Thursday, July 31, 2014

Federalist No. 1, Part I: Context

I’d like to turn back to the Federalist Papers for this next series of posts, and in particular to the first article in the series, which helped established what was at stake for Americans in their evaluation of the proposed Constitution and arguably set the tone for the many essays that followed. I do this because I find it’s evaluation of the challenges facing the United States in the late 1780s, and those inherent in the ratification process of the Constitution, to be distinctly sober and pragmatic. Unlike the soaring language of Thomas Jefferson, or the earnest, deep-seated sincerity of George Washington, Federalist #1 is a very grounded piece of literature, and though the conclusions it offers are at times oversimplify the reality of 1780s America, its voice is one of caution and moderation, and yet also of confidence. Considering its author, the redoubtable Alexander Hamilton, this should come as no surprise.

A political realist whose unsentimental worldview often made his contemporaries uncomfortable, Hamilton was also supremely self-possessed and held a clear vision of his country’s future that he was, more often than not, unwilling to compromise. For this and other reasons, Hamilton was really the odd duck of the Revolutionary generation. Though he was both an immigrant and a self-made man, traits which later generations of American politicians wouldn’t have hesitated to use to their advantage, he spent most of his adult life attempting to distance himself from his rather course upbringing, and to cultivate an air of self-assured gentility. Like Jefferson his life was a study in contradictions, and yet the two men could not have been more different. He was a pragmatist who lost his life in a duel over perceived insults. He was a foreigner who became a passionate American nationalist. Perhaps because he wasn’t a native he was able to perceive the challenges that America faced more clearly than many of his colleagues. And perhaps this is why his voice stands out among the Founders, and why I’d like to take a moment to examine just a small portion of his life’s output and the peculiar point of view it embodies.

Because I’ve already discussed at length the circumstances leading up to the drafting of the United States Constitution and the publishing of the Federalist Papers, and because the details of Hamilton’s biography are perhaps not as well-known as certain other of the Founding Fathers, I’ll take this opportunity to provide a brief overview of his life up to 1787 and the first appearance of Federalist #1 in the New York newspapers.

As I said, Alexander Hamilton was not born in what’s come to be known as the Thirteen Colonies but rather came into the world on the tiny island of Nevis, one of the Leeward Islands in the British Caribbean. His exact year of birth is somewhat uncertain, given that he tended to claim it as 1757 while certain documents place it instead as 1755. Whatever the year, Hamilton was born out of wedlock to a woman of French Huguenot (Calvinist Protestant) descent, Rachel Faucette, and James A. Hamilton, fourth son of a Scottish landowner and a notoriously unlucky businessman and merchant. Because of his legal status as a bastard he was denied entry into the Anglican-run school on the island, and so his early education instead consisted of private tutoring. Sometime after relocating with his family to St. Croix in the Danish Virgin Islands, James left Rachel and their two sons, claiming that he wished to spare her the charge of bigamy after her husband, a prominent Danish merchant, made it known that he intended to sue her for divorce. Though she attempted to support her children by keeping a store in Christiansted, the island capital, Rachel passed away in 1768 after contracting a fever, leaving Alexander and his younger brother James effectively orphaned.

Hamilton was then remanded to the custody of his cousin, Peter Lytton, who not long after committed suicide. Orphaned again, he and his brother were then separated and apprenticed, Alexander to merchant Thomas Stevens and James to a local carpenter. As a clerk in the merchant firm of Beekman and Cruger, Hamilton got his first taste of the financial world in which he would later make his name, and for a five-month period in 1771 was effectively left in charge of the business while its owner was at sea. In 1772, after an essay he wrote that detailed the devastating hurricane that thrashed Christiansted in August of that year was published in the Royal Danish-American Gazette, community leaders took an interest in his further education and put together a modest fund so that the youth might travel to the American mainland and attend one of prestigious colleges located there. He subsequently left the Caribbean for Boston in the fall of 1772, never to return.

