Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 2: Nullification and secession, the War of 1812 experience

John Dos Passos had among his later works two popular histories, Mr. Wilson's War (1962), about the First World War, and The Shackles of Power: Three Jeffersonian Decades (1966). Written in an attractively accessible style, both forgo the burden of footnotes. Which can be frustrating if you like to read the footnotes. Or want to follow up on the source for a quote or claim.

While it makes for smooth reading, important nuance can suffer.

In Shackles of Power, Dos Passos writes about one of the important milestones in the development of states' rights and federal power. It has to do with the Federalists who sympathized with Britain in the War of 1812. They promoted their own version of secessionism in the process. Here is the description given by the 1960 edition of The Beards' New Basic History of the United States by Charles, Mary and William Beard:

To make matters worse for [President James] Madison, the war was decidedly unpopular in the Northeast where, presumably, a war proclaimed in behalf of free commerce would have been welcomed. In the House of Representatives, Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, denounced the draft of men as unconstitutional. Federalists decried the conflict as merely "Mr. Madison's war." The govemor of Connecticut refused to obey the President's call for troops and the Connecticut assembly declared the state to be "free, sovereign and independent." A convention of delegates from various parts of New England, assembled in Hartford in October 1814, adopted resolutions akin in spirit, if not in letter, to those put forth by Kentucky and Virginia in 1798.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Dos Passos echoes the comparison to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions:

Jefferson never forgave the Essex Junto [of pro-British secessionist advocates], any more than he forgave Aaron Burr, for their efforts to break up the Union. He wrote of the mortification of the New England clergy, whom both he and Madison blamed for the Federalist excesses, exulting bitterly in "the disgrace with which they have loaded themselves in their political ravings, and of their mortification at the ridiculous issue of their Hartford convention. no event more than this has shown the placid nature of our constitution. under any other their treasons would have been punished by the halter. we let them live as laughing stocks for the world, and punish them by the torment of eternal contempt."

In the course of the war the Republicans had switched politics with the Federalists. The Federalists were now defending nullification and states' rights as Jefferson and Madison had defended them at the time of the Kentucky Resolutions. The Republicans were now the party of central government, a standing army, and a navy capable of meeting force with force in relations with foreign nations. To that they were about to add a tariff for the protection of manufactures. (p. 286}

Given how the Confederates and their later apologists use historical precedents to justify the secession of 1860-61.

The neo-Confederate version is pseudohistory. Or Fake History, in more topical phrasing.

So part of what I try to do in these Confederate "Heritage" Month posts is to promote real history. In the case of the positions Jefferson and Madison took at the time of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, the Britannica Online article on them rightly notes, "The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were primarily protests against the limitations on civil liberties contained in the Alien and Sedition Acts rather than expressions of full-blown constitutional theory. Later references to the resolutions as authority for the theories of nullification and secession were inconsistent with the limited goals sought by Jefferson and Madison in drafting their protests." (internal links omitted)

The US Constitution, like all constitutions and legal systems, evolves as new problems arise. The Constitution of 1789 didn't explicitly address the question of whether or not a state in the Union could secede by its own choice. Of course, a Constitutional Amendment could always allow for a state to leave the Union. But that would require much more than the single state's own choice.

It's worth noting that the present-day Brexit may wind up raising some similar issues. The 2004 EU Constitution does provide for an exit process. But as the two-year period of negotiation that Britain just initiated proceed, we could see the remaining EU nations contesting the terms and the timing of the actual Brexit event. Here is the BBC News summary of that aspect of the EU Constitution (What the EU constitution says 06/18/2004):

In fact, the EU under Angela Merkel's leadership is already making such threats. Nikos Chrysoloras and Patrick Donahue report in EU Puts the Squeeze on U.K. as Brexit Negotiation Clock Ticks Bloomberg 03/31/2017:

The European Union told U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May she will have to wait almost two months for Brexit negotiations to begin and that talks on a trade deal can come in the fall, but only if she first agrees to pay an exit bill.

The EU moved quickly to exercise its control over the Brexit countdown clock now that May has triggered the two-year negotiation period. Substantive talks can’t begin until May 22, when EU governments are set to approve the final negotiating directives for the bloc’s Brexit point person, Michel Barnier.

In the United States, the question of whether a state can leave the Union on its own accord was settled decisively at Appomattox.

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 1: What's it about?

