The Long Clasp (Post 5)

Part II
The Threat

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UNION

USAmerican exceptionalism lies not in the hand of God, nor in its economic/military do­mi­nance of the world, nor in the accident that this is my country.  Human beings, thoughtful, se­rious, profoundly capable human beings, two-and-a-half hundred years before our time at a moment of economic and military ebb tide, acted on the impulse of empathic vision crucibled in hard experience to forge a structural lattice for a practicable political system wherewith to secure the Blessings of Liberty for ourselves and our Posterity.
            The empathy recognized that, as for me, so for all; my desire for life, liberty, and the pur­suit of happiness is the rightful desire of all people.  The hard experience recognized that people rarely remember or acknowledge that point in the face of immediate private interest or passion.  On those foundational axioms the Framers designed a structure to extend the one impulse by constraining the other.
            The third sentence of the introductory first essay of The Federalist Papers reads as follows:

Therein Hamilton proclaims the exceptionalism of the United States to be the free choosing by the people of their own Constitution.
            In the preceding second sentence, he declares the importance of the subject to be “nothing less than the UNION. . .”  And the 4^th word of the entire set of essays is “experience,” to which all three authors return again and again as “the least fallible guide of human opinions.”^[3]
            There it is in the opening three sentences distilled: The exceptional achievement envisioned of a free people freely choosing their own form of government to preserve the union of the People and the States by means grounded in the experience of the ages, including their own failed first ef­forts.

At stake was the continuance of a government freely established by the people.  That danger remains to this day.  Underlying any consideration of that issue is the fundamental matter, whether and why government is needed at all.  More than a few individuals past and present have expressed a preference for no government at all.  They recognize, and are aggrieved, that they must give up some degree of their natural rights to whatever sort of government there may be.  Therefore, no government, the absence of government, in their calculation, equals maximal freedom to themselves.
            In the minds of the Framers and supporters of the Constitution, government was axiomatic.  “Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of government.” (Jay, #2)  “Why has gov­ernment been instituted at all?  Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of rea­son and justice without constraint.” (Hamilton, #15)  They recognized that “the safety of the whole is the interest of the whole, and cannot be provided for without government.” (Jay, #4)  At argu­ment was only what kind of government might be desirable, attainable, and enduring.
            Already had they laid out in the Declaration of Independence the twin principles that “all men are created equal” and are pos­sessed of “unalienable rights . . . to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  They further envisioned “One people, each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protections.” (Jay, #2)  They had come to recognize, however, that the government of their new nation, as constructed by themselves, was too sickly to survive its infancy.  Like so many earlier democratic con­federations throughout world history, the United States of America, in 1787, faced dissolution.
            As with all governments, matters both external and internal had to be considered.  “Exter­nal” includes relations with other governments in matters of trade and commerce, of friendly intercourse or adversarial, of cooperation, alliance even, or competition, even war.  “Internal” in­cludes marshalling and deploying resources to obtain credit and repay debt, to unify outward-facing policy, to minimize friction amongst the member States, to resist rebellion, to coor­dinate matters of national or regional import or concern.  All this requires strength—that is, author­ity with power—and efficiency—that is, good administration.  Strength concentrates with unity among the parts, as it saps with dissension.
            In all these considerations the Confederation of the United States was proving itself danger­ously deficient.  This was known to all the States “from the embarrassments which characterize the present State of our national affairs, foreign and domestic.” (Proceedings of Commissioners to Remedy Defects of the Federal Government: 1786, Annapolis, Maryland).
            Union truly was the quintessence of the Framers’ vision.  The first 14 essays of The Federalist Papers argued for Union of the States.  Of the total number of 85, 14 is one-sixth, 16%.  This topic was clearly pre-eminent.  “The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its conse­quences nothing less than the existence of the union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.”  So Ham­ilton introduced the series of arguments for adoption of the proposed Constitution.
            It greatly challenges the imagination to place ourselves in the circumstances of those people nearly 250 years ago, to stare into their unformed future.  Having cut their historical cord with Great Britain; living through the present failure of the national experiment they had instituted six years be­fore under the Articles of Confederation; despairing lest the cause and purpose of the Revolution should not succeed to be realized; they sought to persuade their countrymen that strength, effi­ciency, and energy were necessary elements for “establishing good government from reflection and choice.”
            The war with Great Britain had ended four years before.  Thirteen sovereign States were joined by Articles of Confederation into a league under advisement of a common council.  Although referred to as the National Government, it found itself to be without authority or capacity to secure and direct resources.  Spanish claims bordered their south, British claims their west and north.  The thirteen States, while sharing much history, customs, language, and other interests, remained nevertheless thirteen sovereign powers with all the self-interested structures and purposes of sovereignty.  And, as well, all the weaknesses.
            Again and again repeatedly do the authors of The Federalist Papers hammer on the spike of “weakness” in the face of multiple and continual threats.  Foreign intrigue and aggression comprise the most obvious.  Thirteen States would require thirteen military organizations, each to defend itself against invasion.   Each would need the resources to supply and equip them.  Each would have to face the threat alone with little more than a hope of support from perhaps a neighboring State.  Each would have to maintain a ready force, a “standing army” in order to be prepared for any such threat.  Each would develop concerns, jealousies, suspicions over the possible threat that neighbor­ing standing armies might pose to it.  Divergent concerns, jealousies, suspicions form the waving fields of grain on which the plague of foreign intrigue most easily feeds.
            And similarly for domestic dispute or insurrection.  And for commercial interests.  And for policy interests, foreign and domestic.  Thirteen sovereign States could expect to fall into the well known pattern of European perpetual squabble, intrigue, dispute, shifting alliances, invasion, de­fense, disruption, and ruinous war.  And all of that would send an open invitation for further foreign interfer­ence.  The gravest threat to the realization of “good government [established] from reflection and choice” was—and continues to be—disunion.
            The greater strength which Union could achieve seems obvious to us, and so seemed to the Framers.  But the question in contention was the question of Power.  Each State had its own power structure and personnel.  Power attained is difficult to let go.  Ambition, the love of power, is the “impulse” most frequently reviled of the “irregular and violent propensities” of mankind.  The Framers of the Constitution, the authors of the Federalist Papers, spoke, as we do, of States intriguing, disputing, avenging; but they recognized, as many of us forget to do, that it is not the abstraction of a State, but the human beings holding the power of the State, who are afflicted with these passions and who act on their impulse.
            The Federalist Papers discuss political governance.  The two great questions before the Framers and the authors and the public were, how to construct a government based on the declared principles of the Revolution; and how to secure its infancy from the external circumstances of real-world politics and its development against internal usurpation by ambitious, jealous, self-interested men with little regard for the public good.