Hello friends of the Libertarian Revolution in America, now today's topic is, today's topic is, well thank you, I just wanted to get the right title, I know what the topic is, you know, it's like that.
All right, the anti-federalist tradition until the Civil War.
So, we'll call it the Civil War, but, well, we should call it something we know better than that.
Actually, I used to call it the War for Southern Independence, but then I guess it was wrong too,
because the Southern Independence, I mean, Southerners didn't want the war,
so it's really the War of Yankee Aggression.
So, that was the cause of the war, and that was what caused the war.
Now, without talking about the anti-Federalist tradition, especially states' rights and the way that Jefferson and Calhoun and so on brought about this tradition is something I've been studying since childhood.
Well, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but for the past ten years at least.
So, it's not going to be a great lecture because when you know too much about it, well, you don't need no chauffeur, that's a good thing about it.
But definitely it's very difficult to synthesize what you want to say.
But this is actually a very important topic and it's a very important American tradition.
And actually it's the only political tradition that is uniquely American.
And it doesn't have anything to do with the Federalist Papers or that kind of stuff, you know.
Federalist Papers is just a footnote on Hobbes.
That you should remember.
The Theory of Sovereignty that came out of Hobbes, there's just a little footnote, and that's the Federalist Papers.
Now we're talking about something different that has no parallel on any other part of the world.
You may call this tradition anti-Federalism, or anti-Federalism, or you may call it state rights doctrine,
or even true Federalism, as it is, as it has a clear connection with the Federal form of government,
which is considered to be the greatest American contribution to modern politics and which I think it is.
So I will not give you a watered-down version of federalism in which Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Calhoun, Webster, Lincoln and Jefferson Davies are pretty much on the same side.
You know, there are a lot of histories of American political thought and American history simply that they just put all these guys on the same side and so why they were fighting each other, I mean, you just don't get it somehow.
and so the side of the one and only and of course great American political tradition.
No, actually this country was full of tensions and conflicts right from the beginning
and indeed also during colonial times and so there is no single all-encompassing theory of politics
that was shared by the founding fathers or the second and third generation of Americans
as there is not anything like that nowadays.
Rather, what I'll tell you about the American tradition
is really a tale of two cities
and of two very different visions of the American polity
and of the U.S. peoples, plural.
So let's start from the end,
that is from the end of the American experiment
of self-government,
or the beginning of what I already called the War of Yankee Aggression.
In his message to Congress on July 4, 1861, one of the most revered presidents, the framer
of the Second American Founding, said, originally some dependent colonies made the Union.
And in turn, the Union threw off their old dependence for them and made them states.
And he goes on and says, the Union, and not themselves separately, produced their independence and liberty.
The Union is older than any of the states, and in fact, it created them as states.
This is what he said.
And he also warned, I mean, this was not, he also warned that the states had no legal
status outside of the Union.
It was a warning, actually, that was backed up by the bayonets in a few months.
Now, does anyone here believe this interpretation could be correct in any way?
Raise your hands. I mean, don't be afraid.
There might be someone, come on.
Just for the sake of argument, just let's raise one hand.
You know, I don't like unanimity.
Anyway, this actually, although it's still supported by a lot of historians who teach history in a lot of political science or history departments,
you know, this that we call the nationalist interpretation of American history is really untenable.
And in fact, actually during the Continental Congress, the members of Congress were there as agents of existing political societies.
They were not acting as agents of the American people, which did not exist, actually.
And agents cannot authorize their principles to do anything at all.
That goes without saying, but we have to say it, actually.
Also, the common understanding of the participants made the plural nature of the events
crystal clear in the three documents that brought the United States into existence.
And I'm talking actually about the Declaration of Independence that says free and independent states.
I'm talking about the Articles of Confederation between 1781 and 1789 that were like the best constitution that America ever had.
And I'm talking about the Treaty of Paris of 1783 in which Britain recognized the independence of each state separately.
This document doesn't say that the American people can do whatever they want, it says that these states are independent.
According to the three founding documents, we do have a very different story from the one that Lincoln told us,
and especially from the one that people like Samuel Beer and the like tell us nowadays.
The idea that the U.S. are an assemblage of nations and not a single nation is the core belief of the state-right school,
which was the peculiar interpretation of the U.S. Constitution of 1787.
