The American Revolution and Universal Government: Part Four

[Here are part one, part two, and part three.]

The Jeffersonian vision of universal government was structured by a series of political units - ward, county, and state republics - acting as if they were individuals and accorded equal status with their counterparts. These units were layers between the citizen and the top level of the government. The primary concern was to protect the citizen from threats of powerful authority. Federalists who fought for the power of the central government took an opposing view: they wished to mould the people into just one unit, one political order.

Both of the two most famous achievements of Federalist political thought converge on this point. The first is James Wilson's conception of popular sovereignty, in which government derives authority directly (not through intervening ward republics) from the people it encompasses: the 'We, the people,' of the Constitution. The second is James Madison's solution to the problem of majority and factional rule:

Extend the sphere and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probably that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens... [Federalist #10]

Although he declaims it himself for a different reason, it is clear that Madison's logic leads towards a universal government: the maximum extension of the sphere. He finds that it is union, the combination of humanity in its variety, that best protects the individuals who come under its head. If Jefferson fears most the tyranny of distant rulers, here Madison fears the oppression that occurs on local scales, and every day: man's inhumanity to man.

The Federalists, if we take their thought to its extreme, sought the emasculation of the layers of parochial authority. In his plan for the Constitution, Madison provided no representation for the states: his senate was proportional to population. Likewise, he gave Congress a veto on laws made by individual states. His republic was to be supreme and unitary. On both counts he and his party were defeated in the Philadelphia deliberations, and the Constitution as enacted does not purely reflect Federalist thought. In fact, in its text lies a dilemma - midwife to the Civil War and nurse to party strife - between two visions of an abstract, universal government.