Posted on 03/29/2010 8:38:10 AM PDT by Publius
With the example of England’s civil wars not that far back in the past, Hamilton warns that only the Constitution and the Union can prevent war between states at home.
1 To the People of the State of New York:
2 Assuming it, therefore, as an established truth that the several states, in case of disunion or such combinations of them as might happen to be formed out of the wreck of the general Confederacy, would be subject to those vicissitudes of peace and war, of friendship and enmity with each other, which have fallen to the lot of all neighboring nations not united under one government, let us enter into a concise detail of some of the consequences that would attend such a situation.
3 War between the states in the first period of their separate existence would be accompanied with much greater distresses than it commonly is in those countries where regular military establishments have long obtained.
4 The disciplined armies always kept on foot on the continent of Europe, though they bear a malignant aspect to liberty and economy, have notwithstanding been productive of the signal advantage of rendering sudden conquests impracticable, and of preventing that rapid desolation which used to mark the progress of war prior to their introduction.
5 The art of fortification has contributed to the same ends.
6 The nations of Europe are encircled with chains of fortified places which mutually obstruct invasion.
7 Campaigns are wasted in reducing two or three frontier garrisons to gain admittance into an enemy’s country.
8 Similar impediments occur at every step to exhaust the strength and delay the progress of an invader.
9 Formerly, an invading army would penetrate into the heart of a neighboring country almost as soon as intelligence of its approach could be received, but now a comparatively small force of disciplined troops, acting on the defensive, with the aid of posts, is able to impede, and finally to frustrate, the enterprises of one much more considerable.
10 The history of war in that quarter of the globe is no longer a history of nations subdued and empires overturned, but of towns taken and retaken, of battles that decide nothing, of retreats more beneficial than victories, of much effort and little acquisition.
11 In this country the scene would be altogether reversed.
12 The jealousy of military establishments would postpone them as long as possible.
13 The want of fortifications, leaving the frontiers of one state open to another, would facilitate inroads.
14 The populous states would with little difficulty overrun their less populous neighbors.
15 Conquests would be as easy to be made as difficult to be retained.
16 War, therefore, would be desultory and predatory.
17 Plunder and devastation ever march in the train of irregulars.
18 The calamities of individuals would make the principal figure in the events which would characterize our military exploits.
19 This picture is not too highly wrought, though I confess it would not long remain a just one.
20 Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.
21 Even the ardent love of liberty will after a time give way to its dictates.
22 The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights.
23 To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
24 The institutions chiefly alluded to are standing armies and the correspondent appendages of military establishments.
25 Standing armies, it is said, are not provided against in the new Constitution, and it is therefore inferred that they may exist under it. *
26 Their existence, however, from the very terms of the proposition, is, at most, problematical and uncertain.
27 But standing armies, it may be replied, must inevitably result from a dissolution of the Confederacy.
28 Frequent war and constant apprehension, which require a state of as constant preparation, will infallibly produce them.
29 The weaker states or confederacies would first have recourse to them, to put themselves upon an equality with their more potent neighbors.
30 They would endeavor to supply the inferiority of population and resources by a more regular and effective system of defense, by disciplined troops and by fortifications.
31 They would at the same time be necessitated to strengthen the executive arm of government, in doing which their constitutions would acquire a progressive direction toward monarchy.
32 It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.
33 The expedients which have been mentioned would soon give the states or confederacies that made use of them a superiority over their neighbors.
34 Small states, or states of less natural strength, under vigorous governments and with the assistance of disciplined armies, have often triumphed over large states or states of greater natural strength which have been destitute of these advantages.
35 Neither the pride nor the safety of the more important states or confederacies would permit them long to submit to this mortifying and adventitious superiority.
36 They would quickly resort to means similar to those by which it had been effected to reinstate themselves in their lost pre-eminence.
37 Thus, we should in a little time see established in every part of this country the same engines of despotism which have been the scourge of the Old World.
38 This at least would be the natural course of things, and our [reasoning] will be the more likely to be just in proportion as they are accommodated to this standard.
39 These are not vague inferences drawn from supposed or speculative defects in a Constitution, the whole power of which is lodged in the hands of a people or their representatives and delegates, but they are solid conclusions, drawn from the natural and necessary progress of human affairs.
40 It may perhaps be asked by way of objection to this, why did not standing armies spring up out of the contentions which so often distracted the ancient republics of Greece?