So to this school, which was predominant in America from, I would say, 1798 until the War of Yankee Aggression, or what's it called, the Civil War,
The Constitution was a conflict among peoples of different political societies in their capacity as peoples of the several states.
So we will discuss in a bit the basic tenets of this tradition,
advanced first by Jefferson and perfected by Calhoun.
So in 1798 it was Jefferson and then in the 1830s it was Calhoun.
But first we need to see its deep roots, because it did not come out of the blue in 1798 by Jefferson. It was a long, long story.
It goes way back, actually. It's prior to the Union, actually. The discussion on the Union, it's prior to the establishment of the Union.
So the debate on the nature of the American Union did not begin with Webster and Calhoun in the 30s, with Jefferson and Hamilton in the 1790s, but during the First Continental Congress, and even actually earlier.
And it began prior to the formation of any union at all.
at all. Actually, among the revolutionaries, some of them were not genuine radicals. Some of them were very conservative.
And some of them just went along with independence because they realized that they were going to win.
You know, there's always a bunch of people that just follow and sometimes lead because they see that the movement is in a certain way inevitable.
But they were pretty much loyal, loyal to the British Crown.
And when they could not be loyal anymore to the British Crown,
at least they were loyal to that form of government.
They thought that all authority came from the King.
You know, so a great deal of them were just conservatives
who opposed the revolution and went with it only when they saw no alternative around.
And, you know, we were talking, like, I think the first, it was the first night that Professor Higgs was talking about the fate of the tourists in the United States.
We know that 100,000 of them were expelled from this country. Their properties were confiscated and so on.
So these people didn't want to have pretty much the same fate, so they joined the revolution. Some of them became leaders.
So these people wanted some supreme political power authority placed in a central government which could exercise a coercive power over the states and their citizens.
That was their aim as early as 1774, 1775. That was definitely their aim.
And the radicals on the other hand had no intention of recreating in America a form of government similar to that which they were fighting to overthrow.
So in 1775, Sam Adams stated that every legislature of every colony is and ought to be the sovereign
power within its own limits of territory. But a lot of people in America at the time
still thought that the authority derived from the king, a lot, many more than we think,
and pleaded the necessity of a supreme power over the colonies, already in 1774.
So when independence became a fact, they were forced to accept the theoretical foundation
of the revolution, that is the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which is understood
It was never the sovereignty of the single state or the sovereignty of the amassed people of the United States, but the people organized in states.
Well, you can say states as original political communities or just simply state because they existed somehow.
You could take a look at this with an organic look of the state or simply as because they were already existing political communities.
But, as I said, the proponents of state sovereignty and the sovereignty of the central government were already fighting their underground battle prior to the revolution.
There's a famous episode. In 1775, during the writing of the Declaration on Taken Arms, Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the document,
which set forth the radical theory of voluntary political association as withdrawal.
You could withdraw at will and everything was voluntary, like the very radical theory that was gaining ground in America.
And actually, the conservatives didn't like this theory at all, and so what they did, and they thought this was completely wrong, and John Dickinson, who was their leader in the summer of 1775, rewrote the objectionable portions of the document.
So the final version stated that societies or governments vested with perfect legislatures were formed under charters from the crown.
So, you know, they recognized the authority of the king in forming the colonies to begin with.
So thus conservatives supported their contention that all political authority derived from a superior power and not from the people.
So this was like the very beginning of the differentiation among the American political tradition.
And James Wilson, who nowadays is much revered, I mean, there are a lot of books coming out,
and James Wilson as one of the best founding fathers and so on, has become one of the favorites.
Well, you see, the field of American history, there are so many people writing on the same things
James Wilson was the conservative leader during the drafting of the Articles of the United States Constitutional Convention on the Rights of the Human Rights of the Human Rights of the Human Rights of the Human Rights of the Human Rights
Articles of Confederation. So he tried to give Congress, as Congress was the real hair
to the crown, powers which would make it superior to the states. That's what he tried to do
while they were drafting the Articles of Confederation. And of course you all know that they started
to talk about the Articles of Confederation right after the 4th of July of 1776. As soon
as they declared independence there was this talk and they started to discuss the Articles
of Confederation.
But the states were very jealous, so some of them didn't sign until 1781.
So it took a good five years for them, and it had to be unanimous in order to be approved.
