Federalist No. 51, Part III: Government, Human Nature, and Conflict

Part of what seemed to motivate the framers of many of the state constitution drafted in the United States in the late 1770s was a desire to create governments that functioned with a minimum of internal conflict. The disputes between colonial legislatures, royal governors, and the British monarch that had plagued the 1760s and 1770s were seen as pitfalls to avoid, and the most common solution seems to have been the creation of state governments that vested the greatest share of power in the legislature branch. Governors, where they existed, were weak, hamstrung by term limits, and often saddled with councils appointed by the legislature. Under these circumstances, state assemblies were free to operate largely unchecked. A simple majority faced hardly any impediments, and frequent elections ensured that populist issues were almost always on the agenda. As a result, many state governments in the 1770s and 1780s chose to pursue measures that would ensure their re-election, like forgiving debts incurred during the Revolution – in violation of the rights of debt-holders – or printing massive quantities of paper currency – in spite of the inflation that inevitably followed. Because there was no authority then in existence that could have contained or restricted the ability of the various states to pursue such potentially damaging policies – least of all the states themselves – the American economy in the post-independence era suffered.

This, certain statesmen who had served or were serving in the weak national Congress or one of the state governments concluded, would not do. Americans had fought too hard and paid too dear a price to see their nation succumb so quickly to the weaknesses of a few poorly designed state constitutions. The solution this group settled upon – a gathering which included such luminaries as Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison – was the creation of a stronger national government capable of restraining the power of the states. This new federal government would be effective, capable of compelling the states to obedience, and responsible for impressing the diplomatic will of the United States of American upon the world stage. Formidable would hardly seem to capture the essence of the thing. Yet, for all of its necessary power and energy, this same government would need to be constrained in the same way it was intended to constrain the states. The safety of Americans’ hard-fought rights demanded a government that could never threaten what they had shed blood for. Safeguards needed to be put in place. A balance needed to be struck. Trusting the legislature to act in good faith, as many states constitutions had done, represented far too great a risk. As the events of the 1770s and 1780s had shown, state assemblies were just as capable of abusing their power as chief executives. Harmony in government was not the answer. Rather, as Madison himself explained in Federalist No. 51, conflict was the key.

Human nature, Madison explained, ensured that conflict between different parties with different interests was inevitable. Any government that tried to circumvent or ignore this fact – that demanded of its officers they ignore their instincts – was thus doomed to failure. Indeed, he reasoned in the fifth paragraph of his pro-constitutional essay, human society was itself the product of clashing private ambitions. Though each member of the human race may reasonably be expected to seek out solely what benefits them, each also tacitly acknowledges that the best way to achieve their personal goals is to ensure that no one – themselves included –  is capable of overpowering or violating the rights of anyone else. Thus, Madison explained, “The private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.” This being the case, it seemed to him exceptionally prudent that government should take on a similar aspect in its distribution of power. Rather than fashion a national government, as many of the states had done, in which power and trust were deposited almost entirely within the legislative branch – composed, as it was, of human beings as prone to conflict and ambition as any of their species – Madison argued for a framework wherein legislative power was countered by executive power was countered by judicial power. Each would serve, by simply allowing their officers to pursue the ambitions that came naturally, to contain the others, with a sense of equilibrium mirroring that found in human society being the end result. “It may be a reflection of human nature,” he admitted in the fourth paragraph of No. 51, “That such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of Government. But what is Government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”

This represented, for 1787, an exceptionally novel approach. As discussed in a previous entry in this series, ambition was not considered by many American in the late 18^th century to be a human characteristic particularly compatible with public service. The classical education that many of the contemporary elite shared – lessons from the pen of Tacitus, Cicero, Plato, and Thucydides and from the histories of the Roman Republic and ancient Athens – along with their common vocabulary of 17^th and 18^th century English Whig reformist rhetoric formed a strong association between republicanism, individual virtue, and self-sacrifice. People or parties who were considered partisan or “interested” were deemed ill-suited to shepherd the public trust, and those seen to be selfless, objective, or “disinterested” were held in particular esteem. Madison’s assertion in Federalist No. 51 that, “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place [,]” appeared to turn this cultural consensus on its head. Rather than seek out individuals for public service capable of entirely suppressing their avaricious instincts, it claimed, government ought to channel the ambitions of its officers in such a way that produced balance and stability. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison famously wrote. Humans would always be humans; they would grasp, and claw, and suspect their neighbors, and guard what was theirs. If that was the case, it seemed logical that government should embrace these baser instincts, and by its structure make them useful.

The manner by which this could be accomplished was relatively simple, Madison explained. “The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,” he wrote in the fourth paragraph of No. 51, “Consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachment of the others.” It may not have been possible to trust the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of the proposed federal government to carry out their prescribed duties without ever overstepping their respective authority, but each could be at least be trusted to keep the other two in “their proper place.” If the President of the United States was made commander-in-chief of the armed forces while Congress held sole authority to declare war, the legitimate exercise of military power could only result from a consensus of opinion between these two differently-composed and differently-motivated parties. By the same token, a Congress checked in its ability to make law by a Presidential veto would be incapable of passing sentence on any practice without the tacit consent of the executive branch. This was to be countered by the ability of Congress to lay charges of impeachment against any President they deemed as having committed “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” In being a fair guess that Presidents, Congressmen, or Senators would seek to gain advantage over one another regardless of whether or not these mechanisms were in place, creating safe avenues for individual ambition that in turn reinforced the stability of the government as a whole represented a particularly prudent course of action.  

