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.

EVEN IN NEW YORK, 1787 AND BEYOND

 

The last posting shared and described four arguments the scholar Daniel Elazar presents regarding the work of the founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.  These four are the first of five arguments and they are,

 

1.     The Constitution was written by a committee.

2.     It was written as a political document, not a legal contract.

3.     As such, its terminology reflects current fashion as well as precise usage and strives for ambiguity where it was deemed politically necessary to do so.

4.     The framers of the Constitution draw upon more than one major source of ideas for their understanding of federalism.[1]

 

This posting will focus on the fifth argument:  “The Federalist [Papers by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay], valuable as it is as a work of political thought and exposition of the Constitution, is not the whole commentary on the subject.”[2]      

This blog introduced this last argument by highlighting what Elazar emphasizes; it stated, “Collectively, the common opinion is that these writings … [were] the product of three sources:  classical education, … Hobbesian-Lockean social contract [theory] … and the writings of the Enlightenment thinkers.”  To these and of more importance is the influence of the “Biblical-Reformed-Puritan tradition.  But, Elazar adds, however one attributes influence, be it the classical/political theory view or the Puritanical view, “[b]oth traditions address the idea and practice federalism.”[3]

To demonstrate this, Elazar claims that the classical/political theory view contextualizes federalist unions as confederations and as such limits the view as a political arrangement that forms a permanent league but maintains sovereignty with the units constituting the league – an ascription that describes more accurately the polity formed by the Articles of Confederation.  On the other hand, the Puritanical view has a theological base – a federal theology.

Within that latter construct, the agreement forming the union is a covenant (or foedus) which, by design, grounds a resulting union and any such human relationships as part of the original covenant between God and man.  This is originally described in the Bible and is followed through with subsequent pacts.  One can describe a religiously sanctioned marriage agreement as such a union.  This mode of associating, emanating from the Judeo tradition, had evolved to be a viable theo-political model by the mid-eighteenth century.

Varied from the classical notion of a polis – a completely self-defined political entity which could collaborate with other poleis in some form of league – the Biblical framework allows for unions of polities under a shared common law and developed institutions.  And it was this latter view that took hold throughout New England.  The first to do so was Connecticut.  It was created by bringing together various settlements – towns – under unambiguous federal principles; that being a mixture of religious and political principles.

The agreement in Connecticut is known as the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and note its date, 1639, only nineteen years after the Mayflower Compact was proclaimed.  And Elazar is quick to point out that the heirs of this earlier federalist founding authored the most important compromise at the Constitutional Convention forming the United States as a federal union, i.e., the Connecticut Compromise.

Elazar goes on to cite the work of Donald S. Lutz.[4]  This political scientist did an extensive document review of the Constitutional Convention and of the writings of that time and reports convincingly, according to Elazar, that the founders ubiquitously and powerfully relied on the Biblical-Reformed-Puritan tradition in the writing and adopting of the final Constitution.  That is, “Lutz found that the Bible was the most cited source by far.  Indeed, the Book of Deuteronomy, with its discussion of the Mosaic constitution for Israel, alone is cited more than any other source.”[5]

One factor that is often overlooked, and Elazar points out, is that The Federalist Papers were written and distributed initially to a New York audience.  By that time, New Yorkers had become fairly secular in their outlooks – had developed what Elazar calls an “individualistic political culture” – and a heavy dose of Biblical references could probably be a turn off.   As for the rest of the states, one found either the Puritanical tradition or the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian tradition being established and they, those Americans, were more apt to listen to Biblical references.

So, what can one judge The Federalist Papers’ to be in terms of reflecting the thoughts of the founding fathers?  Yes, they are useful, but in no terms should they be considered the sole authoritative source or commentary on why the Constitution is what it is.  Further, since the Constitution lays down the basic model of the polity, even if subsequent changes during the history of the US – for example, the secular turn toward a marketplace economy in the late nineteenth century – the basic ground rules remained federal. 

As such, all variances to the values and principles of governance and politics swarmed around this basic commitment – that of a federated citizenry.  That is, federalism remained the ultimate standard by which to judge these variances, even in New York of the late 1700s.  This blog aims to offer more evidence to this claim, but as for the Constitutional Convention, this blogger feels comfortable with the role that Elazar, Lutz, and others ascribe to federalism in the writing and adoption of the US Constitution.

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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, 3-4.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 5.

[4] In full disclosure, Dr. Lutz served on this blogger’s doctoral committee.

[5] Elazar, “How Federal Is the Constitution?  Thoroughly!,” 7.