And so it took five years for the Articles to be approved.
But during the war, actually, in the period of the Articles of Confederation, the Radicals
won the battle and were able to forge a confederation of free and independent states that lasted
until 1789 and carried America through victory against a powerful country.
And it's really, I mean, we'll have to, we'll discuss it tonight in our group, in our session,
why is it that America, through this great constitutional way, in a few months, you know,
and I decided to do that and then get rid of the Articles of Confederation.
But it's still quite a mystery because during the period of the Articles of Confederation
nothing concerning the individual citizens could come before Congress.
And Congress had no power to make a state comply with its decisions and in a certain
sense it had no power to coerce the state and not even under this constitution it has
It has power to coerce the state, but it used it. I mean, it has used it anyway, but actually after 1783, 1785, that period was pretty rough, but then Americans were enjoying a great recovery.
They were leading a simple but fruitful life, and most of them were actually getting richer and richer.
And certainly, there was no popular demand for a strong and energetic federal government.
You know, in 1786, 1787, the catch word was energetic.
The government had to be energetic.
And actually, Thomas Jefferson, who was in France at the time,
he received a letter about an energetic government, and he wrote back,
what is this energy all about?
I mean, it sounds like tyranny to me, you know.
Government shouldn't be energetic at all, you know, government should be something else, but I mean everything, but not efficient, not energetic at all.
So there was no popular demand, you know, that is for sure, you know, you couldn't find anything like the people demanding a strong and energetic government, but some of the leaders were.
And, of course, you all know what happened, that the conservatives, scared by Shea's Rebellion,
wanted a powerful and energetic government.
So they got together in Philadelphia, and secretly, very secretly.
And in fact, you know, most of the speeches, you couldn't even think about it,
if there was no secrecy involved in it.
Like Alexander Hamilton went there, and he told,
well, it took six hours to say this to him, but I'll say it very briefly,
that you just said since we're not going to get rid of the states I didn't see
any point in me staying here any longer so he left the convention in 18 June 18
then he went back in September and sign it on behalf of his state while his state
decided not to sign the Constitution so I mean the other two delegates decided
that was not so that's and then this Alexander Hamilton was presented as a
was a champion of federalism for about 200 years, so that's pretty bizarre, but anyway the constitution that was drafted was in fact as national as the federalist could make it and as federal as the anti-federalist could keep it so in a certain sense it was really a compromise a lot of people just when they talk about miracle at Philadelphia you know this bizarre things they just think there was a plan and there was a miracle
And to tell you the truth, if you really look at the Constitution, just the words, it was not such a bad compromise, you know, because especially, it was not such a bad compromise, because at least in Jefferson's readings and in Kahlun's reading of it, you could find a lot of room for state rights, but it was not the words that counted at all.
But, you have to remember, there was no plan for that, there was a compromise, nothing was really planned, they just wanted an energetic government and they got it.
But nonetheless, even if it was a compromise, it was not enough for the anti-Federalists, which of course were not against Federalism, they were actually the Federal Party.
The other one was called the National Party of the Convention, so they would have been called the Federal Party.
But then, you know, they struck down the word national because it was it could cause alarm to the American people and they put down federal
So they understood, they were good in the propaganda machine, Hamilton and Madison and Jay
So they just understood that people in America like the world of federalism
So they fashion themselves the federal party and immediately they called the others the anti-federal party since you are against us
And so it's clear that the anti-Federalists were not against Federalism.
Actually, there was the French Minister in Philadelphia who understood perfectly what was going on.
He wrote a letter back and said, while the Federalists want to bring a centralized state,
the anti-Federalists want to preserve Federalism.
It's bizarre, but in Europe you've got to know this, you know, and I'll talk about this later, I'll try to explain it to you later, but that's how they're called.
So there was really a change of etiquette, but it was not completely so, because in a certain sense in the United States in 1787, the idea of becoming federal was also the idea of becoming united.
So, in a certain sense, sometimes they use the word to say, well, Pennsylvania will refuse to become federal.
That is, will refuse to be amassed in one single country. So, you have these two meanings together.
And, actually, the anti-federalists, they gave a pretty good fight, and actually it is doubtful whether the majority of Americans at the time was in favor of the Constitution or not.
This is debated also by historians nowadays.