41 Different answers, equally satisfactory, may be given to this question.
42 The industrious habits of the people of the present day, absorbed in the pursuits of gain and devoted to the improvements of agriculture and commerce, are incompatible with the condition of a nation of soldiers, which was the true condition of the people of those republics.
43 The means of revenue, which have been so greatly multiplied by the increase of gold and silver and of the arts of industry and the science of finance, which is the offspring of modern times concurring with the habits of nations, have produced an entire revolution in the system of war and have rendered disciplined armies, distinct from the body of the citizens, the inseparable companions of frequent hostility.
44 There is a wide difference also between military establishments in a country seldom exposed by its situation to internal invasions and in one which is often subject to them and always apprehensive of them.
45 The rulers of the former can have a good pretext if they are even so inclined to keep on foot armies so numerous as must of necessity be maintained in the latter.
46 These armies being in the first case rarely, if at all, called into activity for interior defense, the people are in no danger of being broken to military subordination.
47 The laws are not accustomed to relaxations in favor of military exigencies; the civil state remains in full vigor, neither corrupted, nor confounded with the principles or propensities of the other state.
48 The smallness of the army renders the natural strength of the community an overmatch for it, and the citizens, not habituated to look up to the military power for protection or to submit to its oppressions, neither love nor fear the soldiery; they view them with a spirit of jealous acquiescence in a necessary evil and stand ready to resist a power which they suppose may be exerted to the prejudice of their rights.
49 The army under such circumstances may usefully aid the magistrate to suppress a small faction or an occasional mob or insurrection, but it will be unable to enforce encroachments against the united efforts of the great body of the people.
50 In a country in the predicament last described, the contrary of all this happens.
51 The perpetual [menacing] of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense.
52 The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen.
53 The military state becomes elevated above the civil.
54 The inhabitants of territories, often the theater of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights which serve to weaken their sense of those rights, and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors.
55 The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters is neither remote nor difficult, but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power.
56 The kingdom of Great Britain falls within the first description.
57 An insular situation and a powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army within the kingdom.
58 A sufficient force to make head against a sudden descent, till the militia could have time to rally and embody, is all that has been deemed requisite.
59 No motive of national policy has demanded, nor would public opinion have tolerated a larger number of troops upon its domestic establishment.
60 There has been for a long time past little room for the operation of the other causes which have been enumerated as the consequences of internal war.
61 This peculiar felicity of situation has in a great degree contributed to preserve the liberty which that country to this day enjoys in spite of the prevalent venality and corruption.
62 If, on the contrary, Britain had been situated on the continent and had been compelled, as she would have been, by that situation to make her military establishments at home coextensive with those of the other great powers of Europe, she like them would in all probability be at this day a victim to the absolute power of a single man.
63 [It is] possible, though not easy, that the people of that island may be enslaved from other causes, but it cannot be by the prowess of an army so inconsiderable as that which has been usually kept up within the kingdom.
64 If we are wise enough to preserve the Union, we may for ages enjoy an advantage similar to that of an insulated situation.
65 Europe is at a great distance from us.
66 Her colonies in our vicinity will be likely to continue too much [disproportionate] in strength to be able to give us any dangerous annoyance. 67 Extensive military establishments cannot in this position be necessary to our security.
68 But if we should be disunited and the integral parts should either remain separated or, which is most probable, should be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be in a short course of time in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe – our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.
69 This is an idea not superficial or futile, but solid and weighty.
70 It deserves the most serious and mature consideration of every prudent and honest man of whatever party.
71 If such men will make a firm and solemn pause and meditate dispassionately on the importance of this interesting idea, if they will contemplate it in all its attitudes and trace it to all its consequences, they will not hesitate to part with trivial objections to a Constitution, the rejection of which would in all probability put a final period to the Union.
72 The airy phantoms that flit before the distempered imaginations of some of its adversaries would quickly give place to the more substantial forms of dangers, real, certain and formidable.
[*] This objection will be fully examined in its proper place, and it will be shown that the only natural precaution which could have been taken on this subject has been taken, and a much better one than is to be found in any constitution that has been heretofore framed in America, most of which contain no guard at all on this subject.
