Introduction
What people usually talk about when they talk about Federalists, especially in the 1780s, is nationalism. That's obviously a complex thing, in a complex context. It has a relationship with parochialism and cosmopolitanism that goes both ways (sometimes Federalist nationalism means "let's drop state divisions and unite," but sometimes that really means "all the states should be like my state"). It's also about relationships with other "nations". But that thinking makes it easy to go down the road of lumping all Americans together, and forgetting the importance of the "struggle for rule at home." We need to think about where the lines of power really are.
1. Education and the National Character
So, start with national identity. What is that, and how is it made? Thinking about that means thinking about culture, and especially education. There was a significant body of discourse about education in the 1780s, and even more about American identity: that's what the first chapter will analyse. The most important question is, what is the purpose of identity and education? Of course Americans' attitudes were never completely clear. What kind of national community, and what kind of citizen, did they want to build? I'll argue that this discourse helped Federalists to develop their sense of obedience, legitimacy, and justice in citizenship. While not everyone agreed, more and more by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the purpose of national identity and education was about markets, transactions, and law. Obedience to God and the community was replaced by obedience to an apparently-scientific, and therefore apolitical and legitimate, set of rules about how to live. Being a citizen and an American was about understanding and following these rules.
2. Commerce, Interest, and Cohesion
The science of political economy underlying these ideas was all about interests, and their potential for harmonious interaction. There was a variety of thought about how that harmony could best be brought about. One aspect involved changing the way people think: that's education. Another involved changing the way government worked, giving it more power to effect harmonious, mutually beneficial schemes - or preventing it from getting in the way of the useful workings of self-interest. For some Federalists, the power of interest was the greatest discovery of recent times, and there were all sorts of things to be done with it. Others (more conservative) resisted this conclusion. But they were more often than not brought onside, when they looked at their own interests. The economy really was a force for bringing people together.
3. Property, Legitimacy, and Social Order
But that issue of interests and government did raise some questions about property and social hierarchy. It was one thing to think about how harmonious interest could make America richer as a whole, but what about the question of who got rich, and what everyone's relation would be to each other? Many Federalists (even more than those who resisted the power of interest) were concerned about maintaing existing social hierarchy - they called it order and justice; especially to the extent that it helped them. On the other hand, the revolution had of course raised all sorts of questions about equality and democracy. Luckily, the new laws of the market could be useful here, because they could legitimise inequality and wealth: it wasn't a creation of arbitrary monarchy, but of the simple, rational functioning of the market. At the same time, of course, it was important to make sure that those rules benefited
4. The Use and Abuse of Government
In order to do that, the right governmental and legal structures had to be in place. Governments and legislatures that did bad things (the state legislatures) had to be restrained, while those that did good things (Congress, at least some of the time) had to be bolstered. Congress was very much less than perfect, however. It was also an international laughing-stock, and that put America in a bad position in the international commercial world. Just as individuals had to be educated (disciplined) into the status of good economic citizens, so too did America itself need to be reformed into a proper player in the world of economic states. That might also, of course, mean trying to change the international system, at least a little bit. But that could hardly be done if America had no international clout. You have to learn the rules before you can break them.
5. Conspiracy, Responsibility, and Rule
That notion of rules, and their corrolary responsibilities, was close to the heart of every Federalist, from the most traditionalist to the most radical, commercial, and modern. In fact, the indeterminacy of the line between old kinds of rules - the ones called by names like honour and virtue, but which extended to things like heredity and deference - and new ones - things like justice (fuliflling your contracts, paying your debts), politeness (separating commerce from morality in everyday proceedings), and order (obeying the [legitimate] laws!) - was vital to the cohesion of the Federalist coalition.
At the centre was not just economic self-interest; there was no conspiracy. Rather, Federalists saw themselves as plain, honest men with a set of responsibilities to themselves and their country. What's interesting isn't the moral character of Federalists, whether as individuals or group, but the way structures, discourses, and interests combined to shape those responsibilities, and the way Federalists fought with themselves, each other, and eventually their political opponents, trying to carry them out.
(Epilogue: the effects of all this stuff on Federalism and America for the next twenty, thirty, two-hundred years &c. &c.)