I think it was, the majority of Americans actually
were not in favor of it, but that's debatable definitely.
Now, who were the anti-Federalists and what did they want?
I'll be very brief on that.
Well, generally I'm very suspicious of class analysis,
but one thing is for sure,
they were not the big holders of the public debt.
This is for sure. Most of them were not.
And they were mostly independent landowners.
I'll stop at that, you know, because the rest of the class analysis I'm not interested in.
But surely the idea that a strong central government could do with assumption of state debts a lot
for the rich and for the wealthy, for the wealth of the people who were involved in this speculation
was a big force striving towards centralization.
And, you know, of course, most of their names. I don't have to use the blackboard.
It's George Clinton, George Mason, Patrick Henry, Richard Hanmerly, Melanchthon Smith, and a bunch of others.
And, but what was, some people that we never figured out who they were.
And some of them were quite literal, actually, and wrote pretty nice essays.
Some of them were just poor Irish people that came to America a couple of years prior to that.
And what was their political view? This is more important.
Well, they never came out with a single book, like The Federalist.
So it's kind of difficult to sort of sum up what their political views were,
because there's a seven-book collection which is called The Complete Anti-Federalist,
Anti-Federalist and it's not complete. It should be 14 or 15 books actually, if you consider it all together, so we should call it the quasi-complete Anti-Federalist.
That came out 20 years ago, and about, yeah, I think it was 1981, and you can find it anywhere and take a look at it, but it's difficult.
I'll tell you what I think their political view was. Well, first of all, they like the Articles of Confederation.
They revere the Articles of Confederation. They wanted some change, but not that much.
Most of them would say, well, we need a little change, especially on foreign power.
But in a nutshell, they thought that the weak federal government was the source of liberty,
as democracy was possible only in a small republic.
And that goes back to Aristotle, Montesquieu, all the classical political thought.
And they believed that the scheme of government that was envisioned in Philadelphia was going to end up in a federal and presidential dictatorship.
Since everybody was talking about energy and efficiency in government, one of them made clear,
Here, quote, the only thing in which a government should be efficient is to protect the liberties,
lives and property of the people. So they were certainly Lockeans. They were also afraid
of the federal bureaucracy, which, quote, will swarm the land, devouring the hard earnings
In short, the problem was that the powers of Congress are complete and unlimited over the purse and a sword, and are perfectly independent of and supreme over the state governments.
was their contention. So basically what they wanted was a refinement of the
articles, but nothing like this totally new scheme of government that came out
of Philadelphia. So the Federalists decided to take seriously only one of
their complaint and only one demand, which was of course the demand
for a Bill of Rights. Although some really thought that it was not
needed, most of the Federalists, you know, will give it to them because to make
Peace. You know, it's just an olive branch. But to this day, actually, some historians believe
that it is unnecessary and potentially dangerous, the Bill of Rights. I'm talking about the great
historian Forrest Macdonald, for instance, whom I respect a lot, but I mean, who says that? Well,
actually, I believe that if the United States is not a complete social democracy, which is,
We should thank the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments. I'm not talking about, you know, holy amendments, of course.
Meanwhile, you know, Thomas Jefferson was in Paris, as you all know, but not many Americans know this prior to the movie.
When the movie came out, you know, a lot of Americans realized that.
But in a lot of opinion polls, there's always 40, 45 percent of Americans that would point out that Thomas Jefferson is the father of the Constitution.
That's really nice, actually, because Thomas Jefferson is remembered also for what he did not do, so it shows he's very popular, and that's fine, at least for me, since I just wrote a book on him.
Thomas Jefferson, in his private letters, he was expressing pretty much the same concerns about the new constitution that the anti-Federalists were.
There's a famous letter in which he says, I'm not a Federalist and I'm not an anti-Federalist,
but everything else that he says, I mean, it clearly shows that he was anti-Federalist.
And he also realized that the alarm caused by Shea's Rebellion was one of the causes
of the Constitutional Convention and of the cry for centralization.
So he wrote these very words, not very moderate actually, quote, what country can preserve
Preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants and this is the moderate Thomas Jefferson now when Jefferson came back from Paris anti-federalism as a political movement was finished kaput done with because most of
Until their leaders crossed and became Federalists in the 1790s.
