The discussion of
the previous week notwithstanding, it is worth reiterating here that the Articles
themselves did not – indeed, were not intended to – achieve the complete and
irreversible integration of the various American states into a singular
national whole. The degree to which the resulting national government deferred
to the discretion of the individual states, thereby allowing them to maintain
their particular character or impress their specific prerogatives within and
upon the national sphere, makes this especially clear. Consider, to that end,
certain of the provisions outlined in Article V and Article VII. The former,
denoting the mechanism by which the legislatures of the various states would
select delegates to represent their state in Congress, notably asserts that
said delegates, “Shall be annually appointed in such manner as the legislatures
of each State shall direct [.]” While this would seem in large part to mirror
the procedure later established by the Constitution for the election of
Senators – Article I, Section 3, superseded in 1913 by the Seventeenth
Amendment – an additional clause introduces a significant wrinkle. Whereas the
provisions of the cited Article V and of the aforesaid Article I, Section 3
were surely both constructed with the intention of ensuring that the several
state governments would have a direct voice in the national assembly of the
United States through the medium of appointing some or all of the members
therein, only Article V reserved to the states the power, “To recall its
delegates, or any of them, at any time within the year, and to send others in their
stead for the remainder of the year.” The importance of this clause – as which
so much of the text of the Articles of Confederation – lies in its symbolic
implication as much as its functional effect.
Granting that the
Articles only allowed delegates to serve in Congress for a term of one year –
and further disqualified them from serving more than three years in any term of
six –additionally permitting state legislatures to replace their
representatives at any point during that annual term would seem on the surface
to be of little practical consequence. Even in the event that a delegate was
recalled and replaced after serving for only one day in Philadelphia – in
consequence, say of a last-minute favor done by the speaker of a given state
legislature to an individual with which they hoped to gain influence – the
longest the citizens of that state would be forced to endure the effects of
such rank abuse of power was three hundred and sixty-four days. With many
states themselves operating on an annual election cycle, the likelihood of
partisan turnover and a resulting shift in the dynamics of state appointments
within that same hypothetical span of time would have been fairly high. This
mutability in the character of state governments, however, is also what makes
the cited provision of Article V so significant.
Under the terms of
Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, state legislatures were responsible
only for appointing Senators to six years terms rather than also possessing the
power to recall them at will. In consequence, regardless of the changes that
may have occurred within a state between its selection of a given individual to
serve in the Senate and the moment that their term expired – be it an election,
the collapse of a longstanding government amidst a corruption scandal, or the drafting
and ratification of a new state constitution – nothing but the death or
resignation of said individual would allow the state legislature in question to
alter the effect of its prior appointment. The resulting balance of
responsiveness and stability was most certainly by design. As hashed out by the
Framers through intense negotiation and compromise, the United States Senate
was to simultaneously serve as the most direct reflection of the states as
sovereign entities within the federal government and provide a degree of
solidity and unhurried reflection incapable of being sustained by either the
House of Representatives – whose members enjoy only two year terms – or the
Presidency – whose occupant takes comparative solace in their four years of
election-free governance. Its members therefore effectively represented –
again, under the now-defunct terms of Article I, Section 3 – a kind of snapshot
of state government as it existed at the time of their election and which may
have ceased to at any given time during their term in office. Being thus
simultaneously connected to and disconnected from state politics, Senators
could perform the double task of serving the interest of their state within the
national legislative process as well as offering a perspective substantially detached
from the often chaotic churn of electoral politics.
As cited above, the text of Article V
attempts to strike no such balance. By providing the state legislatures with a
means to alter the composition of their delegations to Congress at will
regardless of the nominally year-long term the relevant appointees were
supposed to serve, the framers of the Articles ensured that the national
assembly of the United States would represent the states both as sovereign
political entities and as partisan battlegrounds. Having chosen a group of
individuals to represent the needs of their state in Congress, for example, the
relevant government may thereafter be replaced via election by a new government
whose members understandably desire to see the delegates chosen by their
opponents replaced with their own. There being no impediment within the terms
of the Articles – and in fact every kind of inducement – to exactly this sort
of thinking and action, Congressional delegations would thus potentially be
subject to constant change and the character of the resulting national
government perpetually defined by the mutability and combativeness of
contemporary state politics. Doubtless this was the intention of Dickinson and
his committee, to allow – to the fullest degree possible – the various states
to influence and to shape the nature and direction of the United States
government. Better to allow the states to dominate Congress than permit
Congress to dominate the states, they evidently concluded, and in this there
may well have been some well-tempered wisdom.
As experience had
shown, governments that were not forced by design to consider the interests of
certain of their constituents would not do so voluntarily. Indeed, they would
more often than not take advantage of the inability of the relevant peoples to
punish government inattention by pursuing policies that directly injured them.
