Constitutional Thinking

Clement Fatovic

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780700621514
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire des débuts de l'Amérique

If, as many allege, attacking the gap between rich and poor is a form of class warfare, then the struggle against income inequality is the longest running war in American history. To defenders of the status quo, who argue that the accumulation of wealth free of government intervention is an essential feature of the American way, this book offers a forceful answer. While many of those who oppose addressing economic inequality through public policy today do so in the name of freedom, Clement Fatovic demonstrates that concerns about freedom informed the Founding Fathers' arguments for public policy that tackled economic disparities. Where contemporary arguments against such government efforts conceptualize freedom in economic terms, however, those supporting public policies conducive to greater economic equality invoked a more participatory, republican, conception of freedom. As many of the Founders understood it, economic independence, which requires a wide if imperfect distribution of property, is a precondition of the political independence they so profoundly valued.Fatovic reveals a deep concern among the Founders—including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Noah Webster—about the impact of economic inequality on political freedom. America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality traces this concern through many important political debates in Congress and the broader polity that shaped the early Republic—debates over tax policies, public works, public welfare, and the debt from the Revolution. We see how Alexander Hamilton, so often characterized as a cold-hearted apologist for plutocrats, actually favored a more progressive system of taxation, along with various policies aimed at easing the economic hardship of specific groups. In Thomas Paine, frequently portrayed as an advocate of laissez-faire government, we find a champion of a comprehensive welfare state that would provide old-age pensions, public housing, and a host of other benefits as a matter of "right, not charity." Contrary to the picture drawn by so many of today's pundits and politicians, this book shows us how, for the first American statesmen, preventing or minimizing economic disparities was essential to the preservation of the new nation's freedom and practice of self-government.

1

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND THE IDEAL OF EQUALITY

The ideal of equality has been central to the meaning of America ever since the colonies declared independence from Great Britain. Along with the concepts of freedom, democracy, and individual rights, the concept of equality has helped define the idea of America around its highest aspirations as opposed to its sometimes-ugly realities. There have always been discrepancies large and small between stated commitments to these ideals and actual practices, but the ideal of equality has consistently fired the American imagination. However, like the other ideals that shape the American public’s understanding of itself, the meaning and application of equality have always been contested. Even if it was “self-evident” to the generation that founded the Republic “that all men are created equal,” it has never been obvious exactly what that equality actually means, how it gets implemented, or who is promised its benefits. Some conceptions of equality have been more readily accepted than others. Even though bitter and costly struggles have been waged over the ideas of equality under the law, equal opportunity, and equal rights, legal and political conceptions of equality are now generally far less controversial than the ideal of economic equality. The advancement of equality in the spheres of law and politics is one thing, but the promotion of equality in the sphere of economics is quite another. In fact, it is often assumed today that the pursuit of economic equality involves undesirable or even illegitimate trade-offs with freedom or other important values. As a result, many Americans today are willing to tolerate levels of inequality in the economic realm they would find unconscionable in law and politics.

For those Americans who participated in the creation of the Republic, however, equality in the spheres of law and politics was very closely connected to equality in the sphere of economics. Whatever their disagreements over the meaning and application of equality, Americans in that period generally agreed that legal and political equality depend to some degree on economic equality. Following the first stirrings of the American Revolution, more and more Americans came to understand that some measure of economic equality is a precondition for the preservation and promotion of political and legal equality. For that reason, many of them voiced concerns in letters, pamphlets, essays, books, sermons, orations, and legislative debates about the ways in which economic inequalities threaten to introduce and exacerbate legal and political inequalities.

Even more striking than the connections many Americans made between different forms of equality were the links they established between economic equality and political freedom. It was widely assumed that economic relations significantly affect the conditions under which citizens participate in the political process. Equality and freedom were not necessarily seen as distinct or opposing ideals that had to be balanced against each other, but as complementary and mutually constitutive ideals that sustained one another. In particular, economic equality was viewed as essential to political freedom. That is, a rough degree of economic equality creates the conditions for the effective exercise of citizenship.

