A Republic No More. Jay Cost

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СКАЧАТЬ pragmatic. The gentry farmers of Virginia may have dreamed of a true republic in the sense that the Country Party imagined it, but what of Napoleon? What of George III? What of Charles IV? The great powers of Europe were not finished with the American continent, not by a long shot, and were intent—as Hamilton argues persuasively—on forcing America into a “passive commerce.” Hamilton doubted that the structure of the Constitution, at least as Madison envisioned it, was sufficient to ensure America’s security in the international world.

      This has been the general consensus of historians for generations, and it is by and large fair. But there is another way to look at the matter, one that is more sympathetic to Jefferson and especially Madison, who clearly and rightly saw civic dangers lurking in the shadows cast by Hamilton’s Bank. Return to those three criticisms that they leveled so effectively, for they are causally linked: Hamilton had extended the power of the government beyond its original scope, his argument about the Necessary and Proper Clause notwithstanding; this extension undermined the balance between powers and structures that the Framers had implemented, as patronage from the executive-run Bank came to influence members of Congress; and the final result produced factionalism, corruption, and almost—were it not for Hamilton’s vigorous intervention—economic catastrophe.

      This gets to the heart of the Madisonian perspective on the Constitution. His system was designed to survive venality and self-interestedness; indeed, as noted above, it assumed a baseline presence of such vices. As Madison writes in Federalist #51, “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” which implies a soundly designed structure remains in place to make it so. Unbalancing the system, as the Bank did, prevented it from counteracting ambition against ambition properly, giving an undue advantage to the financial elites in the Northeast, especially Duer. We can see that most clearly in how the Bank ensnared members of Congress, according to Beckley. As Jefferson asserted to Washington, a fair vote on the Bank might have produced a very different result, had it not been for the profit members were taking from the Bank. Little wonder that Madison flipped from being a proponent of federally chartered institutions to one of its fiercest critics. This sort of behavior is exactly what had appalled him in the states in the 1780s.

      Historians, political pundits, and the civic minded have long viewed the fight over the Bank as the opening salvo in the battle between partisans in the debate over more or less government, a conflict that continues to this very day. It also serves as an epitome for the argument of this book. For the style of corruption bred by the Bank will recur time and again: ambitious national leaders see some problem that the existing powers granted under the plain meaning of the Constitution do not allow; they expand those powers successfully; this may or may not solve the problem, but it disrupts the balance the Constitution hopes to achieve; and it lends itself to corruption as one faction or another can take advantage of the new weaknesses within the system.

      And, as we shall see in the next chapter, such innovations in governmental power—once successfully claimed—are virtually irrevocable. The Republicans rode to power on a wave of popular discontent in 1800, but once installed in office, they accepted many Hamiltonian innovations and added several new powers to the federal menu. Corruption, unsurprisingly, followed soon thereafter, in no small part because the managers of these powers could not hold a candle to Hamilton.

      As Madison argues in Federalist #10:

      It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.⁶³

      Fortunately, there was an enlightened statesmen to manage the nation’s financial affairs in the early 1790s. As we shall see, Gallatin—himself possessed of extraordinary capacities—would manage ably the Bank after the Republicans took control. But, per Madison, it is in vain to say that men like Hamilton and Gallatin will be there when they are most needed. The Bank may not have exhibited the worst potentialities that Madison feared, but its successor would. As hack politicians replaced exemplary souls at its helm, a corrupt Second Bank would bring the country unneeded economic misery in 1819. And worse would soon follow.

       2

       “The Spirit of the Nation Forbids It”

       Nationalism and Corruption from Jefferson to Jackson

      FOR HOW FIERCE the battle between Republicans and Federalists raged during the 1790s, it is amazing that the latter’s vision of America would so thoroughly triumph in a relatively short order. It is more amazing still that the Republicans would be key players in the Federalist policy victory. Yet that is precisely what happened. If the James Madison of 1789 can be reconciled to the Madison of 1791, as argued in the prior chapter, it is harder to reconcile him to the Madison of 1816, whose attitude toward the national government was often indistinguishable from many of the Federalists he had once so vehemently opposed.

      After the Republican victory in 1800, the Federalists were to limp slowly off the political scene, with Alexander Hamilton suffering a brutal end, slain in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr in 1803. The Republicans were then faced with the very problems that plagued Hamilton. For all their philosophical scruples, they had no novel answers on how to grow and manage the new nation, and they ultimately relied upon the insights he had laid out more than a decade before: a powerful national government based on a generous interpretation of the Constitution could yield a more perfect union by guiding national policy—foreign and domestic—toward a series of sensible goals like economic growth and sovereign independence.

      Indeed, both the Federalists and Republicans—in their ways—committed to a kind of American empire. Hamilton, as we saw in Federalist #10, proposed an economically powerful America that could rival the European powers, and his policies were designed to bring that about. The Republicans hated the Hamiltonian program, which they saw as expanding the powers of government too far. Even so, once in power they were similarly drawn to what Thomas Jefferson had once called an “Empire of Liberty.” The Republicans envisioned a nation that filled in the vast expanses of the North American continent, and to bring that about they too advanced a program that stretched the powers of the Constitution well beyond their original limits. They called for protective tariffs, territorial acquisition, federal internal improvements, and even a Second Bank of the United States.

      But the original insights of the old Republican opposition were no less valid, even if they were impractical for managing an empire: growing the powers of the government without modifying its structures ran the risk of corruption. It undermined the principle of checks and balances, and limited the capacity of the government to self-correct, to make sure that only the public interest was being served, rather than private and parochial interests.

      Thus, it should come as no surprise that the upsides of Hamiltonianism—sensible economic policy; vigorous foreign policy—also brought the downsides—corruption. Governmental perfidy became rampant during the James Monroe administration of 1817 to 1825, but it was during the tenure of Andrew Jackson that it transformed into outright lawlessness. Jackson believed that he was a defender of the old Republican faith, but in reality he supported a big government when and as it suited his political agenda, and worse he was more than happy to enforce or not enforce the law according to similar dictates. In Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Second Bank of the United States, he met a foe every bit as crafty and deluded as he, and the lawless battle between СКАЧАТЬ