All that being said, it is worth make clear – if it has not been already – that
the Framers of the Constitution described the Senate the way that they did in
direct response to the rather extreme reaction of the Articles to exactly this
problem. It may indeed have been desirable in theory to create a national
government for the American republic whose composition was legally bound to the
ebb and flow of state elections and state politics, thus ensuring that said
government was functionally incapable of ignoring the issues or concerns that
most strongly animated its constituents. But as the economic and political
instability that characterized the immediate post-Revolutionary era rather
effectively demonstrated, successfully governing the United States of America
required something more than an ardent dedication to theory. Given more favorable
conditions – an abundance of hard currency, freer access to foreign markets,
and so forth – the Congress described by Article V may well have functioned as
an adequate forum for debate, cooperation, and mediation among the states as
they set to work paying off their debts and settling their borders. Conditions
in the 1780s were not favorable, however, as dire financial straits drove many
states into competition with one another and Congress essentially floundered.
That the framers
of the Articles did not foresee this possibility would seem to speak once more
to their abiding idealism. It evidently did not occur to them that an economic
crisis was looming, or that it would be accompanied by political turmoil. In
consequence, they sought to create the a national government for the United
States of America based almost entirely on the notion that interstate
cooperation was both forthcoming and would prove a sufficient foundation for
perpetual political union. The terms of Article VII provide further evidence of
this rather optimistic perspective – and of the willingness of Dickinson and
his committee to allow the states to dominate the national sphere – particularly
when juxtaposed with a specific passage of the aforementioned Article IX. The
former, speaking to the collective security aspect of the American union, declared
that,
When land
forces are raised by any State for the common defense, all officers of or under
the rank of colonel, shall be appointed by the legislature of each State
respectively, by whom such forces shall be raised, or in such manner as such
State shall direct, and all vacancies shall be filled up by the State which
first made the appointment.
In fairness, there
would seem to be a number of fairly practical reasons why a group of
Congressmen working in the late 1770s to create the first national government
in the exceedingly brief history of the United States would happen upon this
kind of provision. First and foremost, the arrangement described therein would
have served to perpetuate an existing procedure with which all concerned and
effected parties were already quite familiar. As Congress had – since 1775 – reserved
to itself the right of appointing all general officers in service with the
Continental Army, so it also left the selection of all other commissioned
officers to the legislatures of the states under whose authority the relevant
military forces had been raised. Maintaining continuity with this practice
following the adoption of the Articles – particularly in the context of an
ongoing war – was almost certainly viewed by the authors thereof as being both
eminently sensible and accordingly desirable.
Given both the relative novelty of a
distinctly “American” military apparatus, it seems quite likely that Article
VII was to some degree also intended to ensure that American soldiers would
never be asked to serve in a regiment whose commander was not from the same
state as his men. The use of the rank of colonel as the dividing line between
state and national authority appears particularly telling as to this intention.
Regiments being the primary combat unit of European-style armies in the late 18th
century, and colonel being the customary rank of a regimental commander, the
allocation of general officer appointments to Congress would seem an effective
guarantee that only regimental commanders would be forced to take orders from
men who were not residents of their own state – and even then, only in
situations wherein the use of more than one regiment was necessary. In the
event that the United States was forced to react to a major military emergency,
therefore, the vast majority of soldiers called to national service – including
the majority of officers – would be spared the potentially uncomfortable task
of obeying the orders of someone whose birth and education would still likely
have marked them out as foreign.
Though this may
seem a rather trifling concern in the context of the large, diverse, and highly-organized
national militaries of the 20th and 21st centuries, it
was most certainly not so at the end of the 18th century. Regiments,
at that time in the history of European-style warfare, were highly geographic
in nature, drawing their manpower, traditions, and their esprit de corps in
large part from the region in which they were located and after which they were
often named. To be a member, say, of the 1st Massachusetts Regiment
therefore entailed something more than simply being assigned to one unit in
particular out of any number then in service. Rather, it denoted an individual
soldier’s relationship to a particular community, to his fellow soldiers who
were also members of that community, to his commanding officers, and to the nature
of his service. The morale generated and sustained by this web of geographic
and communal ties was essential to the proper performance of a given regiment
when called upon in battle, and could be easily disrupted – particularly given
the relatively parochial temperament of the average 18th century
American – by the introduction of a figure from outside this socio-cultural
framework who nonetheless claimed authority over its members. Certainly is was
expected that a Virginia regiment, a Pennsylvania regiment, and a Georgia
regiment under the command of the same general officer would obey their orders
regardless of the origins of the officer in question. But this was almost
entirely because said regiments would be under the direct control of colonels
chosen by the relevant state legislatures whose men had – ideally – come to
invest in them a great deal of trust and affection. That the framers of the
Articles understood this – that they were familiar with the realities of
contemporary warfare – and proceeded accordingly would thus seem eminently
explicable.
