These four presentations are going to be brief summaries of papers that were delivered at a conference that Don Livingston organized last year under the Abbeville Institute, which is his organization, and they've been turned into a book, and that's the cover of the book that's going to be published in the fall, right, Don, in this fall, Rethinking the American Union. And so you want to put that on your list of books to buy, I guess. And so what I'm going to talk about, founding fathers of constitutional
Conversion is how from the very beginning of the American Republic, there was a very powerful
group of men who wanted to simply subvert the Constitution and create a system of unlimited
government.
And they were led by Alexander Hamilton, one of the co-authors of the Federalist Papers.
And so I guess one of the main points I make in this paper is that it was doomed from the
beginning.
of Limited Constitutional Government was whittled away at as soon as the ink was dry, literally,
on the original constitution. And John C. Calhoun had this figured out. In his great
book, A Disquisition on Government, here's what he said. This was published in 1850.
He said, it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict
and Limit the Powers of Government without investing those for whose protection they
are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance will be sufficient to prevent the
major and dominant party from abusing its powers.
The party in possession of government will always be opposed to any and all restrictions
on its powers.
They will have no need of these restrictions and would come in time to regard these limitations
as Unnecessary and Improper Restraints and Endeavor to Elude Them.
It is sheer folly to suppose that the party in possession of the ballot box and the physical
force of the country, the military force, could be successfully resisted by an appeal
to reason, truth, justice, or the obligations imposed by the Constitution.
He predicted that the restrictions of government and power would ultimately be annulled and
the government be converted into one of unlimited powers.
And of course he was exactly right.
And now where did Calhoun get these ideas?
This was 1850, he was warning about this and he was writing about the need for some sort
of system of the people of the states to interpret the constitution and to have a say in constitutionality
rather than leaving it up to the central government itself.
Well, he got these ideas because he had been involved in politics since 1811 and he had
been observing his colleagues in the Congress, the United States Senate, he was vice president,
he was secretary of war, you know, for a while.
And so he spent his whole adult life in politics and Murray Rothbard considered Calhoun to
to be one of the greatest American political philosophers, if not the best American political
philosopher of all time.
And so what did Calhoun know?
Well, he knew all about the machinations of Hamilton and his fellow nationalists.
Hamilton, when Hamilton got to the Constitutional Convention, he laid out his plan.
His plan was the plan of the nationalists who were headquartered mostly in Philadelphia,
in New York and New England, and they wanted a permanent president who would appoint all
the governors who would have veto power over all state legislation.
So there would be no state government at all, really, it'd be all power would have been
centralized at the center.
And they wanted that in order to adopt British-style mercantilism as an economic system.
They knew that they couldn't have a system where New York could have 50 percent tariffs
on imports, but South Carolina could have 10 percent tariffs on imports.
The Trade of the World would go into Charleston and not New York, so they needed a centralized
governmental power and they needed a bank modeled after the Bank of England, they said,
Hamilton said, and of course he got that when he got the Bank of the United States, and
they wanted a big public debt and they wanted corporate welfare, what we today call corporate
welfare.
They called it an internal improvement subsidies.
It was Hamilton who coined the phrase the American system to describe this economic system.
And so these two things, centralized governmental power and the British-style mercantilism
were at the heart of what the nationalists so-called wanted, the Federalist Party basically.
And so as soon as the ink was dry on the Constitution, Hamilton denounced it as a frail and worthless
fabric because he didn't get his way.
We didn't get a king, a permanent president who would appoint all the governors as his
puppets.
and so he went to work destroying the Constitution. In his great debate with Jefferson over the
constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, the original central bank, he invented
the notion of implied powers of the Constitution. Jefferson said there's no, the delegated powers
do not include a central bank. The Constitutional Convention debated this and rejected the idea of
a national bank and Hamilton said well you have to read between the lines and there are implied
Applied Powers.
And that argument, they even call it a doctrine now, a doctrine of implied powers.
Hamilton was the first to bastardize the general welfare clause of the Constitution,
to expand it to mean not just things that would benefit everyone, but special interest
programs.
He perverted the commerce clause.
He was probably the very first lawyer to expand the commerce clause, which was originally
To make the claim that the states did not ratify the Constitution, the Constitution and the Federal Government somehow created the states, which is exactly backwards of actual history and is illogical as well.
You know, the union of two things cannot be older than the things themselves. That would be like saying a husband and a marriage could be older than either a husband or wife, and so that's just illogical and ahistorical.
and so on.