Though initially intent on enrolling at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), Hamilton ultimately attended King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York City, and during his years there first became acquainted with the ongoing dispute between the colonies and the Crown. In 1774, at age 19, he published his first political writings, a lengthy refutation of a Loyalist critique on the actions of the First Continental Congress then meeting in Philadelphia. Hamilton’s approach was highly methodical, systematic, and confident, set the tone for his later literary efforts, and placed him firmly in the emerging radical Patriot camp. This political affiliation was further consummated in 1775 when, after news arrived of the first engagement between British and American troops in Massachusetts, Hamilton and many of his fellow students formed a volunteer militia company known as the Hearts of Oak. After capturing several British field pieces (cannons) located at the Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan Island, the Hearts of Oak became an artillery company, and thereafter served in the battles of White Plains and Trenton with Hamilton as their captain. In 1776, after refusing similar offers from various Continental Army commanders, Hamilton agreed to serve as General George Washington’s chief of staff. It was during these years of service that he met and married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of one of the most prominent landowning families in New York. By marrying Elizabeth, Hamilton was able to transcend his status as an immigrant by becoming a part of the highly factional, clannish politics of the Empire State. As a member of the Schuyler family he found himself with any number of enemies and allies who would come to shape and define his political life for years to come.    

Hamilton remained with Washington for the duration of his service in the army, and in the process forged a close personal and political relationship with the future president that would prove to be among the most significant of both their lives. After serving in a frontline position at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, a role he pleaded with Washington to let him fulfill, he resigned his commission and was appointed to represent the state of New York at the Continental Congress. There, he occupied himself mainly with advocating for a stronger federal government that could more easily collect the taxes it imposed on the states, or even secure its own independent source of revenue. Hamilton had witnessed, during his time in the army, how ineffective Congress was at funding its various initiatives, and how it impacted the American military effort. Accordingly he believed, along with men like Robert Morris and James Wilson, that the survival of the Union and its stature on the world stage was to be determined mainly in the economic arena. When underpaid Continental soldiers stationed at Newburgh, New York threatened to mutiny in 1783, Hamilton seized upon what he perceived as an opportunity to shock his fellow members of Congress into compliance with his views. Secretly encouraging the officers leading the mutineers to press their demands while also arguing in Congress for a stronger federal government, Hamilton’s plans were ultimately defeated when his mentor and friend General Washington personally addressed the assembled soldiers and effectively defused the uprising.

Frustrated by his lack of progress in converting his colleagues in Congress to his way of thinking, Hamilton resigned in July, 1783 and returned to his adopted home in New York. In the years that followed he took up the practice of law, chiefly defending Loyalists and British subjects who’d had their property seized in the aftermath of the Revolution. He also helped found the Bank of New York, restored his alma mater of King’s College after it had been severely damaged and shuttered during the war, and became a member of the New York state legislature. In 1786 and 1787, Hamilton proved instrumental in organizing first the Annapolis Convention, during which possible amendments to the Articles of Confederation where discussed, and later the Philadelphia Convention, during which an entirely new federal constitution was drafted. In Philadelphia he advocated, as ever, for a strong central government that would not be forced to rely on the states for revenue, and which would possess sufficient authority to enforce its decisions. To this end he proposed electing Senators and a President for life on the basis of good behavior, and even suggested that state governors be appointed by the federal government. These efforts at severely curtailing the authority of the states and creating a system that prized stability over responsiveness earned him ample criticism, and he was for years afterwards pegged as a monarchist by his detractors. In spite of the opposition many of his views met with, and the fact that the final draft of the Constitution was not substantially to his liking, he put his name to it, believing it to be preferable to the existing government under the Articles. He thereafter became one of the document’s strongest supporters during the ratification debate that followed, and recruited fellow New Yorker John Jay and Virginian James Madison to help pen a series of essays defending the new charter and promoting its adoption. Of the 85 articles that resulted Hamilton wrote 51, starting with Federalist #1 on October 27, 1787.

Having said all that, a few key elements of Hamilton’s biography stand out as relevant to a basic understanding of his political persona. One is his at times bloody-minded pragmatism. Unlike many of his colleagues and fellow revolutionaries, who seemed inclined to characterize the formation of the United States as the culmination of human history or the embodiment of Enlightenment philosophical theory, Hamilton was more likely to portray the Revolution and the events that followed in terms of what was possible and what was necessary, how much this would cost and how much of that was required. This may have been due in part to his somewhat shaky childhood. Growing up in obscure tropical outposts of vast empires, losing first one parent, then the other, and then his guardian, facing hurricanes and being thrust into the business world at a young age no doubt taught young Alexander that reality was harsh, and that one’s fondest hopes were best not relied on. In addition, his experiences in the Continental Army, particularly as Washington’s adjunct, surely reinforced in him the need to match ones goals to the circumstances at hand. His time under Washington no doubt also helped to instill in him among his most cherished principles, his nationalism.

