The Jefferson Rule: How the Founding Fathers Became Infallible and Our Politics Inflexible - Softcover

Sehat, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476779783 ISBN 13: 9781476779782

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2016

Synopsis

In The Jefferson Rule, historian David Sehat describes how everyone from liberals to conservatives, secessionists to unionists have sought out the Founding Fathers to defend their policies.

Beginning with the debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the future of the nation, and continuing throughout our history—the Civil War, the World Wars, the New Deal, the Reagan Revolution, and Obama and the Tea Party—many politicos have asked, “What would the Founders do?” instead of “What is the common good today?” Both the Right and the Left have used the Founders to sort through such issues as voting rights, campaign finance, free speech, war and peace, gun control, and taxes, though those Fathers were a querulous and divided group who rarely agreed.

In this “sobering, informative study” (Publisher’s Weekly), Sehat shows why coming to terms with the past would be the start of a productive debate. The result is, simply put, “required reading for those desperate for sane, intelligent political arguments” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). The Jefferson Rule “takes the reader through an engaging and insightful survey course in American history” (The Christian Science Monitor).

About this title

About the Author

David Sehat is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University. His first book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. Visit DavidSehat.net.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Jefferson Rule

CHAPTER ONE

The Quest for Unanimity

George Washington probably should have known better. In 1789, just after taking office, he faced a choice that would turn out to shape his two terms as president. The Constitution had been drafted nearly a year and a half earlier. After a bruising battle over its ratification, in which many people objected to what they saw as the Constitution’s centralization of authority, Washington had been unanimously elected as the nation’s first president. The moment was delicate. Everyone trusted in Washington as a leader, but not everyone trusted one another. And not everyone trusted in the government created by the Constitution.1

As Washington assumed the seat that many thought had been made for him, he needed to reassure concerned citizens that all was well. So he used his first inaugural to smooth over anxiety about the new government. It would be a force for national prosperity and national good, he promised. He would not allow the government to become despotic or to aid one section of the country over another. “No local prejudices or attachments, no separate views nor party animosities, will misdirect the comprehensive and equal eye which ought to watch over this great assemblage of communities and interests,” he pledged to the nation’s citizenry.2

But he also needed to use the new national powers of the government to confront the various and multiple problems that the nation faced. And he needed to appoint people to his cabinet who would use these new powers in a vigorous but politically circumspect manner. They would have to wield the new executive authority provided to the government without antagonizing those who had objected to the Constitution.

In that quest he did not hesitate, at least initially, to think big. His first appointment was Alexander Hamilton, for Treasury. The United States faced a number of economic problems that had been around since the end of the Revolutionary War. Under the Articles of Confederation—the wartime government that the Constitution replaced—the United States had been unable to coordinate the economic activity of the states. The nation, as a result, had no coherent program of economic development. And it struggled under debt from fighting the Revolution. If the United States was going to be successful as a nation, it would need to address its large debt, establish its credit in the eyes of other nations, and raise the capital to engage in still necessary national improvements.

Hamilton was perfect for that task. He was one of the most brilliant minds of the new nation, and he had a clear conception of the economic problems. But he also had a particularly clear vision of national power that was bound to antagonize those who feared a strong central government. More than anyone else among the founding generation, Hamilton believed that the new constitution provided, in his words, “streams of national power” that needed to be channeled to specific ends. Power was, for Hamilton, a good thing. Those who worried about strong governmental power, according to Hamilton, missed the more dangerous problems that arose out of a lack of governmental power. As he explained in the Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper articles written with James Madison and John Jay to support constitutional ratification, under a weak government “we are apt to rest satisfied that all is safe because nothing improper will be likely to be done.” But this view was, he believed, shortsighted. “We forget how much good may be prevented,” he pointed out, “and how much ill may be produced, by the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary, and of keeping affairs in the same unfavorable posture in which they may happen to stand at particular periods.”3

Such a view was at total odds with Washington’s choice for secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. It was here that Washington made his first mistake. State was also a vital cabinet position. Following the Revolution, several aspects of foreign relations needed attention. And because many future treaties would deal with commercial relations, some overlap in Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s respective portfolios was inevitable. The overlap would not have been a problem had they been in general philosophical agreement. But because Jefferson and Hamilton could not disagree more vehemently on any number of issues, conflict was also inevitable.

