An Address to the People of the State of New-York, on the subject of the Federal Constitution, Part V: an Imperfect Union

            Lest anyone out there in Internet Land get the idea that John Jay was wholly and unequivocally a manipulative, fearmongering demagogue, let's now shift the focus of this series towards the many and various wise, prudent, and highly cogent arguments he put forward in his 1788 Address. After all, though Jay was a human being – and thus capable of allowing his less-charitable impulses to overpower his sense of integrity – he was also exceptionally intelligent, and insightful, and, at heart, a dedicated public servant. Consequently, while he was sometimes willing to address his fellow countrymen in less-than-entirely-truthful terms, he also just as often offered them questions and arguments which constructively contributed to the ongoing political discourse of the American Founding. Some of these instances almost exclusively address the particular context of the late 18^th century – by allowing contemporary Americans to see their situation more clearly – while others arguably transcend the circumstances in which they were presented and speak to ideas or concepts that are as relevant at the dawn of the 21^st century as they were in 1788. Examples of each of these two categories of insight will be examined herein, beginning with the former.

            In attempting to convince his fellow countrymen to adopt a wholly new species of national government, Jay doubtless realized that one of the first obstacles to be addressed was how and why the existing national government under the Articles of Confederation was no longer sufficient. Indeed, when one considers how many critics of the proposed constitution made a point during the ratification debate of arguing that the contemporary national administration needed only to be reformed rather than replaced, and that the stated purpose of the Philadelphia Convention was to do just that, failing to address the deficiencies in the Articles would surely have worked against the efforts of Jay and his Federalist cohorts. Jay’s 1788 Address accordingly attempted to tackle that very issue as early as its seventh paragraph.

The great flaw in the Articles, Jay asserted, lay in the context from which it emerged. In the throes of a bloody war with Great Britain, the American people discovered a unity of purpose in the late 1770s which they had not formerly known. This unity, however, was not necessarily the product of reason and deliberation as much as it was a reaction to equal parts fear and hope. Consequently, the national administration which took shape during the war – Congress under the Articles of Confederation – was built upon a somewhat tenuous and ill-conceived foundation. Jay portrayed this flaw premise as a misconception on the part of the men who first drafted the Articles in 1777. “Accustomed to see and admire [,]” he wrote,

The glorious spirit which moved all ranks of people in the most gloomy moments of the war, observing their steadfast attachment to Union, and the wisdom they so often manifested both in choosing and confiding in their rulers, those gentlemen were led to flatter themselves that the people of America only required to know what ought to be done, to do it.

This fallacy manifested itself, Jay continued, in the weakness of the national government under the Articles as compared to the objectives it set for itself. Congress may have claimed a right to legislate for the various states, but it had no power to enforce the regulations its members approved. At “the most gloomy moments of the war,” as he put it, the power of enforcement may not have been necessary – united by shared struggles and shared loss, the American people happily obeyed Congress, their collective source of strength and solidarity – but the war could not, and did not, continue indefinitely. Without the external inducement to cooperation provided by the presence of marauding British armies, Congress under the Articles had neither reason to expect nor means to induce obedience to its dictates.  This, Jay wisely observed, was a problem.

            Men, he reminded his readers, were perfectly capable of hearing and considering well-intentioned advice, but historically they were more likely to ignore it than conform to it. Absent any punitive rationale to acquiesce to decisions made on their behalf, there consequently seemed to him little reason to expect that his fellow Americans would be any different. The aforementioned architects of the Articles, Jay accordingly surmised, “Seem not to have been sensible that mere advice is a sad substitute for laws; nor to have recollected that the advice even of the allwise and best of Beings, has been always disregarded by a great majority of all the men that ever lived.” Working amidst the heightened emotional context of the Revolutionary War, with its trials and its triumphs, this fact may not have been clear. As the post-war years had demonstrated, however, Congress under the Articles was ill-suited to corral states whose independence was secured – i.e. no longer under threat of invasion – and whose economic priorities often clashed. This was true domestically, in terms of regulating trade between the various states, as well as internationally, as it related to the foreign relations of the nascent United States of America. Indeed, as he expanded upon in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh paragraphs of his 1788 Address, the inability of Congress under the Articles to carry on a robust foreign policy seemed of particular concern to Jay, career diplomat that he was.