Among men who’d served in the army it was a common trait, and one he shared with his mentor. Having experienced the Revolution as part of one of the only truly national bodies in the United States in the 1770s, serving alongside men from New York, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Maryland, and having to constantly wrangle with Congress for funds and supplies, Hamilton and many of his compatriots came to view the Union as something more than an ideal or a matter of convenience. For them, and certainly for him, the union of the several states was a living, breathing entity, greater than the sum of its parts and in need of preservation and promotion. His subsequent career in Congress, and his frequent attempts to encourage the formation of a stronger federal government and closer ties between the states, is testament enough of Hamilton’s abiding pride in his adopted nation and his desire to see its strength augmented.

And then there is, of course, his seemingly unshakable confidence. What strikes me about this particular aspect of Hamilton’s personality is how early it seemed to manifest. At age 17 he left behind the only home he had ever known in the Caribbean in pursuit of his education; at 19 he was writing essays for publication that were in answer to treatises by men more than twice his age; by his early twenties he was leading an artillery company into battle; by age 30 he was helping to shape his nation’s constitution. It was a whirlwind life, and Hamilton appeared to approach every challenge utterly convinced of his own abilities. In part, I wonder if this was a form of compensation for his status as a foreigner. Though America was by no means the haven of aristocracy that Britain had become, there certainly existed a form of social hierarchy that was based on birth, education, family connections, and wealth. Being by definition an outsider in this world, with no family to rely on, no wealth of his own, and an education that was the product of others’ charity, he perhaps felt the need to continually overawe his potential detractors with displays of cunning, tenacity, bravery, ingenuity and industriousness. As the efforts of his early adulthood met with one success after another his self-assuredness was perhaps magnified, all in service of displacing the poor orphan form the West Indies that had arrived in America in favor of a polished, hard-working, more socially acceptable persona.

But now I see I’ve lapsed into what we called in Grad school, “psychoanalysing dead people.” Without being able to say if any of the conclusions I’ve just drawn are absolutely true, I hope that I’ve been able to convey how unlike most of the other Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton was, and how his experiences shaped the way he viewed the United States, its purpose, and its future.        

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Part III: Precedents

Though Jefferson’s 1779 Statute represents a defining moment in the history of American civil rights, its passage was not the first occasion when Americans or their colonial forbearers attempted to make freedom of conscience a part of their laws. That being said, few of these other attempts went as far as Jefferson was willing to go to guarantee absolute freedom from religious persecution. Taken together, though, they might be said to demonstrate both that freedom of conscience was a topic very much on the minds of many of the American colonists for decades before and after the Revolution took place, and that Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the most radical among them, and the most willing to see their shared philosophical ideal out to its logical conclusion.  

Though the colonies of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island are most well-known for having promoted religious liberty from a period very early in their respective histories, in the context of 17th-and-18th-century North America they were far from the norm. It is also, I think, worth noting that while Rhode Island’s charter guaranteed unqualified liberty of conscience, Pennsylvania’s only allowed unrestricted worship and participation in government to believers in a monotheistic faith (that is, someone who believes in the existence of a single god or deity). Granted, outside of whatever Native Americans may have resided within the borders of the colony (who would not have been afforded full civil rights anyway) there was virtually no one to whom this restriction would have applied. Nevertheless it is a restriction, of a kind, and one that was reinforced and strengthened by the subsequent Pennsylvania constitution of 1776. This document stated that each member of the legislature, before they took their seat, must acknowledge the existence of the one, true God, and that the Old and New Testaments were the products of his divine inspiration.

Similar qualifications were all too typical of the colonial and later state governments. New York, for example, had been granted a degree of religious liberty by its proprietor, the Duke of York (later King James II). A fervent Catholic, the Duke was no friend of the Church of England and permitted the inhabitants of his colony to belong to whichever church they preferred (though it was clear they had to belong to some kind of church). This state of affairs was later undone when the Duke ascended the throne in 1685 and New York became a crown colony, placing it within the orbit of the British government and its Anglican allies. Certain of the later state governments made similar efforts to ease existing restrictions on religious liberty, but almost always with reservations.