But he made that argument and that argument was repeated for decades thereafter that the
central government had all sovereignty and the people of the states did not.
And so there's a historian named Clinton Rossiter who taught at Cornell for many years.
And Clinton Rossiter said this, he said that Hamilton would have affixed certain certificate
of constitutionality to every last tax.
Hamilton took a large view of the power of Congress to tax because he took a large view
And then he says, having failed to persuade his colleagues at Philadelphia of the beauties of a truly national plan of government, and having thereafter recognized the futility of persuading the legislature of three-fourths of the states to surrender even a jot of their privileges, Hamilton set out to remold the Constitution into an instrument of national supremacy, to remold the Constitution with lawyerly subterfuge, not through constitutional amendments.
," but through reinterpretation of the Constitution.
His view was the opposite of Jefferson's.
Jefferson was a strict constructionist, whereas Hamilton thought that the Constitution could
potentially be used as a rubber stamp of approval of anything the government ever wanted to
do.
That, of course, is what it is now.
That's what it's become now.
As Judge Napolitano pointed out in one of his books, that the Supreme Court did not
and how to rule a single federal law unconstitutional from 1937 to 1995, rubber stamp of everything.
And here's Clinton Rossiter who's celebrating this.
He says, with the aid of the doctrine of implied powers, Hamilton converted the powers enumerated
in Article 1, Section 8 into a firm foundation for whatever prodigious feats of legislation
any future Congress might contemplate.
So Article 1, Section 8 was supposed to be a restriction of the powers of government.
Hamilton's rhetoric turned it into unlimited government, properly interpreted by slick lawyers
like himself.
So this subterfuge continued.
The next most important person that I write about in this paper, and I don't have time
to really get into it in a lot of detail, is John Marshall, the Chief Justice, who was
appointed by John Adams at the very last day of the Adams administration, and he was the
the Chief Justice for over 30 years, and one of the things he did was to invent out of
thin air the notion of judicial review. Those words do not exist in the Constitution, and
this essentially meant review of federal legislation by John Marshall. John Marshall will tell
us all what's constitutional and what's not. He was the Chief Justice after all. And also
In a case called Martin vs. Hunter's Lisey, Marshall also invented out of thin air the
notion that the federal government had a right to veto state court decisions.
That's not in the Constitution either, but so you had the federal government taking over
the state courts at the same time.
Marshall also repeated Hamilton's bogus theory that somehow the nation created the states,
the whole people created the states somehow.
Now, it wasn't the states that ratified the Constitution creating the central government.
And here's what he says, in the name of the people, the federal government claimed the
right quote, to legitimately control all individuals or governments within the American territory.
All individuals or governments. And that was not the American system. The American system
was the states in Article 7 of the Constitution. They ratified the Constitution, not the other
and the Other Way Around, and so Marshall went a long way in adopting Hamilton's implied
powers idea and of course his famous decision of McCulloch versus Maryland where he ruled
that the central bank, the bank of the United States was constitutional, that's where he
almost used verbatim Hamilton's opinion on the constitutionality of the bank that he
This is what our liberties would be. In fact, the Jeffersonians thought that this was the most absurd idea in the world, that you would fight a revolution and then hand over everyone's liberty into five government lawyers with lifetime tenure, put it all in their hands.
What kind of sense would that make? How stupid could they have been to have done such a thing? Why would that be better than a king, as far as that goes?
The next co-conspirator was Joseph Story, the Supreme Court Justice, and he wrote a
famous book called Commentaries on the Constitution, which Clinton Rossiter said should have been
called Commentaries on Alexander Hamilton's Commentaries on the Constitution.
And this was a book that went a long way to spread this idea that the central government
and his supreme Hamiltonian idea that we should have sort of a king-like president who would
appoint all the governors and that the states should be eviscerated of their powers and
we should have a centralized monopolistic state.
And just among some of the things he said in this, you know, it's a big long book and
I've critiqued it, but he said, secession of a single state would mean dissolution of
the government.
Well, how would that happen if Alabama seceded?
When Washington, D.C. disappeared, how many people think that would happen?
When the 11 southern states seceded during the war to prevent southern independence,
the federal government proceeded to fill the largest army in the history of the world up
to that point for four years.
It didn't disappear.
It grew.
And so, you know, that was kind of nonsense.
Another thing Story said, to give you an example of what's in this book, is that the original
The general compact of society in no instance has ever been formally expressed at the first
institution of a state.
That is, there was never any agreement by the citizens of any state to always and forever
be obedient to that state.
