#26-28: Strong government demands a standing army

Hamilton lets fly in #26-28 with some of his strongest language on behalf of a very powerful, very centralized national government. The issue is whether the Constitution should limit the war-making powers of Congress, and whether government should maintain a national army and navy even in peacetime. Hamilton answers the first question with a strong and categorical “No.” He answers the second with an equally resounding “Yes!”

The issue of the standing army has been noncontroversial throughout American history. Citizens say the military should be larger or smaller, that it should or shouldn’t be sent into Vietnam or Libya or Afghanistan or Iraq or Kosovo. But the question whether the US should maintain military forces hasn’t been disputed except by Quakers and a few other strongly pacifistic groups.

If there is a criticism to be made, it is that America has too often been unprepared for war. Look at America in 1776, 1861, 1917 and 1943. In each year, you’ll find America desperate to recruit and train soldiers and build up the weapons and ordinance necessary to respond to an imminent war. The Minuteman is an heroic symbol of the Revolution. But citizen soldiers could never have won the war. The first battles of the civil war were described as clashes of armed mobs. Only in 1862 and after did the armies of the North and South function well. Even in WWII, the Americans spent half the war getting ready. Take the case of Carwood Lipton — a sergeant in the famous Band of Brothers company of paratroopers. Lipton joined the army in August of 1942 — four months before America declared war. But even though Lipton was an early volunteer, he didn’t get involved until the last year of the war. He spend nearly two years training and didn’t see any combat action until June 1944. Despite maintaining a peacetime army and navy, America has often been unprepared when war came.

Getting back to Hamilton’s arguments in Federalist #26-28, he insists that the people (through the Constitution) ought never to limit the powers of the government, and especially not where defense is concerned:

 The idea of restraining the legislative authority, in the means of providing for the national defense, is one of those refinements which owe their origin to a zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened.

“A zeal for liberty more ardent than enlightened.” That’s Hamilton’s way of saying it would foolish to allow the common people to limit what government can do. Might the government not, from time to time, abuse unlimited power? Hamilton agrees that it might, but insists it is worth the risk.

 [I]t is better to hazard the abuse of that confidence than to embarrass the government and endanger the public safety by impolitic restrictions on the legislative authority.

 Hamilton grows so emphatic in his defense of unlimited war powers that he suggests, still in the opening section of #26, that any people who would constrain their legislative branch are probably incapable of living under any government.

[I]f the principles [opponents of the Constitution] inculcate, on various points, could so far obtain as to become the popular creed, they would utterly unfit the people of this country for any species of government whatever.

Citizens ought to be more familiar with these passages. They should that, at least to some of the founders, the Constitution wa primarily an instrument of government power, rather than personal liberties. American citizens’ liberty was much greater before the Constitution than after. These three essays make that point very clearly.

With #26, Hamilton emphasizes that unlimited war powers are needed, despite the risk of abuse. In #27, he assures readers that the risk of abuse is negligible because US Senators are going to be so wise and good:

 [T]here is reason to expect that [the Senate] will generally be composed with peculiar care and judgment; that these circumstances promise greater knowledge and more extensive information in the national councils, and that they will be less apt to be tainted by the spirit of faction, and more out of the reach of those occasional ill-humors, or temporary prejudices and propensities, which, in smaller societies, frequently contaminate the public councils, beget injustice and oppression of a part of the community, and engender schemes which, though they gratify a momentary inclination or desire, terminate in general distress, dissatisfaction, and disgust.

 it is a point of view Hamilton expresses many times throughout the Federalist. He was convinced that the flaws in the Constitution and in the states and in human nature would be mitigated and corrected by the gloriously high and wise actions of the United States Senate. Time has not borne this out.

In #28, Hamilton reassures readers that the big, permanent national army isn’t a danger because it is not likely to be used. He offers the following guiding principle:

The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief

In other words, the size of the military force brought against an enemy or a rebellion ought to be big enough to put it down. He envisions small and local insurrections which local militias could deal with. He further imagines turmoil on a larger scale (as had happened a few year’s earlier in Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts). The state had managed to put that down. So in neither case would the national army even be called on.

Overall, #28 is an exercise in failed imagination. Hamilton can imagine a tiny, local riot. And he can visualize something a bit larger – Shay’s Rebellion was still fresh in the memory after all. But Hamilton seems unable to imagine the national government going up against a large, multi-state section of the country:

When will the time arrive that the federal government can raise and maintain an army capable of erecting a despotism over the great body of the people of an immense empire, who are in a situation, through the medium of their State governments, to take measures for their own defense, with all the celerity, regularity, and system of independent nations?

He expects readers to answer the question “Never.” He expects them to believe that national government would never be large enough to “maintain an army capable of erecting a despotism” over “the people of an immense empire.” But that happened in the Civil War. The rebellious southern states were three times larger in 1861 than the entire nation of America when Hamilton write those words. The confederacy certainly would qualify as “an immense empire” in his terms. And the US government, with its standing army and navy, did “erect a despotism” over it.

Note that use of the word despotism isn’t a criticism. Lincoln and the North were morally and legally right to subdue the confederacy, end slavery, and bring the southern states back into the Union. But “despotism” is an accurate word for the strong rule the US exerted over the rebel states.

Consider:

• Would Hamilton have approved of Lincoln’s actions during the Civil War? How about the other founders?

• What are the chances that America’s standing army will ever again be used in open combat against a section of the country?