The first constitutions of both Massachusetts and New Jersey attempted to guarantee the people’s freedom of conscience, but did so without completely abandoning an explicit religious preference. While the 1780 Massachusetts constitution stated that every person had the right to worship, “in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience,” it also made provisions for the levying of taxes intended to pay for “the institution of the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.” New Jersey’s constitution was even more direct, mandating that in accordance with the prohibition of any kind of religious establishment, “no Protestant inhabitant of this Colony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right, merely on account of his religious principles.” Though these sorts of provisions were no doubt drafted with the best of intentions, they effectively disenfranchised, or made financially responsible for faiths not their own, however many Jewish or Catholic residents of Massachusetts or New Jersey there were in that era. While there may have been, in the 1770s or 1780s, few of either group residing in these states, it was the principle of religious liberty that Jefferson believed was important, and in need of protection and promotion, lest the United States fall into the well-worn habits of its former mother country.

And Britain’s would, indeed, prove to be an example to avoid. In spite of the brief reign of James II (during which a Catholic was officially the head of the Church of England), Britain’s prohibitions against political participation by non-Anglicans held fast for 150 years. It was not until 1828 that anyone was permitted to hold public office without taking Anglican communion, and not until 1829 were Catholics afforded the same privilege. The United States, in the same era, had enjoyed over 50 years of relatively peaceful coexistence between a variety of faiths, as Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists and Puritans served alongside each other in Congress and in state assemblies. I would not go so far as to say that this was because of the influence of Jefferson’s Statute, but his was certainly among the first, and most philosophically grounded, attempts to enshrine the principle of unrestricted freedom of conscience in the laws of the United States. That freedom of religion was among the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, held in as high esteem as free speech and freedom of the press, is telling of the Statute’s influence and of similar attempts made at the end of the 18th century to break away from the religious establishments that so dominated Americans’ shared British past.

Now, before I finish I’d like to touch on one last thing. The last section of the Statute is a sort of caveat, or a warning to future generations. It says, essentially, that though no group of elected officials (in this case the Virginia General Assembly) has the right to bind their successors to the decisions they chose to make, or prevent them from repealing whatever law they feel no longer serves their purpose, whoever chooses to repeal the Statute for Religious Freedom will be committing a crime against the laws of nature, and no doubt by extension “nature’s God.” This is such a fundamentally Jeffersonian thing to add, I find I couldn’t resist commenting on it.

Jefferson was, after all, a man who said or wrote at numerous points over the course of his lengthy career some variation on the phrase, “The earth belongs to the living.” It was a radical notion and he quoted it at length, maintaining that the dead should no more have the ability to decide what their successors can and can’t do, than a minister in Austria should be able to set the laws in Spain. And yet in the matter of freedom of conscience, among the most sacred of the natural rights he often championed, he was willing to violate one of his most dearly held principles, claim that his all-important Statute should never be repealed, and lay a moral injunction against those that would attempt to do so (in keeping with the rights he admits they possess). It’s among one of the most direct examples of Jeffersonian doublespeak, of his ability to claim a principle, violate it, and then assert that the violation actually reinforces the principle in question. Time and again he did this, on a variety of scales and with a variety of results, and for those who have studied the third president it’s one of his defining characteristics, and part of what makes him such a fascinating and at times elusive figure.

  But please, do see for yourself: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Virginia_Statute_for_Religious_Freedom

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Part II: Principles

Though it is remarkably brief, considering the weighty topic it seeks to address, Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom covers a lot of ground. Discussing, at turns, the nature of free will, reason and truth, the inherent fallibility of man, and the impossibility of objectivity, it is in some ways more of a philosophical treatise than a piece of legislation. Its character is decidedly that of the Enlightenment, though it also carries the influence of the British view of established religion (as inherited by the various colonies), and possibly of earlier American attempts at making freedom of conscience a matter of law.

The Statute is divided into three sections, the first of which acts as a sort of preamble that attempts to establish the intellectual and moral basis of the proposed law. Among the ideas that Jefferson puts forward in this section, most could be said to flow out of an Enlightenment, or more specifically Deist, worldview. First, he asserts that God granted to man both free will and the ability to reason, and that because the Almighty chose not to propagate religious belief by force, though he could very easily do so, he must have wanted his creations to make use of these faculties and decide on such matters for themselves. It then follows, Jefferson claims, that attempts to forcefully convert or coerce any person into believing or supporting a particular religious faith controverts the implicit will of God.     