            “Prior to the revolution [,]” he began in paragraph nine, “we had little occasion to inquire or know much about national affairs, for although they existed and were managed, yet they were managed for us, but not by us.” Americans, he continued, had accordingly grown accustomed to focus their intentions solely on their particular domestic concerns – “our internal legislative business, our agriculture, and our buying and selling,” he explained. The governments formed by the states after independence was declared in July, 1776 were strongly indicative of this tendency, being carefully and deliberately designed to meet every domestic need and concern of their citizens. By comparison, owing to the inexperience of his fellow countrymen with international affairs, Jay found the national government under the Articles tasked with seeing to the foreign relations of the United States to be poorly formed, weak, and unequal to its responsibilities. This, too, presented a significant problem. He explained why in the tenth paragraph by running down a series of contradictions which he perceived between the duties of Congress and the powers it actually possessed. “They may make war,” he said,  

But are not empowered to raise men or money to carry it on. They may make peace, but without power to see the terms of it observed–They may form alliances, but without the ability to comply with the stipulations on their part–They may enter into treaties or commerce, but without power to enforce them at home or abroad–They may borrow money, but without the means of having repayment–They may partly regulate commerce, but without authority to execute their ordinances […]

Perhaps without meaning to, and perhaps in response to fears of replicating the centralized British model of government in America, the authors of the Articles of Confederation had created a national administration that was very good at respecting the sovereignty of the individual states and almost completely deficient at everything else. The result was what Jay perceived as an increasingly severe financial crisis, the likes of which neither the individual states nor Congress under the Articles could hope to avert.

            This crisis, Jay explained in the eleventh paragraph of his 1788 Address, was of a kind Americans had never been forced to confront until the outcome of the Revolution thrust the reins of foreign affairs into their untrained hands. Being now simultaneously responsible for and unable to assert themselves on the world stage against the priorities of more skilled and experienced nations, the United States was steadily losing ground. “Our fur trade is gone to Canada,” he thus observed,

And British garrisons keep the keys of it. Our shipyards have almost ceased to disturb the repose of the neighborhood by the noise of the axe and hammer; and while foreign flags fly triumphantly above our highest houses, the American Stars seldom do more than shed a few feeble rays about the humble masts of river sloops and coasting schooners.

Lacking a means to enforce whatever commercial agreements its agents managed to negotiate, the United States under the Articles of Confederation suffered from a lack of diplomatic respect and a paucity of commercial access. Britain, through its long-established trading companies, had monopolized the North American fur trade, while restriction on shipping to and from its colonies had atrophied American shipbuilding. France and Spain were likewise guilty of disregarding American priorities in pursuit of their own mercantilist commercial objectives. “Although we permit all nations to fill our country with their merchandise,” Jay accordingly observed,

Yet their best markets are shut against us. Is there an English, or a French, or a Spanish island or port in the West-Indies, to which an American vessel can carry a cargo of flour for sale? Not one.

Such treatment, by larger nations against a smaller one, was unjust, and far from what Americans deserved in the aftermath of their hard-fought struggle for independence.

            Jay was, for the most part, correct in his assessment of the weakness of the Articles of Confederation. Whatever the reason – ignorance of what was required, or a purposeful denial of powers deemed dangerous – Congress under its aegis lacked the ability to carry out the foreign policy objectives that comprised the majority of its remit. The American economy had suffered as a result, and would doubtless have continued suffering unless the United States adopted a far more centralized and authoritative foreign policy regime. When one also considers the global conflicts that were soon to erupt – the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1803) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) – this would seem doubly the case. French and British commercial policies during this extended series of conflicts – including boycotts, blockades, and the seizure of suspicious shipping – would prove particularly troubling for the burgeoning United States, and it is hard to imagine the nation as it existed under the Articles fielding anything like an effective response.

            That being said, Jay’s characterization of the misleading ease with which the national government functioned during the Revolutionary War is perhaps a little misleading itself. While it is true that Congress was able to provide the necessary cohesion and administrative oversight to see the American states through their struggle with Britain, in spite of setbacks, food shortages, and periods of low morale, Americans were not always prepared to happily obey every request that was made of them. As discussed in previous entries to this series, the relationship between Congress and the state governments during the war was often combative. Indeed, it was thanks in large part to the strong leadership of Continental Army Commander-in-Chief George Washington and the administrative acumen of his aide-de-camp Alexander Hamilton that supplies, munitions, and men were consistently provided. Thus, while granting to Jay that disagreements between the national government and the state government notably increased in the 1780s once the British threat had been dealt with, it nonetheless bears noting that Congress under the Articles was never quite as loved as he portrayed.