Stevens, of course, was no Madison or Hamilton. But like both of them he pounded away at the necessity of reconsidering inherited formulations, testing them for their applicability in the American setting, and excoriated utopianism and self-validating theorizing. His one favorable citation of Montesquieu is a passage in which the Frenchman disparaged Harrington, whom Stevens himself attacked directly together with Plato and Thomas More for having “amused themselves with forming visionary schemes of perfected governments … no better than romances.” Hamilton, equally blistering on abstract, systematic speculation, pointed out that the tiny republics of classical antiquity were in fact scenes of constant and often fatal squabbling; only the larger confederacies had any stability. And as for the fear that law and order would be unenforceable on America’s far borderlands, that, he said, was “a palpable illusion of the imagination.” People on the borderlands will be equally well represented in the central government, will be equally well informed on the effectiveness of their representatives in serving their interests, and in addition their interests will be vigilantly protected by the state governments, if only “from the rivalship of power.” But beyond all that, Hamilton wrote, there is the simple fact that distance will not create different interests in kind:
the citizens who inhabit the country at and near the seat of government will, in all questions that affect the general liberty and prosperity, have the same interest with those who are at a distance; and … will stand ready to sound the alarm when necessary, and to point out the actors in any pernicious project. The public papers will be expeditious messengers of intelligence to the most remote inhabitants of the union.44
But it was left to Madison — first in his extraordinary letter to Jefferson (October 24, 1787) and then in two of his finest Federalist papers (X and LI) — to give this whole line of argument its ultimate range, depth, and intellectual elegance.45 He did not simply assume faction and interest; most commentators, antifederalists as well as federalists, did that.46 He defined them, and showed that they were “sown in the nature of man,” manifested particularly in the inescapable inequalities in the distribution of property. Then he logically reduced the possibility of coping with faction to controlling its effects, and demonstrated that this would be possible only in extended republics. This was so, he argued, partly because America’s unique electoral system would tend to produce local representatives of “most attractive merit and the most … established characters” capable of grasping and pursuing “great and national objects,” but principally because “the greater number of citizens and extent of territory” in a large republic would reduce the possibility that any one faction would become dominant and hence be in a position to oppress the rest.
Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.
And he went on to illustrate the moderating effect of distance and numbers on inflammatory religious sects and on “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.”
It is surprising that there should ever have been any confusion about what Madison was saying and meaning in his most famous Federalist paper. Nothing he said about factionalism or its material basis was new or controversial. Antifederalist as well as federalist assumed the same. Nor was he introducing any shift in basic ideology or anticipating something modern scholars would call liberalism or interest-group politics; and he was neither opposing “civic humanism” nor exalting it.47 He was doing what John Stevens had been doing before him, what James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton were doing too, and what many other, lesser figures — Edmund Randolph, Francis Corbin, James Bowdoin, Charles Pinckney — were also doing, namely, showing the inapplicability in America of the inherited notion that republics can survive only on a small scale. For all of the federalists who commented at length on the problem of size, the safety of republican government lay in extension, not contraction; all of them believed that in a system like America’s the greater the numbers and the extent of territory, the more solidly based and the safer free government would become. None of this had to be learned from Madison. The difference between Madison and the other federalist writers who tackled the problem of size lay not in the point of the arguments but in the style and quality of argumentation. No other writer had Madison’s cogency, penetration, knowledge, and range.
Nor did they need him to show them the way on the larger and engrossing question of virtue and republicanism. Federalists and antifederalists both agreed that man in his deepest nature was selfish and corrupt; that blind ambition most often overcomes even the most clear-eyed rationality; and that the lust for power was so overwhelming that no one should ever be entrusted with unqualified authority. The difference between the two parties lay in the conclusion they reached with respect to the extent and power of a central government. Because the antifederalists saw corruption and the lust for power everywhere, they argued that the weaker the power available, the less harm the manipulation of power could do. The federalists argued that the problem in the American situation had been exaggerated. Yes, people were innately evil and self-seeking, and yes, no one could be trusted with unconfined power. That was as true in America as anywhere else. But under the Constitution’s checks and balances power would be far from unconfined, and for such a self-limiting system there would be virtue enough for success.
