As John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail following a congressional vote for independence on July 2, 1776, “[This date] ought to be Solemnized with Pomp and Parade with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” The future father of the Alien and Sedition Acts was justifiably proud and excited. Consumer spending on Fourth of July fireworks totaled around $2.5 billion this year. Many people today don’t know or care why we celebrate this event—nothing new about that. Nor is the fact that most 4th concerts segue to fireworks with the rousing 1812 Overture something to ponder—we made Tchaikovsky an honorary American long ago.
But for those who took the risk of signing the Declaration, it was the document’s affirmation of the individual over government that became the hill they would die on if necessary. Government was a necessary evil, as Paine wrote, but that wouldn’t stop them from somehow putting the people at the top of the food chain.
To the revolutionaries, government meant sovereignty. That was the “necessary evil” part of any government. As Rothbard might have written in this context, any anarchist thoughts would be “outside the ken of the world at the time.” But how were they going to implement the individualist principles of the Declaration in a government that placed the individual under the state? On November 15, 1777 Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation as their first formal attempt at governing themselves.
There were those in positions of influence, though, who wanted a more “energetic” government than the one provided by the Articles. Today, these people would be calling for a new Pearl Harbor or 9/11 but since government coercion tends to create pushback, they didn’t have long to wait for the needed catalyst.
Shays’s Rebellion
In late 1786 farmers from western counties in Massachusetts were shutting down the courts in protest over onerous taxes. Newspapers described the rebels as “destitute,” but this was propaganda. For every rebel who went to court as a debtor, another went as a creditor. As I wrote in a review of Leonard Richards’s Shays’s Rebellion,
It wasn’t debt that triggered Shays’s Rebellion. . .but the new state government and “its attempt to enrich the few at the expense of the many.” The most glaring instance of this abuse was the decision of Massachusetts to consolidate its war notes at face value.
Even when issued, the notes traded at about one-fourth par and later declined to about one-fortieth face value. Many soldiers were paid in these notes and out of desperation sold them at about one-tenth their value. Boston speculators swooped up eighty percent of these notes, with forty percent of them owned by just 35 men. Every one of those 35 men had either served in the state house during the 1780s or had a close relative who did.
Legislators praised the speculators as “worthy patriots” who had come to the state’s aid in its time of need. But these men did not buy the notes directly from the government; they bought them from farmers and soldiers at greatly depreciated prices, who were now being taxed to redeem them at full value. The speculators, most of whom had stayed home during the war, would now benefit at the expense of veterans.
Massachusetts Governor James Bowdoin called out the militia to suppress the rebellion, and when that failed he turned to Congress to provide special troops for the invented reason that an Indian war was pending in the Ohio Valley. Baron von Steuben—the Prussian drillmaster who had trained Washington’s troops—noted that,
Massachusetts had 92,000 militiamen on its rolls. Theoretically, the militia system excluded the poor and transient. Members were men of substance with deep roots in the community. They were men of property. With such a force at its disposal, why would the Massachusetts government need outside support?
Answer: Only a government at war with its people.
Led by General Benjamin Lincoln—who, on Washington’s order, accepted the sword of British surrender at Yorktown—the army crushed the rebellion early in 1787. As Rothbard notes, General Henry Knox, Noah Webster, and especially Alexander Hamilton, along with George Washington and James Madison, characterized the rebels as levelers wanting to abolish all debts and redistribute property. It was a fear of future rebellions that attracted state delegates to the Federal Convention in Philadelphia, beginning on May 25, 1787.
Jefferson Responds from Paris
While the Rebellion pushed most of the country’s leaders further right toward a strong national government, Thomas Jefferson—minister to France—went radically to the left. As he wrote to Colonel Edward Carrington on January 16, 1787,
I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors; and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty.
He went even further, suggesting anarchy is preferable to oppressive government,
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.
But watch out—if the people turn their backs on public affairs, the governors “shall all become wolves.”
In a letter to Madison on December 20, 1787, commenting on the yet-to-be adopted constitution, Jefferson wrote, “Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.” And so James Madison created a Bill of Rights with the hope it would limit the power of government over the people.
A Government Seeking “Monsters to Destroy”
In early 1917, with the Constitution having taken a beating since its inception, Democrat Representative Oscar Callaway of Texas reported in the Congressional Record that “the J. P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests” had purchased control of twenty-five great newspapers to further the preparedness campaign (for American entry into the Great War).
After Congress voted for war on April 6, the propaganda campaign still needed the draft to force American men overseas to kill and die in what became the First World War. Involuntary servitude in the military was not unconstitutional, according to the state. Jefferson’s “opinion of the people” had been replaced by experts who knew better, and who would shed no blood for their decision.
From that point on war became a major engine of state growth, placing us where we are today, with overseas wars a perpetual backdrop to everyday American life, all in violation of the Constitution.
Conclusion
On January 6, 1789, Paine wrote a letter from London to his recently-married friend, Kitty Nicholson Few, expressing his homesickness for his adopted country amid worry about its future:
A thousand years hence (for I must indulge in a few thoughts), perhaps in less, America maybe what England now is! The innocence of her character that won the hearts of all nations in her favor may sound like a romance, and her inimitable virtue as if it had never been. The ruins of that liberty which thousands bled for, or suffered to obtain, may just furnish materials for a village tale or extort a sigh from rustic sensibility, while the fashionable of that day, enveloped in dissipation, shall deride the principle and deny the fact.
Turns out he was overly optimistic.
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