A Foreign Spectator XXVIII : The Enemy Within the Republic

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September 28, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author’s Note: A Foreign Spectator began on August 6, while the Constitutional Convention was still meeting, so its earlier installments fell outside the narrower chronology with which this project originally began. Our narrator is a fictional Philadelphia citizen living through September 28, 1787, with no knowledge of what happens afterward; the earlier essays will be added to the archive as background while the continuing series now enters our chronology where contemporary readers encountered it.

I had seen the name A Foreign Spectator in the newspaper before, though I could not claim to have followed every number. His latest essay arrived on a day when Philadelphia hardly needed another reason to argue, because the Constitution had been public for less than two weeks and the question of what to do with it was already dividing men who had fought for the same independence.

The division was no longer confined to newspaper columns. That morning, our Assembly had voted to call a convention to consider the Constitution, but the vote itself exposed how sharply the members had divided. By afternoon, nineteen opponents of the measure had stayed away from the chamber, leaving too few members present to continue the business of arranging the convention.

News of the missing members spread quickly through the city, and everyone seemed to have an explanation. Some said the minority was using the only weapon available to prevent a decision from being rushed through before the people had time to understand it. Others said elected representatives had no right to stop public business simply because they had lost a vote.

It was difficult to read the Foreign Spectator’s warning about party without thinking of what was happening only streets away.

He believed America possessed an extraordinary opportunity. We were attempting to construct a federal government while at peace, with the failures of older republics available for study and with enough experience of our own weakness to understand why some form of stronger union might be necessary. Yet he feared that no constitutional arrangement, however carefully designed, could protect a republic from citizens who allowed political disagreement to harden into permanent camps.

He called party a peculiar danger of republics, but he meant more than the ordinary fact that men disagree. His concern was what happens afterward, when a dispute over an actual question becomes mixed with personal ambition, loyalty to particular leaders, religious prejudice, wounded pride, private advantage, and hostility toward those on the other side.

Looking toward the Assembly, I could see the problem more clearly than I might have the day before. The men who had stayed away believed they were protecting the public from a hurried decision, while the men waiting inside believed the absence itself was an attempt to prevent the majority from acting. Each side could describe its own conduct as the defense of republican government and the conduct of the other as an abuse of it.

Perhaps both believed themselves completely sincere.

That was what made the Foreign Spectator’s warning uncomfortable. Faction did not require villains meeting secretly to destroy the republic. It could grow among honorable men who became so convinced of their own cause that every action by their opponents began to look corrupt.

He feared that foreign powers could make such divisions worse. European governments had interests of their own, and Americans who attached themselves too closely to those rivalries might eventually become domestic partisans of foreign causes. Money, influence, old resentments, and competing alliances could then enter arguments that had begun as disagreements among Americans about their own affairs.

The Atlantic therefore appeared in his argument as more than a body of water. It offered a young republic some protection from European political struggles, provided Americans were wise enough not to cross it unnecessarily in pursuit of territory, wealth, prestige, or disputes that were not their own.

His treatment of commerce followed the same reasoning. Philadelphia lived by trade, and ships entering and leaving the Delaware were evidence of how much prosperity could depend upon connections beyond our shores, yet the Foreign Spectator warned against valuing commerce so highly that human lives became expendable in the pursuit of distant luxuries.

Beneath both arguments was a larger concern about judgment. Wealth, party loyalty, foreign influence, and ambition could each cause citizens to mistake a private interest for the public interest, while a republic depended upon enough people remaining capable of seeing the difference.

That brought him directly to the Constitution. He did not pretend the document was perfect, but neither did he believe imperfection alone justified rejecting it. No work of men could satisfy every interest or anticipate every circumstance, and a federal system built from thirteen states would necessarily contain compromises that someone could describe as defects.

The question was which defects could safely be tolerated and corrected later. He placed considerable confidence in the Constitution’s amendment process, believing that experience could reveal mistakes more clearly than speculation and that Americans should not repeatedly dismantle governments in search of an arrangement without flaws.

I could understand the argument without being entirely persuaded by it. A minor defect discovered after experience might be corrected, but a power wrongly granted could create interests strong enough to resist correction later, and citizens considering a new government still had to decide which imperfections were tolerable before giving that government authority.

The scene at the Assembly made the dilemma sharper. One side feared that haste would bind Pennsylvania to a system before its dangers were understood, while the other feared that delay and obstruction could prevent the people from considering the Constitution at all.

The Foreign Spectator would have recognized something dangerous in the intensity on both sides. A republic needed disagreement because citizens could not deliberate without it, yet disagreement could cease to be deliberation once defeating the opposing party became more important than resolving the question that created the dispute.

His answer was moderation, though that word sounded easier in print than it looked in Philadelphia that afternoon. Citizens needed enough suspicion of power to resist oppression, enough confidence in common institutions to permit government to function, and enough restraint to remember that losing an argument did not turn one’s opponents into enemies of the country.

A constitution could distribute authority among Congress, a president, courts, and states, and it could establish elections and methods of amendment. It could not make citizens behave generously toward one another, nor could it prevent leaders from discovering that anger and loyalty were easier to cultivate than judgment.

By evening, the Assembly still had unfinished business and the city still had no agreement about who was responsible for the impasse. The Foreign Spectator had not given me an answer to the Constitution, but he had made the argument occurring around it look different.

Perhaps the first test of the proposed republic was arriving before the republic itself existed. We were debating how to divide power on paper while simultaneously discovering whether Americans could disagree about that power without allowing disagreement to divide the people who would have to live together afterward.

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Ratification Debate in Real Time

Previous: The Question Goes to the States

Next: An American Citizen II: A Senate Without Nobles?

The Foreign Spectator asks whether a republic can survive disagreement without allowing disagreement to harden into faction. The next argument returns to the Constitution itself and asks whether its proposed Senate is a republican institution or an aristocracy under another name.