The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton (books to read in your 20s .txt) π
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In early 1787, the Congress of the United States called a meeting of delegates from each state to try to fix what was wrong with the Articles of Confederation. The Articles had created an intentionally weak central government, and that weakness had brought the nation to a crisis in only a few years. Over the next several months, the delegates worked to produce the document that would become the U.S. Constitution.
When Congress released the proposed Constitution to the states for ratification in the fall of 1787, reaction was swift: in newspapers throughout each state, columnists were quick to condemn the radical reworking of the nationβs formative document. In New York State, a member of the convention decided to launch into the fray; he and two other men he recruited began writing their own anonymous series defending the proposed Constitution, each one signed βPublius.β They published seventy-seven articles in four different New York papers over the course of several months. When the articles were collected and published as a book early the following year, the authors added another eight articles. Although many at the time guessed the true identities of the authors, it would be a few years before the authors were confirmed to be Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, Hamilton and Madison both being delegates at the convention.
Although the articlesβ influence on the Constitutionβs ratification is debatedβnewspapers were largely local at the time, so few outside New York saw the articlesβtheir influence on the interpretation of the Constitution within the judiciary is immense. They are a window not only into the structure and content of the document, but also the reasons for the structure and content, written by men who helped author the document. Consequently, they have been quoted almost 300 times in Supreme Court cases. They remain perhaps the best and clearest explanation of the document that is the cornerstone of the United States government.
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- Author: Alexander Hamilton
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Hamilton: For The Independent Journal, Wednesday, December 26, 1787.
To the People of the State of New York:
That there may happen cases in which the national government may be necessitated to resort to force, cannot be denied. Our own experience has corroborated the lessons taught by the examples of other nations; that emergencies of this sort will sometimes arise in all societies, however constituted; that seditions and insurrections are, unhappily, maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body; that the idea of governing at all times by the simple force of law (which we have been told is the only admissible principle of republican government), has no place but in the reveries of those political doctors whose sagacity disdains the admonitions of experimental instruction.
Should such emergencies at any time happen under the national government, there could be no remedy but force. The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief. If it should be a slight commotion in a small part of a state, the militia of the residue would be adequate to its suppression; and the national presumption is that they would be ready to do their duty. An insurrection, whatever may be its immediate cause, eventually endangers all government. Regard to the public peace, if not to the rights of the Union, would engage the citizens to whom the contagion had not communicated itself to oppose the insurgents; and if the general government should be found in practice conducive to the prosperity and felicity of the people, it were irrational to believe that they would be disinclined to its support.
If, on the contrary, the insurrection should pervade a whole state, or a principal part of it, the employment of a different kind of force might become unavoidable. It appears that Massachusetts found it necessary to raise troops for repressing the disorders within that state; that Pennsylvania, from the mere apprehension of commotions among a part of her citizens, has thought proper to have recourse to the same measure. Suppose the State of New York had been inclined to reestablish her lost jurisdiction over the inhabitants of Vermont, could she have hoped for success in such an enterprise from the efforts of the militia alone? Would she not have been compelled to raise and to maintain a more regular force for the execution of her design? If it must then be admitted that the necessity of recurring to a force different from the militia, in cases of this extraordinary nature, is applicable to the state governments themselves, why should the possibility, that the national government might be under a like necessity, in similar extremities, be made an objection to its existence? Is it not surprising that men who declare an attachment to the Union in the abstract, should urge as an objection to the proposed Constitution what applies with tenfold weight to the plan for which they contend; and what, as far as it has any foundation in truth, is an inevitable consequence of civil society upon an enlarged scale? Who would not prefer that possibility to the unceasing agitations and frequent revolutions which are the continual scourges of petty republics?
Let us pursue this examination in another light. Suppose, in lieu of one general system, two, or three, or even four Confederacies were to be formed, would not the same difficulty oppose itself to the operations of either of these Confederacies? Would not each of them be exposed to the same casualties; and when these happened, be obliged to have recourse to the same expedients for upholding its authority which are objected to in a government for all the states? Would the militia, in this supposition, be more ready or more able to support the federal authority than in the case of a general union? All candid and intelligent men must, upon due consideration, acknowledge that the principle of the objection is equally applicable to either of the two cases; and that whether we have one government for all the states, or different governments for different parcels of them, or even if there should be an entire separation of the states,30 there might sometimes be a necessity to make use of a force constituted differently from the militia, to preserve the peace of the community and to maintain the just authority of the laws against those violent invasions of them which amount to insurrections and rebellions.
Independent of all other reasonings upon the subject, it is a full answer to those who require a more peremptory provision against military establishments in time of peace, to say that the whole power of the proposed government is to be in the hands of the representatives of the people. This is the essential, and, after all, only efficacious security for the rights and privileges of the people, which is attainable in civil society.31
If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state. In a single state, if the persons entrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair. The usurpers, clothed with the forms of legal authority, can too often crush the opposition in embryo. The smaller the extent of the territory, the more difficult will it be for the people to form a regular or systematic plan of opposition, and the more easy will it be to defeat their early efforts. Intelligence can be more speedily obtained of
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