Jefferson had, in fact, long been uncomfortable with the Constitution. Though he did not have a hand in drafting it—he was away in Paris during the entire debate—when he first heard the plan he complained to his friend James Madison, “Primā facie I do not like it. It fails in an essential character, that the hole and the patch should be commensurate. But this proposes to mend a small hole by covering the whole garment.” Jefferson would have preferred to live under the Articles with perhaps a few amendments. “I own I am not a friend to a very energetic government,” he acknowledged. And though he eventually made peace with the Constitution, he did not abandon his belief that energetic government was always a threat to liberty.4

Jefferson’s commitment to liberty, as he understood it, was bound to cause problems when he was paired with Alexander Hamilton, a man also not shy about his opinions. But Washington did not see the potential for conflict. In spite of the raucous debates that the nation had endured during the ratification process, Washington assumed—like many in his time—that any fair-minded gentleman politician would arrive at basically the same place as any other fair-minded gentleman politician, so long as they were both republican in outlook. He did not believe that two republican gentlemen could disagree on principle without one of them suffering from a fatal flaw in character. He thought that if he chose what he called “first characters”—those who made up the natural aristocracy of the United States and could be trusted to lead the nation—he would not need to scrutinize their views too closely.5

So he filled out his cabinet without regard to political inclination or orientation, and laid the seeds for bitter conflict in the future. Hamilton, a partisan of power, went to Treasury. Jefferson, a partisan of liberty, went to State. Edmund Randolph—one of three people who had stayed through the entire Constitutional Convention and then declined to sign the document—became attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the new government. And Henry Knox, Washington’s successor as commander of the army after the Revolution and a secretary of war under the Articles of Confederation, stayed on as the secretary of war under the new government. Given the quality of the people he selected, and ignoring their obvious political differences, Washington looked forward to the future. His administration, he predicted, would shine in “the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent” characteristic of a republican form of government.6

But in this, Washington would be sadly disappointed. And it is out of that conflict that we find the origins of our contemporary debate.

INTERNAL FRACTURE

The problems began almost immediately. Hamilton led the way. In keeping with his views of power, he entered office determined to aggressively use his command of the Treasury to set the nation on what he considered a proper economic path. His goal was the creation of a new American political economy. Faced with the threat of insolvency and neocolonial dependency after the Revolutionary War, Hamilton thought the national government should foster markets, prompt investment and entrepreneurship, and create a coherent national financial policy that protected public credit.

To that end, he put forward a series of economic reports in which he recommended an expansion of government that would occur in three steps. First, he proposed, the federal government should assume the debts of the states to create a large and consolidated national debt. Then it should repay those debts at face value, rather than downgrading the debt and hurting the nation’s credit rating. Once those first two commitments were in place, he proposed that the government create a national bank that could collect new national taxes and use the subsequent capital flows to offer loans to the private sector in order to develop the economy. The net effect would be a powerful and centralized institutional control over American economic life.7

But Hamilton’s proposals were controversial. His promotion of a national bank, in particular, made it clear that he wanted to use the government to favor the merchants of the North, who could aid in the economic development of the nation while simultaneously enriching themselves. To agriculturalists, particularly in the South, it seemed as though Hamilton was using his office to pick winners and losers in the new economy. Or, to put it another way, he was using the power of the government to endanger the agriculturalists’ liberty.8

Jefferson and Madison, who both came from the agricultural state of Virginia, were upset. In the process of debate both emerged as Hamilton’s opponents. Madison in particular used his immense prestige as the architect of the Constitution to call into question the constitutionality both of the bank and of Hamilton’s entire economic system. He did so by arguing that the Constitution granted only limited powers to the Congress in section 8 of Article I. Because chartering a bank was not among those powers, Congress could not do it. This position became known as strict constructionism.9

As the split became clear, Washington grew disturbed. This was the first visible crack in the faēade of agreement that existed in his administration. He had relied on both Madison and Hamilton in the initial part of his government, so a split between the two suggested a growing ideological divide that he did not understand and could not readily explain. But he grew even more disturbed after Madison directly appealed to him to veto the bank bill, once it had passed over Madison’s objection in Congress. Uncertain of what to do, Washington solicited three opinions on the constitutionality of a national bank: one from his attorney general, Edmund Randolph; one from Jefferson; and, after he had consulted the other two, one from Hamilton. Everyone brought considerable legal powers to the task. The resulting opinions confirmed for Washington that a constitutional and political gulf was opening beneath him.

