Cato V, Part II: Context, contd.

Though throughout the 1770s and 1780s George Clinton had shown himself to be a sincere and ardent supporter of the Patriot cause and of the authority of Congress – his working relationship with Continental Army Commander-in-Chief George Washington was notably warm and supportive, for example, and his was the first state government to support the (ultimately failed) five percent tax on foreign imports proposed by Congress in 1781 – this changed to a very large extent once the Revolutionary War came to an end.  Not only did New York under his leadership reject the requisitions – i.e. voluntary taxes –  which Congress requested of it, dispute border claims made by other states which would have infringed upon its territory, and categorically reject the efforts of local authorities in Vermont to gain admission to the American union as the fourteenth state – in spite of the assistance provided by militiamen from Vermont in defending New York during the late war with Britain – but Clinton also entirely refused to comply with one of the provisions of the war-ending Treaty of Paris (1783). Article V of said document, negotiated in part by his fellow New Yorker John Jay, stated that,

Congress shall earnestly recommend it to the legislatures of the respective states to provide for the restitution of all estates, rights, and properties, which have been confiscated belonging to real British subjects […] that Congress shall also earnestly recommend to the several states a reconsideration and revision of all acts or laws regarding the premises, so as to render the said laws or acts perfectly consistent not only with justice and equity but with that spirit of conciliation which on the return of the blessings of peace should universally prevail. And that Congress shall also earnestly recommend to the several states that the estates, rights, and properties, of such last mentioned persons shall be restored to them, they refunding to any persons who may be now in possession the bona fide price (where any has been given) which such persons may have paid on purchasing any of the said lands, rights, or properties since the confiscation.

Granting that Clinton was under no obligation to acquiesce to the “earnest recommendations” which Congress was obliged to make, his refusal to do so was nonetheless cause for concern among certain of his former allies. While the likes of Washington, his former aid-de-camp and confidant Alexander Hamilton, and the aforementioned John Jay were all of the opinion that establishing warm relations with Great Britain was in the best interests of the United States as a whole – economically, politically, and militarily – Clinton seemed to be concerned with nothing more than maintaining the electoral base he had built for himself at the expense of those who, though they had supported the Crown during the late war, were ultimately as American as he was.

            Clinton’s evident selfishness was arguably made yet clearer to his opponents when, in 1784, he oversaw the passage of a series of import duties through the New York General Assembly at around the same time he encouraged the successful rejection of imposts proposed by Congress in 1785, 1786, and 1787. This was hardly an inexplicable turnaround, of course. Following the British evacuation of New York City in November 1783, trade once more flowed through the city’s port facilities and import duties thereafter accounted for between one-third and one-half of the state’s annual revenue. Combined with the aforementioned profits derived from the sale of confiscated Loyalist property, this funding source helped keep property taxes in the Empire States relatively low, preventing the emergence of the kind of rural discontent which plagued many of states in the post-war era, and fostering the sort of economic prosperity of which few other states could boast. Granting the authority to Congress to lay duties on imports would doubtless have upset this state of affairs to some degree, though the exact nature of the potential effects remains an open question. Nevertheless, the very prospect was enough for Clinton to steadfastly and consistently oppose any measures which might possibly have threatened his state’s power to chart a course of economic self-sufficiency. It is therefore more than a little ironic that this adamant opposition to strengthening the authority of Congress on the part of New York’s longstanding Governor arguably proved instrumental in setting in motion the chain of events which would result in exactly that.

            Alexander Hamilton, who had previously become an admirer of Governor George Clinton during the former’s service as aid-de-camp to the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, was given sufficient cause over the course of the 1780s to drastically reevaluate his opinion of his home state’s longstanding chief executive. Certainly there was the fact of his marriage to Eliza Schuyler (1757-1854), daughter of the aforementioned Philip Schuyler. Landholding families like the Schuylers and the Livingstons had shielded their personal holdings from confiscation when they chose to support Congress and the cause of American independence, but they nevertheless looked with anxiety and disfavor upon such laws as made possible the seizure of Loyalists estates and the public sale of Loyalist property. Such aggressive policies, they held, threatened the very concept of private property at the same time that they betrayed a “leveling spirit” that was especially dangerous when coupled to significant executive authority. Governor Clinton, for his part, seemed to symbolize this coupling of radical intention and practical power, particularly in the way that his efforts to ostensibly punish loyalty to the Crown had resulted in a significant redistribution of wealth and the bolstering of a previously sidelined socio-political community. Eager to prevent a further realignment of New York’s political status quo, and otherwise convinced that the surest way to promote social stability was to pursue reconciliation between the government of New York and such of its inhabitants as had supported the Crown during the war and declined to emigrate at its conclusion in 1783, the aforementioned landholding elite thus increasingly sought to limit the power and autonomy of Governor Clinton by way of external pressure.