That's why it was forgotten for a long time in American history.
You know, it was revived, this tradition, by an article in 1955, which was called Men
of Little Faith, meaning they had little faith in democracy.
And that's what got my interest into the Anti-Federalists to begin with.
But actually, for a long time, very long time, nobody in America studied the Anti-Federalist
thought.
And only, you know, the source was always the Federalist, which is, by the way, the Federalist or the new Constitution.
It's not the Federalist Papers, you know, the correct title was Clinton Brosner who gave it this bizarre title.
Now, at this point in the 1790s, I'll make it very short, it was really up to Jefferson and Madison, who really crossed by the other way around,
Because there is the Hamiltonian Madison, and then there is the Jeffersonian Madison,
and then unfortunately, there is the Madisonian Madison, and this is really puzzling.
But it is kind of consistent when it is either the Hamiltonian Madison or the Jeffersonian Madison.
So they really tried to revive the spirit of resistance to government.
And the battle against the so-called Hamiltonian system, which was based on permanent debt,
8 to Manufacture, Central Bank and so on and so forth, convinced Jefferson that only a
new interpretation of the Constitution could save the country from these people who wanted
to make America a New England. And most of them were actually for New England. So, you
know, they just wanted to make a copy, make it a copy of New England. So, with the drafting
of the Kentucky resolutions of 1798, Jefferson sought to provide a constitutional interpretation
that would prevent the union from consolidated even further. During the French scare of 1798,
the Federalists approved the alien and sedition laws that, to make it very simple, made it
a crime to speak against the government and to be a foreigner.
The Kentucky resolutions was defined for a while what was going to be the battleground.
He used the state as the barriers of our liberty and what was to be the battleground for the
next 60 years.
Then came Abraham Lincoln who thought it was time to show that the Constitution did not
I'll read to you just the first, of course, of the Kentucky resolutions, which is very
important because in a nutshell it's the history of states' rights, resolve and so on, that
the several states composing the U.S. of America are not united on the principle of unlimited
submission to their general government, but by a compact and through the style and title
of the Constitution of the United States. They constituted a general government for
special purposes, delegated to that government, certain definite powers, reserve in each state
to itself the residuary mass of rights to their own self-government. And whenever the
general government assumes and delegated powers, its act are void and of no force. No and void
To this compact, each state acceded as a state, its co-states forming, as to itself, the other party.
The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself,
since that would have made its discretion and not the constitution the measure of its powers.
In all cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress.
So this is really the beginning of the state's right school.
First of all, the compact is among the states. It's not as we think today, like the compact between the state and the federal government.
The federal government did not exist. You could not make a compact with an entity that was not there to begin with.
So every single state is a party and the other states collectively are the other party to this.
And the very important thing is that there is no common judge. It's not the Supreme Court at all.
The Supreme Court is part of the federal government.
And since there's no common judge, every party should decide when the compact has been violated and should decide what the right measures of redress are.
And even, of course, at the very end of this escalation of measures, not only nullification, but also withdrawal from the Union, that's pretty clear.
Now, the crucial point is that Jefferson, as a lock-in, transposes the natural rights model from individuals to the states.
Since there is no common judge, the states have the power to determine what to do in cases of violations of the compact.
So they are in a state of nature vis-a-vis each other because they have no common judge, and clearly they retain all the powers of self-defense,
of Defense, in particular, the right to nullify a federal law within their own territory,
but ultimately also the right to secede.
And he stated it several times, actually, the thing that Thomas Jefferson should be
considered the grandfather of the CSA and not the grandfather of FDR and the great society
is a lot of liberals' thing.
So this was called the Jeffersonian Doctrine of 98, this sort of went on in the 30s, 20s,
30s, 40s, became the Jeffersonian Doctrine of 98.
And it was brought to a new life by America's greatest political thinker of the 1800s, that
is the Senator John C. Calhoun and Clyde Wilson told me it is pronounced Calhoun, no H, but
Do you agree, Don Lewiston? Is it true? You don't know. Anyway, we should trust Clyde Wilson, I mean, on that.
I can't pronounce the name the other way.