To this first argument, Jefferson couples an affirmation of the inability of man to sit in judgement of the religious beliefs of others as a consequence of his intrinsic weakness. Men, he claims, are “fallible and uninspired,” and manifestly incapable of accurately or objectively evaluating, for the benefit of others, the suitability of religious faiths that are foreign to their experience. More often than not, a man who finds himself tasked with weighing the rightness of this or that set of beliefs in the public sphere will simply take his own as the baseline, and “approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own.” Because this would further contravene the God-granted free will of those whose faith is being judged, and create a nation of followers rather than believers, it is, in Jefferson’s view, wholly unacceptable.

Furthermore, and in a somewhat veiled criticism of the traditions of the Anglican Establishment, Jefferson argues that, in addition to people suffering under the yoke of religious regimes, religion itself suffers too. A great believer in the Enlightenment concept of natural rights, he claims in his 1779 Statute that every person has the fundamental right to form their own religious opinion, and to not have that opinion, unless it’s proven to be an extraordinarily destructive one, held against them in the eyes of the law or used to discriminate against them in any way. Successful attempts at disenfranchising or otherwise persecuting those deemed religious outsiders, nonconformists, or dissenters had become common a features of both the British and colonial administrations, particularly in the 17th century, as each sought to create a stable social order defined by a set of agreed upon elite values. This previously mentioned Anglican Establishment had solidified in Britain in the 1660s and 1670, and managed to sideline any number of Catholics, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, as well as a host of more radical faiths, like the Quakers, Shakers, Diggers and Adamites. This persistent persecution was, in fact, the central motivation behind much of the British emigration to North America, and influenced the formation of colonial governments that formally promoted religious liberty (such as in Pennsylvania or Rhode Island), and those that sought to perpetuate religious exclusion on their own terms (as with the Puritans of Massachusetts and Connecticut).

Jefferson also asserted that religion itself, in its purest moral sense, suffers greatly by its association with the use of coercion, and by “bribing with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess and conform to it.” In Britain and in many of the colonies, the Church of England was closely intertwined with the political status quo. By the 1670s, only communion-taking Anglicans could sit in the House of Commons or accept positions in the military hierarchy, bishops continued to sit in the House of Lords, and the Supreme Head of the Church of England was the reigning British monarch. Much of this carried over to Virginia, where political office was denied to non-Anglicans, and priests were paid and housed at government expense. In Jefferson’s view, this confluence of spiritual authority and political and economic power ultimately corrupts the virtues that religion (and by that he no doubt means Christianity) is meant to encourage, like charity, humility, and honesty. As well, by rewarding outward professions of faith with greater social and economic influence without being able to truly measure a person’s sincerity, religious establishments served only to fill their congregations with shallow, ambitious wealth-seekers who have no compunctions about mouthing the words of one faith while holding another in their hearts. This too, Jefferson sought to avoid.

The idea of a religious establishment also ran contrary to what Jefferson believed was the nature of truth itself. At the end of his initial preamble, he concludes that, “truth is great and will prevail if left to herself,” has nothing to fear from conflict or disagreement, and will always triumph if free argument and reasoned debate are permitted. This is another notion derived from the Enlightenment; that though there was such a thing as truth it belonged to no one sect or faith. The purpose of life, then, was to seek out this truth, test it against reason, and distill and render it down to something pure and universal; remembering always that truth aided by force or coercion is only an illusion. In Jefferson’s opinion, the Anglican Establishment was inherently flawed because it required the apparatus of the state to prop it up, silence its critics and spread its doctrine. If the Church feared debate, he believed that it was only because it knew that its own principles would not stand up to scrutiny. For the author of the Declaration of Independence, this was manifestly unjust and illogical and needed to be done away with.

This was, among other things, the purpose of the Virginia Statute. By making religion solely a matter of conscience it freed government from committing egregious sins against the will of God, freed religion from the temptation of material wealth and advantage, took account of the fallibility of mankind, and made the laws Virginia better reflect those of nature and of truth. Rather than try to describe or paraphrase the core of the Statute, the second section which actually defines what is and is not to be permitted, I’ll simply excerpt the entire paragraph. It reads, in a very straightforward and concise manner:

“Be it enacted by the General Assembly, That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support an religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

Of particular importance is the fact that Jefferson makes no mention of the Protestant, or even Christian faith. Though there were a comparatively small number of Jewish people living in the Unites States at the end of the 18th century, and far fewer of any other religions, he believed that freedom of conscience must be absolute if it’s to mean anything at all. In addition to being a far cry from the established traditions of Britain and its colonies, the Statute went further even than most attempts by said colonies to promote religious liberty in years prior.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Part I: Context

