REPUBLICANISM AND SIZE

Part 2 of 3 Parts (continued from the March 2006 issue)
By Donald Livingston

So Americans thought to escape monarchy by choosing federation, and declared each state a sovereign republic. But a problem still remained. Each state might have satisfied the first four conditions of republicanism mentioned above, but none satisfied the fifth. They were all too large for republics, and they were too large because the territories they inhabited had been drawn not by republican criteria but by the British Crown. The territorial boundaries of each American State were artifacts of monarchy. So there was the real threat that each American state could become centralized, thereby destroying self-government in the smaller “republican” political units within it. In a word, because of its size, there was the real danger that each individual American state would in time become a monarchy.
The largest state was Virginia, which had conquered from England the vast northwest territory stretching up to Canada. Richard Lee urged the Virginia legislature to cede this vast territory to the Union rather than govern it as a colonial possession. Ruling such a vast territory, he said, would necessarily turn Virginia into a monarchy. So real was this possibility for each state that William Rawle, in one of the earliest works on the Constitution (A View of the Constitution (Philadelphia, 1825) went out of his way to argue that if a state should become a monarchy (and he said it could since the states are sovereign), it would have to leave the Union which is constitutionally a federation of republics. He then went on to lay out, in the last chapter entitled “Of the Union,” the legal conditions a state would have to satisfy in order to secede from the Union.

The fundamental problem of U.S. politics after secession from Britain was to find a way to guarantee republican government within the out-of-scale-territory each state had acquired from the Crown, which had drawn the boundaries without any regard for republican values. The thing was not impossible, because even under monarchy Americans had experienced “republican” life as an order of small self -governing Protestant communities in a nearly universal agricultural world. No urban center at the time of the Declaration of Independence had a population of more than 35,000. Nor is it a contradiction to speak of republican polities under monarchy. We should consider that although a republic should be small and as self sufficient as possible, no republic is an island unto itself. The smaller it is, the more it needs to trade with the world around it for those things it cannot produce itself, and the more vulnerable it is to being conquered. So every republic will have to form trade and security agreements with surrounding polities, and in doing so will sacrifice some of its liberty. How much will depend on circumstances. But it will remain “republican” to the degree that it is self governing in respect to the five criteria mentioned above. Economic integration on a vast scale does not require political integration.
Switzerland and little Iceland are economically integrated with the world but are not politically integrated with other states. Under the Crown the small political societies that made up the colonial order in America were virtually self governing. David Hume could write in the 1730s that “The Charter governments in America are almost entirely Independent of England.”
So Americans enjoyed small-scale “republican” life under monarchy. The question is whether they would continue to enjoy it under the newly created States the territorial boundaries of which were of a scale requiring monarchical centralization. There were two ways republican liberty could be preserved. One was to divide the States through secession in the direction of a human republican scale. Virginia ceded her vast northwest territory to the Union in order to remain republican. Later, Virginia would also allow the western part to secede and form the State of Kentucky. North Carolina allowed secession of its western territory to form the State of Tennessee. Massachusetts allowed the secession of Maine. It is significant that the Constitution makes no provision for acquiring new territory.
Assume then that the territory of the Union is fixed at the boundaries drawn by the Treaty of Paris (1783). In that case, the political logic of republicanism would require the continual division of States by secession in the direction of a more human scale of political order. The result might have been 50 or more small sovereign states today in the territory of the original 13 states rather than the 50 large states we have today on a continental scale.

Each of the 50 states within the original territory of the 13 states would still be large and could be divided into even smaller republican cantonal states each having a high degree of autonomy. This was Jefferson's ideal for Virginia. He greatly admired the New England Town Meeting system, which he saw as so many human scale republics disposed in a larger sphere. And he proposed that Virginia be divided into small “ward republics,” each having considerable autonomy over local matters. This would yield a system similar to Switzerland--a small state (a little over half the size of South Carolina), containing four languages and divided into 27 cantonal states, each with considerable autonomy. America could have developed into a federation of Swiss size republics, themselves divided into Jeffersonian “ward republics.”
So the Jeffersonian solution to the problem of republicanism within the monarchical scale territory of an American state was to “republicanize” the territory through secession and division in the direction of human scale republics. Hamilton's contrary vision was to consolidate the states into one vast empire where the States would be reduced to administrative units of the central government. In this vision the language of republicanism would still be used, but the essential criteria of size and scale would be set aside. After 1865, one would no longer speak of America in the plural as a federation of republican States each with its own way of life to enjoy and defend, but of a single republic of continental size “one and indivisible.” Or as the Supreme Court in its fanciful ruling in “Texas vs White” (1869), would put it: the American polity is an “indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.”

This new political ethic of “indivisibility” would have a chilling effect on the primordial Jeffersonian ethic of republicanizing the monarchical-scale territories Americans had inherited by dividing States through secession into smaller polities in the direction of human scale republicanism. The treaty that annexed Texas to the Union allowed its division into five States, but it has not happened. Twenty seven counties of northern California voted in 1992 to secede and form the 51st State, but the legislature of California would not allow it--unlike the legislature of Virginia which ceded the Northwest Territory to the Union and allowed the secession of Kentucky. Every American state has come to imitate the Union in thinking of itself as a centralized State (i.e., a “monarchy”): “one and indivisible.”

The Jeffersonian republican spirit in the United States has been massively suppressed. But, as in the case of the Roman empire, its republican language survives and is used to legitimate spectacular transfers of power to the central government that no eighteenth century absolute monarch could have imagined. The political party effecting this revolution would, perversely enough, call itself “the Republican Party,” and henceforth a centralized continental empire would be referred to as the “Republic.” Ignoring the essential element of size, the United States empire could be said to be a republic only in the superficial sense of allowing representatives, voting, etc. But even these concepts lose their meaning when detached from the essential context of size and scale. Genuine republican representation, e.g., (and recall that Rousseau's small republic rejects representatives altogether) requires a meaningful ratio of representative to population, so that the character of the representative can be known and his policies monitored. This is impossible unless the ratio has the right scale. The number of representatives in the House of Representatives was capped by law in 1910 at 435. This small number “represents” some 300 million people; an utterly meaningless ratio of one representative for every 690 thousand people.
The United States today can be described as a “republic” only in the same metaphorical sense in which we might say it is a village, or a neighborhood in the city of the world, or a New England town. All of these images, with their warm human scale connotations, have been stolen and used as masks to hide the true “monarchical” (i.e. centralized) character of a vast empire. Lincoln referred to continental America as our national “homestead” and spoke of the nation as a “family.” Franklin Roosevelt held “fireside chats.” Reagan often described America as a “city on a hill.” Clinton held “town meetings” on a continental scale via satellite T.V. Americans have used Orwellian language in their political self-conception for so long, that 1984 came and passed, and no one noticed.

How different was Jefferson's use of these same terms! When Jefferson spoke approvingly of New England town meetings, he meant it; and he understood that the republican life enjoyed therein is not possible without attention to size and scale. Consequently, his “ward republics” in Virginia would not be Orwellian metaphors but literally isomorphic in scale with the New England towns he admired.

What was the catalyst in this revolution in language whereby republicanism was transmuted into its opposite? It was not through argument. The Jeffersonian persuasion more or less dominated throughout the antebellum period. The change was made possible by a sudden and vast increase in the territorial size of the American polity. The Louisiana Purchase (1803) more than doubled the territory controlled by the United States; the size of which was already stretched to the breaking point for the purposes of republicanism. Ironically, it was President Jefferson who initiated this expansion. And later conquests from Mexico would extend territory to the Pacific.
Although the Jeffersonian persuasion would dominate in speech, the central government would gradually succumb to the temptation to govern its far-flung western territories as colonies in the same way the British had governed its colonies on the eastern seaboard. So, in the end, it was a disregard of size and scale that would subvert the United States experiment in republicanism. But human scale republicanism did not go down without a fight, and in the period from 1803 to 1860 some interesting proposals were put forth for reconciling republicanism with the new and unprecedented challenge of size posed by the Louisiana Purchase and later westward expansion to the Pacific. But that is a topic for the next essay. In the meantime, we can no longer use the terms “republic” and “republican” with innocence, but must be prepared to explain exactly what we mean or cannot mean by them.