A THIRTEEN YEAR DEVELOPMENT

The reliance on key dates helps one organize historical knowledge.  The last couple of postings rely on 1787 – the year the founders wrote and issued the US Constitution – to serve as such a date.  This posting incorporates the more popular year, 1776, to conceptualize a range of years, the years in which, according to Daniel Elazar,[1] America’s form of federalism was invented. 

That construct, according to Elazar, informs one about how this nation sees its governance and politics in every aspect.  In this, this writer disagrees with Elazar.  That conceptual role shifted from federalism to natural rights in the years since World War II.  This blog has dedicated a lot of space to make that point and is in the midst of providing the historical evidence that it claims backs that argument.

          But in terms of the aims this blog is pursuing currently, willingness to see federalism through Elazar’s characterization is helpful, at least as far as understanding what those thirteen years – 1776 to 1787 – generated.  In effect, the main development in those years refers to how Americans waned in their view from a confederated union to a federal one; from allegiance to a Continental Congress – a league of sovereign states – to the United States Congress – a federated union with a non-central sovereign arrangement.

This latter set up – the non-central one – occurs when states have areas of sovereign powers (their police powers) and the central or general government has its sovereign powers (its delegated powers such as issuing the nation’s currency).  It is a complex ideation of government and of how it is best suited for Americans – federalism is not easy.  And part (only part) of the story by which this complexity came about is to look at and understand what happened at the state levels when independence was claimed in 1776. 

It turns out that upon “independence,” four colonies set about to draw up their constitutions before the Declaration was even issued.  They were New Hampshire, South Carolina, Virginia, and New Jersey.  Four more, then states, did so before the year ended:  Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina.  All of the rest wrote a constitution in short order and all, but one ratified their basic laws within sixteen months – Massachusetts took several years to complete the process.

These developments were followed by the drafting of the Articles of Confederation which served to set up the structure of a general government to carry out the Revolutionary War effort from a national perch.  That instrument, though, was not ratified until 1781.  While this timing was used to upgrade the sovereign statuses of states in the states’ rights arguments in years to come, today the consensus is that all of this – the establishment of the states’, and central government’s sovereignty – was formulated at the same time.

What should be taken into account is that the ambiguities of federal rule, its diverse origins – for example, the number of parties coming together to form this union – were very much in evidence at the beginning.  Of little note today, for example, was the role local towns and counties played in the Constitutions’ development and ratification.  They just felt they had the right to get involved and express their considered opinions even though they did not really have a legal status to do so.  And so, they contributed their unsolicited input.

Here, Elazar offers a very telling summary descriptive statement of how Americans have seen and treated its constitution,

 

          In order to understand the over 200 years of the American federalist experience, we must examine American federalism in the broadest sense of the term – not as inter-governmental relations, as federalism has come to be interpreted from the managerial perspective of the twentieth century; not as a matter of the constitutional distribution of powers between the general and state governments, as the constitutional lawyers are wont to see it; not even as the grand political struggle between the Union and the states which covered the canvas of nineteenth century historians; but as something close to what the French term “integral federalism,” that is to say, as the animating and informing principle of the American political system flowing from a covenantal approach to human relationships.[2]

 

And in this last aspect – the covenantal approach – the colonial influence, the Biblical-Reformed-Puritan tradition referred to in the preceding postings, provides that foundation as “crucial” in its form and how the various documents – including the US Constitution – were developed, interpreted, and judged.

And to organize these judgements, one is served by looking at these developments through four roots:  the political, economic, social, and religious roots.  This blog has already reviewed the first root, the political root, by describing the covenantal tradition stemming back to the Mayflower Compact. 

The interested reader can trace this development by going through the various foundational documents written between the early 1600s and the late 1700s by the colonists.  Repeatedly, in each of the various colonies, this covenantal model is repeated in the drawing up of the constitutional or theoretical frameworks the colonists utilized through the colonial years.[3] In one volume, Donald Lutz presents 80 such documents arranged by each of the colonies.  That is, this model transcends the New England area and can be considered simply as how Americans went about establishing their polities.

The road to the Articles of Confederation and then the Constitution can be easily detected – if one can get by the older English language – by reviewing these documents.  Of note, the initial documents trace all the way back to the Mayflower Compact of 1620 and one can identify a clear lineage of covenants, compacts, constitutions organizing not only local and state governments but, in one case, an inter-colonial confederation.

 These documents not only depended on federal beliefs and values, but also furthered the developments of those beliefs and values.  They encouraged a federated populous to form and behave within the entailed moral standards these beliefs and values set forth – of course, not at a hundred percent levels (the colonies were not populated by saints) but to a significant degree.  It should be remembered, the demanding frontier environment set as necessary that sort of discipline to be able to survive and even prosper in hostile surroundings.

This blog will proceed in upcoming postings to look at the economic, social, and religious roots from which these founding documents were written.  But this might be a good point to make a distinction this blog has pointed out before – it is alluded to earlier in this posting.  That is, what is being described in these postings primarily refers to espoused theories of governance – what was held in the ideal realm.  While the demands on the colonists were severe, one always needs to allow for a gap between ideals and what is considered “real” or as some might say, “theories-in-use.”[4]

That is to say, more self-centered behaviors – as opposed to the ultraistic ones upon which federation depends – can always be found among any population.  The concern of this blogger is that currently, self-centeredness has become the ideal by using the language of the natural rights construct.  That language casts self-centeredness as almost patriotic expressions of liberty or freedom.  Hence, the need to be reminded that the nation’s basic law was written under the influence of another perspective, i.e., federal theory.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution?  Thoroughly!” In a booklet of readings, Readings for Classes Taught by Professor Elazar (1994), prepared for a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute. Conducted in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, 1-30.  The factual information in this posting is drawn from this source.

[2] Ibid., 8.

[3] Donald S. Lutz (editor), Colonial Origins of the American Constitution:  A Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN:  Liberty Fund, 1998).

[4] For example, see Kenneth D. Benne, “The Current State of Planned Changing in Persons, Groups, Communities, and Societies” in Planning of Change, eds. Warren G. Bennis, Kenneth D. Benne, and Robert Chin (New York, NY:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 68-82.