Cato V, Part V: The Influence of Corruption

As George Clinton saw it – and as he, as Cato, explained it – the representation allocated by the proposed constitution to the state of New York in the lower house of Congress was simply too small. By the terms of said document, submitted to the people of the state of New York for their ratification or rejection in the fall of 1787, they were to be collectively represented in the House of Representatives by a bare six people elected via districts for two years each. Bearing in mind that this same population was then being spoken for in the New York State Legislature by twenty-four senators and sixty-five delegates, their ratification of this arrangement would have necessarily entailed a tacit agreement to forgo the same quality of representation in Congress which they enjoyed at home. There were a number of reasons why this should have been the case, several of which will be discussed at length as this present series progresses. Yet none of them seemed to satisfy Clinton, or did much to allay his sense of suspicion. No, six was too few for his liking, and the reason behind such a paltry representation too obvious not to raise his concern. As he explained in the seventh paragraph of Cato V, “It is a very important objection to this government, that the representation consists of so few; too few to resist the influence of corruption, and the temptation to treachery, against which all governments ought to take precautions [.]” To Clinton’s thinking, it seemed, the reformed Congress described by the proposed constitution would not contain enough Representatives to successfully resist the threat of corruption. Whether or not he believed this to be part and parcel of the Framer’s intentions – he did not say so explicitly, though his political sympathies tended that way – it nevertheless followed he would have preferred to see the ratio of Representatives to constituents substantially altered. Specifically, and in the name of subverting possible attempts by nefarious forces to take control of Congress by way of bribery or intimidation, he thought it necessary that there be more Representatives per person than the text of the proposed constitution had explicitly allowed. 

As to the rationale behind the clause of the proposed constitution which declared that, “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand,” efficacy was doubtless the single quality which the Framers were most eager to promote. Whereas Congress under the terms of the Articles of Confederation had often been sluggish and ineffectual, Congress under the terms of the proposed constitution was designed to operate in a brisk and decisive fashion, trading consensus and transparency for speed and efficiency. Replicating the degree of representation then practiced in the various state legislatures in Congress would accordingly have been somewhat self-defeating. Taking New York’s aforementioned sixty-five delegates as an average –acknowledging that certain other states possessed much smaller local legislative contingents – and multiplying that by the total number of states (13), the resulting reformed Congress would seemingly have contained something on the order of eight hundred elected representatives. Recalling that not even the House of Commons contained more than six hundred MPs as of the late 1780s – and that in the late 2010s it has yet to exceed six hundred and fifty – this would have constituted one of the largest democratic legislatures in human history. Adding to this already daunting figure the various complications that would have faced any attempt to create a national government in the United States in the late 18^th century – from deficiencies in transportation and communications infrastructure to the highly seasonal labor demands of what was still principally an agricultural society – and it would seem little wonder that the Framers opted for a ratio of representation in Congress that was somewhat less finely grained.

Granting, then, that exactly mirroring the collective compositions of the state legislatures in Congress would have been practically undesirable within the context of the late 1780s, Clinton’s critique of what he perceived to be the paltry representation described by the proposed constitution nevertheless bears some thought. If the deficiencies inherent in contemporary communications and transportation technologies had not been a factor, would the Framers have agreed with Clinton that more Representatives per person were preferable to fewer? And for that matter, was Clinton right in his assessment that the more delegates that sat in a legislature the more resistant that legislature would become to corruption? As representative democracy has become an increasingly common form of government in countries across the globe since the publication of Cato V in November, 1787, and as legislative corruption continues to present an urgent threat to this same positive trend, these kinds of questions would seem to possess an enduring relevance. Yet still, if texts like Cato V are going to be looked to for answers, one must be very careful not to impute more knowledge to their authors than they could possibly have possessed. Clinton’s evident contention that larger legislative assemblies are more resistant to corruption than small ones was, and is, entirely reasonable in and of itself. But before adopting this position as one’s own and proceeding to apply it to the context of the political present, it would seem only prudent to ask by what manner could Clinton have come to this conclusion and what wasn’t he aware of that might have otherwise colored his opinion? George Clinton, like many of the Founders, may yet be a source of tremendous insight and wisdom notwithstanding how foreign many of his basic assumptions and experiences would have been to our own. But he, and they, must be met, not as divine sages whose words entirely transcend the era in which they were written, but as people who lived and worked within the context of a particular moment in time and whose insights were accordingly limited by what it was possible for them to see and to imagine.

Let us consider, to that end, how it was George Clinton ultimately came to believe, within the context of a legislative assembly, that a larger representation presented a better guarantee against corruption than a smaller one. His home state of New York doubtless provided some manner of example. As mentioned previously, the lower house of the State Assembly was comprised of some sixty-five delegates as of the late 1780s. And though at that time this number was still very much dominated by the hereditary landed interests against which Clinton as Governor regularly found himself arrayed, they were not known for being particularly corrupt. Indeed, it was not until the mid-to-late 19^th century that the New York Assembly and the New York Senate would accrue a collective reputation for endemic influence trading, bribery, and embezzlement. This isn’t to say, of course, that political corruption didn’t exist in the United States prior to the emergence of railroad trusts and robber barons. Looking beyond just New York to the American republic as a whole, land speculation was an exceedingly common practice among a certain class of contemporary Americans throughout the latter half of the 18^th century.