  The ability of the proposed federal constitution to tolerate and channel ambition and conflict applied not just to the relationship of its internal departments, but also extended to its prospective relationship with the various states. Conflict between the states and Congress as it existed under the Articles of Confederation had been a mainstay of the years that followed the end of the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), and it no doubt seemed inevitable to many observers that a similar state of tension was bound to persist in the event that the federal government was reformed or replaced. If, however, the government that the Philadelphia Convention delegates had designed was to be as powerful in practice as it seemed on paper, it appeared unlikely that the states would be able to resist or ignore federal authority as successfully as they had grown accustomed to. This reversal of the status quo on which they had come dependent – a weak federal government unable to restrain the states – doubtless alarmed many of the Americans who were asked to evaluate the proposed constitution during the ratification process that unfolded across the winter of 1787 and spring of 1788. It did not, however, seem to alarm James Madison.

Though he agreed in the ninth paragraph of Federalist No. 51 that conflict between the state and federal governments was almost certainly inevitable, Madison did not perceive discord of this type as cause for concern. Indeed, he explained, the proposed constitution had been designed to accommodate some degree of tension, and the American people were to be made safer for it. Whereas many critics of the proposed constitution argued that the government it would create was distinctly “consolidated” – less like, say, Switzerland, which is highly decentralized, and more like, say, the United Kingdom, which is highly centralized – Madison declared to the contrary that the federal government he and his fellow delegates had devised could best be described as a kind of “compound republic.” Within such a scheme, he elaborated in paragraph nine of No. 51,

The power surrendered by the People is first divided between two distinct Governments, and then the portion allotted to each, subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the People. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself.

Having served a number of terms in the legislature of his home state, Madison had hardly been alone among his colleagues at the Philadelphia Convention. The men who were directly responsible for the tone and structure of the federal constitution laid before the American people in the fall of 1787 understood full well that conflict between the state governments and whatever federal government happened to exist was unavoidable. The states had grown accustomed to circumventing the dictates of Congress as it existed under the Articles of Confederation, and any attempt to empower the national government was bound to meet with resistance.

For this reason, Madison explained, the framers of the proposed constitution had determined to factor state/federal conflict into the basic governing formula. Rather than try to harmonize the actions of the states and the national government – as much a losing proposition as trying to harmonize the actions of the various branches of any individual government – the proposed constitution was designed in such a way as to depend on and take advantage of the friction that would result from state governments resisting federal authority. This made good practical sense, in that it turned something that could easily have become an obstruction into a marked advantage at the same time that it made the resulting federal power structure safer in practice. This, it must be said, represented nothing short of a stroke of genius. To many of the proposed constitution’s detractors, the prospect of conflict between an empowered national government and the various state governments was doubtless understood as both a negative outcome – such conflicts leading to inefficiency and the potential for violence – and an implicit threat – a kind of punishment for adopting a constitution against the objections of certain parties. The response of Madison and his cohorts, as No. 51 indicates, was to essentially agree with the critical premise that conflict between the state and federal governments probably was inevitable under the proposed constitution while countering that such conflict was actually a good thing. The state governments should quarrel with the national government, he reasoned, because their disagreements would aide in keeping each of them in check. By simply choosing to look at the situation from a different perspective rather than attempt to alter what he knew to be unalterable, Madison effectively turned vice into virtue and lent the new federal government he was so keen to promote an exceedingly flexible rationale under which to function.

The 21^st century implications of Madison’s admission in Federalist No. 51 to the inevitability of conflict and the potential value of ambition in government are several. For one thing, it ought to be cause for reflection that one of the primary architects of the United States Constitution was of the opinion that tension between different branches, and different levels, of government was both unavoidable and potentially beneficial. Madison understood, from experience and study alike, that legislators, government ministers, and jurists would seek to expand and guard the jurisdiction of their respective offices. Being human it was in their nature to do so, and expecting them to rise above their impulses was simply not practical. The United States government, therefore, was designed to account for and channel the ambitions of its officers in such a way that ensured no one party was able to gain an advantage over the others while keeping the rights of the people safe from encroachment. If, therefore, the President occasionally stymied the acts of Congress, that was how it was supposed to work. If, in other instances, the federal courts frustrated the efforts of the President, that was how it was supposed to work. Modern expectations of harmonious cooperation between these different branches may consequently be somewhat misplaced. The House of Representatives, the Senate, the President, and the Supreme Court each have different responsibilities, different functions to perform, and different constituencies. Disagreements between them are accordingly to be expected, and even welcomed on the occasion when one attempts to intrude upon the prerogatives of another. The same can rightfully be said, as Madison pointed out, of relations between the federal government and the state governments. So long as each party in a given dispute holds to the powers and responsibilities allowed them by the Constitution, he argued, the people of the United States are the ultimate beneficiaries.

This admission to the utility of conflict should not be taken to mean, however, that Madison believed either the various branches of the United States government or the state and federal governments should seek to destroy one another. Disputes between the Senate and the President, or between the Supreme Court and the government of, say, Colorado, may indeed serve an important purpose, but only if the parties involved adhere to the mechanisms laid out in the Constitution. Federalist No. 51 made this clear in its aforementioned fourth paragraph. “Security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department,” it read, “Consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means” (emphasis added). The federal charter by which the United States government is formed was designed, Madison explained, in order to give vent to the natural ambitions of its various agents. The President can veto acts of Congress, Congress can impeach and remove the President, and the Supreme Court can invalidate the actions of both. It was not designed to tolerate any of these branches attempting to circumvent the mechanisms at their disposal, trying to disempower any other branch by non-Constitutional means, or permitting their individual grievances or ambitions to threaten the sovereign rights of the American people. As Madison saw it, the various branches of the United States government and the federal and state governments are entirely permitted to have at each other once in a while. But they are also required to be conscious of the limits within which their disagreements can take place without endangering the health of the nation.