Quote of the Day (John Adams, on Threats to the Constitution)

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams (1735-1826), signer of the Declaration of Independence and second U.S. President, in a letter to the Officers of the first Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, Oct. 11, 1798, quoted by Maria Campbell, Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (1847)

This Day in Constitutional History (Birth of John Jay, Conservative Revolutionary)

Dec. 12, 1745— John Jay, who came late to the cause of American independence but then assured its security by negotiating its key early treaties, advocating for a strong central government, and serving as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, was born in New York City.

The son of a New York aristocrat of Huguenot descent and successful lawyer in his own right, Jay exerted significant influence in the Continental Congress and in the period between the end of the American Revolution and the establishment of the federal government. But he was not in Philadelphia for the two early events that marked the founding of the nation: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That factor meant that his birthday would not be celebrated by schoolchildren or that he would become the subject of a musical, in the way that Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton have entered the inner circle of best-remembered Americans of the Revolutionary period.

For instance, before I started researching this post, what I knew about Jay could be boiled down to a few bullet points:

*his years of birth and date;

*his education at King’s College (later Columbia University, where a residence hall is named after him);

*his service as governor of New York State;

*his short stint as the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court;

*his negotiation of an extremely controversial treaty with Great Britain named after him.

In my opinion, few Patriots were held in higher regard among their peers—or have been as neglected by the general public today—as Jay. He deserves far better than this, though, and I hope with this post to raise consciousness, at least among my readers, of his achievements.

A Scottish visitor to the United States, Henrietta Liston, described him in this way at the height of his career in 1796: “his appearance is rather singular; in dress and manners strikingly like a Quaker; –His eye penetrating, his conversation sensible and intelligent.” That was the same impression he made on those he encountered in the law, government and diplomacy.

As a member of the Continental Congress, Jay had helped create the “Olive Branch Petition,” a last-ditch attempt at reconciliation with England. But with independence declared, he cast his lot irrevocably with the Patriots. He was held in such high regard by other delegates at the Congress that he was chosen to lead it in 1778.

The four figures carved into Mount Rushmore were meant, according to sculptor Gutzon Borglum, to commemorate “the founding, growth, preservation, and development to the United States of America.” But if a non-President could be added to the group, Jay would deserve serious consideration.

His triumph in negotiating the 1783 Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War lay not merely in securing American independence, but also the country’s right to all the territory east of the Mississippi, south of Canada and north of Florida. That immediately made the new nation geographically larger—richer in resources—than Britain, France and Spain.

And Jay did this under challenging circumstances. The other American treaty diplomats were not there at first to join him (Henry Laurens had been captured at sea by the British, John Adams was negotiating a loan with the Dutch, and Franklin came down with a bad case of gout), and Congress had instructed him to do nothing without involving America’s French ally. But Jay succeeded in making Spain (France’s other ally) and Britain, go along with his non-negotiable demand for the area east of the Mississippi.

The best compressed depiction I know of for Jay comes from historian Joseph J. Ellis’ The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789, which praised his “massive probity” and “persistent geniality.” Even a crankier appraisal, in Forrest McDonald’s The Formation of the American Republic, 1776-1790, before calling him (with little to no substantiation) “pompous and pathetically vain,” also referred to him as “a brilliant and almost pathologically honest New York aristocrat, [and] a dedicated nationalist.”

Jay’s well-known nationalism led to him being frozen out of the New York delegation at the Constitutional Convention by Gov. George Clinton, the closest figure at that time to what we consider a political boss. But he could not be taken out of the fight for long.

Sickness prevented Jay from writing more than five of the eventual 85 essays in the key pro-Constitution documents, The Federalist Papers, but—as the politician who had spent the longest time in the public eye and the senior member of the trio—he was more crucial in lending prestige to the early stages of the ratification struggle than the younger contributors to the project, James Madison and Hamilton. He and Hamilton then proved shrewd in delaying New York’s vote until a positive vote by Virginia persuaded delegates at New York’s convention in Poughkeepsie that they should not be isolated from the new nation.

With ratification secured, George Washington offered Jay any position he wanted in the new government. The former Chief Justice of New York’s Supreme Court took the similar position at the national level.