After Thomas Jefferson passed away on July 4th, 1826, it was discovered that he had written his epitaph in advance. Accordingly his tombstone, when it was finally erected, bore only the simple inscription: Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and father of the University of Virginia. That he felt no need to mention his time in Congress, as an ambassador, as Secretary of State, Vice-President or President is telling of Jefferson’s opinion of the outcome of the American Revolution, the state of the American government in the 1820s, and his own professional legacy. Even more telling, however, are the three items he saw fit to commemorate, and in particular the second. Though at times stretched to the breaking point, the separation of church and state is one of the defining aspects of American political culture, and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom (or Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, hereafter to be referred as just the Statute) is perhaps its finest articulation. Comparatively little known, it was originally drafted in 1777, introduced into the Virginia General Assembly in 1779, and became law in 1786. It’s also quite brief, with three sections covering a little over 730 words, yet it confronts one of the most controversial issues in human history, contravenes centuries of established relations between church and government, and handily encapsulates some of Jefferson’s views on mankind, the nature of free will, and the power of truth. It is, in many ways, a surprising document for how much it is able to cover in such a short span of words. And, as with any other I’ve covered in these posts, it is best appreciated in its proper context.

In the 1770s, on the eve of the Revolution, most of the colonies possessed what are referred to as established churches. These organizations received funding from the colonial governments, administered institutes of higher learning, and were generally sanctioned and endorsed by the political status quo. Citizens who were not congregants of one of these churches were usually excluded from political participation, often prohibited from owning property, and frequently harassed by members of the dominant social order. Connecticut and Massachusetts were both bastions of the Puritan faith, whose members had actually fled persecution by the established Anglican Church in England, while New York, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were officially provinces of the Church of England. Maryland had initially been organized as a safe haven for English Catholics before being re-chartered as an Anglican colony in 1689, and Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and New Jersey either prohibited any established church or made no mention of them in their charters. These latter four where exceptional in their promotion of religious liberty and had arrived at that position via a set of exceptional circumstances (which I won’t go into here). The promotion of an established sect and persecution of dissenters was far more common in British North America, and was one of the many cultural and political legacies of Britain itself.

The Church of England was founded in 1534 by Henry VIII, and for most of its history has been closely intertwined with the British state. As the formal head if the church, the British monarch has long held sway over the essential character of the clerical hierarchy, and different factions supporting different sets of practices have risen or fallen based on the backing they enjoyed from the sitting king or queen. Generally speaking, whichever form of Protestant worship was favored by the Crown was sanctioned and supported by the state, leaving all others to be either sidelined or persecuted. In the 1640s and 1650s, during the English Civil War and the formation of the English Commonwealth, the Church was radically reformed by the formally persecuted and now victorious Puritans. This reformation lasted until the restoration of Charles II in 1660, who reverted the Church to its traditional form. In the years that followed, a series of laws were passed by parliament in an attempt to finally and formally entrench the Church of England, establish a set of basic practices, and disenfranchise all “nonconformists” so as to ensure that they could no longer be a force in British politics.

These included the Corporation Act (1661) which made it necessary for all municipal officials to take Anglican communion, the Uniformity Act (1662) which made the Book of Common Prayer (the standard Anglican liturgical handbook) compulsory, the Conventicle Act (1664) which prohibited unauthorized worship by meetings of more than five people, the Five Mile Act (1665) which forbade nonconformist preachers from coming within five miles or incorporated towns or from teaching in schools, and the Test Acts (1673,1678) which declared that all persons (including members of both houses of Parliament) filling any military or civil office were required to take an oath of supremacy and allegiance to the monarch as the Supreme Head of the Church of England, and state a formal rejection of certain key aspects of the Catholic liturgy (transubstantiation in particular). So impenetrable were these acts and the Protestant stronghold they created that when Charles II’s Catholic younger brother and heir, James, Duke of York ascended the throne in 1685 and attempted to promote religious liberty for Catholics and nonconformists, he was deposed within three years by his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William. 17th-century Britain was a decidedly Protestant land, and its political establishment increasingly of one mind as to how their faith was to be practiced, and how their fellow congregants were to maintain their hold on the reins of power.

