THE PROFESSOR’S PREVIEW

Publius cuts directly to the core of republican theory: justice is the end of government — and of civil society itself. It is foundational. It has been pursued in every age, under every form, and will continue to be pursued — until it is either secured, or liberty is exhausted in the attempt. The tension is permanent: the search for justice sustains political life even as it risks consuming the very freedom that makes such a search possible.

Within the republic, the central problem is not merely the existence of power, but its direction — specifically, the danger that a majority, acting in concert, may become as oppressive as any tyrant. The remedy, however, is not to elevate a singular authority above the people, as in a monarchy, but to reorder the conditions under which power operates. A society sufficiently large, sufficiently varied, and sufficiently divided in its interests resists consolidation. Unjust combinations do not disappear — they fail to cohere. This may also be said of true and pure capitalism or free speech — competition naturally purges the worst, making the most favorable to the masses, whether in product markets or ideas.

Thus emerges the distinctive strength of the federal republic of the United States: by multiplying interests, sects, and competing claims, it renders the domination of any single faction increasingly improbable. Security is not entrusted to the virtue of one, but to the structure of many. In this arrangement, the rights of individuals find a more durable protection — not in the will of a monarch, however enlightened, but in the inability of society itself to unite in injustice.

THE PRIMARY SOURCE

Authored by Alexander Hamilton or James Madison in the New York Packet

Friday, February 8, 1788.

To the People of the State of New York:

TO WHAT expedient, then, shall we finally resort, for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the Constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places. Without presuming to undertake a full development of this important idea, I will hazard a few general observations, which may perhaps place it in a clearer light, and enable us to form a more correct judgment of the principles and structure of the government planned by the convention. In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others. Were this principle rigorously adhered to, it would require that all the appointments for the supreme executive, legislative, and judiciary magistracies should be drawn from the same fountain of authority, the people, through channels having no communication whatever with one another. Perhaps such a plan of constructing the several departments would be less difficult in practice than it may in contemplation appear. Some difficulties, however, and some additional expense would attend the execution of it. Some deviations, therefore, from the principle must be admitted. In the constitution of the judiciary department in particular, it might be inexpedient to insist rigorously on the principle: first, because peculiar qualifications being essential in the members, the primary consideration ought to be to select that mode of choice which best secures these qualifications; secondly, because the permanent tenure by which the appointments are held in that department, must soon destroy all sense of dependence on the authority conferring them. It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified. An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department? If the principles on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test. There are, moreover, two considerations particularly applicable to the federal system of America, which place that system in a very interesting point of view. First. In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself. Second. It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable. The first method prevails in all governments possessing an hereditary or self-appointed authority. This, at best, is but a precarious security; because a power independent of the society may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties. The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government. This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system to all the sincere and considerate friends of republican government, since it shows that in exact proportion as the territory of the Union may be formed into more circumscribed Confederacies, or States oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished: and consequently the stability and independence of some member of the government, the only other security, must be proportionately increased. Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradnally induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful. It can be little doubted that if the State of Rhode Island was separated from the Confederacy and left to itself, the insecurity of rights under the popular form of government within such narrow limits would be displayed by such reiterated oppressions of factious majorities that some power altogether independent of the people would soon be called for by the voice of the very factions whose misrule had proved the necessity of it. In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good; whilst there being thus less danger to a minor from the will of a major party, there must be less pretext, also, to provide for the security of the former, by introducing into the government a will not dependent on the latter, or, in other words, a will independent of the society itself. It is no less certain than it is important, notwithstanding the contrary opinions which have been entertained, that the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government. And happily for the REPUBLICAN CAUSE, the practicable sphere may be carried to a very great extent, by a judicious modification and mixture of the FEDERAL PRINCIPLE.

PUBLIUS.

THE PROFESSOR’S PREVIEW

James Madison identifies factions — combinations of men driven by passion or interest, willing to advance their aims at the expense of others’ rights — as the fatal disease inherent in popular government. Written nearly two and a half centuries ago, the diagnosis does not read as antiquated — it reads as immediate, almost uncomfortably so, as if the intervening years have altered the circumstances but not the condition.

And yet, Madison resists the temptation of an easy remedy. To destroy liberty in order to eliminate faction would be to cure the disease by killing the patient. Liberty is not incidental to republican government — it is its animating principle. The question, then, is not how to eradicate faction, but how to contain it — how to prevent its excesses without extinguishing the freedom that gives rise to it.

Here emerges the distinctive ingenuity of the republican solution: extension. By enlarging the sphere of the republic — by multiplying its interests, diversifying its population, and diffusing power across a wider field — no single faction can easily consolidate itself into a dominant majority. Ambition is checked by competition — interest is balanced against interest. What appears, at first glance, as a liability — size, complexity, diversity — becomes, in Madison’s design, the very mechanism of stability. The republic endures not despite its breadth, but because of it.

THE PRIMARY SOURCE

Authored by James Madison in the New York Packet

Friday, November 23, 1787.

To the People of the State of New York:

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence, of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes, and probably by neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.

By what means is this object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people. The question resulting is, whether small or extensive republics are more favorable to the election of proper guardians of the public weal; and it is clearly decided in favor of the latter by two obvious considerations:

In the first place, it is to be remarked that, however small the republic may be, the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and that, however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude. Hence, the number of representatives in the two cases not being in proportion to that of the two constituents, and being proportionally greater in the small republic, it follows that, if the proportion of fit characters be not less in the large than in the small republic, the former will present a greater option, and consequently a greater probability of a fit choice.

