But at least Bryan included some reasoned arguments against specific provisions of the Constitution, something Benjamin Workman, an Irish immigrant of 1784, never managed to do in his twelve “Philadelphiensis” papers. There is nothing in the ratification writings to match the violent rhetoric of those feverish diatribes. The federalists, Workman wrote, were “demagogues despising every sense of order and decency”; they were the “meanest traitors that ever dishonoured the human character,” and as “the haughty lordlings of the convention” they were engaged in a “conspiracy against the freedom of America both deep and dangerous,” a conspiracy that could only end in “one despotic monarchy.” “Ah my friends,” Workman wrote, “the days of a cruel Nero approach fast; the language of a monster, of a Caligula, could not be more imperious” than that of the federalist plotters who “now openly browbeat you with their insolence, and assume majesty.”18
No doubt Workman, in Tench Coxe’s phrase, was simply “bellowing and braying like a wild asses colt,”19 but calmer minds too saw in the federalists’ efforts a renewal of the hidden dangers Americans had faced in the years before 1776. They declared again and again — in a great outpouring of newspaper squibs, carefully reasoned essays, and convention speeches — that the old struggle had been renewed, and that the ancient issues confronted them once more.
Examination of the Constitution revealed, they believed, a taxing power in the hands of the proposed national government that would prove to be as unqualified by the restraints of the states as Parliament’s had been by the colonial assemblies. With such limitless taxing power, Patrick Henry declared in one of his vast speeches in the Virginia convention — one of those heaving oceans of antifederalist passion whose thundering waves threatened to drown Madison’s small, tight cogencies — the Senate would live in splendor and a “great and mighty President” would “be supported in extravagant magnificence, so that the whole of our property may be taken by this American government, by laying what taxes they please, giving themselves what salaries they please, and suspending our laws at their pleasure.” The New York antifederalist “Brutus” could see an even greater danger, in the federal government’s power to “borrow money on the credit of the United States.” With this power “the Congress may mortgage any or all the revenues of the union … [and] may borrow of foreign nations a principal sum, the interest of which will be equal to the annual revenues of the country. By this means, they may create a national debt so large as to exceed the ability of the country ever to sink. I can scarcely contemplate a greater calamity that could befal this country than to be loaded with a debt exceeding their ability ever to discharge.”20
The notion that lesser governmental bodies — the states — could effectively share sovereignty with a central power (the principle of federalism) made no more sense to the antifederalists in 1788 than it had when the colonists had fruitlessly proposed it in the years before 1776 and people like Galloway and Hutchinson had effectively ridiculed its logic. So once again the antifederalists rang the changes on the famous “solecism,” imperium in imperio, explaining in endless iteration that, as George Mason put it, “two concurrent powers cannot exist long together; the one will destroy the other.” “There is a spirit of rivalship in power,” “An Old Whig” of Pennsylvania wrote, “which will not suffer two suns to shine in the same firmament; one will speedily darken the other, and the individual states will be as totally eclipsed as the stars in the meridian blaze of the sun.” A “mutual concurrence of powers,” Patrick Henry declared, “will carry you into endless absurdity.”21
The federal government, like the British government before 1776, “Brutus” wrote in two of his finest papers, empowered by the “necessary and proper” and the “supreme law of the land” clauses, “would totally destroy all the powers of the individual states,” for no “two men, or bodies of men, [can] have unlimited power respecting the same object.” It contradicts logic, scripture, even the principles of mechanics. “The legislature of the United States will have a right to exhaust every source of revenue in every state, and to annul all laws of the states which may stand in the way of effecting it.” In the end, the national government, through its taxing power, “Brutus” then wrote in a florid peroration that conjures up the horrors of totalitarian states,
exercised without limitation, will introduce itself into every corner of the city and country. It [the national government] will wait upon the ladies at their toilett, and will not leave them in any of their domestic concerns; it will accompany them to the ball, the play, and the assembly; it will go with them when they visit, and will, on all occasions, sit beside them in their carriages, nor will it desert them even at church; it will enter the house of every gentleman, watch over his cellar, wait upon his cook in the kitchen, follow the servants into the parlour, preside over the table, and note down all he eats or drinks; it will attend him to his bed-chamber, and watch him while he sleeps; it will take cognizance of the professional man in his office or his study; it will watch the merchant in the counting-house or in his store; it will follow the mechanic to his shop and in his work, and will haunt him in his family and in his bed; it will be a constant companion of the industrious farmer in all his labour, it will be with him in the house and in the field, observe the toil of his hands and the sweat of his brow; it will penetrate into the most obscure cottage; and finally, it will light upon the head of every person in the United States. To all these different classes of people and in all these circumstances in which it will attend them, the language in which it will address them will be, GIVE! GIVE!