I've been doing Confederate "Heritage" Month posts on the blog since 2004. And I'm doing it this year, too. It's a counter-observation of the event, which also know as Confederate History Month. It's ably explained (in its variation) in a new article by Ashton Pittman in the Jackson [MS] Free Press, What ‘Confederate History Month’ Really Is 03/29/2017:

In April, five states will officially celebrate Confederate History Month (or Confederate Heritage Month): Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In Georgia, which stopped the celebrations after a neo-Confederate killed nine black churchgoers in neighboring South Carolina in 2015, a lawmaker is pushing to bring it back, citing Trump's election and the end of the era of "political correctness."

#To be clear, Confederate History Month isn't about remembering our past and taking lessons from it. Key proponents of the month's continued existence are the Sons of Confederate Veterans, whose revisionist history of the Confederacy and the Civil War minimizes and even denies the role of slavery in southern secession. On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in Virginia. Yet 152 years later, many in our region are still fighting the lost war. Some of us do it by flying Confederate flags, complete with lofty slogans like, "The South Will Rise Again!" and "Heritage, Not Hate!" Some of us do it in more insidious ways. For no good reason, we work overtime to make sure those "Yankees" don't come in and wreck our perfectly dead-last economies. We definitely don't want those federal Yanks telling us how to run our education system. And despite the fact that we are the region that most needs health-care options that the Affordable Care Act offers, we did everything we could to thwart any effort from the Obama administration to help improve our miserable condition.

In the 03/28/2017 version at the Deep South Daily Pittman edits, the headline is Call ‘Confederate History Month’ What It Really IS: 'White Supremacy Month'.

Last year, civil rights activists in Mississippi had the following reaction to Republican Gov. Phil Bryant's official proclamation of Confederate Heritage Month (Critics assail Mississippi governor for declaring April ‘Confederate Heritage Month’ Raw Story/Guardian 04/03/2016):

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leaders in Mississippi reacted by proposing a civil war remembrance of their own: Union Army Heritage Month.

“These white and black Mississippi patriots fought for the continuation of the United States of America as one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all,” Derrick Johnson, president of Mississippi’s NAACP, wrote to the Clarion-Ledger.

“Should not these soldiers be honored, too?”

Scores rallied on the steps of the capitol, in Jackson. They were diverse. Kathleen Chambers personified a shift in the state’s mentality: she is young and white, and instead of a southern drawl she spoke with the universal up-talk of young people.

“Any white people I know? They’re not OK with this,” she said to the local television station WAPT.

Of Bryant, she said: “He’s trying to turn a Confederate heritage into a good thing, when it’s not. It shouldn’t be celebrated. Especially we shouldn’t celebrate owning people in the past.”

While we are marching through Georgia - Tennessee Ernie Ford:

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2013, April 12: Again with Madison and nullification

The Nullification Controversy (or Nullification Crisis) of 1832-3 was an important moment in the development of the conflict between slave and free states which eventually led to the Civil War.

An older US history text, A Concise History of the American Republic (1977) by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager and William Leuchtenburg recalled that it was one of two major events that secured Andrew Jackson's reputation: "Andrew Jackson's high place in history derives from the way he confronted the two great issues of his presidency: the nillification that threated the Union and the war on the Bank of the United States that arrayed the Jacksonians against the 'money power.'"

As to Jackson's Presidency, his successful sponsorship of the Indian Removal Act also counts as one of his major achievements, and certainly serves to qualify his deservedly "high place in history." The two acts that Morison et al mention greatly advanced the cause of democracy and equality; the Indian Removal Act is a blot on the history of American democracy. That Act is a different kind of embarrassment for neo-Confederates, though. It was, even more so than the Nullification Crisis, a case in which the vote split along sectional lines and was not about slavery. However, in this case the Southerners (including Jackson) were supporting a measure that overrode states rights, a irony that the opponents of the bill were more than happy to point out.