In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.

It must be confessed that in this, as in most other cases, there is a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.

The other point of difference is, the greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter. The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.

Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic,--is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it. Does the advantage consist in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice? It will not be denied that the representation of the Union will be most likely to possess these requisite endowments. Does it consist in the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest? In an equal degree does the increased variety of parties comprised within the Union, increase this security. Does it, in fine, consist in the greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority? Here, again, the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists.

THE PROFESSOR’S PREVIEW

The politicians shout “DEMOCRACY” — but the Founding Fathers intended a republic, and James Madison believed the entire American experiment would stand or fall on a single proposition: mankind’s capacity for self-government. The American republic is not a democracy, not an aristocracy, not a monarchy — it is, properly understood, all three at once.

That is what distinguishes it. Its power derives from the great body of the American people, and those entrusted to exercise it serve as accountable guardians, bound to limited terms, answerable at last to the source from which their authority flows.

The word “republic” has always attracted abuse. Holland, Venice, Poland, in the age of the founders — Iran, China, North Korea, in our own — all have worn the name while concentrating power in nobles, dictators, or princes.

Republican in name, oligarchic in fact. But Madison sets the standard, and it is demanding: in a true republic, authority flows from the people, and no hereditary class, no ruling party, no self-appointed sovereign can claim a permanent share of it. The Constitution is not merely one arrangement among many. It is the answer to what republican government actually requires.

THE PRIMARY SOURCE

Authored by James Madison, for the Independent Journal.

To the People of the State of New York:

THE last paper having concluded the observations which were meant to introduce a candid survey of the plan of government reported by the convention, we now proceed to the execution of that part of our undertaking.

The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government. If the plan of the convention, therefore, be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible.

What, then, are the distinctive characters of the republican form? Were an answer to this question to be sought, not by recurring to principles, but in the application of the term by political writers, to the constitution of different States, no satisfactory one would ever be found. Holland, in which no particle of the supreme authority is derived from the people, has passed almost universally under the denomination of a republic. The same title has been bestowed on Venice, where absolute power over the great body of the people is exercised, in the most absolute manner, by a small body of hereditary nobles. Poland, which is a mixture of aristocracy and of monarchy in their worst forms, has been dignified with the same appellation. The government of England, which has one republican branch only, combined with an hereditary aristocracy and monarchy, has, with equal impropriety, been frequently placed on the list of republics. These examples, which are nearly as dissimilar to each other as to a genuine republic, show the extreme inaccuracy with which the term has been used in political disquisitions.

If we resort for a criterion to the different principles on which different forms of government are established, we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic. It is SUFFICIENT for such a government that the persons administering it be appointed, either directly or indirectly, by the people; and that they hold their appointments by either of the tenures just specified; otherwise every government in the United States, as well as every other popular government that has been or can be well organized or well executed, would be degraded from the republican character. According to the constitution of every State in the Union, some or other of the officers of government are appointed indirectly only by the people. According to most of them, the chief magistrate himself is so appointed. And according to one, this mode of appointment is extended to one of the co-ordinate branches of the legislature. According to all the constitutions, also, the tenure of the highest offices is extended to a definite period, and in many instances, both within the legislative and executive departments, to a period of years. According to the provisions of most of the constitutions, again, as well as according to the most respectable and received opinions on the subject, the members of the judiciary department are to retain their offices by the firm tenure of good behavior.

On comparing the Constitution planned by the convention with the standard here fixed, we perceive at once that it is, in the most rigid sense, conformable to it. The House of Representatives, like that of one branch at least of all the State legislatures, is elected immediately by the great body of the people. The Senate, like the present Congress, and the Senate of Maryland, derives its appointment indirectly from the people. The President is indirectly derived from the choice of the people, according to the example in most of the States. Even the judges, with all other officers of the Union, will, as in the several States, be the choice, though a remote choice, of the people themselves, the duration of the appointments is equally conformable to the republican standard, and to the model of State constitutions The House of Representatives is periodically elective, as in all the States; and for the period of two years, as in the State of South Carolina. The Senate is elective, for the period of six years; which is but one year more than the period of the Senate of Maryland, and but two more than that of the Senates of New York and Virginia. The President is to continue in office for the period of four years; as in New York and Delaware, the chief magistrate is elected for three years, and in South Carolina for two years. In the other States the election is annual. In several of the States, however, no constitutional provision is made for the impeachment of the chief magistrate. And in Delaware and Virginia he is not impeachable till out of office. The President of the United States is impeachable at any time during his continuance in office. The tenure by which the judges are to hold their places, is, as it unquestionably ought to be, that of good behavior. The tenure of the ministerial offices generally, will be a subject of legal regulation, conformably to the reason of the case and the example of the State constitutions.

Could any further proof be required of the republican complexion of this system, the most decisive one might be found in its absolute prohibition of titles of nobility, both under the federal and the State governments; and in its express guaranty of the republican form to each of the latter.

“But it was not sufficient,” say the adversaries of the proposed Constitution, “for the convention to adhere to the republican form. They ought, with equal care, to have preserved the FEDERAL form, which regards the Union as a CONFEDERACY of sovereign states; instead of which, they have framed a NATIONAL government, which regards the Union as a CONSOLIDATION of the States.” And it is asked by what authority this bold and radical innovation was undertaken? The handle which has been made of this objection requires that it should be examined with some precision.

