Military Influences in the 1780s

To judge by their own figures, the correlation between army officers and Federalists isn't actually as strong as often is implied by the historians of military influence, like Richard Kohn. Likewise, the Society of the Cincinnati clearly doesn't represent a proto-Federalist organisation: future Federalists like John Adams and James Madison were suspicious of it, and even Washington was anxious and ambivalent about it. So these groups played complex roles in the construction of a Federalist persuasion. They did not simply carry military values into the new politics of the republic. Rather, they participated in a dialectic that produced shifting patterns of values, and new visions of the world.

For one thing, the debate around the idea of inherited prestige in early versions of the Cincinnati did more than demonstrate that such a notion was not anathema to some revolutionaries: it also helped set Federalist politics against that idea. Congressional wrangling in the 1780s also acted to shape Federalist thinking on the issue of militia and the standing army. In the Federalist, Hamilton (the militarist par excellence) was even able to use fear of standing armies as an argument in favour of the Constitution. One thing both these examples show is how negotiation and shifts over values and institutions was continuous throughout the 1780s, not just at the Philadelphia Convention.

After all, there seems to be a fundamental contradiction in the basic militarist case, as made around the end of the war. The idea that such a weak central administration, and such limited support for the professional armed forces, could not effectively defend the country or protect its interests, was belied by the very victory those forces had achieved. Civilians and anti-militarists could effectively rest on their antagonists' laurels. Meanwhile, real American weakness was being revealed by issues like the Northwest forts and Barbary states piracy, but these could be seen as beside the point. The same counter-point could even be made about Shays' Rebellion: it was, after all, put down relatively easily and swiftly.

Max Edling may not, then, be totally correct to say that "Federalism would create a state focussed on the fiscal-military sphere." We should ask in what ways Federalist notions of the fiscal-military sphere developed, and what they entailed. How much and in what ways did Federalists want to replicate their European cousins, and how much fulfil the promise of the new?