1Guardians
Publius Valerius served the people. A Roman aristocrat, Publius helped lead the revolution that overthrew the last king of Rome in 509 B.C.1 Rather than seizing power for himself, Publius worked to establish the first Roman republic. Grateful citizens rewarded him with the surname Poplicola: “friend of the people.”
Early American history was filled with pseudonymous scribblers dressing up their arguments in costumes borrowed from antiquity—Catos, Agrippas, even the occasional Caesar. Alexander Hamilton was especially fond of Publius. He first used the name in 1778, then brought it out again during the ratification debates over the Constitution in the fall of 1787.2 It struck the right balance for a statesman who would serve the public without succumbing to the mob, another friend of the people.
Writing at a furious pace—about a thousand words a day over seven months—Publius mounted a comprehensive defense of the proposed government. “In decency he should now rest on his arms, and let the people draw their breath for a little,” one critic of the Constitution grumbled two months into the campaign.3 First published in New York, the eighty-five essays found a wider audience in 1788 when they were collected in a two-volume book titled The Federalist. Most were written by Hamilton, a handful by his fellow New Yorker John Jay, and the remainder by James Madison.
At the beginning, the authors tried to ensure that Publius spoke in one voice, though as the deadlines piled up, coordination quickly became impossible. But a set of common themes ran through Publius’s writings. Together they provided the blueprint for a new political order built out of three interlocking parts: a central government strong enough to bring unruly state legislatures to heel, a political elite that Publius insisted would be “pre-eminent for ability and virtue,” and a national electorate whose approval would legitimize the entire system.4
Take one leg away from this stool, and the whole thing collapsed. A weak government would tip the country into chaos. A corrupt political class could do the same. And even the best regime could not survive without a semi-plausible foundation in the will of the people; the democratic elite needed the demos. More than anything else in the Constitution—more than the separation of powers, more than checks and balances—this three-part system was the basis for Publius’s appeal to the country, and ultimately for the Constitution’s remarkable longevity.
But Publius missed something crucial about the new government. According to The Federalist, elections would fracture the public into a kaleidoscopic array of competing interest groups. Narrow factions might temporarily form a majority in a single state, but never in a large and diverse country. With the masses divided, statesmen would be free to pursue the true interests of the country.
That, of course, is not how events played out. Instead of breaking into ever-shifting factions, the public split in two.5 Not even Publius could resist the lures of partisanship. Just a few years after uniting to defend the Constitution, Hamilton and Madison became leaders of rival political parties—Hamilton’s Federalists, Madison’s Republicans—each convinced that the other was leading the country back toward monarchy.
Republicans won because they were the first to grasp the power of an electoral majority and master basic techniques for winning office. But they wanted to use the tools of partisan politics to destroy political parties, freeing statesmen from their dependence on fleeting majorities.
And they succeeded. When Madison left public life after two terms as president, the Federalist Party was imploding and Republicans were learning to accept crucial elements of Hamiltonian orthodoxy. In the Era of Good Feelings, Publius was reborn.
The rise, fall, and resurrection of Publius is, in miniature, the story of the American political elite in its formative years, as republican statesmen careened toward democracy. It shows them writing fundamental rules of American politics, and then discovering new ones as they began to grasp the purpose and power of elections. And to understand this larger history, it helps to begin with a peculiar friendship.
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In almost every way that counted in the narrow circles they traveled, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were opposites—except for politics, which is what they both cared about most.
The eldest of eleven children, Madison grew up on four thousand acres of the Virginia Piedmont.6 Madison’s family plantation, later named Montpelier, was home to more than one hundred slaves. The bookish young master stayed indoors, fashioning himself into a proper gentleman. He blitzed through his undergraduate education at Princeton in two years, leaving with a working knowledge of French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. In 1776, at the age of twenty-five, he participated in the convention that declared Virginia’s independence. Too sickly for combat—he blamed his absence from the battlefield on “discouraging feebleness”—Madison instead opted for politics.7 He had a talent for picking up influential mentors, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and in 1780 he became the youngest member elected to the Continental Congress.
Nobody denied Madison’s genius, but he was far from a natural politician. Short and frail, with chestnut hair that, in his early thirties, was already thinning, he mumbled his way through speeches and tended to fall silent in crowds. “A gloomy, stiff creature,” wrote the wife of one of Madison’s colleagues. “They say [he] is clever in Congress, but out of it there is nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners—the most unsociable creature in existence.”8
Hamilton was … not that.9 The illegitimate child of a Scottish merchant, he was a self-made aristocrat who, after coming of age in the British West Indies, left the Caribbean behind as a teenager and never looked back. He dropped out of King’s College (later Columbia) to join the Revolution, serving as George Washington’s aide-de-camp and leading a bayonet charge at the Battle of Yorktown. In 1782 Hamilton joined Madison as a representative in the Continental Congress. By then, Hamilton had married a wealthy heiress and fathered the first of his eight children (though rumors suggested that he had another out of wedlock). Madison was courting a fifteen-year-old girl who soon broke off their relationship.
George Washington’s two young protégés were an unlikely but effective duo.10 From their first meeting until the ratification of the Constitution, one problem overshadowed their discussions. Benjamin Franklin described it this way: “We have been guarding against an evil that old states are most liable to, excess of power in the rulers; but our present danger seems to be the defect of obedience in the subjects.”11
This was a dilemma more than a hundred years in the making. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the colonies that later became the United States already allowed for more popular participation in government than anywhere in Europe.12 At the onset of the Revolution, about a quarter of England’s white men could vote; in the thirteen colonies about to declare independence, the total was closer to two-thirds.13
But suffrage alone did not make a democracy. Americans were expected to know their place in a deferential political culture that recognized the inevitability—and desirability—of hierarchy. Campaigns typically featured contests between competing members of the colonial elite, turning elections into mechanisms for validating the status quo. Most of those who could vote usually chose not to, with participation rates fluctuating between highs around 50 percent and lows bottoming out around 10 percent.14
Dismal voter participation reflected the low priority of politics in colonial life. As one writer put it in 1776, “The rich, having been used to govern, think it is their right; and the poorer commonality, having had hitherto little or no hand in government, seem to think it does not belong to them to have any.”15 Real power belonged to distant authorities— a king, a parliament, an aristocracy, an entire world that kept on turning without any assistance from the masses.
Copyright © 2022 by Timothy Shenk