Without inquiring into the accuracy of the distinction on which the objection is founded, it will be necessary to a just estimate of its force, first, to ascertain the real character of the government in question; secondly, to inquire how far the convention were authorized to propose such a government; and thirdly, how far the duty they owed to their country could supply any defect of regular authority.

First. In order to ascertain the real character of the government, it may be considered in relation to the foundation on which it is to be established; to the sources from which its ordinary powers are to be drawn; to the operation of those powers; to the extent of them; and to the authority by which future changes in the government are to be introduced.

On examining the first relation, it appears, on one hand, that the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a NATIONAL, but a FEDERAL act.

That it will be a federal and not a national act, as these terms are understood by the objectors; the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration, that it is to result neither from the decision of a MAJORITY of the people of the Union, nor from that of a MAJORITY of the States. It must result from the UNANIMOUS assent of the several States that are parties to it, differing no otherwise from their ordinary assent than in its being expressed, not by the legislative authority, but by that of the people themselves. Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority, in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes, or by considering the will of the majority of the States as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules have been adopted. Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a FEDERAL, and not a NATIONAL constitution.

The next relation is, to the sources from which the ordinary powers of government are to be derived. The House of Representatives will derive its powers from the people of America; and the people will be represented in the same proportion, and on the same principle, as they are in the legislature of a particular State. So far the government is NATIONAL, not FEDERAL. The Senate, on the other hand, will derive its powers from the States, as political and coequal societies; and these will be represented on the principle of equality in the Senate, as they now are in the existing Congress. So far the government is FEDERAL, not NATIONAL. The executive power will be derived from a very compound source. The immediate election of the President is to be made by the States in their political characters. The votes allotted to them are in a compound ratio, which considers them partly as distinct and coequal societies, partly as unequal members of the same society. The eventual election, again, is to be made by that branch of the legislature which consists of the national representatives; but in this particular act they are to be thrown into the form of individual delegations, from so many distinct and coequal bodies politic. From this aspect of the government it appears to be of a mixed character, presenting at least as many FEDERAL as NATIONAL features.

The difference between a federal and national government, as it relates to the OPERATION OF THE GOVERNMENT, is supposed to consist in this, that in the former the powers operate on the political bodies composing the Confederacy, in their political capacities; in the latter, on the individual citizens composing the nation, in their individual capacities. On trying the Constitution by this criterion, it falls under the NATIONAL, not the FEDERAL character; though perhaps not so completely as has been understood. In several cases, and particularly in the trial of controversies to which States may be parties, they must be viewed and proceeded against in their collective and political capacities only. So far the national countenance of the government on this side seems to be disfigured by a few federal features. But this blemish is perhaps unavoidable in any plan; and the operation of the government on the people, in their individual capacities, in its ordinary and most essential proceedings, may, on the whole, designate it, in this relation, a NATIONAL government.

But if the government be national with regard to the OPERATION of its powers, it changes its aspect again when we contemplate it in relation to the EXTENT of its powers. The idea of a national government involves in it, not only an authority over the individual citizens, but an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things, so far as they are objects of lawful government. Among a people consolidated into one nation, this supremacy is completely vested in the national legislature. Among communities united for particular purposes, it is vested partly in the general and partly in the municipal legislatures. In the former case, all local authorities are subordinate to the supreme; and may be controlled, directed, or abolished by it at pleasure. In the latter, the local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority, than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere. In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a NATIONAL one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects. It is true that in controversies relating to the boundary between the two jurisdictions, the tribunal which is ultimately to decide, is to be established under the general government. But this does not change the principle of the case. The decision is to be impartially made, according to the rules of the Constitution; and all the usual and most effectual precautions are taken to secure this impartiality. Some such tribunal is clearly essential to prevent an appeal to the sword and a dissolution of the compact; and that it ought to be established under the general rather than under the local governments, or, to speak more properly, that it could be safely established under the first alone, is a position not likely to be combated.

If we try the Constitution by its last relation to the authority by which amendments are to be made, we find it neither wholly NATIONAL nor wholly FEDERAL. Were it wholly national, the supreme and ultimate authority would reside in the MAJORITY of the people of the Union; and this authority would be competent at all times, like that of a majority of every national society, to alter or abolish its established government. Were it wholly federal, on the other hand, the concurrence of each State in the Union would be essential to every alteration that would be binding on all. The mode provided by the plan of the convention is not founded on either of these principles. In requiring more than a majority, and principles. In requiring more than a majority, and particularly in computing the proportion by STATES, not by CITIZENS, it departs from the NATIONAL and advances towards the FEDERAL character; in rendering the concurrence of less than the whole number of States sufficient, it loses again the FEDERAL and partakes of the NATIONAL character.

The proposed Constitution, therefore, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.

PUBLIUS.

In 2020, I sat in my office, a square of stillness amid the dislocation of that year, logged into a graduate seminar conducted over Zoom with a cohort of PhD students here in Southern California. It was, in its composition, predictable — and yet revealing. Of the six assembled, I was the only republican (small-r). The setting itself carried a certain irony: a seminar devoted to the history of the Early American Republic, unfolding in real time alongside one of the most chaotic elections in American history (Trump v. Biden). The past and present, rather than illuminating one another, seemed to collide.