The aforementioned Hamilton, who had also become an ardent nationalist during his service under Washington and came to believe very strongly that the prosperity of any one state was inextricably tied to the prosperity of the United States as a whole, presented the Schuyler/Livingston faction with arguably the best means of accomplishing this very objective. Having argued in favor of Loyalist property claims as a trial lawyer in New York City during the immediate post-war years in the early 1780s, the son-in-law of Philip Schuyler was likewise of the opinion that the civil rights of an entire social class had effectively been violated by Clinton’s heavy-handed application of the Confiscation Act. The solution which he alighted upon was to strengthen the authority of Congress to the point that it might effectively serve to restrain states like New York from infringing on the property rights of those of its citizens found to be in the minority on a given popular issue. The confiscation of Loyalist property was one such instance of radical populist policy relatively common in the states during the Revolutionary Era. Debt forgiveness was another, as was the mass printing of paper currency whose value depreciated rapidly upon issue. While the lower and middling classes who supported such measures believed they were essential to helping them avoid insolvency, pay off their outstanding obligations, and attain some degree of economic self-sufficiency, the likes of Hamilton and his elite supporters regarded them as harbingers of eventual economic and social chaos. Debts were contracts, after all, and property was sacred, and paper money was notorious for very quickly becoming valueless. If state government were allowed to proceed as they had been, of course, none of this would matter. Contracts would become meaningless, private property would become vulnerable to limitless seizure, and men of wealth would be forced to part with their services in exchange for nothing at all in the way of recompense. What else could one whose personal worth was bound up in land and loans call such a state of affairs but complete and total anarchy?

Congress seemed to Hamilton and his supporters as the best possible counter to such populist excesses among the states, though its relative weakness would need to be shored up. An early attempt at this – Hamilton’s aforementioned endeavor to use the threat of the Newburgh Conspiracy in 1783 to essentially extort his fellow delegates into approving new tax powers – had admittedly  met with failure, but others would nevertheless follow. The idea, essentially, was to incrementally increase the authority of Congress by allocating to it steadily greater and more wide-ranging responsibilities. Giving the primary organ of the contemporary United States government the ability to raise its own revenue would not alone have been sufficient to allow it to restrain or otherwise countermand the actions of the individual states, of course. But it would have granted Congress an increased degree of autonomy, permitted it to fund its own initiatives, and gone some distance towards promoting the idea that the national government of the American union was as deserving of respect and obedience as that of any state government. In short, it would have been an incremental step towards what Hamilton and his cohorts believed was ultimately necessary. Unfortunately - in the immediate, at least – this first step proved impossible to achieve. As mentioned above, efforts on the part of its supporters to see a national impost approved by Congress were defeated in 1785, 1786, and 1787 at the same time that New York under Governor Clinton was soaking up the revenue provided by its own local import duties. Were this not galling enough, the fact that the costs of such excises were often passed on to consumers in neighboring states like Connecticut and New Jersey simultaneously served to create the yet more intolerable situation by which taxes levied in one state were being paid by the citizens of another. In light of the seeming impossibility of seeking solutions from within the existing institutional status quo, therefore, Hamilton and other like-minded reformers determined at some point between September, 1786 – during which the failed Annapolis Convention met – and May, 1787 – when the Philadelphia Convention first convened – to completely restructure the institutions in question. At this point, of course, the Framers went about their framing, the proposed constitution was submitted to Congress, Congress submitted it to the states, and the ratification debate began.