Due to circumstances largely beyond Jay’s control, that choice proved frustrating. During Jay’s five years on the court, he and the associate justices ruled on only four cases. Not only were justices expected to “ride circuit”—i.e., hold hearings twice a year in one of three judicial districts—but some (e.g., James Wilson) missed attendance because of land speculations and the resulting need to avoid debt collectors.

The issues that Jay faced in his quarter-century career continue, in one way or another, to figure in American political dialogue:

*A strong, united federal government. Jay’s anxiety in watching the young nation flounder under the Articles of Confederation led him to press for a stronger form of government, in what eventually became the Constitution. He warned, in Federalist No. 3, against the nation fracturing into “three or four independent and probably discordant republics or confederacies.” He looked to the trans-Allegheny territory just won at the negotiating table as a means of binding the nation together further through commerce. When he lost his first race for governor of New York in 1792 because of questionable vote counting, he urged his supporters to accept the results with grace. All of this stands in marked contrast to the current post-election atmosphere in which Presidential vote counts are endlessly litigated and Rush Limbaugh has talked loosely about secession.

*The proper government response to health emergencies. As New York Governor, Jay faced a stark challenge during the yellow fever epidemics of the mid-1790s. In a blog post in March of this year, Robb Haberman, associate editor of The Papers of John Jay, analyzed how Jay transitioned state health policy from private philanthropy to government action, through measures instituting a quarantine and better sanitation.

*Race relations. Jay had inherited slaves from his father, but by the mid-1780s he had publicly turned against the practice, becoming the first president of the New York Manumission Society. As governor of the state, he finally won passage, after five tries, in 1799 of a law calling for emancipation in the state to take effect in 20 years.

*Congressional opposition to treaties negotiated by Presidential envoys. The Iranian nuclear deal, concluded by Barack Obama and abandoned by Donald Trump, does not come remotely close to engendering the same level of controversy as the Jay Treaty. Jay accepted Washington’s request to negotiate with Great Britain reluctantly, and only because he believed it would be the only way to avert war only a decade after the American Revolution had ended. The outcome of the negotiations— requiring Britain to stop “impressing” or capturing sailors, but granting “most favored nation” status as trading partners—formed one of the wedge issues spurring the rise of Thomas Jefferson’s more Gallic-oriented faction, the Democratic-Republican Party.

As he left office in 1801, John Adams appointed Jay to return as Chief Justice. But Jay declined, citing his poor health and the lack of the “the energy, weight, and dignity” needed to support the court. That opened the door for John Marshall to take the post.

Jay lived another 28 years, but was deeply saddened that shortly after his retirement from public life he lost his beloved wife Sarah. Yet now he was content to enjoy, untrammeled, private life as a gentleman farmer.

Flashback, April 1869: Supreme Court Number of Justices Set at Nine

With a new President more amenable to its agenda in April 1869, the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress increased the number of Supreme Court justices to nine, a figure that has endured to the present, though not without some challenges.

From the inauguration of George Washington in 1789 to that of Ulysses S. Grant 80 years later, the number of justices changed six times. That shifting history was forgotten during the firestorm of controversy in 1937 when Franklin Roosevelt presented his “court-packing” scheme (i.e., appointing an “assistant” with full voting rights to any justice who would not retire after age 70).

The number of justices has become something of an issue again in recent weeks as Democratic Presidential candidates have floated proposals to “fix” the court. Frustrated over the shelved nomination of Barack Obama appointee Merrick Garland and Donald Trump’s successful placement of Neil Gorsuch and Brent Kavanagh on the high court, they have cast about for a solution that would counter potentially decades of right-wing domination of the judiciary.

Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren all told Politico that they'd consider expanding the size of the Supreme Court. Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend, Ind., has presented the most concrete proposal for returning to something like bipartisan in the confirmation process, advocating giving Democrats and Republicans the same number of seats on the bench (5 each) with the combined 10 choosing another five among themselves.

Amid all this hullabaloo, it might be worthwhile revisiting another historically fraught period of Congressional-Supreme Court relations: the 1860s. Arguably, the dominant event of the decade—the Civil War—became, in the phrase of the time, an “irrepressible conflict” because of the high court’s divisive Dred Scott decision. 