What began as a discussion soon took on a different character. Exchanges moved not toward understanding but toward accumulation — points scored, positions staked, a cadence less of inquiry than of performance. It was in this atmosphere that the professor — one of the finest historians in California, an author I greatly admire, and one who knew me, simply, as “conservative” — turned the conversation. With a deliberate ease, he posed the question: “Who can give us insight into the republican mind?” The room did not need to shift for the intention to be clear. The question had already found its mark.

My response emerged less as an argument than as an observation — a pattern I had come to recognize through the study of the ancients, through the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and through my own experience in politics over the preceding two decades. It was not a defense, nor an apology, but an attempt to describe a structure often misunderstood, even by those who inhabit it.

We, as republican (small-r) minded, do not perceive political life through the same lens as the Democrats, or the democratic minded more broadly. Issues, for us, are not intersectional in the modern sense — they do not interlock into a seamless ideological fabric. Republicanism is not woven. It does not aspire to be.

Rather, the foundation of republicanism — and of our republican government — rests not upon a singular, coherent philosophy, but upon a series of pillared coalitions. These pillars stand adjacent, sometimes aligned, sometimes in tension, but never dissolved into one another. This distinction is not incidental — it is structural. A philosophy demands coherence — an internal consistency that can be traced, defended, and expanded. In such a framework, contradiction is failure. But American republicanism is not constructed to win the game of coherence, and when it attempts to do so, it misunderstands itself.

A coalition of pillars requires a different architecture altogether — one older than system, less refined but more durable. It is practical rather than theoretical, contingent rather than totalizing. Its endurance depends not on the elegance of its logic, but on the strength and independence of its supports.

It is here that my concern with the activity within the California Republican Party begins to take shape. A coalition-style party cannot be sustained as though it were a philosophical school. To attempt this is to substitute abstraction for structure, and in doing so, to weaken the very foundation upon which it depends. What such a party requires is not greater coherence, but stronger pillars — something more attuned to the realities of political life.

A pillar, in this sense, is not an abstraction but a discrete political commitment — one capable of standing independently of the others, requiring neither reinforcement nor validation from the whole. It does not demand assent in total. One need not subscribe to every pillar for the structure to hold — the integrity of the system presumes otherwise. Acceptance of two or three pillars — even accompanied by the rejection of the rest — is sufficient to sustain the larger edifice of the Republican voter bloc. The structure does not collapse under disagreement — it anticipates it and gives it strength.

Thus, a voter may accept three pillars and reject two others, and still find themselves firmly situated beneath the Republican Party’s roof. This is not a contradiction — it is the design. The architecture allows for divergence without disintegration, for variance without exile (in theory).

For example: fiscal restraint, restricted immigration, energy independence, deregulation, opposition to abortion, lower taxes, law and order, school choice, protection of religious conscience, and, in some factions, a preference for tariffs and consumption taxes over income or property taxes as the mechanism of public finance. If the top two “pillars” of a voter intent on lower taxes and law and order, they are a likely Republican voter in California. There are also single issues: a pro-life person, where that is their singular top issue, are likely to vote Republican in California without considerations of any other pillar of the Republican Party’s platform.

In theory, such a system should grant the California Republican Party a remarkable durability — indeed, an exceptional one. Its resilience lies precisely in what it does not require. It does not demand conversion en whole, nor the surrender of prior commitments in exchange for entry.

These pillars, moreover, are not formed in abstraction. They are defined — and continually redefined — by cultural norms, shaped as much by time and circumstance as by doctrine. They do not stand outside society, fixed and permanent, but emerge from within it, adapting as the contours of public life shift. It is here, perhaps, that we find an explanation for a development that would have seemed improbable — if not inconceivable — in earlier decades.

The Republican Party in California, once sharply bound in its social composition, has opened itself to populations that, in the 1990s and early 2000s, stood in clear opposition to it. Homosexuality, once a point of sustained political conflict, and even those aligned with First Amendment absolutists — both examples of positions the party once resisted with considerable force — now find, if not full incorporation, at least a place within the broader structure. The same could be said of the Hispanic community after Proposition 187 (1994, “Save Our State”) — now, there are many Hispanic-Americans who find certain pillars of greater importance than that of their ethnic identity.

This is not, strictly speaking, a transformation of principle so much as an adaptation of structure. A coalition built on pillars rather than a single philosophical line possesses a certain elasticity. As cultural norms evolve, so too do the pillars — not uniformly, and not without tension, but sufficiently to allow new alignments to form. When the platform is slow to react to cultural shifts, the California Republican Party will wane. With a nimble platform that may once have required exclusion, it can, under a different arrangement, be accommodated without requiring full agreement.

Such developments do not signal the abandonment of the past so much as a reconfiguration of its terms. The same structure endures, but the composition of its supports shifts, reflecting the changing realities of the society from which it draws its strength. Rather, it asks only that a newcomer — or a No Party Preference voter — take hold of enough pillars to help bear the weight of the roof. The threshold is not total agreement, but sufficient participation.