James Madison, 4th President of the United States and opponent of secession

But my focus here again is on the Nullification Controversy and James Madison's reaction to it, some of which I discussed in yesterday's post. Morison et al quote Madison at the end of this summary of the nullification theory elaborate by John C. Calhoun, who with this act began his career of treason to the United States:

Calhoun, once an enthusiastic nationalist, now believed that he had made a grave mistake, for protection had turned out to be an instrument of class and sectional plunder. In a document called the South Carolina Exposition, approved in 1828 by the legislature of that state, he set forth a new doctrine - nullification, though his authorship was secret. The Constitution, he asserted, was established not by the American people, but by thirteen sovereign states. Sovereign in 1787, they must still be sovereign in 1828. Since the Federal Government was merely the agent of the states, a state convention, the immediate organ of state sovereignty, could take measures to prevent the enforcement within state limits of any Act of Congress it deemed unconstitutional. Calhoun, however, recognized one constitutional authority superior to the interpretation of a single state, an interpretative federal amendment adopted by three-fourths of the states. Under the nullification doctrine, South Carolina insisted on the right to disobey the laws of the Union while claiming the privileges of the Union. Calhoun's sincerity and intelligence cannot be doubted, but as the aged Madison declared, 'For this preposterous and anarchical pretension there is not a shadow of countenance in the Constitution.' [my emphasis]

In an earlier work, The Oxford History of the American People (1965), Morison had described the Exposition's Calhounian political theory this way: "Nullification was based on two postulates: the common assertion that the Federal Constitution was a compact between states, and the theory of indestructible sovereignty."

The pretext and public justification of South Carolina's act of defiance was the Tariff of 1828, which opponents described as the Tariff of Abominations.

But the underlying theme, the real basis for the nullification attempt of Calhoun's theories to justify it and otherwise defend slaveholders against the will of the democratic majority, was slavery. After Jackson had ended the crisis in early 1833 with the Force Act clearly establishing federal authority to enforce the laws in South Carolina and a compromise tariff more to South Carolina's liking, he predicted that the "next pretext" for such an attempt "will be the Negro, or slavery question."

Madison also recognized that some compromise on the tariff had to be part of the solution, though he was bitterly opposed to the nullification doctrine and South Carolina's backing of it. The tariff had been in part a political ploy, as Morison et al describe it, "It was a politicians' tariff, concerned mainly with the manufacture of a President [in the 1928 election]. Pro-Jackson congressmen had introduced a bill with higher duties on raw materials than on manufactures, hoping that New England votes would help defeat it and the onus fall on [then-President John Quincy] Adams, but the strategy misfired, to the South's chagrin." Proposing something you don't actually want passed can be a tricky business!

As Madison put it it in a letter to Henry Clay of 03/22/1832:

I fear that without alleviations separating the more moderate from the more violent opponents, very serious effects are threatened. Of these the most formidable & not the least probable [would] be a Southern Convention; the avowed object of some, and the unavowed object of others, whose views are, perhaps, still more to be dreaded. The disastrous consequences of disunion, obvious to all will no doubt be a powerful check, on its partisans; but such a Convention, characterized as it [would] be by selected talents, ardent zeal & the confidence of those represented [would] not be easily stopped in its career; especially as many of its members, tho' not carrying with them particular aspirations for the honors, &c &c presented to ambition on a new political theatre, would find them germinating in such a hotbed.

(That and the other excerpts quoted here are from The Writings of James Madison Vol. 9, Gaillar Hunt, ed.; 1910.)

Henry Clay would be the sponsor of the compromise tariff that Congress would pass and Jackson sign a year later.

Madison recognized the legitimacy of the right of resistance to unjust authority and the right of revolution, of course. But he emphatically rejected the nullifiers' argument that the Tariff of 1828, their nominal cause, represented anything close to such a jutification:

The idea that a Constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings, and a Union aomitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty and happiness of the people of the States comprizing it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than any existing causes is more painful than words can express. It is impossible that this can ever be the deliberate act of the people, if the value of the Union be calculated by the consequences of disunion. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, May 1832))

In a letter to C.E. Haynes of 08/27/1832, Madison argued against Calhoun's theory on the nature of the compact among the states:

And here it must be kept in mind that in a compact like that of the U. S. as in all other compacts, each of the parties has an equal right to decide whether it has or has not been violated and made void. If one contends that it has, the others have an equal right to insist on the validitv and execution of it. ...

It is true that in extreme cases of oppression justifying a resort to original rights, and in which passive obedience & non-resistence cease to be obligatory under any Government, a s1ngle State or any part of a State might rightfully cast off the yoke. What would be the condition of the Union, and the other members of it, if a single member could at will renounce its connexion and erect itself, in the midst of them, into an independent and foreign power; its geographical relations remaining the same, and all the social & political relations, with the others converted into those of aliens and of rivals, not to say enemies, pursuing separate & conflicting interests? Should the seceding State be the only channel of foreign commerce for States having no commercial ports of their own, such as that of Connecticut, N. Jersey, & North Carolina, and now particularly all the inland States, we know what might happen from such a state of things by the effects of it under the old Confederation among States bound as they were in friendly relations by that instrument [i.e., the Articles of Confederation].