Yeah, but, but actually it's Galu, no H. Anyway, that's what Clyde, Clyde Wilson is certainly an expert.
expert. So in the 30s and the 40s, what he did, beginning in 1828, he just exposed what
was to become actually the standard view of federal state relations in the South and also
in the few enlightened spots of Yankee Dom, actually. There were some parts of the North
where people were reasoning about the Constitution and agreed with Calhoun, actually, and especially
during the 40s, but also during the war for southern independence, you could see pamphlets
written in the north that argue the case with southern secession.
So Calhoun's defense of state rights rests on the doctrine of sovereignty.
It's very different from Jefferson's.
So the Mesonian theory of divided sovereignty was the source of every error according to
the Carolinian.
So sovereignty, the supreme authority of making the laws, either belongs to the Union or to the states.
And according to the Constitution, it is the states, or rather the people of the several states,
that have the supreme authority to change the Constitution, according to Article 5,
and thus are the sovereign of the Constitution.
So the federal government is actually exercising only some powers that we would call some powers of sovereignty,
that were delegated by the several states, but it was not sovereignty which was delegated or which was divided,
because you cannot divide sovereignty, it was the power to exercise some powers of sovereignty.
But these very states could retract the same powers at any time, because it was them,
It's pretty much like the opposite of what could happen in France or Italy as they do in a regional system.
The central government delegates some power to the regions, and they can retract it any time,
because the power to begin with was within the central government.
This is just like the exact opposite view, and that is supposed to be true federalism.
That is what I call true federalism.
And according to Calhoun again, the U.S. are not a nation, but an assemblage of nations,
or of member peoples of their respective political community.
So he didn't deny that there were some changes between the Articles of Confederation and
the Constitution, the Philadelphia Constitution.
But what he actually thought was that the changes that had taken place with the new
The new constitution did not change the fact that when the states and the federal government exercise their governmental powers, they're acting like agents of the people of each individual state.
So federal and state governments are simple agents that could be ordered, changed and abolished at will.
Clearly the difference between Jefferson and Calhoun is that the senator thought of the
states as organic and original political communities that had rights because they existed in nature.
So in a certain sense there is an organic view of the state as little small political
community and there's also in Calhoun's view there's also an organic view of the plantation
and of slavery and so on but we will not go into that. While actually the Virginian believed that
the states were only the true barriers of our liberty so the states should be used
antagonistically against the federal power in order to let's say chain the federal power and render
and make it less desperate as possible.
So it is pretty much, so you have these two visions, two views.
So I would say, I'll make a pretty easy parallel
that it's pretty much, as I said, like libertarianism
and might be defended on the solid rock of natural rights
or on the sandy ground of convention and utilitarianism.
But the important thing is you defend it.
And I personally, to tell you the truth,
He never uses the concept of sovereignty in the Kentucky resolution of 1798.
It never comes up, you know, the word sovereignty.
It talks about powers where there should be delegated powers, come and judge, everything.
But it doesn't resort to the theory of sovereignty.
And actually that seems to me quite clever because the theory and the concept of sovereignty is really quite heavy.
It's a quite heavy European notion, and it's intimately related to the king's body and person, and it may lead to certain consequences, even if you talk about popular sovereignty, because sovereignty, popular sovereignty, I mean, it's an oxymoron, it's like sovereignty was really connected to the person of the king.
I mean, you could not tear him apart, and you could not actually divide sovereignty because the body of the king was one.
Now, in 1860, the election of the great president from Illinois made it clear to Southerners that they had become a perpetual minority within the Union.
And that, as you all know, was pretty much the cause of the war.
You know, they realized that there was nothing you could do, state after state after that.
They resorted to the ultimate expression of the state rights dogma, which is definitely secession.
We all know, of course, what happened. Consolidation took a great leap forward.
And the Free Republic of Jefferson was transformed by Lincoln into a radical centralized state rooted in the principle of equality.
However, one must never forget that while the compact theory of the Union was common sense for a large portion of the American people,
the federal government was really kept in check.
And actually, there are some historians that argue that it was actually smaller in size in the 1850s than it was in the time of Washington.
You know, when you had this theory, which was diffused among American people, of a voluntary
union, of states' rights and so on, the federal government was actually kept in check.
You know, a lot of people just toss in the question and think, what were they thinking
about?
They had almost no government.
Well, they had almost no government because they were very jealous of their rights, you
And that's why the government was kept pretty small during the 1800s until Lincoln came.