And in practice, this produces an outcome that, to those outside the structure, may appear paradoxical. Two Republican voters may share the same three pillars, differ on the others entirely, and yet arrive at the same conclusion — casting their vote for the exact same candidate. What appears, from a distance, as inconsistency is, from within, a reflection of the system’s design: a coalition not of uniformity, but of alignment where it matters most. This is how the American Federal government was built by Jefferson and the other founding fathers — now, fifty experiments, each with their own constitutions, laws, norms that ebb and flow with their regional cultures. And it is this capacity for partial entry — for selective commitment without expulsion — is what gives a pillared coalition its exceptional durability.

This is why Jefferson understood the Constitution as a living document — it is always evolving based on the priorities of geography, culture, and politics — the republican logic embedded within the constitutional design itself. In fact, he noted this in his struggle against slavery in the early American republic, observing that “a good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of its friends than by the arguments of its enemies.” Indeed, Jefferson knew that, at times, social and cultural movements required patience to become law and that the abolition of slavery would demand a “revolution in public opinion,” and this was “not to be expected in a day, or perhaps an age; but time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.” Not ironically enough, Jefferson, one of the primary architects of the Constitution, would see a political faction emerge in the name of republicanism — the Republican Party emerged to abolish slavery.

Federal republicanism’s architecture of overlapping interests — as should be foundational to the Republican Party — factions, Madison called them, which he did not praise but accepted as the irreducible material of free government. Madison was precise on this point: the causes of faction “cannot be removed,” and relief is only to be sought “in the means of controlling its effects.” His remedy (applicable to internal party Republican politics) was not to eliminate faction but to multiply and diffuse it across a sufficiently large republic (arguably here, the California Republican Party) — so that no single interest could consolidate into a tyrannical majority. The pillar system is, in this sense, federalism translated into electoral practice: it does not suppress competing interests but channels them into a structure large enough to contain them.

What gives the pillar model its significance is its practical force — is that it moves (theoretically) with the cultural ebbs and flows. The pillars of American conservatism in 1860 bear only a passing resemblance to those of 1964, and those of 1964 are not the pillars of 2016 or 2026. Free soil, hard money, and Union gave way, over generations, to anti-communism, social traditionalism, and supply-side economics, and then gave way again to economic nationalism, skepticism of foreign entanglement, and the defense of speech that the party spent the 1990s trying to police. Each transformation reflected a real shift in what the coalition’s constituents feared, valued, and felt themselves to be losing. The pillars do not move arbitrarily. They move with the culture, and with the particular anxieties of a particular historical moment. This is not weakness. It is the system functioning as designed.

Bibliography | Notes

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to James Heaton, May 20, 1826. In The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, edited by J. Jefferson Looney. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, Being a Collection of Essays Written in Support of the Constitution Agreed Upon September 17, 1787, by the Federal Convention. Introduction by Edward Gaylord Bourne. Vol. 1.

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John C. Frémont and Andrés Pico were born thousands of miles apart, yet the distance between them was merely geographic. Both were military men and successful politicians — highly ranked officers, risk-takers, and hard drinkers with something to prove. Each carried ambition, honor, and a lived faith in republicanism into a frontier where sovereignty was unsettled — and power was always provisional.

They met as adversaries during the Mexican War and emerged from it as friends, despite cultural, linguistic, and national detachments that should have kept them apart. Republicanism was not an abstraction for either man — it was a tool, a language, and a source of legitimacy they both learned to wield. That shared republican grammar did not arise independently. Though republican and liberal ideas long predated both Frémont and General Pico, the ideological bridge between them ran through a rooted figure — Joel Roberts Poinsett — and through an institutional vehicle that carried his influence into Mexican political life: York Rite Freemasonry.

Republican ideas already circulated among the second and third generations living in Mexico’s northern provinces, but Yorkino Freemasonry supplied organization, cohesion, and momentum. It did more than disseminate ideology — it forged bonds of family, friendship, and political culture across borders that were themselves still being imagined, named, and enforced. This was the shared, peculiar, and little-known connection between Frémont and General Pico: Joel Roberts Poinsett, American republican thinker, politician, world traveler, and one of the first United States envoys to Mexico following its independence.

Poinsett’s career exposes a defining contradiction of the early American republic — a nation that imagined itself a yeoman commonwealth while depending on relentless territorial expansion. During his diplomatic service in Chile in the 1810s and Mexico in the 1820s, Poinsett sought to distinguish the United States from European empires by promoting republican culture and institutions abroad. Yet this effort was inseparable from an increasingly aggressive pursuit of American national advantage, revealing how the language of liberty and civic virtue could function not as a restraint on power, but as one of its most effective instruments.

By the time President James Monroe announced what became known as the Monroe Doctrine (1823), Poinsett had already spent years in South America and Mexico advancing the argument that the United States represented a fundamentally different kind of power — not an empire of conquest, but a republic with a moral stake in the political independence of the hemisphere. That argument appears almost verbatim in the doctrine’s core logic: Europe must not recolonize the Americas, and the United States would assume a special guardianship over the hemisphere’s political future.

Poinsett was appointed U.S. Minister to Mexico in 1825 and arrived in Mexico City at a moment of extraordinary volatility. Mexico was newly independent, politically fragile, and ideologically fluid — and Poinsett stepped directly into that instability, backing federalists (the Yorkinos) against centralists (the Escoceses). Though the Yorkino framework was described as “federalist,” Poinsett stood firmly within the Jefferson–Madison–Atlantic republican tradition. His influence aligned seamlessly with the hemispheric vision crystallizing in the Monroe Doctrine: republican sovereignty defended by American moral authority.