And although South Carolina was nominally threatening to nullify federal laws while staying in the Union, Madison knew that secession was implied in the arguments:

I partake of the wonder that the men you name should view secession in the light mentioned. The essential difference between a free Government and Governments not free, is that the former is founded in compact, the parties to which are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of them therefore can have a greater right to break off from the bargain, than the other or others have to hold them to it. (Letter to Nicholas Trist, 12/23/1832)

He expanded on that idea in a letter to Alexander Rives of January 1833:

The characteristic distinction between free Governments, and Governments not free is that the former are founded on compact, not between the Government and those for whom it acts, but among the parties creating the Government. Each of these being equal, neither can have more right to say that the compact has been violated and dissolved than every other has to deny the fact and to insist on the execution of the bargain. An inference from the doctrine that a single state has a right to secede at will from the rest is that the rest would have an equal right to secede from it; in other words, to turn it, against its will, out of its union with them. Such a doctrine would not, till of late, have been palatable anywhere, and nowhere less so than where it is now most contended for.

These arguments Madison is making about the government compact were based in classical liberal theories of government.

Calhoun's idea of indestructible sovereignty made the novel assertion that "sovereignty" was absolute, that if a state was sovereign in its sphere of authority, that no other sovereignty could be above, including that of the federal government. Here in a letter to Sen. William Cabell Rives of 03/12/1833 who had recently given a Senate speech against it, he indicates how little such a notion had occurred to people before, and how patently ridiculous it struck him to be:

[Your speech] takes a very able and enlightening view of its subject. I wish it may have the effect of reclaiming to the doctrine & language held by all from the birth of the Constitution, & till very lately by themselves, those who now Contend that the States have never parted with an Atom of their sovereignty; and consequently that the Constitutional band which holds them together, is a mere league or partnership, without any of the characteristics of sovereignty or nationality.

It seems strange that it should be necessary to disprove this novel and nullifying doctrine; and stranger still that those who deny it should be denounced as Innovators, heretics & Apostates.

And in that letter he states even more clearly how obvious that secessionist tendencies are at work:

The conduct of S. Carolina has called forth not only the question of nullification; but the more formidable one of secession. It is asked whether a State by resuming the sovereign form in which it entered the Union, may not of right withdraw from it at will. As this is a simple question whether a State, more than an individual, has a right to violate its engagements, it would seem that it might be safely left to answer itself. But the countenance given to the claim shows that it cannot be so lightly dismissed. The natural feelings which laudably attach the people composing a State, to its authority and importance, are at present too much excited by the unnatural feelings, with which they have been inspired at' their brethren of other States, not to expose them, to the danger of being misled into erroneous views of the nature of the Union and the interest they have in it. One thing at least seems to be too clear to be questioned; that whilst a State remains within the Union it cannot withdraw its citizens from the operation of the Constitution & laws of the Union. In the event of an actual secession without the Consent of the Co-States, the course to be pursued by these involves questions painful in the discussion of them. God grant that the menacing appearances, which obtruded it may not be followed by positive occurrences requiring the more painful task of deciding them!

And in a draft letter from sometime in 1833, he addressed Calhoun's notion that special state conventions - like the ones that endorsed secession in 1860-61 - were a uniquely valid expression of the popular will, using the term "popular assemblages". And he also addressed the secessionists' anti-democracy attacks on government by the majority (which at this time still meant a majority of white men, and as Madison even notes in the draft, there were still property requirements for voting in many places):

You justly take alarm at the new doctrine that a majority [Government] is of all other [Government] the most oppressive. The doctrine strikes at the root of Republicanism, and if pursued into its consequences, must terminate in absolute monarchy, with a standing military force; such alone being impartial between its subjects, and alone capable of overpowering majorities as well as minorities. ...

The history of the ancient Republics, and those of a more modern date, had demonstrated the evils incident to popular assemblages, so quickly formed, so susceptible of contagious passions, so exposed to the misguidance of eloquent & ambitious leaders; and so apt to be tempted by the facility of forming interested majorities, into measures unjust and oppressive to the minor parties.

