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.
The Revolutionary War knocked that world off its axis. The years between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the drafting of the Constitution witnessed an outpouring of democratic energy on an unprecedented scale. Popular conventions rewrote state constitutions to consolidate power in legislatures, which were seen as the branch of government most accountable to the people. The Articles of Confederation left most of the work of governing up to the (presumably more democratic) states. Turnout for elections jumped. More important, the character of the typical elected representative changed, as farmers and other men of humble background claimed a place in government.16
The new legislators took office in the midst of a crisis. Colonial Americans had been some of the wealthiest people in the world. Average incomes were significantly higher than in England, and economic inequality much lower. But then came the Revolution, an economic disaster that sent per capita income plunging by at least 20 percent. The total damage might have exceeded that of the Great Depression.17 Small landowners struggled to keep up with rising interest rates, and veterans complained of unpaid wages. In protests up and down the country, demonstrators burned courthouses and assaulted government officials. (Tax collectors were especially popular targets.) Legislatures from Georgia to Rhode Island addressed these grievances by passing measures catering to their voters—for instance, printing paper money that inflated away the debts of their rural constituents. To the men—and, occasionally, women—who profited from the payment of these debts, grassroots rebellions and legislative reforms looked like incipient class war.18 Elite nerves were especially frayed because, despite the public outroar, losses from the economic downturn were concentrated at the top, where the loss of British trade hit the hardest.
“Our whole system is in disorder,” fretted Hamilton.19 Madison was just as anxious, telling Jefferson in 1784, “confusion indeed runs through all our public affairs.”20 In his private notes, Madison wrote that the turmoil brought “into question the fundamental principle of republican Government, that the majority who rule in such Governments are the safest Guardians both of public Good and of private rights.”21
After liberating themselves from a monarch, Americans had been afraid to trust the government with too much power. Hamilton and Madison thought it was time for a correction. Their mentors—Washington, Jefferson—had won a revolution. But the spirit of 1776 had curdled after a decade of mismanagement. Incompetent state legislators and rioters in the streets were two sides of the same problem—an absence of strong, centralized authority that would correct for “the defect of obedience in the subjects.” With the cynicism of youth, they wanted to move from leading a revolution to running a government.
They got their chance in 1787. A convention had been called in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation. The men who would be Publius wanted to scrap the whole thing and start over. “This is the critical opportunity for establishing the prosperity of this country on a solid foundation,” Hamilton told Washington, warning that the delegates in Philadelphia must not “let slip the golden opportunity of rescuing the American empire from disunion, anarchy, and misery.”22 Speaking bluntly, he said that Americans were “gradually ripening in their opinions of government—they begin to be tired of an excess of democracy.”23 Now it was time to save the people from themselves.
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Always the diligent student, Madison arrived in Philadelphia eleven days before the convention was scheduled to begin. His outline for an entirely new government called for a system divided into three branches—executive, legislative, and judicial—each possessing the ability to check the others. Congress would be split into an upper and lower house, with representation in both branches determined by population. Voters would directly elect members of the lower house, who in turn would choose members of the upper house. The plan also gave the legislature the ability to veto state laws, a point that Madison considered essential.24
At Philadelphia, Hamilton was as unreliable as Madison was studious. Madison spoke often, took copious notes, and later said, rather priggishly, that he “was not absent a single day, nor more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day.”25 Hamilton was quiet for the first three weeks, then broke his silence with a six-hour address detailing his own blueprint for the government, including an executive so powerful that, he acknowledged, it would be called “an elective Monarchy.”26 The delegates praised Hamilton for his genius, then ignored his suggestions. He soon left the convention, spending much of the summer back in New York and returning full-time only in September.
But at a crucial moment he rose in support of Madison. One month into the convention, a debate broke out after South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney told the delegates that they did not have to worry about a class war, saying, “The people of the United States are more equal in their circumstances than the people of any other Country.”27
Madison disagreed. Although he granted that the United States did not have an inherited aristocracy, he said that “the distinction of rich and poor” was already present and would grow more pronounced with time. “An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings,” he said.28 Hamilton seconded his friend. “It was certainly true that nothing like an equality of property existed,” he said, adding that “inequality of property constituted the great and fundamental distinction in Society.”29
By accepting economic division, Madison and Hamilton hoped to transcend it. In Madison’s case, this meant establishing a political system that could serve as an impartial arbiter between factions. Hamilton, less confident in society’s tendency toward equilibrium, believed that a strong government would have to step in to maintain balance. Madison spoke about harmony and neutrality, Hamilton about efficiency and power. One focused on curbing local democracy, the other was already thinking about how a national government could flex its muscles. Madison said that the House of Representatives would be the seat of authority in the new government; Hamilton set his eyes on the presidency. But those differences sounded abstract in 1787, when the two were desperate to restore order to a country they feared was spiraling into anarchy.