The thought that Abraham Lincoln’s Southern successor in the White House, Andrew Johnson, might move the court toward postwar disenfranchisement of African-Americans led the Radicals in Congress to reduce the number of justices from 10 in 1863 till only six by 1866.

This meant that when the President did have someone in mind to fill a seat on the bench—former Ohio attorney general Henry Stanbery—the nomination was virtually dead on arrival, especially following the rumor that Stanbery had drafted the President’s veto of the Civil Rights Act.

It quickly became apparent, though, that by striking a blow against Johnson, the Radicals only impaired the overall functioning of the judicial system. For years, the justices, in addition to their regular court duties, were expected to serve as circuit judges within particular geographic jurisdictions. This had been a bone of contention for aging jurists dating back to the founding of the republic. (Indeed, John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, refused reappointment to the bench because he did not want to deal with this again.)

By the 1860s, the admission of California to the Union, and the possibility of more states entering soon, meant that the justices would have to ride even longer distances than they had previously. 

And even without the greater demands made by this additional travel, the transformation of the republic had placed additional strains on the judicial system. Not only had the expansion in geography to the Pacific Ocean produced more litigation, but so did the consequent growth in business and in government itself, as the federal government created new powers to quell the far-flung rebellion that broke out in the Confederacy, as well as the counter-revolution that sought to deny the new class of freedmen their rights in the Reconstruction period.

All of this created such an untenable situation that a bipartisan consensus for reform actually developed. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois was able to secure solid majorities among Republicans and Democrats in passing the bill. At one fell swoop, by adding an intermediate level of circuit courts between the Supreme Court and the district court and by boosting the Supreme Court number of justices to nine, the legislation was able to relieve pressure on the highest court in the land and ensure a greater federal presence in southern states that were resisting Reconstruction.

While Republicans played games with the court’s composition in the 1860s, Franklin Roosevelt was willing to do so at the start of his second term, in frustration over all the New Deal legislation that the high court held unconstitutional. It should be remembered, though, that even at the height of the President’s popularity, members of his own party were willing to stand up to him and make him back down in a humiliating defeat.

Three years ago, Republicans breached any possibility of a bipartisan approach to the confirmation process by refusing even to act on the nomination of Garland. They have now invited a furious reaction by Democrats.

On one point, the Democrats are correct: nothing in Article III of the Constitution sets out a specific number of justices. On the other hand, changes in the number of justices have served as a marker for the politicization of the high court—and, once the electoral tides have turned, can be used against the party that proposed the change in the first place.

(The image accompanying this post, taken in 1869, is believed to be the first photo of the justices of the Supreme Court.)

Quote of the Day (John Jay, on the Safety of a ‘Wise and Free People’)

“Among the many objects to which a wise and free people find it necessary to direct their attention, that of providing for their safety seems to be the first.” —American patriot, statesman, and diplomat John Jay (1745-1829), “The Federalist #3,” Nov. 3, 1787

In the last 48 yours, after watching the press conference in Helsinki, the American people felt it necessary to express their disapproval of how their safety concerns were regarded by their President. It is an open question how “wise” they were in putting Donald Trump close to power to begin with. Only time will determine Americans will check his power enough to remain “free.”

This Day in Federal History (Compromise-Carved Constitution Signed)

Sept. 17, 1787—After meeting for nearly four months behind closed doors amid a muggy Philadelphia summer, 38 of 41 delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed a document nearly all had grave reservations about, including the two men that later generations would hail as its “father” and “author.” But all clung to the hope that the institutions set up for the new government—an untried experiment in federalism, blending central and state government—would cool the unruly passions of men.

There is no federal holiday celebrating the U.S. Constitution, as there is for the Declaration of Independence. It is far from a perfect state paper. But were it not for the Constitution and the relative stability it created, Americans would probably be in no position to recall the Declaration at all, and if it did not ensure a “more perfect union,” it allowed the young republic to continually move toward it.

Just about the one point of agreement among the delegates meeting in the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) was that the new federal government would be in good hands in the short run because of the man expected to lead it as President—the same man who had presided over their often stormy confab, George Washington. 