Pretty small. I couldn't make the case that it was really smaller than in Washington times,
but certainly it did not increase at the same pace in America than the size of government, let's say,
of France or Prussia or a lot of other states, not to speak of England.
So, you know, also another thing you can say about states, right, is that it is to say about true federalism that it has always been considered the institutional arrangement most hostile to government intervention in the free market.
In fact, actually the social planners of the 1930s declared the federal system obsolete.
There's a very famous article by Lasky in 1939 in the New Republic, it's two or three pages, but I think it's called the obsolescence of federalism, or federalism is obsolete, or something like that, but it was obsolete because in light of Keynesianism, you had to have public expenditures in one given center, you had to control everything, you know, what were you going to do?
In order to increase the wealth of the nation and consumption and c-minus and multiply the wealth and so on and all these mathematical traps,
the first thing you had to have was a centralized government that could decide everything about spending.
So really, for the social planners of the 1930s, the states were just something they had to get rid of.
with and they declare the federal system obsolete and then you know of course you know in the 60s
LBJ really tried to get rid of it all together and create a great society centered only on the
federal government and and even nowadays actually the few friends of the free market and individual
liberty somewhat by instinct realize that the desperate in the United States is always the
the Federal Government and not the individual states, not at this point, I mean we're going
to fight our fights against the individual states in the future, I mean if we could get
rid of the federal government, but this is not the case right now.
So also think about the very famous theory, I guess advanced by Ted Lowey some years ago,
and the question was why is there no socialism in the United States, which is a very stupid
Well, you've got to explain why there was so much socialism in France and Italy and so on.
I mean, that's the question, and I don't see why comparing histories you can come up with this kind of question.
But anyway, his answer was that unfortunately there was this federal system that prevented socialism to become a great force in the history of the United States.
Well, we're only for this reason. I think we should do anything we could to restore authentic federalism, that is, state's rights interpretation of the Constitution.
Thank you very much.
Question, questions. Yes, please. It's nice, it looks like the president, you know, you see 400 hands and then he goes, yes, please.
Something I don't know. I know there were 13 colonies and they started out as independent states into the Union.
But what about the other states? How did they get into the contract? How did they emerge?
there is a clause you know the other states could as soon as they get gained
statehood they were there the assumption was the thing the fiction was that that
they were original states so they had original status into the Union so that
like the 13 original states became 50 original states but there was the clause
as soon as they gained statehood they were just like the other ones so this
This comes up in the case of Michigan, when they're on the off-shore, but there's a competing group claiming that they are blessed, like the state of Michigan, and the question is for the Congress to create the state.
The problem is that, the California has one of the people that can recognize the position of the president of the United States.
Only the people of Michigan do that.
Congress can recognize the position of the president of the United States.
There was a view then that the Congress created a state, like a state creating a county.
Joe.
Oh yes, do I have to comment on that or was it just your comment?
All right, no, no, no, you're perfectly right. Yes.
How much was the need and the desire for a stable money supply and a trade factor that came into the consciousness of these people to go from a confederation of states to a federal concept that we have today?
I think that there were a lot of speculators, definitely, who really wanted the debt to be assumed by the central government or the federal government, of course.
But there weren't many people in the United States who were into this business of speculating on the public debt.
Well, I have to ask you, how fragmented was the trade? Or was the trade really fragmented after the revolution?
What was going on with the regular guy on the street, going out and making a living, with trade going on?
And how was it going on? What was the form of money, or what was the form of, you know,
transmitting, I do this, and you do this, and we'll trade?
They had furs also. There was a lot of barter, but...
Not much is said in the Constitution anywhere about how a state succeeds or breaks the contract, but there is in Hoppe's footnotes.
Number 43 of Hoppe's footnote says that natural law is a decider.
Yes, and oddly enough, if I'm correct, it was written by Hamilton, right?
Madison, Madison.
This is Madison. But there's another one by Hamilton in which he says that, of course, the states can always secede.
And so the thing is you have to realize that this Hoppe's footnote was a book which was written as propaganda on the papers of New York.
You see New York was the bastion of anti-Federal immigrants. So if they lost New York, no way. They couldn't have passed the Constitution.
So they started to write and write the essays and we know for sure that these people wrote things about the Constitution that they did not believe in
because at the federal convention, they supported exactly the opposite position.