As odd as it seems now, the idea of a "standing military force" of any significant size in 1833 was considered to be in itself an anti-democratic thing.

Even after the South Carolina controversy was settled, Madison continued to see the secessionist sentiment as a threat to the Constitution and democratic government. In a letter to Edward Coles of 08/29/1834, he wrote, "On the other hand what [could] more dangerous than Nullification, or more evident than the progress it continues to make, either in its original shape or in the disguises it assumes. Nullification has the effect of putting powder under the Constitution & Union, and a match in the hand of every party, to blow them up at pleasure." And he saw where the alignment of the slave states with the Calhounian doctrine could lead:

It is not probable that this offspring of the discontents of S. Carolina, will ever approach success, in a majority of the States. But a susceptibility of the contagion in the Southern States is visible; and the danger is not to be concealed that the sympathies arising from known causes, and the inculcated impression of a permanent incompatibility of interests between the South & the North, may put it in the power of popular leaders aspiring to the highest stations, and despairing of success on the Federal theatre, to unite the South, on some critical occasion, in a course that will end in creating a new theatre of great tho' inferior extent. In pursuing this course, the first and most obvious step is nullification; the next secession; & the last, a farewell separation. How near was this course being lately exemplified? and the danger of its recurrence in the same, or some other quarter, may be increased by an increase of restless aspirants, and by the increasing impracticability of retaining in the Union a large & cemented section against its will. [my emphasis]

Madison was annoyed by the kind of criticisms that some opponents of slavery were delivering against the South. But he was clearly unsympathetic, to put it mildly, to the secessionists using it as an excuse. Note here that he identifies slavery as the great dividing issue:

The positive advantages of the Union would alone endear it to those embraced by it; but it ought to be still more endeared by the consequences of disunion, in the jealousies & collisions of Commerce, in the border wars, pregnant with others, and soon to be engendered by animosities between the slaveholding, and other States, in the higher toned [Governments] especially in the Executive branch ["higher toned" here had a positive connotation], in the military establishments provided [against] external danger, but convertible also into instruments of domestic usurpation, in the augmentations of expence, and the abridgment, almost to the exclusion of taxes on consumption (the least unacceptable to the people) by the facility of smuggling among communities locally related as would be the case. Add to all these the prospect of entangling alliances with foreign powers multiplying the evils of internal origin. (Letter to Daniel Drake 01/12/1835) [my emphasis]

Maidson died in 1836 at the age of 85. So we can fairly say that he was very concerned about this issue up until the end of his life. In other words, he went out still fighting against the poisonous slaveowners' ideology of secession.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, james madison, john calhoun, nullification controversy

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 11: Madison and the Nullfication Controversy

When John Calhoun and his allies in South Carolina staged their confrontation with the United States and the Jackson Administration over the tariff in 1832-33, the nullificationists pointed to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had promoted during the Adams Administration in opposition to the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts as supporting their cause of nullification and treason.

As it turns out, James Madison himself was still around to comment on the issue in real time. In a letter to Nicholas Trist in December 1831 (based on the date at the Library of Congress site just linked, he wrote:

I cannot see the advantage of this perseverance of South Carolina in claiming the authority of the Virginia proceeding in 93-99, as asserting a right in a single state to nullify an act of the United States. Where indeed is the fairness of attempting to palm on Virginia an intention which is contradicted by such a variety of contemporary proofs: which have, at no intervening period received the lightest countenance from her: and which with one voice she now disclaims. There is the less propriety in this singular effort, since Virginia, if she could, as is implied, disown a doctrine which was her own offspring, would be a bad authority to lean on in any cause. Nor is the imprudence less than the impropriety, of an appeal from the present to a former period. as from a degenerate to a purer state of political orthodoxy: since South Carolina, to be consistent would be obliged to surrender her present nullifying notions to her own higher authority when she declined to concur and co-operate with Virginia at the period of the Alien and Sedition laws. It would be needless to dwell on the contrast of her present nullifying doctrines. [sic] with those maintained by her political champions at subsequent and not very remote dates.

