The large republic as a neo-classical reconstruction: Federalist and Anti-Federalist, energy and debt, the ward, and Reconstruction as a second answer to domination.
LHE LARGE REPUBLIC IS A NEO-CLASSICAL RECONSTRUCTION. The Constitution establishes a republic: separated powers, federalism, enumerated (and residual) authorities, independent judiciary, and a Bill of Rights that constrains majorities. Article IV guarantees every state a republican form of government. Elections are competitive, parties alternate in power, and formal legal continuity has held through crises. These are not empty labels. Federalist 10 answers the classical worry about faction by arguing that an extended sphere multiplies interests and makes majority oppression more difficult. Anti-Federalist writers reply that the same extension destroys the public vigilance and the rotation that keep governors dependent. Hamilton’s defense of executive energy and of a funded debt collides with the older fear that such instruments create a standing interest capable of corrupting the legislature. Jefferson’s proposals for wards, for public education, and for the elimination of entail attempt to preserve local independence and an educated citizenry inside the new scale. The Reconstruction amendments supply a second answer to domination, and this time directed at the states and at private power that the states would not restrain. Citizenship, due process, and the vote are written into the national constitution as limits on what any state may do to persons within its jurisdiction.
The record is the constitutional argument about scale, energy, local capacity, and the national duty to protect citizens against domination. The large republic is neo-classical because it inherits the problems of faction, of the armed citizen, of property, and of public virtue, and because it proposes institutional answers that the classical cities had not tested at continental scale. Reconstruction is part of the same reconstruction. It asks whether the national government can secure the independence of persons whom the states and private powers had subjected.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments answer the domination that slavery and the Black Codes had institutionalized. The Thirteenth abolishes slavery. The Fourteenth defines national and state citizenship, prohibits the states from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens, from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process, and from denying equal protection, and empowers Congress to enforce these limits. The Fifteenth prohibits denial of the vote on grounds of race. In the congressional debates of 1866 Republicans argued that these provisions were required because the states had used their reserved powers to recreate the substance of slavery and because private violence, often tolerated by state authorities, had nullified formal emancipation (U.S. Constitution, Amendments XIII-XV; Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1866).
The refounding is aimed at the states and, through the enforcement power, at private power that the states will not restrain. It widens the earlier republican settlement, which had left ordinary civil rights largely to the states and had accommodated slavery. Citizenship, due process, and the vote become national guarantees. The large republic that Federalist and Anti-Federalist had debated in 1787-88 is thereby given a second institutional answer to the problem of domination. Whether the answer succeeded depended on subsequent enforcement and judicial construction. The debates themselves record the claim that a national citizenship includes protection against state law and against tolerated private violence. Reconstruction is the moment at which American republicanism either incorporates that claim or fails to complete the answer to arbitrary power that the founding had left unfinished.
REFERENCE SOURCES
- James Madison, Federalist No. 10.
- Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 70. Reports on public credit and the bank.
- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia. Letters on the ward system.
- U.S. Constitution, Amendments XIII, XIV, XV.