So this is like propaganda. It's a nice, very nice piece of propaganda,
but it's not exactly what Madison or Hamilton or Jay really thought.
If you want to know what they really thought, you have to read what they said at the convention.
But actually, I don't... Well, Madison, of course, believed...
Madison, generally speaking, believed in natural law.
It came out during the phase of Hamiltonian, Madison, a little bit of Jeffersonian Madison.
The important thing is that the Madisonian Madison doesn't come out, otherwise it's just murky.
Still it's one of the basic organic documents of our government.
Oh, no, I don't think so.
The Supreme Court uses it?
Yeah, as an historian, I'm at free will to say that it's not.
That is not. I mean, the Constitution maybe, but that is not. That is just propaganda to have the people of New York vote for enough Federalists so they can pass the Constitution.
Yes, please.
I was just going to make a comment on how absolutely terrible was my experience in the case of the Anti-Federalists in the Coneye American College, where I was told that the Anti-Federalists were debtors, the Federalists were the debt lenders, and that the reason Anti-Federalists were the Constitutionalists was because they didn't want to pay their debt.
Yes, some of them were not quite literate, I mean, compared of course to Maddison, Hamilton and even Jay, and so, I mean, if you pick up some of their pamphlets, some of them may look like idiots, definitely.
And what are the recordings of the article for the Federation that continues that and
tip?
Well there are various things, various things.
One which was very much overlooked was the fact, you know, that the United States had
a little Navy at the time.
And North Africa, usually what they did for a living, they do it right now as well.
But they kidnapped people, just Navy people, and so they asked for ransom, and the United
States couldn't act under the Articles of Confederation, because they were citizens
of Rhode Island, Vermont, and so on.
They had to ask everybody, do you want to pay the ransom for your guy, and they would
go on for quite a while.
So that thing of international prestige, well of course, you know, the British would just
Pay immediately and get them free, all like the French and so on.
So that national prestige of America abroad was definitely one issue.
And the other one was, of course, that there was chaos, they thought, in the States.
But the most important thing is the Shays' Rebellion.
And in 1786, this poor man who was a part of the revolution and he thought that he had
some rights, believed that actually the Massachusetts tax laws were inadequate, were actually oppressive
and so on.
So they started a little rebellion, it was nothing really big, but they moved the army
and so on, chasing him all over for three or four months.
And so they were really afraid that, you know, this kind of people going around talking about
I'd like to respond to what you said, that they were illiterate, often insidious. This is simply not true.
they may be used in a certain sense and they may be, you know, they may be shown as idiots, but they were not idiots at all.
I was not talking about Patrick Henry, I was talking about pretty unknown people that you can find on the quasi-complete anti-federalist papers, of course.
I mean, if you compare it to the Federalist papers, there's quite a difference, I mean, if that are...
There are difficult stereotypes about the Somnans, and the Somnans were Irish.
Some of them were not Southerners, some of them were Irishmen, poor Irishmen coming, just coming to America.
There are very difficult stereotypes about the Somnans, and the Somnans were Irishmen, and the Somnans were Irishmen.
I'll give you two papers, and you'll compare it, and you'll see it for yourself, and I'm not...
But they were advancing the right reasons for opposing the Constitution, I'm just...
I was wondering if you'd comment on Calhoun, actually, I think it might be you who presented the paper at the Scholars Conference about him having a view of the Union as perpetual, but I can't remember if it was another student, but...
It was, yeah, it was me, but I didn't...
Well, he just thought it was a perpetual political pact, as far as it was respected.
But when it was not respected anymore, then you could go first to nullification,
and then there was this escalation. I mean, you would go first to nullification,
then you'd have all the states to go, and if that became part of the Constitution,
it was a new compact, and you could withdraw from it.
It's just interesting in difference with Jefferson, who says, look, it's fixed, I don't want to be a part of it anymore, let me go.
You've got to have a grievance, a specific reason.
The Constitutionalist, because everything was based on the Constitution. While Jefferson, earlier on,
I mean, he could be a political thinker, sometimes, you know, not thinking exactly of the words and of the wording of the Constitution.
But that's part of the history of American political thought. You know, the Constitution is right there,
and it's very institutionalized in a certain sense, American political thought. But I think time's up, isn't it?
Thank you very much.