Besides the external and other internal evidence the at the proceeding of Virginia occasioned by the Alien and Sedition law do not maintain the right of a single State, as a party to the Constitution, to arrest the execution of a law of the United States. it [sic] seems to have been overlooked, that in every instance in those proceeding where the ultimate right of the States to interpose rs alluded to, the plural term States, has been used: the term State as a single party being invariably avoided. And if it had been suspected that the term respective in the 3d Resolution would have been misconstrued into such a claim of an individual State or that the language of the 7th Resolution invoking the co-operation of the other States with Virginia * * * * * * [ellipsis in original] would not be a security against the error, a more explicit guard would doubtless have been introduced. But surely there is nothing strange in a concurrence and co-operation of many parties in maintaining the rights of each within itself. [emphasis in original]

That quote are taken from the version published in 1912 as Madison's Famous Original Letter Against Nullification 1832, which title obviously assumed an 1832 date for the letter. The text of a portion of the letter is also available at the Library of Congress. And it is included in The Writings of James Madison Vol. 9, Gaillar Hunt, ed. (1910), but it begins with the sixth paragraph of the 1912 edition; the two paragraphs quoted above are the second and third in the letter.

He certainly makes it clear that he did not support the nullification attempt by South Carolina, which was nominally over tariffs but was understood by Calhoun and his supporters as a trial run for nullification and secession in support of slavery. Of the major controversies that led up to the Civil War, the Nullification Crisis was the only one not explicitly about slavery.

The December 1931 letter is also an important document in interpreting the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in their own context, with necessary allowance for the fact that here Madison was writing decades after the event.

In an earlier letter to Jared Sparks of 07/27/1831 dealing with South Carolina's nullification claims and the Constitutional arguments advanced to support them, Madison argued that "the nature of the Constitutional compact" precluded "a right in any one of the parties to renounce it at will, by giving to all an equal right to judge of its obligations; and, as the obligations are mutual, a right to enforce correlative with a right to dissolve them." He also said that is would be impossible as well as unjust to execute "the laws of the Union, particularly the laws of commerce, if even a single State be exempt from their operation." (From Writings, Vol. 9)

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, james madison, nullification controversy

Madison, the Revolution and the Constitution

Andrew Jackson fought in the Revolution, so he counts as a Founder, too

Our Blue Voice partner Dave mentioned James Madison in a recent post, which got me thinking in political-sciency terms about the American Revolution. Which is, after all, the event we're celebrating today. The point of Dave's post was to take issue with knee-jerk patriotism that automatically assumes, like the Judge Samuel did for ancient Israel, that the US is something more than "one of the nations".

And I don't want to step on that main point of his. The arrogance of assuming that we're "the greatest country in the world" can lead to things like like the disaster we know as the Iraq War. I've been saying this for years, but one day I'm going to spend a few days time in a university library somewhere and try to run down the first time that a President used the phrase "the greatest country in the world" to describe the United States. It's not exactly a humble claim.

I know it goes back at least to Jimmy Carter. I've never encountered it from even Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt during the two World Wars. I'm guessing it started around the bicentennial celebrations of 1976, but I haven't seen a Jerry Ford example yet.

But I do want to say a good word for that veteran revolutionary James Madison.

Dave's post alluded to a statement of Madison's at the Constitutional Convention that he understood to mean that Madison was endorsing the rule of an oligarchy under the Constitutional government they were designing. But his famous definition of the state in general in Federalist #10 is a more clear statement of his position. In that essay, Madison focused on the need for a meaningful balance between majority rule and minority rights. Or, in the particular terms which he used there, the dangers that a democracy can be destroyed by "the violence of faction", as the common body of knowledge among the Founders' generation told them had occurred in ancient Athens and the Roman Republic. The point of having institutional checks and balances among the three Constitutional Branches, of federalism, and of staggered election periods (e.g., only a third of the Senate was to replaced every two years) was to prevent a slim antidemocratic majority grabbing power in some period of crisis or panic and abolishing basic institutions of democracy.

Madison makes it clear, though, that the point of democratic government is that various "factions" need to have a public voice and have representation in government, not dependent on the whim of an entreched hereditary monarchy:

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. (my emphasis)

Where we're used to hearing endless Republican whining about the insidious influence of "special interests" (by which they mean unions and consumer groups and environmentals, not business lobbyists), it doesn't necessarily jump out at us from Madison's words that he was articulating a revolutionary-democratic understanding of politics and the state, recognizing that economic interests and social classes produced parties and other political factions. And that it was the legitimate business of democratic government to take those varied interests into account.