The Revolutionary War hero was almost revered because of his sense of resolution throughout the war, his refusal to become a king or dictator afterward, and his good judgment at all times. The delegates feared that too much power vested in the office of the Presidency would tempt demagogues to exploit recent outbursts of mass discontent such as Shays’ Rebellion, but also did not want to restrain the President so much that Washington would be impotent to lead the new government.

“The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications,” Alexander Hamilton, one of New York’s delegates at the Constitution, wrote in The Federalist Papers. Within a dozen years, he felt so alarmed that events were already undercutting this optimistic contention that he persuaded Federalists in the House of Representatives to support Thomas Jefferson—with whom he had clashed repeatedly over the prior decade over the direction of the government—rather than Aaron Burr, whom he had come to regard as utterly unprincipled.

(I myself will make no comment on the worthiness of the current occupant of the White House, other than to direct the reader’s attention to a Slate article this past spring, whose title and subtitle say volumes: “Trump Is a Stress Test for Democracy; We Are Failing.”)

Much of the uneasiness felt about the Constitution by the men who created and signed it—as well as those attendees who could not support it in the end—stemmed from what it was: from first to last, an elaborate series of compromises. Nobody got all that they wanted, including the Virginia delegate who was its prime mover, James Madison. Worried that the new federal government would not have the authority to overrule state legislation, he pessimistically predicted to his Virginia friend Thomas Jefferson that the new plan, “should it be adopted will neither effectually answer its national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which every where excite disgusts agst the state governments.”

For all his misgivings about the final form of the new government, no other Founding Father has been associated more with its creation than Madison, the “Father of the Constitution.” It wasn’t just that he proposed the so-called Virginia Plan desiring proportional representation, which would benefit large states such as his own. 

No, Madison also had created a painstaking list of the problems with the Articles of Confederation ("Vices of the Political System of the United States") that served as a point of comparison with the desired government he and others wanted; he spoke more than 100 times during the proceedings; he secretly kept detailed notes on the secret debates among the delegates that serve as historians' primary source of what went on; he interpreted the document (along with Hamilton and John Jay) in The Federalist Papers; and, as Secretary of State and President within the next generation, he applied what he learned.

Over 30 years after the convention, John Quincy Adams, disgusted by one of its compromises—the refusal to confront the evil of slavery—groused privately in his diary, “The Constitution is a compact with Hell, and a life devoted to its destruction would be a life well spent.” About the best that can be said of the framers’ work on this point is that events would nudge politicians to discover a solution that they couldn’t.

One delegate who dared to broach the matter of slavery was Madison’s fellow member on the convention’s Committee of Style, Gouverneur Morris. Most people know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; far fewer know that Morris had the same task with the Constitution. 

He was, in many ways, Madison’s polar opposite. While  Madison was reticent, serious, and painfully shy around women,  Morris was urbane, humorous, and a ladies’ man. No delegates spoke more often at the convention than Morris. 

The two men had deep, serious disagreements: Madison charged Morris with desiring a monarchy in the United States, while Morris, during the War of 1812, felt so strongly that President Madison had initiated the conflict to enlarge the lands of Southern slaveholding states that he supported the Hartford Convention, a foolhardy attempt to hasten the secession of New York and New England.

Nevertheless, even Madison felt it necessary to acknowledge the Pennsylvania delegate’s role in the final document. “The finish given to the style and arrangement of the Constitution fairly belongs to the pen of Mr. Morris,” wrote Madison. “A better choice could not have been made.”

One telling exhibit of Morris’ craftsmanship: The draft supplied by the Committee of Detail simply began: “We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts . . . ” and so on, through Georgia. Morris pared it down to the simple, but crucially important words, “We the people of the United States.” 

It was not simply an enormous stylistic improvement, but an essential statement on the source of sovereignty in the new republic. In other words, the nation derived its authority not merely from a confederation of individual states that might leave at any time, but from the ordinary citizens who gave rise to the states--and who could not so easily depart.

Flashback, January 1787: Shays' Rebellion, First U.S. Revolt of the Have-Nots, Crushed

In late January 1787, an attack on a federal armory in Springfield, Mass., led by a wounded Revolutionary War veteran now barely making ends meet on his farm, was crushed, leaving four dead and 20 wounded, with its scattered remnants brought to heel in early February.