Hamilton’s Critique
Hamilton argues that the prospect of civil war should act as a powerful argument in favor of the adoption of the Constitution, which by its unifying nature should act to find the middle course between the rocks of rebellion. Hamilton had personal experience of rebellion caused by the failure of the Confederation to pay its troops; indeed, this experience and his own personal circumstances led him to understand that a government unable to levy taxes to pay troops whose services it had already used was a rebellion begging to happen.
But here he speaks solely of the probability that state governments would find themselves adversaries in warfare in the absence of a strong federal government. That the various state governments already had sufficient differences to warrant caution, he and Jay explored convincingly in their previous papers. But what of this claim that warfare would be uniquely destructive in the new United States?
4 The disciplined armies always kept on foot on the continent of Europe, though they bear a malignant aspect to liberty and economy, have notwithstanding been productive of the signal advantage of rendering sudden conquests impracticable, and of preventing that rapid desolation which used to mark the progress of war prior to their introduction.
5 The art of fortification has contributed to the same ends.
His point is that the country was still too undeveloped to possess the level of defense in depth that all European nations of the time had constructed as a result of centuries of rampaging warfare. The art of fortification had come of age during the Italian Renaissance, and stone walls still provided a credible defense against even the artillery of the day. Of these, both stone walls and artillery, the nascent United States was notably bereft.
13 The want of fortifications, leaving the frontiers of one state open to another, would facilitate inroads.
Hamilton was both wrong and right about this. But first, pause to consider his own qualifications for such a sweeping statement. They turn out to be considerable. Hamilton was an early believer in the Revolution and an ambitious, self-made man beside. He had acted at age 24 as the aide de camp to George Washington himself, graduating in time to the status of Chief of Staff and issuing orders in Washington’s name under his own signature.
A really good staff officer is a priceless possession to any general, and they tend to be held closely despite a nearly universal desire for the alpha-male status of combat command. Washington understood this and kept Hamilton on a fairly tight tether as a result, the good of the army trumping the glory of personal command, which Hamilton felt he needed, both for his own credibility and his political future. This is not a slur; indeed, many notable general officers never did lead troops personally in battle: Carl von Clausewitz, for one; Dwight Eisenhower, surprisingly, for another. But it rankled Hamilton as it does nearly every staff officer who sees his line officer comrades taking the risks and winning the battles.
Hamilton essentially threatened to resign his commission toward the end of hostilities if he were not given a combat command, and Washington at last relented, naming him the leader of three New York infantry battalions that, with the French, prosecuted the final assault on the heights overlooking Yorktown that resulted in Cornwallis’ position becoming untenable and his subsequent surrender. Hamilton’s men swept the British from their redoubt at bayonet point, and his guilt at scribbling orders while his compatriots faced enemy fire was washed away in blood.
It was now six years later, and the positions that Hamilton carried had decayed through desuetude. Yet their traces were still visible some three-quarters of a century later when the civil war of which Hamilton was warning brought hostilities to the Yorktown peninsula once again. It was no irony, but a simple function of the strategic terrain, that names such as Richmond, Yorktown and Petersburg should figure both in Washington’s fight with Cornwallis, and McClellan’s with Joseph Johnston and Robert E. Lee during the Peninsular Campaign of 1862.
Although the theory behind the statements of Hamilton’s essay is somewhat suspect, the actual events bore him out. The War Between the States did turn out to be exceptionally violent even by European standards, and where the unsettled nature of the terrain dictated irregular warfare – Quantrill’s Raiders come to mind.
15 Conquests would be as easy to be made as difficult to be retained.
16 War, therefore, would be desultory and predatory.
17 Plunder and devastation ever march in the train of irregulars.
Where this sort of bloody-handed chaos comes to reign, freedom dies.
20 Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct.
21 Even the ardent love of liberty will after a time give way to its dictates.
23 To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.
It is, in the event, more than a risk, and subsequent history has shown in considerable detail the lengths to which citizens will surrender their rights in pursuit of security. The very nature of government tends to change as well.
32 It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority.
The experience of the Roman Republic was precisely thus, it giving way first to a subtle, and then an outright, monarchy under the later Claudian Caesars. Bread and circuses took the place of the inalienable rights of Roman citizens, and at last when even they failed, so did the government.