These ideas grew out of a sober acknowledgment of the dangers excessive levels of economic inequality pose to self-government. Many expressed anxiety that disparities in economic resources would eventually translate into disparities in political power that ultimately weaken the foundations of free government. Concentrations of wealth make it much easier for the rich to gain undue influence in government and dominate the political process. By the same token, lack of material resources makes it much more difficult for the poor to gain a voice and participate in the political process. The most worrisome feature of economic inequality concerned the relations of dependence and domination that formed between members of different classes. Many feared that large concentrations of wealth would give members of the upper classes the ability to determine not only the availability and prices of goods, employment opportunities, working conditions, and the wages of those in the lower classes but also the tax policies, spending priorities, and other public policies that affected the lives of ordinary citizens. If the political process were skewed in favor of the few at the expense of the many, support for the institutions of free government would gradually erode over time, eventually threatening the freedom of rich and poor alike.

To combat the dangers economic inequality poses to political freedom, many Americans looked to the government to prevent economic inequality from becoming excessive. The use of public policy to minimize or prevent the growth of economic inequality was viewed as a legitimate function of government by a wide spectrum of political actors, from middling farmers such as Revolutionary War veteran William Manning and urban champions of the laboring classes such as Thomas Paine to wealthy planters such as Thomas Jefferson and intellectual elites including Noah Webster. Even though many of these and other important figures generally favored small and limited governments, they were open to the use of public policy to minimize the damaging effects of economic inequality on the kind of government they wished to preserve. Religious and humanitarian considerations frequently entered into arguments in favor of public policies designed to address economic inequality, but political considerations revolving around the links between the maldistribution of wealth and imbalances of power ultimately justified a more active role for government than many were otherwise willing to accept.

Attitudes toward Inequality and Hierarchy during the Founding

The presence of slavery and indentured servitude throughout all thirteen colonies and states serves as an obvious reminder that various forms of extreme inequality were well entrenched if not always accepted. A variety of cross-cutting and overlapping hierarchies characterized social and political life in eighteenth-century America. As historian Gordon Wood notes, “Most of colonial society was vertically organized.”¹ Colonial society was stratified along racial, gender, religious, occupational, and financial lines. Although Americans were conscious of belonging to different economic strata, antagonisms stemming from differences in occupation, national origin, and other markers of identity hampered the development of a politicized class identity or general class-consciousness.² Relations of subordination between whites and blacks, men and women, Protestants and Catholics, professionals and laborers, native-born citizens and immigrants, and rich and poor existed throughout the country, but there were notable regional differences in manners and sensibilities, especially when it came to relations between classes.³ Class distinctions were much more rigid in the South than in the North. Hierarchical patterns of behavior and vertical structures of power were also far more prevalent in the southern states compared with their northern counterparts, with large planters continuing to model their behavior and consumption patterns on that of the English gentry.⁴

Those in the lower ranks of society were expected to exhibit appropriate levels of respect toward their “betters” and submit to their judgments about what was best for the community as a whole. Norms of deference required certain forms of address, posture, and gesture in social intercourse between members of different social and economic classes that were taught in guidebooks and enforced through social norms.⁵ Official rules reflected and reinforced these inequalities. Property qualifications for voting and officeholding throughout the colonies gave institutional expression to the notion that the propertied were more fit for public service and concentrated political power in the hands of the wealthy. As a result of these political rules and social attitudes, members of more prestigious and lucrative professions, including lawyers, merchants, and large landowners, were heavily overrepresented in assemblies, whereas farmers, artisans, and other laborers were badly underrepresented.⁶ In addition, the tax system in the colonies generally favored landed aristocrats and imposed heavy burdens in the form of poll taxes on citizens of more modest means.⁷