But Shays' Rebellion—originating in debt-burdened farmers’ desperate but unheeded pleas for postponement of tax collections, elimination of unfair mortgages, and a fairer hearing in the courts—reverberated far beyond the confines of Western Massachusetts in that winter. Its causes and consequences were endlessly analyzed and debated not only by the aristocrats who largely governed America, from New Hampshire to Georgia, at the time, but also by historians from coast to coast who continue to shape interpretations of the event more than two centuries later.

Events That Continue to Echo

Indeed, through the mists of history, the unrest in the Connecticut River Valley sounds terrifyingly familiar to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with current events in this country:

*A wrenching recession that left white male breadwinners already in a precarious position on the brink of total collapse;

*Massive and unfair seizure of homes at the behest of entrenched financial interests;

*A protracted legislative stalemate that failed to solve anything;

*Have-nots exploding in counterproductive, if understandable, ways; and

*Elites, utterly bewildered by the recent astonishing turn of events, undergoing intense soul-searching over the recent divisions revealed and the possibility that a foreign power could exploit them.

Shays' Rebellion was the first protest movement of the newly independent United States. Its outburst of violence, though limited and contained, awakened, to an unprecedented degree, most of the leaders of the American Revolution to the weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation, the compact of the 13 colonies that had governed the new nation since 1781. Though the material conditions that sparked the protest eased only gradually, a consensus formed that the Articles not only needed to be drastically revised, but even scrapped in favor of what became the U.S. Constitution.

It almost certainly forced a reluctant General George Washington out of retirement, making him the focal point of the Constitutional Convention held later that year in Philadelphia.

The Origins of Unrest

The issue bearing down on Western Massachusetts after the cessation of hostilities with England in 1783 was similar to the one that set off the Boston Tea Party the decade before: taxes. The commonwealth’s constitution, passed in 1780, used property as the qualification for voting and considerable property as part of the criteria for holding office.

But the compact not only limited the power of the common man but hindered his ability even to make a living. With merchants and investors on the coast devastated by the hit delivered by Britain in the war, they insisted on a stepped-up schedule of “hard-money” repayment from their small creditors to handle their own often whopping debt, and the new commonwealth government turned a deaf ear to farmers’ demands that the cash-only basis of transactions be modified. Not only could the government not issue paper money, but farmers could not even employ the bartering that had gotten them through earlier hard times.

It all came to a head in 1786, when the Commonwealth sought to make up for lower-than-expected revenues in the prior year by hiking poll and property taxes. These were not graduated taxes—the same heavy duties were placed on land without regard to their value. Moreover, almost 40% of revenue was derived from head taxes—again, levied without regard to income levels.

Resentment against the new measures grew especially high in central and western Massachusetts, where the new burdens compounded the dual suffering caused by the just-concluded war and by notably inhospitable soil. Before long, confiscation of farms and imprisonments for debt had multiplied.

A Stymied Reform Movement and Its Fallout

At first, the unrest was confined to a few conventions across the state that called for these reforms:

*lower court and lawyers’ fees

*reduced salaries for state officials

*paper money

*relocating the state capital away from Boston, the center of commercial interests

*lower taxes

*shifting the tax burdens

*abolishing the state senate

*reining in the governor’s appointive power.

By late summer 1786, the deadlocked legislature had not moved on any of these measures. In reaction, 1,500 farmers marched on Northampton to halt foreclosure proceedings. But tensions escalated dramatically in September, when another group of farmers took arms and closed the courthouse in Springfield.

While offering a pardon that fall, Gov. James Bowdoin also condemned the protesters’ “riot, anarchy and confusion.” It was already too late: the rebellion was picking up steam, with the mantle of leadership settling on 45-year-old Daniel Shays of Pelham—who, by virtue of his sterling record in the American Revolution (including serving at Bunker Hill, Ticonderoga, Saratoga, and Stony Point), rose to command the insurgents known as the “Regulators.”

Seeing himself as a mediator between his force and the government, Shays wrote to a fellow Regulator that he was "unwilling to be any way accessary to the shedding of blood, and greatly desirous of restoring peace and harmony to this convulsed Commonwealth." But he agreed to a move against the arsenal in Springfield—partly because the barracks would provide shelter to his men in the winter, partly because the arms there would bolster his force’s position against the recalcitrant governor and legislature.