Political science geeks may notice a striking similarity between Madison's word's and the theory of politics articulated by Karl Marx and his adherents. This is not imaginary. But since Madison had not only written this essay and served two terms as President before Marx was born, in 1818 in far-oft German (Prussian) city of Trier, almost four decades after the publication of Federalist #10, it would be more accurate to say that Marx adopted a Madisonian view of the origin of political parties. Madison's more conservative contemporaries would have preferred to describe parties and factions in terms of more abstract categories of ideas and beliefs.

There's no doubt that the American Revolution was a businessman's revolution. But it was no less a revolution because of that. Since we're speaking of Marxists, it's worth noting that the Russian revolutionary leader Lenin called the American Revolutionary War, "one of those great ... really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few."

The American revolutinaries weren't revolting against a feudal class, like the contemporary French Revolution which was still underway at the time the US Constitution was written, debated and adopted, or Oliver Cromwell's Puritan revolution in England in the preceding century. But the English colonial system in America was a feudal element that was overthrown by the American Revolution. And the Revolution was also a war for national freedom, that established the United States as a distinct nation.

The leaders in the Revolution were largely merchants and other businesspeople. And the majority of the country were farmers, who operated in a capitalist farming environment rather than a feudal system. As in England and France, the ideas of "liberalism" (in the sense of Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations also appeared in 1776) and democracy found their main champions among businesspeople. There were also free artisans, endentured servants and slaves in the colonies in 1776. But factories were limited and employed a small number of people. An industrial working class existed only in embryo at that time.

The Progressive historian Charles Beard wrote a famous history, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, that looked at the personal wealth and business interests of the members of the Constitutional Convention and argued that they had their eye on their personal benefit in designing the Constitution. They portrayed the Constitution as a reactionary move primarily aimed at benefitting the wealthy against the common people. This is the capsule description of Beard's approach from the 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica:

He then developed a schema of historical explanation that found its most famous expression in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913). In this book he claimed that the Constitution had been formulated by interest groups whose motivations were just as much personal financial ones as they were political ones. Although American politicians were generally outraged at the implications of material interests embodied in the Constitution by the Founding Fathers, the book was received by academicians as an innovative study on motivational factors among socioeconomic groups. In The Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915), Beard placed somewhat more emphasis on the philosophical context of political struggles, but he nevertheless reaffirmed his view of the importance of economic interests in governmental action.

This is a good example of why the Progressive movement, which represented a middle-class idealism that was at least as suspicious of unions and urban workers as it was of the business "trusts", has always been hard for me to grasp or sympathize with. But I can grasp Beard's particular twist on the Constitution, which misinterprets the political battles over the Constitution and winds up promoting a cynical, conservative, "everybody's in it for a buck" attitude.

How many revolutionary leaders ever supported a revolution because they thought they were going to be personally damaged by it in the end? Yes, the men at the Constitution Convention were well-off and were interested in protecting the status of themselves and others like themselves. But they also took their role as political leaders and American patriots seriously. They weren't trying to reverse the Revolution, they were trying to institutionalize it.

The opposition to the Constitution was in part from people who were worried that a stronger central government would threaten personal freedoms. But there was also a great deal of conservative opposition, also including businessmen who thought they might personally benefit from retaining the Confederation arrangement. In today's terms, the Federalist Party was the first "conservative" party and developed from the pro-Constitution movement. And Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party was the "liberal" party and developed from the anti-Constitution movement. But while that is true in broad terms, it's misleading to read the political conflicts of 1796 or 1800 back into the debate over the Constitution.

The more democratic-minded among the Constitution's critics were most concerned over the lack of a Bill of Rights, which was quickly corrected by the first Congress. Less democracy-minded opponents wanted a more monarchical government, or were afraid that the Constitutional government might make it more difficult for their own "faction" to make mischief for narrow ends.

By the 1820s, a significant urban working class had developed and were beginning to from their own organizations and to assert themselves as an important political "faction". They were an essential part of the Jacksonian democratic coalition. In The Age of Jackson (1945), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., quotes an issue of the Working-Men's Gazette from Vermont from this period which articulated grievances that most workers' papers at the time also highlighted:

Equal Universal Education.
Abolition of Imprisonment for Debt.
Abolition of all Licensed Monopolies.
An entire Revision, or Abolition of the present Militia System.
A Less Expensive Law System.
Equal Taxation on Property.
An Effective Lien Law for Laborers.
All Officers to be Elected by the People.
No Legislation on Religion.