The only solution, which was endorsed by other antifederalists, was to go back to the distinction between external and internal taxes and external and internal spheres of power, which had flourished during the Stamp Act struggle twenty-three years earlier and had been endorsed by Franklin in his testimony before Parliament, only to be repudiated in John Dickinson’s Farmer’s Letters and thereafter dropped from serious discussion.22
Thus the antifederalists, impelled by the fear of power, saw ancient issues in modern problems. Just as the king in Parliament once had absolute power over the selection of representatives who collectively might protect the people against excessive exactions by a central power, so, they pointed out, the Constitution, in Article I, Section 4 — one of the most hotly debated clauses in the entire ratification struggle — gave Congress the right to alter the times and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives. And more than that, Patrick Henry declared, representation in Congress will be not actual but virtual. “We contended with the British about representation,” he reminded the Virginia ratifying convention. “They offered us such a representation as Congress now does. They called it a virtual representation. If you look at that paper [the Constitution] you will find it so there … Representation is not, therefore, the vital principle of this government. So far it is wrong” — and so far “the tyranny of Philadelphia [the federal convention] may be like the tyranny of George III.”23
Representation was a basic issue, in 1788 as in 1776; but nothing excited antifederalist passions more than Congress’ power, under Article I, Section 8, “to raise and support armies,” the curse of which, for most antifederalists, was in no way diminished by the two-year limit on military appropriations. (Britain’s Parliament, they immediately pointed out, was limited to annual funding; and what would keep Congress from continuing appropriations indefinitely?) There is simply no way to measure the volume and fervor of the antifederalists’ denunciation of this provision, which revived for them not simply a general fear of military power but the specific danger of “standing armies,” a peculiar and distinctive threat to liberty that had been formulated for all time, they believed, in England in the 1690s, and had been carried forward intact to the colonies. There the danger had been fully realized in 1768, when the first British troops were stationed in peaceful Boston and a predictable “massacre” resulted.24
“Standing armies” were not nationa
l guards, protecting the people. They were janissary troops, palace guards, predatory mercenaries loyal to the power source — the Crown, the executive, the President, anyone in authority to whom they were loyal or who would pay them. So it had been said in the 1690’s; so it had been said in 1768; and so it was said two decades later. The good people of South Carolina, a speaker in that state’s ratifying convention warned, will certainly resist the despotism of the Constitution, as threatening to liberty as Archbishop Laud’s doctrine of “non-resistance” had been. And what will result? “Your standing army, like Turkish janizaries enforcing despotic laws, must ram it down their throats with the points of bayonets.” Surely, a Pennsylvanian “Democratic Federalist” wrote in one of the most powerful replies to Wilson’s October 6 speech, surely
the experience of past ages and the … most celebrated patriots have taught us to dread a standing army above all earthly evils. Are we then to go over all the thread-bare, common place arguments that have been used without success by the advocates of tyranny, and which have been for a long time past so gloriously refuted! Read the excellent Burgh in his political disquisitions on this hackneyed subject, and then say whether you think that a standing army is necessary in a free country.
Even the “aristocratical” David Hume, the writer stated, believed that a standing army was “a mortal distemper in a government.” Wilson’s “thread-bare, hackneyed argument” for a standing army, the writer concluded, “has been answered over and over in different ages, and does not deserve even the smallest consideration.” One scarcely needed to argue the issue, the dangers were so obvious and well known. “Brutus” contented himself simply with quoting at great length the famous, often reprinted speech on reducing the army that William Pulteney had delivered to the House of Commons in 1732.
As for the supposed safeguard of the state militias, to the antifederalists the idea made a mockery of reason. Not only did the Constitution specifically allow Congress to nationalize the state troops, hence absorb them into the standing army, but there was nothing to prevent the President from using them as if they were standing armies, since he had the power to deploy them anywhere: Virginia’s troops could be shipped off to Massachusetts to put down political opposition there, Rhode Island’s to Pennsylvania — or for that matter to Cuba or Timbuctoo — wherever the President’s adventures might lead him. Even worse: the national government, George Mason said, referring specifically to events in Pennsylvania forty years earlier, might cunningly neglect the state militias, fail to arm them, or otherwise immobilize them, so that in time, when the people felt the need for military protection, they would throw themselves on the mercy of the national government and cry out, “‘Give us a standing army!’” A fantasy? “Those things which can be,” the Presbyterian preacher David Caldwell said in the North Carolina convention, “may be.” “I do not … say Congress will do” the evil he feared, Abraham Holmes of Plymouth County declared in the Massachusetts convention, “but, sir, I undertake to say that Congress … may do it; and if they do not, it will be owing entirely — I repeat it, it will be owing entirely — to the goodness of the men, and not in the least degree owing to the goodness of the Constitution.” And the goodness of men being a hopelessly frail reed, evil possibilities must be eliminated at the start. A standing army, once established, will be uncontrollable.25