He hadn’t reckoned that soldiers were already inside the barracks, nor that the reinforcements from other Regulators would not be there when he launched his assault. Small arms and artillery were enough to rout the Regulators that January. Several weeks later, Gen. Benjamin Lincoln—anxious to repair a reputation damaged by his surrender to the British at Charleston in 1780—marched his men 30 miles through a howling snowstorm in early February, then surprised and routed Shays’ remaining force at Petersham. The insurrection was, for all intents and purposes, over.

The Horror of the Elite

Except among outsiders who had been eyeing events with mounting alarm. Alexander Hamilton, a young aide-de-camp to Washington who had established a thriving law practice in New York, wrote: “Who can determine what might have been the issue of [the] late convulsions, if the malcontents had been headed by a Caesar or a Cromwell? Who can predict what effect a despotism, established in Massachusetts would have upon the liberties of New Hampshire or Rhode Island, of Connecticut or New York?"

Hamilton's remarks were typical of those who feared the unrest could spread to other states. While some, like Hamilton, worried that mob rule could lead to a dictator, still others dreaded the possibility that the weakened republic could fall back into the hands of England.

Afterlife of a Rebel

A year after the collapse of the rebellion, Shays—seeing that most of the Regulators had received pardons in exchange for laying down their arms—requested clemency. New Gov. John Hancock, more lenient than his predecessor, granted the request.

In 1795, Shays relocated to New York in an attempt to improve his fortunes, but, despite moving around several times within the Empire State, continued to experience difficulties. Finally, at age 77, he applied for and received a pension based on his meritorious record in the American Revolution. He died in obscurity in 1825, a half-century after fighting at Bunker Hill and nearly 40 years after being denounced as a traitor by his commonwealth’s “haves.”

For a century, Shays was regarded as an emblem of disorder and a mortal threat to the young republic. In the early 1900s, however, he came to be viewed as a precursor of the Populist movement, and more recently still he has been embraced by New Left historians such as Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States.  

Among those who now eyed Shays with considerable sympathy was the contrarian American man of letters Gore Vidal, who in 1972 wrote an essay that became the centerpiece of his collection Homage to Daniel Shays. Only late in the 20th century, Vidal felt, was the time right for "the egalitarian vision of Daniel Shays and his road not taken":

“Property is power, as those Massachusetts veterans of the revolution discovered when they joined Captain Daniel Shays in his resistance to the landed gentry’s replacement of a loose confederation of states with a tax-levying central government. The veterans thought that they had been fighting a war for true independence. They did not want London to be replaced by New York. They did want an abolition of debts and a division of property. Their rebellion was promptly put down. But so shaken was the elite by the experience that their most important (and wealthiest) figure grimly emerged from private life with a letter to Harry Lee. ‘You talk of employing influence,’ wrote George Washington, ‘to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties and properties will be secured or let us know the worst at once.’ So was born the Property Party and with it the Constitution of the United States. We have known the ‘best’ for nearly 200 years. What would the ‘worst’ have been like?”

Mechanisms for Quelling Disorder 

The federal government had not been able to move against the rebellion because the Articles left it no enforcement mechanism to collect the taxes needed to raise even a small force. Thus, it was left to the Massachusetts militia to deal with the event--and the money to raise those troops came from the coastal merchants with the most money to lose. The Constitution, despite the lack of egalitarianism decried by Vidal and others, at least went some way to assuring that less parochial interests would not hold sway in the United States.

While the momentum that this domestic insurrection provided to the creation of the Constitution has been analyzed quite a bit over the years, less discussed has been its impact on a key provision of that founding document. Article 1, Section 8 gave Congress the power to provide for calling forth the militia "to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”   

Seven years later, President Washington used that power to stamp out the first significant challenge to federal authority under the Constitution, the Whiskey Rebellion. And, nearly 75 years later, Abraham Lincoln used this same legal authority to move against secession by defining it as a rebellion. (In fact, the U.S. government records of the Civil War refers formally to “The War of the Rebellion.”)