Given the current power of the Christian Right in the Republican Party, it's notable that separation of church and state were a major concern of the early workingclass organizations in the US. At this period, the federal Constitution forbid the "establishment" of religion, but the federal Bill of Rights did not apply to the states until the post-Civil War 14th Amendment was adopted.

Schlesinger gives and example of how one grievance played out:

But the main specific grievance came to be the question of imprisonment for debt. In 1830 five sixths of the persons in the jails of New England and the Middle states were debtors, most of them owing less than twenty dollars. The law was thus, in effect, a class law, applying chiefly to the poor. It was an irrational law, for, by withdrawing debtors from the economic world, it prevented their saving up and paying off. It was, moreover, insulting, for in last analyg assumed that debtors would never meet their obligations unless prompted by terror of punishment. General fears about loss of status thus began to focus on imprisonment for debt as a peculiarly cruel and wanton agency of degradation.

John Quincy Adams, after his Presidency, distinguished himself in his advocacy for the abolition of slavery. But as President, he was scarcely a partisan of the dispossed. Schlesinger writes that President Adams opposed efforts by New York Senator Martin Van Buren and otheres to ban imprisonment for debt:

The chief opposition came from the business community with its vague but deep conviction that imprisonment for debt was bound up with sanctity of contracts. "I shall surely get no thanks from any one," wrote [President] John Quincy Adams testily in 1831, contemplating a letter on this question, "for pointing to the consequences ... upon the security of property and upon fidelity to contracts, as well as upon credit." Van Buren reported meeting the greatest hostility among mer-rliants and lawyers. ... Years later Thurlow Weed discovered certain prominent businessmen in Albany incredulous at the idea they could have fought the reform until he showed them antiabolition petitions headed by their own names.

(The latter reminds me of all the Southern whites who never, ever supporter segregation. Hopefully, ten years from now we'll hear the same kind of hypocritical lying from those who today support the Cheney-Bush torture policy. We're already hearing it from people who never supported the Iraq War, oh, no.)

As President, Andrew Jackson supported the movement against debtor prisons at the federal and state levels. The practice was abolished for federal courts in 1832. It was one of the Jacksonian movements successes that the practice was largely abolished in the states by the 1840s. Jackson said "it should be the care of a republic not to exert a grinding power over misfortune and poverty."

It was one of the great advantages of American democracy, compared even to nations like Prussia and France in Jackson's time, that various classes and "factions" could exert influence on the Constitutional government to shape policy. As Dave mentioned in his earlier post, the state can be and often is an instrument of oppression: debtor's prison is an excellent example.

But a democratic state can and has been employed as well to limit and balance the excessive power that private interests can and do exercise over the less economically powerful. The goal of the Roberts Four in last week's Community Schools re-segregation decision was to prevent the government from stepping in to prevent racial discrimination. Although that particular decision applied to schools, today's Republicans would love to see the Supreme Court invalidate any and all legislation aimed at preventing racial discrimination in private employment.

Which brings me to the utopian idea of the eventual disppearance of the State as we know it. There were utopian groups in the days of Andrew Jackson who formed ideal communities whose goal was to create an isolated ideal society. The Mormon Church essentially attempted such a project in its early years.

In the labor movement, both in Europe and the US, the idea has also been envisioned as a desirable goal. Frederick Engels famously forsaw "the withering away of the state" in the ultimate worldwide condition of communism. Anarchists and syndicalists envisioned a kind of labor self-government, the One Big Union in the famous "Wobbly" formulation (Industrial Workers of the World, IWW). But those visions of the state disappearing were in a way circular definition. They defined the state as a tool of class rule. Once classes were abolished in the ideal world, there could be no "state" by definition.

But all of those concepts envisioned some kind of governing institution for society that would be the equivalent of what most of us would think of as the state: the Church, the One Big Union, the Owenite or Fourierian commune.

Today's economic "libertarians" also envision a withering away of the state of a particular kind. But they don't want to want until property is owned in common and social classes have disappeared. Some of the more radical libertarians might like to do away with basically the entire civilian government except for the military and the police. Heck, these days they may even want private security companies and mercenary firms to take over those roles, too. Many of them would settle for doing away with anti-discrimination laws, workers' saftey laws and agencies, food and drug standards and pollution restrictions.

But rule by One Big Corporation doesn't sound so appealing to most people.

A healthy Jacksonian democracy would be an awful lot better for most of us.

Tags: american revolution, james madison