Not many people care these days about the Articles of Confederation. Few think we should return to them today, and few lament that they were replaced by the current US Constitution. (I say few — not none. There is a species of domestic terrorist called sovereign citizens who insist the Articles of Confederation are still in effect, and that they are exempt from taxes and traffic laws because they choose not to pay them or obey them. But for the rest of us, the Articles don’t mean much.

So the batch of Federalist essays from #15 to #22 are beating a dead horse, sort of. Hamilton recognizes this early in #15: 

“It may perhaps be asked what need there is of reasoning or proof to illustrate a position [the deficiency of the Articles] which is not either controverted or doubted, to which the understandings and feelings of all classes of men assent, and which in substance is admitted by the opponents as well as by the friends of the new Constitution.”

 And yet it is worthwhile learning what the defects of the Articles were. It shows what problems the founders were trying to fix with the new Constitution.

If you happen to be standing in a wide open public place and someone shouts, “Danger! Run!” you’re going to want to ask, “Where is the danger, and in which direction should I run to escape it?” Similarly, if the Articles were deficient and the Constitution aims to fix those deficiencies, we should know what the defects were.

And the main defect was this: The Articles of Confederation were a pact among the 13 states. The national Congress was dependent on the states for everything. Congress had no power at all over the citizens of the country, except by appeal to the states. And it didn’t have much leverage on the states, either.

Congress could ask for money, but the states were free to give as much or as little as they wished. Congress could negotiate a trade agreement with Holland or Spain, but each state was free to abide by it or ignore it.  Congress could raise an army to defend settlers on the frontier in Georgia. But it had no leverage to force Connecticut and Rhode Island to join in the effort.

The Articles were not a bad document. Experience found them too weak, but they were aiming for the right thing. Reading the Articles, you get very much the same sense of high ambition that you get from reading the Constitution:

The said states hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of their Liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any other pretence whatever.

Truth is, the Constitution was not a dramatic turn in human affairs toward liberty and self-government. It should be seen, rather, as a step away from those principles after the disappointing experience from 1778 to 1787. The purpose of the Constitution was to give the national government more coercive power over the states and the citizens.

Under the Articles, the states could do what Congress asked if they wanted to. But due to self-interest, they often didn’t. Hamilton writes that the country had learned its lesson and needed to stop relying on voluntary compliance:

“There was a time when we were told that breaches, by the States, of the regulations of the federal authority were not to be expected; that a sense of common interest would preside over the conduct of the respective members, and would beget a full compliance with all the constitutional requisitions of the Union. This language, at the present day, would appear as wild as a great part of what we now hear from the same quarter will be thought, when we shall have received further lessons from that best oracle of wisdom, experience.”

Hamilton underestimates the difficulty and harmful effect of tying the states together under one government. The advantages of a large and powerful nation with few internal regulations to trade and commerce are clear and correct. He’s right about those. But he fails to recognize the downside. The states – even the 13 original ones – were quite different in their populations, their geography and their economic pursuits. The 50 states today are even further apart. Shoehorning them all into a single set of national regulations is uncomfortable and almost never satisfactory to everyone.

But the notion of a national government dominating American life didn’t occur to Hamilton. He was striving to lift the national government from failure to competence. Hamilton worried that citizens would never take the national government seriously. He said people would always look first to their local governments for solutions to issue that mattered to them.

“Upon the same principle that a man is more attached to his family than to his neighborhood, to his neighborhood than to the community at large, the people of each State would be apt to feel a stronger bias towards their local governments than towards the government of the Union; unless the force of that principle should be destroyed by a much better administration of the latter.”

That could hardly be more wrong today. News media today is overwhelmingly national. The names of the president and key congressional representatives are mentioned on the news every day. Voters are far more likely to know the name of their congressional representatives than their state legislators. A tiny proportion know their county commissioner or city councilor. Most Americans have never set foot in their state capitol building.

Local governments keep the lights on and the streets paved and the schools operating and the parks open and the police patrolling. If they do their jobs well, the people need not even notice. State governments are mostly in charge of funding and administration, and are even more inconspicuous. But the national government seems to always be discussing hot-button issues designed to make people angry. The world today shares none of the inclinations toward local action and local loyalties that Hamilton counts on to keep the national government in its place.

Discuss

• Does it surprise you that the Constitution was designed to create a powerful national government?

• Which level of government — local, state, or national — do you feel matters most?

• Which level of government serves you best?