It was ironically also during this era, while the Anglican Establishment was being erected in Britain, that the philosophical Enlightenment was flourishing in intellectual circles across Europe, and concepts like rationalism, empiricism, and religious liberty were being openly discussed. Religious liberty in particular became a favored topic of Enlightenment scholars and reformers who feared a return to the religious wars of the past (in particular the recent Thirty Years War that had devastated Central Europe between 1618 and 1648, to the cost of eight million lives) and saw the end of established religion and the simplification of complex religious doctrines as the surest way of avoiding future conflict. Among the ideas that were put forward, some promoted a formal separation of politics from religion and law, advocating instead that each person subscribe to whichever belief they found most convincing. Others advanced the theory of Deism, wherein God created the Universe and the physical laws by which it operates (gravity, friction, momentum, radiation, etc…), and gave man a mind capable of seeking out and discovering these things for himself without any need for divine intervention. Though there was something of a divide between those that viewed religion as absolutely necessary to the preservation of the existing social order, and those that saw religion as deeply personal, and concerning only the relationship between the individual and their creator, there seemed to be a loose consensus that religion functioned best without the use of force or coercion, when allowed to stand solely on the strength of its fundamental moral quality.     
  
Interestingly enough, Thomas Jefferson sat at the confluence of these two competing religious traditions. On the one hand he was raised in late 18th-century colonial Virginia, and like most men of his social standing was brought up in the established Anglican faith. On the other he was a man of the Enlightenment, and a devotee of European (and particularly French) philosophy and culture. He was well-versed in the arguments of both sides, witnessed the operation of the Anglican Establishment in Virginia firsthand, and showed a particular concern for what he perceived as the corruption of Christianity’s superior moral principles by its continued association with government. His 1779 Statute, introduced during the first year of his tenure as Governor of Virginia, sought to address this concern, and its successful passage in 1786 remained for him one of the great triumphs of his lengthy public career.     

Friday, July 4, 2014

Thoughts on Government, Part IV: Recommendations, contd.

While it’s clear enough that Thoughts on Government played a significant role in shaping many of the original thirteen states first constitutions, it’s also worth considering whether it played a similar role in shaping the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution, the two charters that have historically governed the US of A. Or if it’s impossible to determine whether Adams’ 1776 treatise really did shape those documents (and I suppose it is), it’s still worth comparing the three in an effort to reveal how the different strains of American political thought shifted and evolved between Adams’ early musings, the first attempt at US constitution-making in 1777, and the events of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.

Though I already discussed some of the weaknesses of the United States government under the Articles in a previous post, I’d like to take a moment to outline how and when they were written, and what it is they actually say.

At the same time in 1776 that a committee was formed within the Second Continental Congress to draft a formal declaration of independence (the celebrated Committee of Five), a second group of thirteen delegates was authorized to begin the process of drafted a formal constitution for the union of the various states. It was felt that such a charter was necessary in order to better facilitate the war effort, centralize trade and diplomacy, and present a unified front to the various European powers that the states were either at war with or courting the support of (either military or financial). The committee, led by Pennsylvania John Dickinson, managed to turn out a first draft after about a month, which was then debated at length and amended numerous times before finally being approved by Congress in November, 1777. The ratification process which followed took significantly longer, in no small part thanks to the refusal of certain states to abandon their land claims west of the Appalachians to the new federal government. Maryland was the last state to approve the Articles, in February, 1781, and did so only after Virginia and New York consented to give up their claims in the Ohio valley. Because they required the ratification of all thirteen states to come into force it was only then, over three years after they were completed, that government under the Articles of Confederation officially began.

To Americans familiar with the highly-structured government outlined by the United States Constitution, or even to someone who had read Adams’ Thoughts on Government, the Articles would no doubt seem rather sparse and anemic. Unlike the three-part government favored by Adams and the Framers of the Constitution, the authors of the Articles favored a much simpler arrangement. Lacking an executive branch or a federal judiciary, power was concentrated in the unicameral Congress, which could form its own administrative committees and elect its own president. Each state legislature was responsible for sending between two and six delegates to sit in said Congress, and each state represented therein was granted a single vote in all proceedings. Domestic authority was left almost entirely in the hands of the states themselves, while the United States government was given sole authority to determine peace and war, send and receive ambassadors, enter into treaties and alliances, grant letters of marque (in order to authorize privateers), appoint courts for the trial of crimes committed on the high seas (mainly piracy) set standard weights and measures, and serve as a final court for disputes between the various states. Individual states were prohibited from raising standing armies but were required to maintain trained militias and provide the necessary weapons and supplies, and Congress was empowered to requisition whatever funds it required from the various states legislatures (who regularly refused to comply).