And so he recognized that, that there was never any agreement to be obedient to whatever
the state does, even if it's done in the name of the majority or whatever.
And then he goes on to say, however, every part should pay obedience to the will of the
whole.
And then he says, who is to define the will of the whole?
The government.
He doesn't say that there should be any plebiscite or any vote or anything like that.
The government will tell us what the will of the whole says, and then we must be obedient
to that.
That's Joseph's story.
And then he goes on to say, the majority, and he's not talking about the majority of
of the People. He's talking about the politicians' interpretation of what they think the majority
will is. He says, the majority must have a right to accomplish that object by the means
which they deem adequate for the end. The will of the majority of the people is absolute
and sovereign, and here's the creepy part, limited only by its means and power to make
its will effectual. So the only limits are the limits of violence, you know, the limits
of Money and Credit, The Theory of Money and Credit, The Theory of Money and Credit, The
and the French Revolution.
He also expressed the view that if government becomes tyrannical, the only legitimate resort
should be, quote, the proper tribunals constituted by the government, which would appeal to the
good sense and integrity and justice of the majority of the people.
So rely on elections.
Okay, well, we'll just rely on elections, and don't let the people have anything to
do with it.
Okay.
I will repeat John Marshall's fable that the so-called Supremacy Clause of the Constitution
made the Federal Government supreme over all matters, but all the so-called Supremacy Clause
did is that there were delegated powers in Article 1, Section 8. There are 17 things
there. The Federal Government is supreme in those, the foreign policy, for example,
but that's it. The 10th Amendment says all else is reserved to the people and the states,
And this has been perverted year after year after year by people who think that because
it's called the Supremacy Clause, the federal government is supreme in everything.
But no, it only has precedent in those things that are, those powers that are delegated
to it in Article 1, Section 8.
Okay, but that lie was spread by a story also.
I'll go on. Daniel Webster was another one. Daniel Webster had a famous debate with Robert
Hayne, a senator from South Carolina, on the Constitution. And this is online. You can read
stories. The book is online. The commentary is on the Constitution. And the Webster-Hayne
debate is also online, if you want to read it. And he was a very prominent person, of
The Constitution of the United States confers on the government itself the power of deciding ultimately and conclusively upon the extent of its own authority.
So he declares that if there are going to be limits on the government authority, it's the government itself that determines what those limits are to be.
That was never the American system. It was always supposed to be the people of the states and political communities organized at the state and local level would confer this power.
And Senator John Taylor of Virginia, he wrote a book on the Constitution based on the notes that were taken by Robert Yates, who was a New York Supreme Court Chief Justice who attended the Constitutional Convention.
and after Yates' death his notes on the convention were published by his wife
and Taylor, John Taylor cited these
and he said one of the things he said was the constitution could never have
designed to destroy liberty
by investing five or six men installed for life
with the power of regulating the constitutional rights of all political
departments
and that's what Webster was saying that we should just leave it up to the
government itself
to determine what the limits of its powers are
He also said, quote, one of two things is true, either the laws of the union are beyond the discretion and beyond the control of the states, or else we have no constitution or general government. So either the people of the states are totally out of it and have no control over the central government, or we have no government. So if you want to have a government, you have to give us monopolistic power. And this is the kind of propaganda. He also, the bottom line was, trust us.
He said this, you know, so what if we have tyranny in the future? What do we do about it?
He says this, quote, trust in the efficacy of frequent elections, trust in the judicial power,
trust us lawyers, trust us politicians. That's what he's saying.
And so you hear old John Calhoun is reading this and he probably didn't know whether to laugh or cry
reading of trust in lawyers and the lawyers who beginning with Hamilton went diligently at work
destroying the constitution trust in them to limit the tyrannical proclivities of government
that's not likely to work that's why people like Calhoun thought nullification and secession
in concurrent majorities and other vehicles like this were necessary so that the people could
interpose for themselves and not just rely on the good graces of the Daniel Websters and the Joseph
of Stories of the World.
And so the point of this paper, really the main point, is to show how from the very beginning
the Constitution was in the minds of some people a dead letter, the Hamiltonian segment
of American polity, and they worked very diligently for many years.
And Stories, Commentaries was really the book that the northerners, northerners understood
to be the theory of the Constitution prior to the American Civil War, as it's called.
Whereas most of the people in the South understood the Jeffersonian vision of states' rights
and federalism as far as that's concerned.
And so my time is about up and that's my story for now.
Thanks.
Thank you very much.