What scholars have labeled the “politics of deference” was a well-established feature of public culture before the Revolution.⁸ Despite periodic challenges to the pretensions of elites and the subordination of the lower ranks, the prevailing social order was never in any real danger of being overturned during the colonial period. Even some of those who contested the British Parliament’s right to govern the colonies defended the right of the “better sort” to rule within the colonies. For instance, the same writer who proclaimed the right of the people to resist tyrannical or corrupt government asserted that individuals must remain subordinate and obedient to their superiors: “The welfare, nay, the nature of civil society requires, that there should be subordination of order, or diversity of ranks and conditions in it; that certain men or orders of men be appointed to superintend and manage such affairs as concern the public safety and happiness.”⁹ Defenders of hierarchy could find justifications in a variety of authoritative sources that considered inequalities rooted in nature or in divine reason, from ancient texts such as the Bible and Aristotle’s Politics to modern classics such as Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man.¹⁰

After the Revolution got under way, Americans became more outspoken in questioning hierarchical attitudes and practices.¹¹ The notion that the rich have a right to govern the rest was an early target of patriots.¹² Going back to the seventeenth century, there were critics who condemned elite pretensions to superiority, reformers who sought to lower barriers to political participation, moments of popular resistance to established structures of power and privilege, boycotts against public markets that seemed to benefit wealthy merchants at the expense of small retailers and vendors, religious denunciations of the acquisitiveness of the rich and their stinginess toward the poor, and even occasional physical attacks on the property of the rich.¹³ One of the major differences was that various forms of inequality that had been widely accepted started to come under attack from Americans of all ranks, including those who stood at the top of the social hierarchy. Challenges to social and economic inequality that used to grow out of and be confined largely to local circumstances were being mounted on an increasingly larger scale with national implications. For instance, the political and military need to mobilize the people in the struggle for independence compelled elites to rethink the role of the marginalized and subordinated. It was getting more and more difficult to reconcile institutions such as slavery, habits of deference, and great disparities of wealth with the animating principles of the Revolution. Increasing numbers of Americans began to argue that social and political hierarchies were incompatible with revolutionary ideals of liberty, self-rule, balanced government, and most of all equality.

According to Wood, “Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution.”¹⁴ The ideal of equality, which was articulated in pamphlets, sermons, addresses, newspapers, correspondence, and, most memorably, in the Declaration of Independence, inspired patriots to expand the franchise, eliminate vestiges of feudalism in property law, curtail indentured servitude, and challenge the morality of slavery. It also reshaped Americans’ ideas about social relations between upper and lower classes. Many men enlisted in the Revolutionary Army with the expectation that they would get to choose their own officers.¹⁵ Newspaper and pamphlet writers urged the adoption of annual elections and rotation in office to instill a sense of “humility” in elected gentlemen who might otherwise avoid and develop contempt for their inferiors.¹⁶ The use of honorific titles such as gentleman, esquire, and honorable—never very rigid or well defined to begin with—continued to fade in importance.¹⁷ By the same token, the use of pseudonyms such as “A Farmer,” “A Mechanick,” and “A Husbandman” by pamphleteers from all backgrounds indicated the changing political status and mobilization of those in the laboring classes.

As the ideal of equality became more firmly established in both popular and elite opinion, Americans also began to question existing distributions of wealth and power. Indeed, participants on both sides of the war for independence viewed the conflict at least partly in terms of class.¹⁸ For a moment, ideas and interests converged in opposition to various forms of inequality. Attacks on the rule of economic elites often went hand in hand with attacks on British rule because so many of the wealthiest inhabitants in the colonies were Loyalists. Samuel Adams cast the British as plutocratic exploiters who grew “rich and powerful” by seizing the “honest earnings of those industrious emigrants” in order to “support themselves in their vanity and extravagance.”¹⁹ One of the chief grievances Pennsylvanians voiced against British rule was the swelling concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the “few.” They complained that the political system was dominated by a “minority of ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 The American Revolution and the Ideal of Equality
• 2 Class Conflict and Crisis under the Articles of Confederation
• 3 The Constitutional Backlash against the “Excesses of Democracy”
• 4 “Necessary and Proper”: Alexander Hamilton on the Economic Powers of the National Government
• 5 Constructing the Constitution: How the Early Congresses Understood Their Own Powers and Tackled Economic Hardship
• 6 “Silently Lessening the Inequality of Property”: Thomas Jefferson on the Government’s Role in Reducing Economic Inequality
• 7 “Not Charity but a Right”: Thomas Paine on the Justice of a Welfare State
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover