Republicanism and Size - Part 3

By Donald W. Livingston

Let me first sum up the argument from the first two parts of this extended essay on “republicanism and size.' From the Greeks on, it was held that a republic had to be small (somewhere in the range of 50-200 thousand people or fewer). Rousseau's The Social Contract (1761) was modeled on his beloved Geneva, a city that had a population of 25,000. And it was commonly believed that a large polity demanded monarchy (which in the eighteenth century was a code word for a centralized unitary state). After achieving independence, Americans faced a dilemma. They were determined to be republicans, but the vast political boundaries they inherited were drawn by the British Crown, and so seemed to demand monarchical government as both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton said.

The matter was not hopeless. For although the States were too large, they were sparsely populated. At the time of independence no city was over 30,000. As population increased, the State could be divided through secession in the direction of a human republican scale. And so what is known as the States of Kentucky and West Virginia seceded from Virginia. Tennessee seceded from North Carolina, and Maine from Massachusetts. Each entered the Union as a sovereign State on terms of equality with the other States. But each of these new States were large enough to demand monarchical government. So it would appear that even these States, as their populations expanded, would have to be divided, and divided again to achieve the traditional scale of republican government.

Or did they? David Hume was the first to challenge the traditional belief that a republic had to be small. In 1752 he published an essay, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” in which he argued not only that a republic could be large, but that if properly ordered, a large republic would be the best polity. He began by accepting the traditional view that, all things equal, a small republic would be the best polity. But small states are vulnerable to conquest by larger ones. The remedy was a large state composed of small republics. He called the later “county republics.” These would have considerable autonomy over morals, education, and social welfare, leaving to the central authority such general matters as defense, foreign treaties, and commerce. Hume observed that such a polity was already mirrored in the Swiss federation and the United Provinces, and he saw no reason why a country the size of Britain or France could not be ordered in this way. Strictly speaking, such a polity would not be a republic in the traditional sense, but it would not be entirely arbitrary to call it a republic insofar as its “county republics,” which were of traditional republican scale, retained a tolerably high level of self government.

Jefferson had read Hume, and it might have been Hume's essay that inspired his project of dividing Virginia into what he called “ward republics,” each of which would retain considerable autonomy over its local affairs. “Each ward,” he said, “would thus be a small Republic within itself, and every man in the state would thus become an acting member of the common government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, but important, and entirely within his competence. The wit of man cannot devise a more solid base for a free, durable, and well administered Republic.” Jefferson knew that Virginia was already too large to be a proper republic, and that the remedy should be division of the territory into small cantonal states. Just as the Constitution guarantees to each State a republican form of government (Art. IV, Sec. IV), so Jefferson is arguing that Virginia should guarantee this privilege to each ward republic. He put it this way: “Just as Cato ended every speech with ‘Carthage must be destroyed,' so do I [end] every opinion with the injunction: divide the counties into wards.”

The United States were born in secession, carried out in the name of human scale republicanism. Insofar as republican government was taken seriously, secession and division would be at the core of U.S. politics until the territorial boundaries drawn by the British Crown were reduced to republican scale either by secession from a State to form another sovereign State or by division of a State into cantonal republics.

But this republican disposition was challenged by the Louisiana Purchase (1803). If the territory of the original thirteen colonies was too large for republican government, then the Louisiana Purchase Territory ( which more than doubled the original territory) posed an even greater temptation to monarchical government. In time, Washington would rule this territory as the British Crown had ruled its colonies. Instead of dividing existing States in the direction of human scale republicanism, new States would be added to the empire. Attention would shift from republican division to monarchical centralization. Moreover, new States were added not by constitutional amendment but by a majority of Congress. Given that different sections, in a federation of continental scale, had different interests, the entrance of new States could and did upset the regional interests of certain State coalitions. A furious battle for control of the city of command now ensued, and the unintended consequence of this battle would be a steady expansion of its powers.

After the war to suppress secession 1861-1865, no American State any longer retained a republican form of government, no matter what it might profess. An American State today is little more than an administrative unit of the City of Command. The tradition of secession and division in the direction of human scale republicanism that once characterized American politics has dried up. The treaty annexing Texas allowed its division into five States, but that has not happened. Twenty seven contiguous counties in Northern California voted in 1992 to secede and form the 51st State. The legislature of California vetoed it. And it is doubtful if Congress would have allowed secession in either Texas or California--even if their legislatures had approved.

But none of this had to happen. It was the result of choices made by Americans and their rulers, often in ignorance of what they were doing. Up until 1861, the tradition of secession and division in the direction of human scale republicanism was still strong. Most of the secession movements in the antebellum period had their source in quarrels over the disposition of western territory–extending now to the Pacific through conquests and purchases from Mexico. In 1843, John Quincy Adams and other New England leaders argued that the annexation of Texas meant the secession of New England.