Jefferson and Randolph followed Madison in his strict constructionist argument, with Jefferson using his full rhetorical arsenal to defend what he had earlier called “the holy cause of freedom.” By rooting his opinion in the Tenth Amendment—which reserved all powers not delegated to the national government for the states and the people—Jefferson argued with Madison that the Constitution was like the Magna Carta, primarily a restraint on power that served as a charter of liberty. “To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress,” Jefferson complained, “is to take possession of a boundless feild [sic] of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”10

But when Hamilton read the opposing opinions, he could barely contain his contempt. Jefferson was not even at the Constitutional Convention, and Randolph, who had been there, refused to sign it at the convention’s end. And they were lecturing him on the Constitution’s meaning! “Principles of construction like those espoused by the Secretary of State and the Attorney General,” Hamilton coolly responded in his own opinion, “would be fatal to the just & indispensable authority of the United States.”11

Their disagreement was really about the nature and purpose of governmental power. For Jefferson, power always had a tendency toward malevolence that needed to be contained, but for Hamilton, power was the ability to do things that contributed to the public good. Precisely because the Constitution was designed to invigorate national government after the weakness of the Articles, Hamilton suggested that it was a charter of power, not merely liberty. It gave some powers to Congress by explicit statement and gave other powers to Congress by implication.

In essence, Hamilton argued that if Congress had the express power to do one thing, such as collect taxes, it had the implied power to do other things, such as chartering a bank, that were a means of exercising that express power. To support his claim, Hamilton pointed to the so-called “necessary and proper” clause of Article I, section 8: “Congress shall have power . . . to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers.” “The whole turn of the clause . . . indicates, that it was the intent of the convention, by that clause[,] to give a liberal latitude to the exercise of the specified powers,” Hamilton wrote. This position became known as broad constructionism.12

Washington tarried for two days, uncertain what to do. Then he signed the bill. It appeared to be a clear victory for Hamilton. But, to Hamilton’s consternation, the debate was just beginning.

FANATICAL PARTISANSHIP

Hamilton had pinpointed the exact questions of their debate, which would only grow more bitter in the future. Did the Constitution invigorate national government or constrain it? Did the framers trust or distrust power? And how exactly did they imagine that liberty would be maintained in this new federal system?

Those questions would soon grow more urgent, but in the meantime the debate itself was disturbing to many in Washington’s administration. They expected consensus in politics. The Founders saw politics in terms of the deferential and rank-­ordered society that they sat atop. Politics was supposed to be an expression of the enlightened governance expected by society’s natural rulers. As Thomas Jefferson said in 1776, the goal of any political system is “to get the wisest men chosen [in government], and to make them perfectly independent when chosen.” The voting masses would elect their betters, who could then, in tranquil deliberation, decide matters of public policy. And the Constitution had continued this idea. As Madison explained in Federalist No. 10, the Constitution used the principle of representation “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.” The best in society could then oversee “the permanent and aggregate interests of the [national] community.”13

But it was not working. After the success of Hamilton’s legislative program, Jefferson and Madison became convinced that the system had been overtaken by proto-despots. Hamilton had used his powers to aid not the permanent and aggregate interests of the national community, but the narrow interests of merchant capitalists. And he had done so with the overwhelming support of Congress. To resist what looked to them like the beginning of national degeneracy, Jefferson and Madison began canvassing New England and New York to seek support from regions other than Virginia. Their opponents claimed with some justification that they were trying to form a political party, but Jefferson and...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1476779783
• ISBN 13: 9781476779782
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320