As to Clinton himself, having here established his biography and the nature of his relationship to the whole concept of reforming the government of the United States of America, a few last points ought to be reiterated specifically. For one thing, though Clinton was not a well-educated man in a formal sense – certainly compared to the likes of Hamilton or Madison – he was neither ignorant of the philosophy which underpinned much of the ratification debate nor incapable of expressing himself in a clear and eloquent fashion. His father, the aforementioned Charles Clinton, was said to have possessed an extensive personal library to which his children had full access, and it is known by way of contemporary personal accounts that George was himself a voracious reader. The fact of his having attained the New York provincial bar in the early 1760s when he was scarcely more than twenty years old would seem to attest to the efficacy of this largely self-guided course of study.  The text of Cato V itself would seem to do likewise. While a fuller discussion of the same will follow in the next entry in the present series, it will here suffice to say that Clinton’s familiarity – nay, comfort – with the theories of political economy espoused by the likes of Montesquieu (1689-1755) and Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) was by no means inferior to that demonstrated by his nominal Federalist opponents. On the contrary, though he lacked the academic credentials of which they could boast – Hamilton and John Jay had attended King’s College (now Columbia University) while Madison was a graduate of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) – his written contributions to the ratification debate were as rigorously-reasoned and as well-sourced as their own.

For another thing, though Clinton was most definitely a New Yorker to the bones, he wasn’t particularly close to or enamored with that state’s thriving commercial sector. This, in truth, may have been one of the few things he had in common with his patrician rivals. Families like the Schuylers, the Livingstons, and the Van Rensselaers were primarily landlords by trade whose wealth was sustained by the rent payments of their potentially thousands of agriculturalist tenants. Commerce, of course, was what allowed these tenants to turn enough of a profit to pay their yearly rents while buying seed enough for the following season, but the manor lords tended not to trouble themselves with such details. From their perspective – naturally one of great wealth and privilege – merchants were a necessary evil whose habitual acquisitiveness rendered them unfit for polite society. They might have been able to provide some of the things which made it possible to live a gentlemanly lifestyle – fine textiles, silver tableware, Ceylon tea, Madeira wine, etc. – but they were themselves slightly scummy in their wheeling and dealing over bushels of wheat and hogsheads of tobacco. Though he was nearer, socio-economically, to a merchant than a manor lord, Clinton seemed to agree with this assessment, or at least to view the social consequences of New York’s domestic commerce with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Perhaps this was because, though not a patrician, he had nonetheless also managed to attain a prominent position for himself in the political power structure of the Empire State without having to indulge in any commercial ventures of his own. Having come up through the military, public service, and the law, Clinton was accordingly able to regard with suitable distance both the mercantile and aristocratic aspects of contemporary New York society and offer criticism of each in turn.

Finally, though Clinton was the product of a historical and cultural context in which public service tended to be viewed as either a badge of social rank or a class obligation – in a “To the manor born” sort of way – his personal approach to public office seems to have hewed much closer to that which was practiced in the United States of America by so-called “party bosses” between the middle of the 19^th century and the end of the 20^th century. These figures tended to be ostensibly low-level functionaries – i.e. county commissioners, treasurers, local committee chairs, or mayors – whose control over party nominations, patronage, and campaign strategy gave them a tremendous degree of power and influence over regional – or at times even national – politics. Bosses like New York’s William Tweed (1823-1878) and Richard Croker (1843-1922), Delaware County, Pennsylvania’s John J. McClure (1886-1965), and Chicago’s Richard Daley (1902-1976) presided over their respective organizations or “machines” for decades at a time, collecting and dispensing favors and currying influence with national political figures in accordance with what they felt were their party’s best interests. Granted, George Clinton was not a member of any formal political organization – as of the 1770s and 1780s at least – and his actions tended to work solely to his own benefit rather than that of some national figure whose indulgence he was attempting to solicit. Nonetheless, and in a very enterprising and populist sort of way, he used his authority as Governor of New York to make alliances, distribute patronage, and create and sustained new electoral blocs all while cultivating a popular following by appearing to be attentive and approachable where his opponents were arrogant and remote. This decidedly hands-on approach to politics was very much at odds with the arm’s-length and rather entitled style practiced by New York’s customary patrician elite. Whereas the Schuylers and Livingstons expected public office to effectively seek them out in recognition of their unequalled social status – and accordingly viewed campaigning as crass and undignified – Clinton built a highly successful political career on the principle of both engaging the public in the political process and becoming deeply engaged in the process himself. Such was his approach as chief executive of the state of New York, and such was also arguably his attitude as the author of Cato V.