This four-year window (1825–1829) proved decisive. It was during this period that Poinsett’s republican influence took root and radiated outward, eventually reaching Alta California through men like José María de Echeandía. Poinsett dispatched far more than diplomacy into Mexico City. Over the course of two decades, he slowly infiltrated Mexican political culture with what the Escoceses decried as “radical” republicanism. One of history’s quieter ironies is that the poisonous poinsettia was introduced into the United States by Poinsett himself in 1825, the work of an amateur botanist.

Frémont encountered Poinsett at just twenty years old. Poinsett lifted him from obscurity, perhaps recognizing in Frémont a familiar vigor and relentless will. The two men bonded first through botany, but their deeper connection was ideological. Frémont and Poinsett shared the republican tradition — federal in structure, national in loyalty, suspicious of oligarchy and inherited power. In many ways, Poinsett rescued Frémont from the scrap heap. Frémont never forgot it. The experience hardened his ambition and sharpened his sense of purpose. Backed by the ideological confidence of a like-minded nation, Frémont positioned himself as a vessel of American expansion — the Pathfinder, with “the carriage of a soldier and the face of a poet… he was unlike other men — something bigger and finer, made for some great purpose.”

Poinsett’s influence on Andrés Pico and the Californios was more indirect, but arguably more consequential. His republican seed, carried through York Rite Freemasonry into the political soil of Mexico City, would shape a century of turbulence. The Yorkino became not merely a faction, but a political identity. With the appointment of Yorkino José María de Echeandía as territorial governor of Alta California, Poinsett’s ideological legacy began restructuring how the next generation of Californios understood authority, citizenship, and their place on the Mexican frontier.

Alta California was ripe for republican thinking. Young Californios watched their fathers labor beneath church authority and government-imposed inferiority enforced through the Sistema de Castas. Missionaries and merchants controlled the economy, while Californio families survived on poor wages and rationed food. The men who protected the land — land taken through blood — remained penniless from cradle to grave, without a single acre to call their own.

Through Poinsett, via Echeandía, Yorkino ideology emboldened Californios to seize the body politic, to shift definitions of worth away from caste, and to refashion themselves in a republican image. In the name of federalist rights, backed by the Mexican Constitution of 1824, they rose in rebellion and took what they believed was theirs under the cloak of liberty. As Yorkinos, they justified the seizure of labor, land, and trade as a birthright — a Manifest Destiny of their own.

Few historians have fully reckoned with this ideological throughline between American republicanism and Alta California. Yorkino thought was not merely rebellious — it was structural. It bridged the Mexican and American periods of California’s history. Republicanism fostered a hyper-political environment, Californio insurgency, and a durable political identity.

Californios like General Andrés Pico understood the machinery of the United States Constitution through their Yorkino foundation. That fluency enabled General Pico’s negotiated citizenship under the Treaty of Cahuenga. Without it, Californios would have exited the Mexican War on the margins — and with it, the idea of a “Mexican-American” — their history swallowed by the advancing tide of Manifest Destiny in 1847. Even with citizenship secured on paper, the Mexican-American Californio emerged forged — and scarred — in the fire of the American landscape.

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Bibliography | Notes

Anna, Timothy E. Forging Mexico, 1821–1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Cathey, H. Marc. “A Blooming Industry: Poinsettias Lead the Way in Sales.” Agricultural Research 40, no. 12 (January 1992): 5.

Fischer, Ernest G. Robert Potter: Founder of the Texas Navy. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1976.

Freed, Feather Craword. Joel Poinsett and the Paradox of Imperial Republicanism: Chile, Mexico, and the Cherokee Nation, 1810–1841. Master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 2008.

Rolle, Andrew F. John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Salomon, Carlos Manuel. Pío Pico: The Last Governor of Mexican California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010.

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Thomas Jefferson was born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, at Shadwell in Albemarle County, Virginia, on April 2, 1743. He would spend most of his life at Monticello, though his work as a U.S. minister afforded him the opportunity to live in Paris, France, from 1784 to 1789, where he absorbed the Enlightenment culture, architecture, cuisine, and political theory as the French Revolution gathered steam. He studied agriculture, manufacturing, and constitutional practice in England.

Jefferson studied finance and republican traditions in the Netherlands. He toured Milan and Turin in Italy, turning his attention to architecture, irrigation, and viticulture. In southern France, he examined Roman ruins, canal systems, and the wine region through his agrarian lens. And as a life fulfilled by his studies and the achievement, he passed on July 4, 1826, at the age of eighty-three — a fitting end for one of America’s original patriots.

His father, Peter Jefferson, of Welsh descent, was a man who made his own way in the world by sheer force of character. He married Jane Randolph, of Scotch descent, a daughter of one of the oldest and proudest families of colonial Virginia. Peter Jefferson became a surveyor, held the most important county offices, and was a man of the people — forceful, capable, and sociable in business. His death on August 17, 1757, when Thomas was fourteen, would profoundly shape the younger Jefferson.

Thomas was the eldest son and inherited the greater part of his father’s property. He had been encouraged from boyhood to live much outdoors and was fond of shooting and fox-hunting. He became an expert horseman, even for a Virginian. At nineteen, he graduated from the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg, Virginia. He read law under George Wythe of Williamsburg, a man eminent in his profession and notable as the instructor of James Madison, and a formative influence on Patrick Henry, and John Marshall, afterward Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the United States.