Three decades earlier Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts argued in the House of Representatives that the admission of Louisiana as a State, without a constitutional amendment, would justify the secession of New England. His speech is a window through which we can see how strong republican dispositions were at that time. “I hold,” he declared, “my life, liberty, and property, as the people of the State, from which I have the honor to be a representative, hold theirs by a better tenure than any this National Government can give...We hold these by the laws, customs, and principles of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Behind her ample shield we find refuge, and feel safety....Sir, I confess it, the first public love of my heart is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The love of this Union grows out of this attachment to my native soil, and is rooted in it. I cherish it, because it affords the best external hope for her peace, her prosperity, her independence” (italics mine).

Notice that Quincy treats the Union as an instrument created by the States for their prosperity. Later Lincoln would treat the Union (in the manner of emerging European nationalism) not as an instrument but as a mystical end in itself. In post-Lincolnian rhetoric the Union would no longer be a federation of republics, but the republic, “one and indivisible.”
But an indivisible unitary state is precisely what the Founders used ‘monarchy' as a codeword for. Quincy went on to say that the admission of Louisiana, without a constitutional amendment, would justify secession: “it is my deliberate opinion that it is virtually a dissolution of this Union; that it will free the States from their moral obligation; and, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some, definitely to prepare for a separation–amicably if they can, violently if they must.” The speaker ruled Quincy's language out of order, but the House took a vote, and ruled it in order.

Quincy was simply continuing the Founding American tradition of using secession and division as policies in search of republican scale in a territory of monarchical scale. Writing to William Crawford in June, 1816, after thirteen years of secessionist agitation in New England, Jefferson said: “if any state in the Union will declare it prefers separation ... to a continuance in Union....I have no hesitation in saying, ‘let us separate.'” Nor did he think that the vast Louisiana territory should be governed by a centralized regime. He thought that as the territories filled up people would naturally form governments of their own and that these would federate into new Unions separate from the mother Union as the colonies had seceded from the British Crown and set up their own Union of States. In a letter to Joseph Priestley January 29, 1804, he said that he would be happy to have a Mississippi Confederacy alongside the old Atlantic Confederacy. Jefferson's vision of westward expansion was to create what he called “an empire of liberty,” which meant expanding the sphere of self-governing republics, whether they formed themselves into one, two, three, or more Unions of States did not matter. This is how he thought of John Jacob Astor's settlements in the northwest: “Free and independent Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood and interest, and employing like us the rights of self-government.” Here secession and division would have brought about a Commonwealth of American Unions, held together by trade and defense treaties and by common kinship and cultural allegiances.

In a speech before the Senate on March 1, 1825, Thomas Hart Benton bore witness to this Jeffersonian republican vision of the West. “In planting the seed of a new power on the coast of the Pacific ocean, “ he said, “it should be well understood that when strong enough to take care of itself, the new Government should separate from the mother Empire as the child separates from the parent at the age of manhood.”

But it was not to be. Post-Lincolnian America would abandon the republican policy of secession and division in favor of the French Revolutionary model of a centralized “republic,” one and indivisible. Or more precisely, this was not an abandonment of the republican tradition so much as a perversion of it. The French Revolutionaries had taken certain aspects of republicanism - equality, fraternity, and sovereignty of the people - qualities that can exist only on a small scale and mapped them on to a France of some 30 million people. They wanted the morally favorable human scale virtues of republics without regard to scale, but that is impossible. A unitary state such as France can no more be a republic than an assembly of 20,000 can be a committee, or a mansion can be a large cottage.

The characterization of the mass modern unitary state as a “republic,” one that appeared with the French Revolution, was the greatest open air swindle in modern history. Tocqueville immediately understood this. What was evil in monarchy, he said, was not so much an hereditary executive, as the disposition to build a centralized unitary state. The French Revolution and the mass democracy it spawned did not weaken this disposition to centralize power at the expense of smaller independent social authorities but increased it a hundred fold. In Tocqueville's view the so called “French Republic” was more of a monarchy, and potentially more despotic, than that managed by Louis XVI.

And he was right. The centralized mass “republics” of the 19th and 20th centuries would pursue global wars and totalitarian revolutions on a scale and intensity unprecedented in history. An 18th century monarch could not order universal conscription, but the French Republic could and did. While Louis XVI had to content himself with an army of 180,000, the force the Republic sent into Russia numbered 600,000. Nearly the entire army perished, as the “citizens” of this newly formed mass democracy were transformed into canon fodder. But this posed no problem, for another draft could be ordered. By the end of Napoleon's rule, the French Republic had conscripted some 3,000,000 troops.

Just as the Romans continued to use the language of republicanism as a mask of legitimacy long after the Republic had been crushed underfoot by the empire, so modern states call themselves “republics” when they have centralized more power than 18th century European monarchs could have dreamed of. The anti-republican modern state has stolen the moral goods of republicanism and covered its despotic nakedness with them. If we are ever to recover the civic virtues of republican life, in some form or other, we must begin by deconstructing the modern state's inverted-world-use of republican language, and by unmasking the modern state as the hyper-monarchy that Tocqueville perceived it to be at its birth.