Speech to the Virginia ratifying Convention, Part XV: Governments of Dissimilar Structures

Before at last delving into the broader significance of Patrick Henry’s aforementioned predilection for manipulative – but nonetheless ingenious – rhetoric, I would beg my readers to indulge me just a few more examples of the kinds of tactics which he saw fit to deploy. I would say that their significance will be revealed before this final entry in the current series has concluded – and that is indeed the case – but it would approach somewhat closer to the truth for me to simply admit that I think they stand to make for an interesting discussion. In casting about for some means of securing a rhetorical victory over his opponents, Henry seized upon various and varied topics, the selection of which to some extent speaks to the prejudices and predilections which he believed his audience possessed. Thus, briefly, let us take a moment to reflect upon some of the things which one of the greatest orators in American history believed would capture the attention of his countrymen circa 1788.

Whereas it would become quickly much more common to hear an American statesman draw a comparison between his own government and that a foreign polity in an exclusively negative sense – indeed, Henry had himself already done so when briefly drawing attention to the sorry state of the contemporary House of Commons – the speech which the former Governor of Virginia delivered to his fellow delegates at their shared home state’s ratifying convention did contain a rare example of a positive comparison. That is to say, seeking to demonstrate the viability of a given principle or policy within the American context, Henry drew attention to a foreign example whose success he seemed to think spoke very well of the same. Specifically, eager as he was to establish that the union of American states as governed by the Articles of Confederation was perfectly adequate to the needs of the inhabitants thereof and that the proposed constitution was accordingly unnecessary, the subject of his oration turned to the subject of Switzerland. That country, he avowed,

Is a confederacy, consisting of dissimilar governments. This is an example which proves that governments of dissimilar structures may be confederated. That confederate republic has stood upwards of four hundred years; and, although several of the individual republics are democratic, and the rest are aristocratic, no evil has resulted from this dissimilarity; for they have braved all the power of France and Germany during that long period. The Swiss spirit, sir, has kept them together; they have encountered and overcome immense difficulties with patience and fortitude.

Broadly speaking, this was an accurate assessment. Switzerland, as it existed in 1788, was a confederacy of dissimilar governments possessed of only a skeletal national authority in the form of a delegated assembly called the Tagsatzung. Some of the republics, or cantons, were relatively democratic – like Uri, Schwyz, Glarus, and Appenzell – while others were dominated by wealthy landed patrician families or merchant guilds – Solothurn and Fribourg being of the former, Basel and Schaffhausen being of the latter. It was also true – remarkably so – that the Swiss had managed to resist numerous attempts at conquest between the 14^th and 16^th centuries by Austria, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. Indeed, so successful were the Swiss in battle that the various cantons became the premier suppliers of mercenary soldiers to the Great Powers of Europe in the 17^th and 18^th centuries following the formal establishment of Swiss neutrality in 1647. Beyond these basic points of description, however, Henry’s evaluation grows increasingly tenuous. 

“No evil [,]” Henry asserted of the differing styles of administration practiced in the Swiss cantons, “Has resulted from this dissimilarity [.]” While there were instances which a student of Swiss history in 1788 could have pointed to that might have served to complicate this assessment – conflicts, namely, which occurred within certain republics over the nature and source of political authority – it was at least broadly true that the Swiss Confederacy had never succumbed to all-out civil war over any manner of political disagreement. That being said, it wasn’t true that Switzerland had never experienced internal conflicts of any kind. In addition to various peasant revolts which the combined cantonal governments worked to swiftly and brutally suppress, the Protestant Reformation brought sectarian violence to the Swiss cantons in the form of the Kappel Wars – single-day exchanges with occurred in 1529 and 1531, respectively – and the Villmergen Wars – months-long campaigns in 1656 and 1712 – both of which pitted the Catholic and Protestant republics against one another over which faction would dominate the internal affairs of the confederacy. While it accordingly remained true, as Henry had avowed, that “no evil had resulted” specifically from the differences in government between the various cantons, a significant amount of evil had nevertheless been the consequence of some differences. Indeed, though Henry was not wrong to cite the political system of the contemporary Swiss Confederacy as ostensibly conducive to – or at least not prejudicial towards – domestic harmony, it might likewise have been accurate to claim that this selfsame system of decentralized administration was not wholly immune of civil strife of any kind. The administrative structure of early modern Switzerland may not have caused the religious conflicts cited above, but nor did it serve in any way to prevent them.