Madison had begun his statements on this question in Federalist LV and LVI, published in mid-February 1788: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he then wrote, “which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” Four months later he elaborated the point in what was for him a remarkable outburst. It was touched off by Mason’s insistence, in the Virginia ratifying convention, that legislators will do everything mischievous they can think of and fail to do anything good. Why is it not as reasonable, Madison replied, to assume that they will as readily do good as evil? — not that one should “place unlimited confidence in them, and expect nothing but the most exalted integrity and sublime virtue.” And then followed this statement of his basic philosophy:
I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.48
Other federalists, equally convinced of the power of self-interest, greed, and corruption, said the same. Washington wrote Lafayette that the guarantee that the American government would never degenerate into despotism lay in the ultimate virtue of the American people. John Dickinson asked, “will a virtuous and sensible people choose villains or fools for their officers? Or, if they should choose men of wisdom and integrity, will these lose both or either, by taking their seats? If they should, will not their places be quickly supplied by another choice? Is the like derangement again, and again, and again, to be expected? Can any man believe that such astonishing phenomena are to be looked for?” Similarly, the federalist Reverend Samuel West in the Massachusetts convention demanded to know whether it was likely that people would “choose men to ruin us … May we not rationally conclude that the persons we shall choose to administer [the Constitution] will be, in general, good men?” — a sentiment that astonished his adversary, General Samuel Thompson, who thought it “quite contrary to the common language of the clergy, who are continually representing mankind as reprobate and deceitful, and that we really grow worse and worse day after day.” Even the archconservative F
isher Ames, ever fearful of the destructiveness of pure democracy, conceded, in justifying republicanism, that “the people always mean right; and, if time is allowed for reflection and information, they will do right.” But it was Hamilton — clear in his belief that in the proportion that riches and luxury prevail, virtue will tend to become a mere “graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard” — who nevertheless most strongly reinforced Madison’s balanced view of human nature: “The supposition of universal venality in human nature,” he wrote in Federalist LXXVI, “is little less an error in political reasoning than the supposition of universal rectitude. The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind, which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence. And experience justifies the theory.”49
So, the federalists argued, virtue existed sufficient for the purposes of a government of checks and balances — in fact, must exist, as Madison said, in “any form of government” that secured liberty and happiness. It followed, therefore, that the peculiar identification of virtue with republicanism — the hitherto unquestioned precept whose authority could be traced back to classical antiquity — was simplistic: not wrong, but misapplied. Without virtue “no form of government can render us secure.” But the critique of the received tradition could go much deeper. A few — not many — of the federalists went beyond the standard federalist formulation, which assumed the existence of basic virtue, and probed more deeply the logic and presuppositions of the ancient formulation.
This deeper critique had begun from a peculiar angle even before the Constitution was written. In 1784–85 a twenty-four-year-old American law student in London, William Vans Murray, wrote six essays in defense of the American state governments which appeared in pamphlet form in Philadelphia while the convention was still at work and were then reprinted in the American Museum at about the time the Constitution was published. Their purpose was to examine what Murray called the “false theory,” the “hackneyed assertion,” that “democratic forms required a tone of manners unattainable and unpreservable in a society where commerce, luxury, and the arts have disposed the public mind to the gratifications of refinement” — the error, in other words, that “what is usually understood by the term virtue, as fancifully displayed by Montesquieu, is the root of democracy” and that “the progress of luxury” destroys it. The American situation, Murray wrote, defies such “system mongers,” and he devoted his entire second essay — a discourse of well over 4,000 words — to demonstrating the falseness of the belief that virtue was incompatible with wealth and luxury or peculiarly necessary for a free state in an advanced civilization.
It all went back to Montesquieu, Murray wrote, and the trouble with Montesquieu is that he had “never studied a free democracy.” If he had, he would have realized that “a greater share of virtue is not [more] necessary to a democratic than to a monarchial form.” It wasn’t really a question of virtue: virtue was necessary for both forms. But spartan asceticism, being based on a “love of poverty … [which] could operate but in very small societies of men,” is not the only form of virtue. In fact, in the growing affluence of democratic America, not only has freedom flourished but the development of the human race has advanced, giving the lie to the idea that the spirit of a “simple age, uncultivated and rude, was essential to that very form which … is best adapted to the plenitude of human felicity.” “Liberty and … the fullest dispersion of luxury through every vein of the body politic are in all degrees and respects compatible with each other.” Montesquieu had simply not probed deeply enough: “great as he was and venerable as he will ever be, [he] was too fond of hypothesis … He was too mechanical, too geometrical”; his writing shows the “ingenuity of a great mind which fritters away its powers in conceit.”50
With all of this, Noah Webster agreed, but for him Murray’s critique did not go far enough. In 1785, in his Sketches of American Policy, he too had questioned the precept “that virtue is the foundation of republics.” What was meant by virtue? “The great Montesquieu,” Webster assumed, had meant “patriotism, or disinterested public spirit and love of one’s country.” But had that ever, truly, existed in human society? If that is what virtue means, and if one is talking about actual, operational human motivation, then virtue has never been, and is not now, the peculiar attribute or “principle” of any form of government, republican, monarchical, or aristocratic. There is only one “real principle that is predominat in every individual and directs all his actions,” Webster wrote, and that is “self-interest,” and self-interest operates differently in different forms of government.