At Williamsburg, Jefferson associated with men much older than himself, but men of ability and of great liberality in matters of thought and religion. From his father, he inherited 1,900 acres of land and slave laborers, though the bulk of his enslaved workforce came later through marriage. During his few years of legal practice before public life claimed him, he substantially expanded his landholdings.

At the age of twenty-eight, he married Mrs. Martha Skelton, a charming young widow of twenty-three. Upon her father’s death soon after the marriage, she inherited thousands of acres and more than one hundred slaves. With the estate, however, came heavy indebtedness, for Jefferson was still paying off old obligations twenty years later.

He was admitted to the bar and began practicing law in 1767. Two years later, he was elected to the House of Burgesses from his native county of Albemarle, and in 1773, he was re-elected. His next advance was to a seat in the Continental Congress at Philadelphia, which he took in June two years later. He served through the following winter and spring, took a keen interest in its deliberations, and sat on several important committees.

According to Jefferson’s own account, on June 10, 1776, John Adams, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, and Jefferson were appointed to a committee to prepare a declaration of independence. The committee requested Jefferson to draft the document. In the discharge of this trust, he prepared what has been widely regarded as the most profound public document ever written — the Declaration of Independence. Approved by the committee, it was reported to Congress by its author on Friday, June twenty-eighth.

Elected for the third time to the Virginia Legislature from Albemarle County, Jefferson resigned his seat in Congress on September second and took his place in the Legislature early in October of the same eventful year.

In 1779, he was chosen Governor of Virginia. Jefferson served two one-year terms (1779–1781) and was again elected to Congress. He next succeeded Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France in 1785 and remained in Paris for the four following years. Upon his resignation and return, he became the first Secretary of State. His republican views brought him into sharp conflict with Alexander Hamilton, leading to his resignation from the Secretaryship on the last day of December, near the end of Washington’s first administration.

In the election that placed John Adams in the presidential chair at the end of Washington’s second term, Jefferson received the next-highest number of votes and became Vice President, and thus the presiding officer of the Senate. Public sentiment had steadily grown more favorable toward his ideas of government and the so-called Jeffersonian principles, and in 1801, he was elected President after an ugly campaign. He was re-elected four years later, and at the close of his second term, on March 4, 1809, he retired to his estate of Monticello, two miles from Charlottesville, adjoining Shadwell, the place of his birth. He never again journeyed far from Monticello and the state of Virginia.

The remaining years of his life were far from idle. His views on education were as far in advance of his age as his ideas of republican government had been a quarter century earlier. The establishment of a thoroughly equipped university for Virginia became the darling hope of his later years and the goal of his ambition. He gave to it his means, his time, and his personal supervision, and lived to see the legislature pass the act in 1819, founding the University of Virginia. He was chosen as one of the Board of Overseers, made its first rector, and lived to see the institution formally opened in the spring of 1825, with an able corps of professors and a promising body of students.

In March of the following year, his physical powers began to fail. The great clock was running down. And as the fiftieth anniversary of American independence arrived, the sun of his life — serene, peaceful, and beautiful — sank beyond the clouds near midday on July 4, 1826. Over his grave was erected a modest obelisk of his own design, bearing an epitaph written by himself:

“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.”

Jefferson’s manner of life, while not ostentatious for his time and place, was elegant. He maintained his coach-and-four, his French cook, and his French dishes, except during the first two years of his presidency, and he dressed neatly and with taste.

Jefferson possessed a profound belief in the common people. He believed that an uneducated plowman was as likely to judge rightly in matters of morals as a philosopher, and that the mass of the people were fitted to take a full part in government. At the same time, he kept his slaves, loved a good table and good wines, and thoroughly enjoyed the society of his aristocratic neighbors and friends. His connection with the masses was, in truth, at arm’s length. He craved popularity, was acutely sensitive to criticism, and dreaded — even shunned — any situation involving personal contumacy or direct contest.

An elegant writer, he produced but one book, and that not originally intended for publication. He frequently asserted that he never wrote for the newspapers, though he occasionally influenced them indirectly. Though a fine conversationalist in small company, he never made public speeches. Perhaps no man ever read and judged public sentiment with greater instinctive accuracy than Jefferson.

Estimates of his character differ so widely and appear so irreconcilable that it is best to allow his biographers to speak for themselves — and to leave the final judgment to the reader.

Bibliography | Notes

Sawvel, Franklin B., ed. The Complete Anas of Thomas Jefferson. New York: The Round Table Press, 1903.

Looney, J. Jefferson. “Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/jefferson-thomas-1743-1826/.

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Bolívar’s Jamaica Letter remains one of the clearest windows into his understanding of republicanism and its uneasy transplantation into Latin America. It is written as a long, serpentine meditation — a historical wandering through conquest, subjugation, and misrule — until the reader [myself, and perhaps you] realizes that the wandering has been deliberate. Bolívar leads us, patiently and almost deceptively, into a trap: republicanism not as preference, but as moral inevitability. When government ceases to be a matter of taste and becomes a question of justice, republicanism emerges as the only form capable of cleansing three centuries of “atrocities” and permanent tutelage imposed upon the New World.