And they both thought it could be done by handing power to the people—indirectly. To the founders, untrammeled democracy stood for mob rule.30 But they needed a justification for taking power away from states that wouldn’t spark a revolt from citizens accustomed to choosing their leaders. So they established a higher authority, a national electorate whose elected leaders could tame the state legislatures. “The great fabric” of this new government, Madison said, “should rest on the solid foundation of the people themselves.”31 That’s why Madison, like Hamilton, insisted that at least one branch of the legislature should be chosen by popular vote.
Compelled by political necessity, Hamilton and Madison were stumbling toward a third way between democracy and aristocracy.32 Elections had been—and still are—a tricky subject for advocates of pure democracy. Casting a ballot for the candidate of your choice looks like the essence of democracy to contemporary eyes. But when the founders thought of democracy, they pictured the ancient Athenians, who had a much more nuanced view of elections. Democratic Athens relied on lotteries to fill most public offices, preferring to leave the decision to chance, rather than to a process that could lead to the rich and well connected monopolizing government—and locking out ordinary citizens.33 If you’re looking to empower the masses, then a system rigged in favor of the wealthy probably wouldn’t be your first choice. That’s why, according to Aristotle, it was “democratic for officials to be chosen by lot, and oligarchic by election.”34
A dose of oligarchy is just what the framers wanted. They saw elections as a check against the dangers of democracy, a way of supplying the political class with the authority that came from representing the public while keeping power in the hands of the right sort of rulers. “Guardians of the people,” Madison called the democratic elite, “selected by the people themselves.”35
Today, we describe this kind of government as a representative democracy, a term that seems to have been coined in 1775 by a young Alexander Hamilton.36 Americans did not invent the concept of political representation, but they were the first to make it—as Madison noted with pride—“the pivot” of their politics, with all power derived from the consent of voters.37
You can see this reasoning at work in Madison’s preferred method for selecting a president. Although he eventually came around to the Electoral College, he first argued that the president should be chosen by “the people at large”—that is, by popular vote.38 “Elections,” he explained, would “extract from the mass of the Society the purest and noblest characters which it contains.”39 The wider the field, the easier it would be for statesmen to distinguish themselves. A national election would be the widest field of all and therefore produce the best candidate, a complete inversion of ancient democracy’s assumption that true self-government was possible only in a small community.
Pure democracy seeks to abolish the elite; representative democracy is designed to legitimate one. Thomas Jefferson captured the logic in a letter to John Adams. “There is a natural aristocracy,” Jefferson wrote. “That form of government is the best which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government.”40 Think of the Constitution as a machine, full of clanking pistons and churning gears, engineered to create a democratic elite by sifting out natural aristocrats from the public at large.
The founders had a specific image in mind when they pictured a natural aristocrat. A gentleman like themselves, he was by definition white, male, and well-to-do, with the independence and education that money could buy. He was supposed to wear the right clothes (lace ruffles, silk shirts), have the right hobbies (dancing, fencing), and have the right hair (powdered, or a wig). More important, he was supposed to think in the right way—free from local prejudices, with his eyes on the common good, a master of what Hamilton called “the science of politics.”41
Before natural aristocrats could approach the many, however, they had to reach consensus among themselves. Out of the many divisions in Philadelphia, one issue was so explosive that the Constitution’s final text avoided mentioning it by name. The delegates were more candid when they were talking among themselves. “The security the Southern states want,” South Carolina’s Pierce Butler explained, “is that their negroes may not be taken from them.”42
* * *
“In all ages one half of mankind have been slaves,” Charles Pinckney observed two months after his paean to American equality.43 Although Pinckney’s math was off for the United States, where just under a fifth of the population was enslaved, he was correct that slavery had existed throughout history.44 But racialized slavery was something new—and so, in the eighteenth century, was the concept of race.45
Early American colonists recognized, of course, that the Africans they enslaved had darker skins than their own. Like other elites before and since, they developed prejudices about the people whose labor they exploited. But their depictions of African inferiority centered on culture, not race. Belief that humanity could be categorized into races based chiefly on skin color, that Black people and white people belonged to distinct races, and that the white race was innately superior to the Black—all that belonged to a later era. It was the difference between a hazy prejudice and a (purportedly) scientific classification.
What changed to make the idea of race thinkable—and, as the eighteenth century wore on, increasingly popular? In the United States, the answer was bound up with the intertwined histories of slavery and democracy.46 Slavery had required no special justification in the thousands of years it had flourished. By the time the framers gathered in Philadelphia, however, slavery was on the road to extinction in most of the North. Faced with an unprecedented assault, slavers were forced to justify a way of life that had once seemed beyond question.
Societies founded on explicit hierarchies could depict slavery as one more link in the great chain of being. Some people were masters, others were slaves, and the rest fell somewhere in between. That was how the world had always been and always would be.
Copyright © 2022 by Timothy Shenk