Two years later Webster elaborated. In his pamphlet An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution … by a Citizen of America, which he wrote at the request of the federalist leadership shortly after the ratification debate had begun, he said that Murray had been right in his criticism of Montesquieu, but he had failed to show the correct principles that had eluded the great man. After an introductory passage of much learning followed by a refutation of various criticisms of the Constitution, Webster developed his view of liberty and then turned to the concept of power. “In what,” he asked, “does real power consist?” Not simply military force, and not cultural forces like religion. “The answer is short and plain — in property.” The “inseparable connexion between property and dominion” can be seen throughout Roman history and throughout British history. “Wherever we cast our eyes we see this truth, that property is the basis of power.” Therefore “a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom,” and it is this that Montesquieu, wise as he was, had never understood.
The system of the great Montesquieu will ever be erroneous till the words property or lands in fee simple are substituted for virtue, throughout his Spirit of Laws. Virtue, patriotism, or love of country never was and never will be, till mens’ natures are changed, a fixed, permanent principle and support of government … An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic. While this continues, the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form.
All the rest — “liberty of the press, trial by jury, the Habeas Corpus writ, even Magna Charta itself” — though no doubt “palladia of freedom,” were all “inferior considerations when compared with a general distribution of real property among every class of people … Let the people have property and they will have power … The liberties of America, therefore, and her forms of government, stand on the broadest basis.” Abstract virtue — absolutely disinterested love of country — is unreal and has nothing to do with the matter.51
But it was the fervent federalist John Stevens, writing a month after Webster’s pamphlet appeared, who poured the bitterest scorn on applying the classical dicta on republicanism to the American situation. Everything Stevens wrote in the early numbers of the “Americanus” series was explicitly or implicitly a criticism of Montesquieu, but in the fifth paper (December 12, 1787) he confronted the central issues directly. Aside from its being “evidently defective” as a work of “philosophic precision,” The Spirit of the Laws had been written to soften the rigors of monarchy, hence it was largely irrelevant in America. Montesquieu’s threefold classification of the types of government — republican, monarchical, and despotic — jumbles up distinctive categories, and his definition of the principles, or “springs of action which set these different species of government in motion,” is “certainly a very fanciful piece of business … an ingenious conceit.” By the virtue that he believed animated republics Montesquieu had meant ascetic self-denial and “an enthusiastic attachment to the political system of the country we inhabit.” But one had only to look at the results in his favorite example, the “monstrous political p
rodigy” of Sparta, to see “the absurdities mankind are capable of.” If Americans tried to imitate the Spartans, “we should soon become mere nests of hornets … Away with this Spartan virtue and black broth; we’ll have none of them.”
There were, Stevens wrote, only two truly animating principles, and they were everywhere the same “though compounded in various degrees” for the different types of government: fear, or the dread of punishment; and attachment — that is, “customs, manners, habits, prejudices.” Further, Montesquieu’s notion that ambition is pernicious in a republic is precisely wrong: no form of government needs the “laudable desire of excelling in whatever we undertake” as much as a republic. “Montesquieu may talk of virtue as the spring of action in a republican government, but I trust its force would be found too feeble to produce great exertions without the aid of ambition … It is ambition that constitutes the very life and soul of republican government. As fear and attachment insure obedience to government, so does ambition set its wheels in motion.”52
4
So the federalists questioned the classical formulation that bound republicanism in some unique way to the principle of virtue. For most, it was sufficient to say that some degree of virtue was necessary for any free and secure government whatever its constitutional form, and that there was virtue enough in republican states to make the complex system of the Constitution work. But a very few others went further, probed the meaning of “virtue,” questioned its applicability if defined either as asceticism, disinterested patriotism, or the denial of personal ambition, and suggested more realistic principles of political motivation and of the means of securing the permanence of free republican governments.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Page 44