Yet the republicanism Bolívar advocates is not naïve. He pursues republican ends while distrusting democratic means. Liberty is his animating principle, but it immediately raises a destabilizing question: do the emancipated possess the capacity to sustain liberty once it is achieved? Federalism, as he observed, collapsed into factionalism. Like Cicero, Plato, Jefferson, and other republican thinkers before him, Bolívar understood the corrosive effects of “monarchical parentalism,” the habit of rule that trains a people into obedience rather than judgment. His core problem is not theoretical but anthropological: how does one define republicanism for a population trained by Spain into passivity — how, without an apprenticeship in liberty, do the politically “nonexistent” suddenly legislate, judge, and govern as magistrates of a republic?

The question Bolívar presses, implicitly and relentlessly, is whether a people so long deprived of liberty can sustain the virtue required by the republican form.

With the ties to Spain broken — “The veil has been torn asunder.” A republic, in Bolívar’s telling, does not begin with elections but with sight. The colonized see their condition, and once seen, it cannot be unseen. This is an awakening, but Bolívar remains uncertain whether it is a moral awakening sufficient to make consent possible and servitude intolerable. Here lies the dividing line between Bolívar’s republicanism and that of Washington and Jefferson. Bolívar’s republic must secure the consent not only of property holders, but of the enslaved and the common citizen — the Mulatto, the Mestizo, the Creole. His republicanism is inseparable from political economy: commerce, agriculture, and the ordinary labor of a society finally permitted to develop on its own terms.

The American Revolution did not require the governance of a permanent minority, as Spanish rule had imposed in Latin America — “an active and effective tyranny.” This, for Bolívar, is the central dilemma: how does one confer liberty upon a population barred for three centuries from the civic muscle memory that makes self-rule possible? Latin Americans had been trained to produce and consume, explicitly forbidden to govern. Republicanism, therefore, could not simply assert abstract rights; it would have to recover a stolen capacity.

Where liberty has been stolen, there can be no romanticizing republicanism — no belief that virtue blooms spontaneously the moment chains are broken. The untrained in liberty often drift toward the simplicity of democracy. Bolívar warns that “wholly representative” institutions are not a betrayal of republicanism but an attempt to preserve it; yet untempered democracy risks exhausting liberty rather than securing it, driving republics toward the very anarchy they sought to escape. In Caracas, he witnessed party spirit in elections and assemblies that “led us back into slavery.” “Wholly popular systems,” he cautions, lacking the “abilities and political virtues” present in the American Revolution, may bring “our downfall.”

The question, then, is not whether liberty is desirable, but what institutional form can preserve it amid inexperience, faction, and the inherited “vices” of Spanish rule.

Bolívar’s answer is strikingly pragmatic. The best form of republicanism for Latin America, he writes, is “the one that is most likely to succeed.” This is his great compromise — a rejection of republican purity in favor of republican durability. It is why he proposes Colombia with an executive elected “at most, for life,” and a hereditary senate interposed between the republic and the “violent demands of the people.” These buffers were not designed to negate liberty but to shelter it. For Bolívar, this was not apostasy but engineering: a recognition that republicanism, if it is to survive, must be built for stability rather than ideal symmetry.

On the conservative end of his analysis, Bolívar regarded monarchies as possessing a “constant desire” to expand their authority and possessions. Security, under a monarchy, is purchased through war and conquest. Republican interests, properly understood, aim instead at preservation, prosperity, and glory — ends compatible with peace and internal development. A republic does not require conquest to justify itself; it requires competent governance. In a hemisphere exhausted by forced extraction, this became both a moral and practical argument for republican government. But scale remained the unresolved problem.

A republic that grows “too large” risks degenerating into despotism; one that remains too small becomes prey to imperial ambition. Bolívar’s republicanism is therefore plural. However “grandiose” the dream of continental unity, he argues that climate, geography, interests, and “dissimilar characteristics” forbid a single Latin American state. What he envisions instead is a confederation — not unity under one will, but coordination among many. Yet even here, Bolívar cannot relinquish the republican moral horizon.

He returns repeatedly to the language of regeneration: a people must “recover the rights to which the Creator and Nature have entitled them.” A hemisphere is summoned toward “justice, liberty, and equality.” His doubts about institutions do not dilute the end they serve. Republicanism restores agency. The Jamaica Letter is ultimately an inquiry into how a republic is created — and how it is preserved. Bolívar explicitly rejects the fantasy that a single heroic figure might unify the continent — Quetzalcoatl returned, a prophet, a god. He declines the myth without ridicule.

The struggle is the same one known to the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. When Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Benjamin Franklin what government the Americans had secured — “a republic or a monarchy?” — Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Bolívar echoes this sentiment in his own idiom. Founding a republic may be natural — sustaining it requires “sensible planning and well-directed actions rather than by divine magic.” This is a republican sentence. Bolívar demotes salvation, elevates deliberation, and places the future in institutions and collective discipline rather than charismatic fate. A republic, at bottom, is a wager that a people can govern themselves without waiting for a god.

Thus, the Jamaica Letter is not a celebration of republicanism’s ease or virtue, nor a promise of success. It is an argument that monarchy is structurally corrupting, politically impracticable in the Americas, and morally incapable of repairing the injuries of conquest; that liberty, once seen, cannot be unseen; and that a people denied the practice of governance must nevertheless begin learning it — because the alternative is perpetual infancy.

Bibliography | Notes

Bolívar, Simón. Letter from Kingston, Jamaica, September 6, 1815.