As it happened, of course, many of these speculators had either close connections with state and national government or were themselves officers of the same. No less than George Washington (1732-1799), James Madison (1751-1836), James Monroe (1758-1831), Patrick Henry (1736-1799), and Clinton’s own father Charles (1690-1773) were all involved at one time or another in exactly this kind of scheme, often as not though organizations like the Ohio Company of Associates (est.1786) or the Scioto Company (est. 1789). Such join-stock ventures attempted to leverage the ongoing desperation of the national government under the Articles for some source of revenue in order to secure the purchase of massive tracts of federally-owned land in the West which it could then resell to homesteaders at a profit. Though the fact that many of the primary investors in such projects were either sitting or former members of Congress evidently did not strike the relevant authorities as cause for much concern, it would nonetheless be difficult to imagine that everyone involved remained at all times unaware of how certain benefits were being accrued and to whom those benefits ultimately flowed. The directors of the Ohio Company – or private speculators like Washington, Henry, or Madison – did not attempt to promote the settlement of the this or that region of the United States out of some patriotic desire to see the country fulfill its destiny as a robust and self-sufficient “Empire of Liberty.” Rather, they sought to exploit shifting migration patterns, ongoing demographic changes, and government malaise in order to turn a personal profit. Perhaps this was not considered to be improper because the speculators were the ones paying the government rather than the other way around. The same could not be said of certain other species of speculation.

Consider, to that end, the career of Robert Morris (1734-1806). English-born and Pennsylvania-raised, Morris had become exceptionally wealthy as a merchant operating out of Philadelphia over the course of the 1750s and 1760s. In the 1770s, when his reluctance to support radical action against an increasingly heavy-handed British administration in North America was finally overcome by Britain’s evident willingness to resort to force of arms, he thereafter became one of the primary directors of finance and supply for the Continental Congress. While in this role one of his primary accomplishments was the consistent procurement of arms and ammunition for the Continental Army via a robust network of smugglers – an achievement for which he is rightly lauded – Morris also made use of his newfound responsibilities to achieve a number of personal victories which only the ongoing war effort could have made possible. As a member – and later as chairman – of the secretive Committee of Trade, for example, he enjoyed virtually unsupervised authority over the awarding of supply contracts on behalf of the Continental Army and the Continental Navy. That he and many of his fellow committee members were also prominent merchants naturally complicated this arrangement. Absent any formal oversight – there being neither an executive branch nor anything like an inspector general to contend with – what reason did Morris and his associates have not to award contracts to themselves? It would have been expedient to do so, of course, and the ongoing war was certainly a reasonable cause for expediency. But it also would have entailed a cabal of businessmen using the authority granted them by their respective state governments and by Congress to funnel public funds into their own pockets. Transparent, such practices were certainly not.

And then there was the Bank of North America, essentially the first national bank ever chartered in the United States. Its purpose, as with its successor the 1^st Bank of the United States, was to provide the government with a mechanism by which it could take out loans and consolidate a line of credit without needing to reach out directly to private individuals or foreign governments. And while the need for such an institution was first made explicit by Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), it was Robert Morris who proposed the idea to Congress and ultimately secured the approval of a charter. At this point, in late December of 1781, Morris had been serving as Congress’s Superintendent of Finance for the better part of a year, an office he would continue to occupy until 1784. In spite of his concomitant role in directing the economic policy of the government of the United States, however, Morris himself ended up purchasing over sixty percent of the Bank of North America’s shares when they subsequently went on sale at $400 apiece. The money that the United States was thereafter in a position to borrow was thus largely Morris’s, to whom the majority of the accrued interest would likewise be paid. Combined with the aforementioned fact of Morris having helped design and charter the institution itself, it would seem rather difficult in hindsight not view the Bank of North America as little more than a mechanism by which an already very wealthy man attempted to become wealthier.

Granted, one might also fairly characterize Robert Morris’s purchase of the majority share of the selfsame bank issue as a selfless attempt on his part to personally absorb the financial risk which his government had no choice but to undertake. Not knowing whether Congress would ever manage to pay back what it borrowed, he nevertheless placed his own fortune at the disposal of his countrymen so that they, too, might prosper as he had already. The only problem with this understanding of Morris’s actions would seem to be the manner in which his resulting financial involvement with the Bank of North America would likely have affected his responsibilities as Superintendent of Finance. Notwithstanding his presumed selflessness in putting forth his fortune for public use to begin with, it would be hard to imagine that none of the decisions Morris made going forward as the principle authority in the realm of national economic policy would be at all colored by even a subconscious desire to either see a profit on his initial investment or at least recoup what he had spent. Perhaps this didn’t represent exactly the kind of influence that Clinton warned against in the text of Cato V, being internal rather than external. All the same, it speaks to the degree to which he was right to draw attention to the possibility of the American republic’s political processes becoming entangled with interests and motivations that had no relation at all to the needs of the American people at large.

No doubt Clinton was aware of all of these goings-on in some capacity or other. He knew George Washington and Robert Morris, and what they did with their money, and how they were invested. Save for the proceedings of the Board of Trade, such things were all a matter of public record. And he certainly must have been conscious of how his father had dealt in land. But there would hardly seem to be much connection between these kinds of practices – be they corrupt or merely somewhat improper – and the effects of this or that ratio of elected representation upon the moral integrity of a legislative body. The legislatures of the various states in which land, or bank stock, or securities, or pensions were issued, bought, and sold at a profit throughout the 1780s varied in size and composition to the point that no particular conclusion could seemingly be drawn. Nor did Congress appear to offer much in the way of an object lesson.  Though it was an indirectly elected body as opposed to a directly elected one, its membership tended to hover at around fifty delegates at any given time. And while this would seem to have compared favorably to the sixty-five seat lower house of New York’s state legislature, the membership of Congress had clearly shown themselves to be far from immune to the potential advantages one might derive from mixing public service and private interest.