CHAPTER XII. 1786-1787. NO SECURITY AFFORDED BY THE CONFEDERATION TO KINDRED DISTURBANCES. No federative government can be of great permanent value which is not so constructed that it may stand, in some measure, as the common sovereign of its members, able to protect them against internal disorders, as well as against external assaults. The Confederation undertook but one of these great duties. It was formed at a time when the war with England was the great object of concern to the revolted colonies, and when they felt only the exigencies which that war created. Hence its most important powers, as well as its leading purpose, concerned the common cause of resistance to a foreign domination. A federal league of states independent of each other, formed principally for mutual defence against a common enemy, was all that succeeded to the general superintending power of the British crown, by which the internal affairs of each of them had always been regulated and controlled, in the last resort. When the tie was broken by which they had been held to the parent state, each of them created for itself a new government, resting for its basis on the popular will, and deriving its authority directly from the people; but none of them provided for the creation of a power, external to itself, which might stand as the guarantor and protector of their new institutions, and secure the principles on which they rested against violence and overthrow. Yet the constitutions thus formed, from their peculiar nature, eminently needed the safeguards which such a power could afford. These constitutions were admirably constructed. They contained principles imperfectly known to the ancient governments; found in modern times only in the government of England; and applied there with far less consistency and completeness. They embraced the regular distribution of political power into distinct departments; legislative checks and balances, by means of two co-ordinate branches of the legislature; a judiciary in general holding office during good behavior; and the representation of the people in the legislature, by deputies of their own actual election, in which the theory of such representation was more perfectly carried into practice than it had ever been in the country from which it was derived. But the fundamental principle on which they all rested, and without which they could not maintain existence, required means of defence. They were established upon the great doctrine that it is the right of every political society to govern itself, and for the purposes of such self-government to create such constitutions and ordain such fundamental laws as its own judgment and its own intelligent choice may find best suited to its own interests. But society can act only by an expression of the aggregate will of its members; and as there may be members who dissent from the views and determinations of the great mass of society, and it is therefore necessary to decide with whom the power of compelling obedience resides-since there must be obedience in order that there may be peace-nature and reason have determined that this power is to reside with a majority of the members. The American constitutions, therefore, are founded wholly upon the principle that a majority expresses the will of the whole society, and may establish, change, and abrogate forms of government at its pleasure.' It follows, as a necessary deduction from this fundamental doctrine, that so soon as society has acted in the formation and establishment of a government, upon 1 Gibbon, with that graceful satire which knew how to hit two objects with the same stroke of his pen, describes hereditary monarchy as "an expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master." The historian of the Decline and Fall began to publish his great work just as the American Revolution burst upon the world. Since that sentence was penned, the experiment of a system by which the multitude give to themselves a master, in the constitutional organs of their own will, has had a fair trial. We may not say that its trial is past, or that the system is established beyond the possibility of further dangers. But we may with a just pride point to its escape, in the days of its first establishment and greatest danger, and to the securities which the Constitution of the United States now affords against similar perils when they threaten the constitutions of the states. this principle, no change can take place but by a new expression of the will of society through the voice of a majority; and whether a majority desires or has actually decreed a change, is a fact that must be made certain, and can only be made certain in one of two modes, either by the evidence and through the channels which the society has previously ordained for this purpose, or by the submission of all its members to a violent and successful revolution. The first constitution of Massachusetts did not designate any mode in which it was to be amended or changed. But no peaceable change can take place in any government founded on the expressed will of a majority of the people, consistently with the principle on which it had been established, until it has been ascertained, in some mode, that a change is demanded by the same authority. The vital importance of ascertaining this fact with precision was not so clearly perceived at that early period as it is now. Seizing upon the newly established doctrine, which made them the sources of all political power, the people did not at once apprehend the rule which preserves and upholds that power, and makes the doctrine itself both practicable and safe. Hence, when troubles arose, individuals were led to suppose that they had only to declare a grievance, to demand a change, and to compel a compliance with their demand by force. So far as they reasoned at