Hamilton now turns his attention to the topic of standing armies, which were universally dreaded under the time-tested assumption that they would eventually be used to enforce domestic governmental authority at the expense of the citizenry, the loyalty of such armies given to general and despot rather than any theoretical construct such as a Constitution. The student of subsequent American history might be forgiven for thinking the Founders remiss in not anticipating the broad failure of this menace to materialize, such standing armies as the United States has nurtured since then seldom employed in anything remotely resembling that function. That is, to the contrary, very much an historical aberration. It is not so on the part of British history, however.
57 An insular situation and a powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army within the kingdom.
62 If, on the contrary, Britain had been situated on the continent and had been compelled, as she would have been, by that situation to make her military establishments at home coextensive with those of the other great powers of Europe, she like them would in all probability be at this day a victim to the absolute power of a single man.
Here one is reminded that Hamilton was very much an admirer of the British system, and the “one man” to whom he referred was not George III but a latter-day Cromwell. The happy situation he was describing was not necessarily the case even twenty years later when the British had to stand against such a man in Napoleon. It is true, however, that much of the military activity attendant to the construction of the Second British Empire to come revolved around private armies in the employment of such entities as the East India Company. Nevertheless, these too would constitute a more or less standing army. The insistence that standing armies are necessarily inimical to liberty must remain a topic of considerable controversy.
Hamilton closes with his principal case in favor of the Constitution.
68 But if we should be disunited and the integral parts should either remain separated or, which is most probable, should be thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be in a short course of time in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe – our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.
Dire predictions indeed. The Constitution was, in this interpretation, to save Americans from themselves, the function of a strong federal government to keep the state governments from one another’s throats. It is here that one sees the beginnings of Hamilton’s public departure from the small government policies of Jefferson and his fellow Federalist authors Madison and Jay, and toward the promotion of a single strong central government, all this within the Constitution itself. He had already departed from his fellow New York colleague Robert Yates, read as the Anti-Federalist “Brutus,” with respect to the adoption of the Constitution in the first place. These fissures would eventually place the respective men in the position of direct political opposition within the country’s newly adopted constitutional government.
The American Standing Army
With the strong classical education of the times, the generation of the Founders was intimately familiar with Roman history, having read about much of it in the original Latin. No one forgot the lesson of Rome’s standing army, the great Roman legions, that eventually took sides in the undoing of the Roman Republic and established the Roman Empire on its ashes. All it took was one ambitious general.
For that reason, the Constitution placed a time limit on the existence of a standing army. But that was still too much for the Anti-Federalist writers, who warned that a free republic would never maintain a standing army. However, experience was to prove otherwise.
One of Jefferson’s first acts as president was the reduction of the army to a mere three regiments, which was not even enough to defend against Indian attacks. But the Jeffersonian Republicans were adamant in their belief in the efficacy of militia troops. This was to cause disaster in the War of 1812 when it became difficult to raise an army when one entire region of the country vehemently opposed the war. Thus, when the war ended, Madison pushed Congress to create a permanent standing army.
During America’s occasional wars, the trend was for state militia units to be merged in with the army and then released after the war, which made a rapid American mobilization for war problematic. In 1953, with the prospect of a Cold War that could last for centuries, Dwight Eisenhower regretfully signed on to a large permanent defense establishment, which he later warned against in his farewell address.
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
A bumparooni for the morning crowd. I’ll admit to being a little touched at the reverence both Union and Confederate soldiers expressed toward the ruins of the positions that were occupied by the British some three-quarters of a century earlier. But you want to take that part of Virginia, that’s where you have to go. McClellan got stomped by a better man, IMHO.
BTTT
Compare the level of reading comprehension necessary then to that required to consume a modern newspaper.
The way Publius spoke of ancient societies, British 17th century history, he apparently assumed with confidence that the common reader of the day was familiar with the topics.
To call today's media and average newspaper reader shallow in comparison is a laughable understatement.
Back from Searchlight/Las Vegas .... finally.
Starting on this today!
I am no expert, but i have been adding to this page: http://conservapedia.com/Separation_of_church_and_state
“To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free. “
“It was no irony, but a simple function of the strategic terrain, that names such as Richmond, Yorktown and Petersburg should figure both in Washington’s fight with Cornwallis, and McClellan’s with Joseph Johnston and Robert E. Lee during the Peninsular Campaign of 1862.”
And may yet again.
Both Jefferson and Hamilton have been prophetic regarding this great republic. What scares me are their other prophecies that may come true.
Kinda like the Bible...
5.56mm
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.