A somewhat more specific reason for
the existence of the aforementioned Article VII would seem to stem from
something less mundane than mere military logistics. Recalling the origins of
the American Revolution in the tensions that had arisen in the 1760s between a
distant and highly-centralized government in Britain and the various colonial
governments in America – and further calling to mind the role played by British
military officers like Thomas Gage (1719-1787) in hastening the beginnings of
armed conflict between them – there doubtless remained a great deal of fear and
suspicion in Congress and among its supporters surrounding the notion of concentrated
institutional and military power. Indeed, the structure of the Articles of
Confederation in large part appears to have been designed to assuage exactly
this sense of disquiet, mainly by preventing the resulting national government
from being able to exert anything like the coercive force at the disposal of
Parliament. By declining to authorize the creation of a standing national army
– a perennial source of distrust in the Anglo-American political tradition –
and further prohibiting Congress from either raising regiments on its own
authority or appointing the commanders of those raised by the states, Article VII
in particular seemed to quite effectively confound this possibility. In the
unlikely event that Congress ever became sufficiently divorced from the
influence of the states to attempt the enforcement of its directives upon the
same, it would find itself capable only of calling to service and appointing
general officers to command regiments created and staffed by the states
themselves. As it would seem equally unlikely that any state regiment – led by
a colonel chosen by the relevant legislature – would answer such a call or
permit itself to be put to such a use, the prospect of a national military
establishment ever coming to dominate the states would appear virtually impossible.
The degree to which the framers of
the Articles felt confident they had taken the necessary steps to foreclose
upon the likelihood of a military confrontation between the states and the national
government is made clearer yet by certain unaddressed ambiguities of Article
VII and Article IX. Whereas the former – cited in full above – reaffirmed the
authority of the states to appoint “All officers of or under the rank of
colonel” attached to the regiments raised under their auspices, the latter
contained a clause which stated that,
The United
States in Congress assembled shall have the sole and exclusive right and power
of […] commissioning all officers whatever in the service of the United States
– making rules for the government and regulation of the said land and naval
forces, and directing their operations.
Consider, for a
moment, how these two provisions might interact in practice. By the terms of
Article VII, the state legislatures were solely responsible for appointing all
officers in their service below the rank of colonel. By the cited terms of
Article IX, Congress was solely responsible for commissioning all officers
whatsoever in the service of the national government. Because a military
officer who has been duly appointed cannot formally assume their command until
they have first received their commission from the appropriate authority, it
would seem as though – under the authority of the Articles – Congress might
have conceivably possessed the ability to decline to recognize the relevant
state appointments in the event that the regiments in question were called into
national service. The further assertion that Congress was also exclusively
responsible for “making rules for the government and regulation” of the forces
in question would appear to affirm this state of affairs by effectively
allowing the national government to set the terms under which national military
service was to be performed.
In fairness, the notion that this
apparent ambiguity would have led to conflict between the state governments and
the national government – or that the evident interaction of Articles VII and
IX even represents an ambiguity – represents little more than supposition. The
cited provisions are somewhat unclear as to the precise objects they intend to
regulate, particularly in terms of the authority granted to Congress in either
commanding or regulating military formations. It is not immediately obvious,
for example, to whom the phrase “all officers whatever in the service of the
United States” was intended to refer. It may have been reasonable to interpret
the intended party as being comprised of all military officers intended to
serve under the authority of Congress at a time of national emergency
regardless of which body originally appointed them. At the same time, it may
also have represented a sensible reading of this clause to regard its subjects
as being only those general officers appointed by Congress to positions of
command during the appropriate period of national need. Likewise, the
affirmation of Congressional authority to govern and regulate all land forces
under national command in no way indicates precisely what form the relevant
oversight was intended to take. Would Congress be permitted to restructure the
state-raised regiments that it called to service? Could Congressmen conceivably
begin to dictate how the relevant military units administered discipline or
organized their command staff? As with the purported national authority over
commissions, the meaning of this clause simply isn’t clear.
In light of the otherwise weak and
inactive nature of the national government described by the Articles, however,
this evident lack of clarity likely presented little cause for concern. If
Dickinson and his committee even perceived the implications of the provisions
cited above – the clauses which appeared to place an unusual degree of power in
the hands of Congress – whatever fleeting concerns they might have felt were
doubtless swept aside by a shared recollection that the government they had
created was so completely bound to the will of the states as to effectively
nullify the possibility of an intractable confrontation between them. Under the terms of the Articles, in short,
Congress would be essentially incapable of exerting its will upon the states
because it would possess no will that was substantially separate from theirs.
By ensuring that delegates to Congress – the only officers of the United States
government as described by the Articles – were to be appointed, recalled, or
replaced by the various state legislatures at any time of their choosing, the
aforementioned Article V effectively made this a foregone conclusion. Even in a
time of emergency during which Congress might reasonably choose to exercise its
authority to summon state military formations to national service, the men
responsible for commissioning the relevant officers and governing and
regulating the relevant formations would be exceedingly unlikely to act in
opposition to the interests of the states to whose governments they owed their
authority. Thus, by its very nature, the national government described by the
Articles was seemingly prevented from ever exercising the kind of military
coercion most feared and detested by the people it was intended to serve.
No comments:
Post a Comment