Just so, though Henry claimed of Switzerland with some justification that, “The Swiss spirit […] has kept them together; they have encountered and overcome immense difficulties with patience and fortitude [,]” the specifics of Swiss history paint a far messier picture. It cannot be denied, of course, that the Swiss managed to field some of the most formidable fighting men in Europe during the early modern period (circa 1500 to 1800), defeated better trained, better equipped, and numerically superior armies on many occasions, and managed to carve out a prominent space for themselves in European geopolitics amidst the regional machinations of larger and ostensibly much more powerful empires. That being said, it would seem as accurate to affirm that the various cantons accomplished these feats because of the threats they faced externally as it would be to claim that some indefinable “Swiss spirit” had allowed them to do so in spite of those threats. The Swiss Confederacy, at its heart, was a mutual defensive pact whose signatories shared the common objective of maintaining their administrative autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire against the encroachments of Hapsburg Austria. Without the threat of the Hapsburgs, however, or the Holy Roman Empire, or the French, or the Burgundians, the cantons arguably would not have had all that much reason to band together. They were possessed of different administrative traditions, and different customs, and even spoke different languages. All that they shared, fundamentally, was a desire to remain independent of Hapsburg – and later Imperial – hegemony. The civil wars brought on by the Reformation made this especially clear. Absent an external threat to their common desire for autonomy, the Swiss Confederacy showed itself to be as susceptible as any political community to petty internal divisions. To put it another way, the Swiss Confederacy as much owed its existence to the aggressive ambitions of the House Hapsburg as the Hapsburgs actively threatened that existence. If there was such a thing as “Swiss spirit,” it came about after the fact in response to being near-constantly besieged and consisted of only a bare skeleton of national identity. Certainly, it hadn’t been enough to stop Swiss people of different religious faiths from trying to kill each other on several occasions. And certainly it did very little to endear the peasants living in the various rural cantons to their feudal overlords. What good, then, was this spirit? Or did it even exist?

Bearing all of this in mind, it might seem rather odd for Patrick Henry to have chosen Switzerland as a shining example of what the United States of America could have been if it remained under the auspices of the Articles of Confederation. As aforementioned, the Swiss Confederacy was the product of mutual self-interest more than a common adherence to a particular strand of political philosophy on the part of the Swiss people. Indeed, there wasn’t really a “Swiss people,” even as late as the 1780s. Culture, language, government, and religion differed – sometimes quite drastically – on a canton-by-canton basis, and internal conflicts were far from unheard of over the relative balance of power between one faction and another or one class and another. All that being said, however – and arguably alongside the Dutch Republic – the Swiss Confederacy was probably more like the American republic than any other country in the 18^th century world. Though there were aristocratic elements to certain segments of Swiss society, they were perhaps no more patrician – in terms of their wealth and prestige – than the planter class that then dominated the American south. Just so, the Swiss cantons and the American states were each adamantly autonomous, both from one another and from their respective national governments. And there was certainly a valid comparison to be made between Congress and the Tagsatzung, in as much as both were delegated assemblies whose domestic authority was formally and functionally very limited.

There were still major, glaring differences, of course. Switzerland was only partly republican, was in other ways still very feudal, had come into existence as a defensive necessity, and had expanded from three cantons to thirteen via conquest and alliance-making. But in the world of the late 18^th century, one could not afford to be too picky about such things. Casting about for some manner of contemporary example that might possibly have aided him in making a case in favor of the Articles of Confederation and the government that they framed, Switzerland was likely about as close as Patrick Henry could likely have hoped to get. In addition to giving evidence of the sheer elasticity of Henry’s reasoning – embodied by the number of otherwise disqualifying facts he endeavored to gloss over on the way to making his argument – this would also seem to point to a relatively obvious but nonetheless extremely important point about the contemporary American republic. Though there was at least one other nation in existence in 1788 that could accurately claim the title of republic – the aforementioned Dutch Republic, which was also highly feudal in character – and though the Swiss Confederacy did share a number of basic traits with the United States of America, in truth there wasn’t really anything quite like it. There had been revolutions before, in the history of the world, and nations had come into being by breaking away from other nations. Switzerland arguably fitted the latter description; the Dutch Republic most certainly did. But the reasoning behind the American Revolution, the manner by which it was accomplished, and the political outcome that resulted set the United States of American firmly apart from any other nation that then existed or had existed.