Limitless taxation, corrupted representation, a specious sharing of sovereignty that would end in absolutism, standing armies — these were not new issues, but ancient issues that had been fought over a generation earlier in precisely the same terms and that had resulted in revolution. Similarly familiar — notorious — was the omission, in Article III, of jury trials in civil cases, a repudiation, it seemed to the antifederalists, of the central safeguard of common law procedure, reminiscent of the Crown’s advancement of prerogative courts in its effort, in the 1760’s and 1770’s, to assert its power over the colonies. Familiar too was the issue of Congressmen paying their own salaries: “Before the Revolution,” Dr. John Taylor told the Massachusetts convention, “it was considered as a grievance that the governors, etc., received their pay from Great Britain. They could not, in that case, feel their dependence on the people, when they received their appointments and salaries from the crown.” Rawlins Lowndes, in South Carolina, objecting to the lack of popular control over Congressional salaries, had a vivid memory of the precedent, recalling “what a flame was raised in Massachusetts, on account of Great Britain assuming the payment of salaries to judges and other state officers; and that this conduct was considered as originating in a design to destroy the independence of their government.”26
The fear of “secret services” money dispensed in covert operations by the executive through hidden slush funds — one of the Crown’s most dangerous practices — was also revived, along with the sense that the President’s pardoning power was a legal re-creation of the ancient precept that the king can do no wrong. Like the King, the President, under Article II, Section 2, was empowered to pardon anyone “for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” So the President, George Mason wrote, could “screen from punishment those whom he had secretly instigated to commit the crime, and thereby prevent a discovery of his own guilt,” a maneuver that would be the less dangerous for him since — Luther Martin pointed out — trials of Presidential impeachments were to be conducted by the Senate, “a privy council to the President” whose “leading and influential members may have advised or concurred in the very measures for which he may be impeached” — senators who would, in addition, still be hopeful of lucrative Presidential appointments. Such trials, moreover, were to be presided over by a chief justice nominated by the President “probably … not so much for his eminence in legal knowledge and for his integrity, as from favouritism and influence, since the President, knowing that in case of impeachment the chief justice is to preside at his trial, will naturally wish to fill that office with a person of whose voice and influence he shall consider himself secure.”27
So the antifederalists’ vision of the dangers they faced was deeply colored by their recollections of the past. “The same causes produces [sic] the same effects,” a Massachusetts debater argued, recalling the Boston Massacre in a discussion of standing armies. Like Patrick Henry, they feared the anticipated creation of federal customs officers: “the experience of the mother country leads me to detest them.” Like James Winthrop, in his eighteen-part “Agrippa” series, they recalled that at the heart of the disaster of British rule had been Parliament’s effort to impose uniformity on the great variety of life in this distant periphery, an effort that would have to be repeated, catastrophically, by Congress and by the federal courts if the national government were in any degree to rule the diverse nation effectively. Artificial uniformity of any kind would be, just as it had been, disastrous: a uniform trade policy would destroy the successes of regional enterprise; a uniform naturalization law would violate the need either of some states to import people rapidly or of others “to keep their blood pure.” And in the end any such effort would require the imposition of armed might, which would lead inevitably — as it always had in the past — to turmoil and civil war.28
It was all a familiar story, with a predictable outcome to people who had been through it all before. Amos Singletary — referred to affectionately as our “Honourable Old Daddy” by his colleagues in the Massachusetts ratifying convention — reminded the delegates that he had been “on the stage in the beginning of our troubles, in the year 1775,” and he recalled, even if no one else did, precisely what had happened. If, at that time, he declared, “any body had proposed such a constitution as this … it would have been thrown away at once. It would not have been looked at.” For could not Congress under the Constitution do precisely what people like himself had gone to war to prevent — assert a limitless right to tax and to “bind us in all cases whatever”? So they cited leading documents of the pre-Revolutionary debates. They quoted Stephen Hopkins�
� Rights of Colonies Examined, John Dickinson’s Farmer’s Letters, James Burgh’s Political Disquisitions, Hutchinson’s debates with the Massachusetts Assembly; and they invoked the ancient deities — Hampden, Sidney, Pym, Wilkes — and denounced the ancient villains — Hutchinson, Hillsborough, Bute, even those fabled apologists of “passive obedience and non-resistance” in the time of Charles I, Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Mainwaring.29
But the historical dimension of the antifederalists’ condemnation of the Constitution had a subtler and more powerful element. One unquestionably fundamental belief in the received tradition which had been brought into focus during the pre-Revolutionary struggle with Britain was the conviction that the only truly free states were republics, where people ruled themselves through freely elected representatives; that republics, necessarily delicate structures, could survive only in small units since they required uniformity of opinion, or at least a rough consensus, force being necessary to control clangorous diversity; and that the animating principle of republics was virtue. The ultimate sources of these ideas they rarely cited. Their chief authority, insofar as they needed any authority to document what seemed to them such obvious ideas, was Montesquieu, whose name recurs far more often than that of any other authority in all of the vast literature on the Constitution. He was the fountainhead, the ultimate arbiter of belief, his ideas the standard by which all others were set. They reverted to his authority at every turn, and through his eyes saw the moral impossibility of creating a massive republic.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 41