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January 5 - January 15, 2022
no one got everything they wanted from the Constitution. When considering the document, it is useful to see it as a kind of peace treaty between the states.
Southern defense of slavery. The delegates spent much time at the convention discussing that institution,
Georgia and South Carolina were emphatic: They would not sign any document that carried a whiff of emancipation.
So the convention, which concluded in September 1787, would wind up passing the moral debt of slavery to later generations, who would have to pay in blood.
“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.”44 This preference would become the fundamental difference between him and Adams, and so between the Jeffersonians and the Federalists.
Alexander Hamilton had wanted a far more aristocratic or monarchical system, with presidents and senators selected for life terms.
Madison and Hamilton believed that ratifying the proposed Constitution, with all its flaws and compromises, was far more desirable than continuing the government under the Articles of Confederation.
Madison and Hamilton, with a few contributions from John Jay, produced three dozen persuasive essays, now remembered as the Federalist Papers.
total of eighty-five by August of 1788.)
“it is this document rather than the Declaration of Independence that strikes me as the most characteristic produc...
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all of them were published under the pen name Publius.
introversion is especially unusual in someone who was so politically astute.
“The causes of faction cannot be removed,” he stated, which means that “relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states.”
There is a lot of Hume here
Roy Branson, traces Madison’s most innovative thinking, about how to accept and use party politics as a form of checks and balances, back to Hume and other Scottish thinkers.
“Constant experience shows us, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it. . . . To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.”
Athens and Sparta “inflated with the victories and the glory they had acquired, became first rivals, and then enemies.” That led to the eventual destruction of Athens, he noted. “Their mutual jealousies, fears, hatreds and injuries, ended in the celebrated Peloponnesian war; which itself ended in the ruin and slavery of the Athenians who had begun it.”
Hamilton’s contributions to the Federalist Papers were less enamored of classicism.
violence and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.”
1788, Congress announced that the Constitution had been ratified and set dates for the election of a president.
Jefferson had drafted the more affecting Declaration, but Madison played a central role in the more practical Constitution.
loose groups began to form, mainly in opposition to the growing power within the Washington administration of Alexander Hamilton,
fiercely partisan newspapers of the day,
Federal counterattack on the newspapers themselves, in the form of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
“The Federalists never saw themselves as a party but as the beleaguered legitimate government beset by people allied with revolutionary France out to destroy the Union,”
We must not imagine that the freedom of the Romans was lost, because one party fought for the maintenance of liberty; another for the establishment of tyranny; and that the latter prevailed. No. The spirit of liberty was dead, and the spirit of faction had taken its place on both sides.
John Adams had yet to apprehend how much power had shifted to the people, both politically and culturally. He would spend much of his time in power in the 1790s resisting that trend, eventually going so far as to imprison newspaper editors who criticized him.
Madison was becoming avowedly partisan.
“In every political society, parties are unavoidable. A difference of interests, real or supposed, is the most natural and fruitful source of them,”
“In all political societies, different interests and parties arise out of the nature of things, and the great art of politicians lies in making them checks and balances to each other.”
Aaron Burr (Princeton, 1772), then a senator from New York, that “if we have an embryo-Cæsar in the United States ’tis Burr.”
Hamilton, who never seemed to have enough enemies to satisfy himself, lit into his main target, Jefferson.
It was Caesar, the liberal, “who overturned the republic,” he noted, while it was Cato, the conservative, “who died for it.”
The initial tentative seedlings of organized political parties began to emerge at this time, in the form of Democratic Societies.
He observed at one point that it was producing sufficient potatoes and clover “to feed every animal on my farm except my negroes.”
the hold on the president of Hamilton and other Federalists—that is, advocates of a strong central government—was growing.
“His memory was already sensibly impaired by age, the firm tone of mind for which he had been remarkable, was beginning to relax, it’s energy was abated; a listlessness of labor, a desire for tranquillity had crept on him, and a willingness to let others act and even think for him.”
Cf. Joe Biden
Jefferson and Madison were about to invent American presidential politics,
The federal government, seeking to reduce its war debt, imposed a tax on whiskey and other distilled spirits.
to quote Cicero: “How long, ye Catilines, will you abuse our patience.”
Cincinnatus, the soldier who rescued his country and then relinquished power.
foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.”
Adams is nowhere to be seen. In one of his more discerning comments, he would reflect late in life that “Mausoleums, Statues, Monuments will never be erected to me.”
The founders always had been acutely aware of the destruction of the Roman Republic and the short duration of the Athenian democracy.
the late eighteenth century, the world had just two leading examples of “democratic republican” government—that is, nations ruled by the majority of the people. One was the United States. The other was France,
the French experiment had gone off track—first into a reign of terror, followed eventually by a “first consul,” Napoleon Bonaparte, who would consolidate his power into a dictatorship.
“Terror is the order of the Day. . . . The Queen was executed the Day before Yesterday.”
Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the French radicals, claimed that his group was motivated by virtue: If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue.
insisting that terror and virtue go hand in hand. The thought builds an intellectual bridge between the ancient world and modern totalitarianism.
