth century, you have decisively left Spartanism behind. Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike regarded government as an invention of prudence designed to secure the natural rights of individuals, and only secondarily as a device of civic education. Commercial-republican mothers, even Christian ones, do not adjure their husbands and sons to come back with their shields or on them; they are more likely to require them to bring home some bacon. Anti-Federalist appeals to personal and civic virtue had considerable power, but it was finally the power of nostalgia, an affection for a half-invented past mixed with dreams of an impossible future, even less plausible than the ersatz chivalry of nineteenth-century southerners, eventually to be gone with the wind.

Anti-Federalists were drawn by too many conflicting ambitions. They wanted the self-government of the states with the security of a more perfect union. They wanted agrarianism but not on self-sufficient farms; they wanted a commercial agriculture which required national and even international markets. Sparta did not adopt a policy of free trade. They wanted self-defense but wanted no standing armies; they wanted the citizen-soldiery of the militia, who were the same people who had returned to their fields when crops needed to be gathered during the Revolutionary War. They wanted a perfect equilibrium of state and federal power, but saw that America under the Articles of Confederation could not effectively govern itself. They wanted to secure natural rights, including the right of property, but could not find a way to prevent the state governments from being seized by rights-abusing minorities. American under the Articles could not continue to prosper economically as the Anti-Federalists (too) wanted it to do.

So they fought the Federalist politically but settled for a reasonable bargain—the 1787 Constitution with a bill of rights appended. As a consolation to idealists, the city on a hill remained standing, an example for the other peoples of the world. But it shone less, was less the New Jerusalem emitting a light unto the nations, more a rational model of popular self-government.

In that fight, it should be added, Anti-Federalists were overmatched intellectually as well as economically, socially, and politically. Anti-Federalists never wrote anything in defense of the Articles remotely comparable to The Federalist. In a civil-social milieu where substance counted more than style, that mattered. The more cosmopolitan, commercial sections produced the more impressive statesmen. The Virginia Anti-Federalist (for example) tried to match Patrick Henry against Madison (educated in the commercial-republican state of New Jersey), Randolph, and Washington. That, too, was an unequal contest. Federalist had the edge on Anti-Federalists, both in quantity of votes and quality of leadership. The representatives of most of the people were persuaded not to want radical democracy.

 

Works Cited

Gordon S. Wood: The Creation of the American Republic. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1972.

Gordon S. Wood: The Radicalism of the American Revolution: How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any that Had Ever Existed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.