all, they persuaded themselves that, as their government was the creation of the people, by their own direct act, bodies of the people could assemble in their primary capacity, and, by obstructing any of its functions which they connected with a particular grievance, produce a reform, which the people have always a right to make. By overlooking, in this manner, the only safe and legitimate mode in which the popular will can be really ascertained, they passed into the mischiefs of anarchy and rebellion, mistaking the voices of a minority for the ascertained will of society. To these tendencies the recently established governments of New England, where the spirit of liberty was most vigorous, could oppose no efficient check; while, in any open outbreak, they were without any external defender on whose power they could lean. The Confederation succeeded to the Revolutionary Congress, as we have more than once had occasion to observe, with less power than its predecessor might have exercised. It was formed by a written constitution, yet it was, strictly speaking, scarcely a government. It was a close union of the states; but it was a union from which all powers had been jealously withheld which would have enabled it to interfere with vigor and success between an insurgent minority of the people of a state and its lawful rulers. The Revolutionary Congress was once possessed of such large, indefinite powers, that, upon principles of public necessity, it might have assumed, in a great emergency, to hold a direct relation to the internal concerns of any colony. It was, in fact, looked to, in some degree, for direction in the formation of the state governments, after it had broken the bonds of colonial allegiance to the English crown; and it might very properly have undertaken to support the governments whose establishment it had recommended. But such a relation between the early states and the continental power, though it certainly existed in 1776, was soon lost in the independent and jealous attitude which they began to occupy, and the Union rapidly assumed a position where the character of sovereignty which it appeared to wear when it promulgated the Declaration of Independence was scarcely to be discerned. At no period in the history of the Confederation did it act upon the internal concerns or condition of a state. Its written articles of union hardly admitted of a construction which would have enabled it to do so, and certainly contained no express delegation of such a power. At the same time, some of the state governments, during the period of which we are treating, were singularly exposed to the dangers of anarchy. None of them had any standing forces of any consequence, three years after the peace, and the New England States had no military forces whatever but their militia. No state could call upon its neighbors for aid in quelling an insurrection, for their militia would not have obeyed the summons, if it had been issued; and no state could call upon the federal government, in such an emergency, with any certainty of success in the application.' A power to interfere in the internal concerns of a state could only have been exercised by a broad construction of the third of the Articles of Confederation, which was in these words: "The said states hereby severally enter into In such a state of things, the year 1786 witnessed an insurrection in Massachusetts of a very dangerous character, which, from the fortunate circumstance that her counsels were then guided by a man of singular energy and firmness of character, she was just able to subdue. The remote causes of this insurrection lie too far from the path of our main subject to be more than summarily stated. At the close of the Revolutionary war the state of Massachusetts was oppressed with an enormous debt. At the breaking out of that war the debt of the colony was less than one hundred thousand pounds. The private debt of the state, in the year 1786, was one million three hundred thousand pounds, besides two hundred and fifty thousand pounds due to the officers and soldiers of the state line of the Revolutionary army. The state's proportion of the federal debt was not less than one million and a half of pounds. According to the customary mode of taxation, one third of the whole debt was to be paid by the ratable polls, which scarcely exceeded ninety thousand. The Revolution had made the people of Massachusetts familiar with the great general doctrines of liberty and human rights; but it had a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare; binding themselves to assist each other against all force offered to or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever." When this is compared with the clear and explicit provision in the Constitution, by which it is declared that "the United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government," there can be no wonder that a doubt was felt in the Congress of 1786-87 as to their powers upon this subject. It is true that the Massachusetts delegation, when they laid before Congress the measures which had been taken by the state government to suppress the insurrection, expressed the confidence of the legislature that the firmest support and most effectual aid would have been afforded by the United States, had it been necessary, and asserted that such support and aid were expressly and solemnly stipulated by the Articles of Confederation (Journals, XII. 20. March 9, 1787). But this was clearly not the case; and it was not generally supposed in Congress that the power existed by implication. All that was done by Congress towards raising troops, at the time of the insurrection, was done for the ostensible purpose of protecting the frontiers against an Indian invasion, as we shall see hereafter. 1 Minot's History of the Insurrection, p. 6. 2 Ibid. |