Granted, the colonies of British America were in some sense attempting to assert their existing rights and privileges in a manner very similar to that which the Swiss cantons adopted vis-à-vis the House of Hapsburg. But then, rather than preserve the status quo for which they had fought after succeeding in combat – which the Swiss very much did, to the point of actively quashing internal threats to the same – the newly-minted American states proceeded to question and reassess a great many of the basic assumptions under which they had but recently labored. Statesmen in Virginia, and Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, and New York proceeded to write new constitutions, creating new institutions, and new offices, and new procedures, and new truths about how and why the American people would be governed. Much of what remained was still heavily influenced by the precepts of the English Common Law and the principles embedded in the Bills of Rights (1689) and the Magna Carta (1215), to be sure, but much else was also especially novel. A number of states came to possess chief executives that were chosen by the general electorate. Several more erected legislatures that were intended to wholly dominate the administration thereof. At least one did away with the concept of an executive altogether. And the American national government behaved like no other in the world. The Tagsatzung, as mentioned previously, was not at all unlike Congress in form and function, but there the similarities between the American republic and the Swiss Confederacy just about ended.

There was, in consequence, no roadmap that the American republic could reliably follow in 1788. There were no guarantees, no running the odds, and nothing more solid to count on than the industry and the ingenuity of the American people. For some statesmen, no doubt, this was an exciting proposition. Having cast off the yoke of a conservative, aristocratic empire, the American states were now free to remake themselves in accordance with the kinds of principles which even the most liberal European states could pay heed to only in part. Others, however, were not so sanguine, and perceived in the uniqueness of the American situation a great and abiding risk of failure. Who could say what would work and what wouldn’t? Whether society would respond positively to the changes being wrought or reject them catastrophically? What single decision could possibly be made that might not result in disaster? These were sobering thoughts, to be sure, and far from unreasonable. Resort might accordingly have been made to tradition, to custom, and to the overwhelming example of history. Strong central authority was a proven source of stability, after all. For that matter, so was aristocracy. By adopting these things, even in part, the United States of America could conceivably have charted a much safer path forward than would likely have been the case under the auspices of an exceedingly decentralized national administration. Liberty was all well and good, of course, but what was the point if the nation that attempted to preserve it began to fall apart at the seams?

This, no doubt, is a question that Patrick Henry himself was made to confront upon the submission of the proposed constitution to the various American states at the end of 1787. Clearly, faced with an uncertain future and unproven institutions, some portion of the American political class had sought solace in attempting to emulate the successful centralized models of government being practiced in contemporary Europe. How else could one explain the similarities between the framework described by the proposed constitution and the monarchical governments of France, and Spain, and Great Britain? From a unicameral legislature with no executive, no judiciary, and minimal domestic authority, the Framers were proposing to transform the government of the United States of America into a tripartite arrangement with a strong, king-like executive, a bicameral legislature with a pseudo-aristocratic upper house, and a national judiciary with absolute appellate jurisdiction. Regardless of the dangers that such systems and institutions represented, some portion of the American population evidently felt that there was more to fear from proceeding as they had been under the Articles of Confederation. It might be taken for a given that Patrick Henry strongly disagreed with this assessment, though it would seem far less obvious what he could have offered by way of an alternative model. Switzerland, as aforementioned, was about as near as he could get. Yes, the Swiss Confederacy had been formed under a very different set of circumstances than had the United States of America. And the relationships between the cantons weren’t much like the relationships between the states, and Swiss history – awash as it was with peasant revolts, commercial rivalries, and religious strife – arguably didn’t do much to recommend the confederal form of government. But it was something.

A more honest approach – one might say a more courageous one – would surely have been to respond to the fears and trepidations which the proposed constitution represented by calling upon the American people to rise once more to the occasion as they had done in the 1760s and 1770s when faced with seemingly insurmountable adversity. Indeed, Henry seemed to do just that in other sections of the same oration being presently examined. “It was but yesterday,” he had earlier remarked, “When our enemies marched in triumph through our country. Yet the people of this country could not be appalled by their pompous armaments: they stopped their career, and victoriously captured them. Where is the peril, now, compared to that?” Henry’s evident need to seek some foreign example to counter that which had arguably influenced the Framers would thus seem yet more curious. Having established himself as a great believer in the strength, the endurance, and the ingenuity of the American spirit – “That spirit [,]” he declared, “Which has enabled us to surmount the greatest difficulties” – why not rely solely on a reaffirmation of the same? The likeliest answer would seem to stem from Henry’s aforementioned reliance on rhetorical chicanery. There was just enough truth in what he claimed about Switzerland, and just enough alike between that country and the United States of America, for him to claim victory in the eyes of the uninitiated and the credulous. Most Americans in 1788 likely knew very little of the history of the Swiss Confederacy, its complexities and its contradictions. Perhaps Henry was himself among them. But what they almost certainly did know was what he had cited explicitly: the Swiss were decentralized, they were peaceful, they had successfully defended themselves against the encroachments of vast empires, and they had managed to endure independently for centuries. So long as they acknowledged these things to be true, the finer details didn’t really matter.