Where Thoughts on Government seems to incline more towards the classical republican ideal of balanced government, the Articles are intent on providing as little government as possible. This is not, I think, because the authors of the Articles were consciously ignoring or rejecting Adams’ recommendations and the character of the various states constitutions that followed. Rather, it was because the state governments were so (relatively) strong, so structured, that a weak, outward-facing federal government was preferred. After all, the American Revolution was in many ways a conflict between central and delegated authority, between strict constructionism and assumed power. The colonies, and later states, had over the course of their existence become very jealous of the authority that tradition and law had set aside for them. Whether the body that claimed authority over them was a distant British Parliament or a near American Congress, the states were loath to give up the powers they had reserved as their own. Congressional delegates in 1777 were acutely aware of this, and structured the Articles accordingly.

None of this is to say that the state constitutions were without flaws. Many of them created governors that were beholden to legislatures, or legislatures that were volatile and easily influenced by popular, but ultimately destructive, sentiments. But, having emerged from the British tradition of an un-written constitution, the framers of the various state charters were treading new ground in attempting to draft plans of government that were not based in inherited tradition or legal precedent, but in commonly-held ideals of logic, reason, and justice. Thus it stands to reason that Americans’ first foray into constitutional government would prove to be a rocky one at the outset.

Bearing that in mind it’s interesting to contrast Thoughts on Government, as an example of early American ideas about government, with the United States Constitution. Drafted after several dysfunctional years under the Articles of Confederation, the structure of the Constitution aligns much more closely with Adams’ ideal 1776 arrangement, and consequently with the structure that had been adopted by most of the states themselves. As Adams suggested, it arranges the federal government into three distinct and independent branches: a bicameral legislature, one-man executive, and a judiciary. The lower house of the legislature was to be elected by qualified voters (who possessed the requisite amount of property) according to the districts in which they lived, while delegates to the upper house were to be selected by the various state legislatures (popular elections of Senators came only in 1913). Members of the federal judiciary were to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the legislature, and were to serve for life during good behavior. The president, unlike the governor in Adam’s outline, was popularly elected and chose his own cabinet (with the advice and consent of the upper house). Like Adams’ governor, however, the president was to serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, possess a veto, and reserve the ability to grant pardons. Though the notion of annual elections was abandoned by the Framers in 1787, term limits were enforced: six years for members of the upper house, two for members of the lower, and four for the president.

As with the individual state constitutions, and as Adams himself suggested, some changes were made to the overall formula that was put forward in 1776 in an attempt to create a government that more fully served the needs of the people. The notion of a popularly elected president no doubt spun out of the problems experienced in many states in the 1770s and 1780s. Taking into consideration the difficulties under the Congress of the Confederation (as the federal legislature was known between 1781 and 1788) wherein a complete lack of independent executive authority made rapid decision making exceedingly difficult, as well as the weakness of many of the state governors (who were elected by, and beholden to, the legislature), the Framers decided on a presidency that would have its own mandate, and that could respond to sudden crisis (such as the rebellion that broke out in Massachusetts in 1786) quickly and effectively. Similarly, because the proposed bicameral federal legislature would need to balance the interests of the people (via their representatives) and the states, it would not have seemed altogether proper for the lower house to elect the members of the upper house. Accordingly, the state legislatures were made responsible for electing senators since they were felt to best represent the states as individual political entities. 

I’ll admit that I’m simplifying the narrative of the Constitution somewhat; every one of the issues I’ve described were tirelessly debated by the assembled delegates, and any number of plans were proposed, amended and scrapped before the final draft was agreed upon. That being said, I hope it’s become clear enough how fluid American political thoughts was in this era, and how, over the course of the early decades of the American Republic, theory and experience collided in order to produce better, more stable, and more flexible forms of government than had even been conceived before. The finished Constitution deviated from Adams’ 1776 proposal in any number of ways, but in spirit it adhered to the values that he most cherished: balance, accountability, and utility. It’s also worth noting that Adams was suggesting a balanced, three-part government in 1776, fully a decade before it would be adopted on the federal level. That it took several troubled years under the Articles of Confederation for most Americans to come around to the idea that their national government should more closely resemble their state governments is telling of how new and strange a project they were collectively engaged it.

But, as always, I implore you to see for yourself: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Government