The Tree of Liberty: Standing Armies and the Struggle to Define American Governance

One the United States’ Founders, writing under the pseudonym Brutus, argued that the new country, spanning too great a distance and too many distinctly interested peoples, was not viable.^[1] His predictions were bleak: the government would lack the support of the people, who would feel both neglected and subsumed by its distant authority. To generate real power, the “nerveless and inefficient” state would eventually acquire, through patronage and the vast administrative tasks that the great size of America required, a powerful executive with an “armed force to execute the laws at the point of the bayonet—a government of all others the most to be dreaded.”^[2] This analysis of the Constitution’s limited standing army rested upon the assertion that a “free republic will never keep a standing army to execute its laws,” because it possesses the affection of its people,^[3] an opinion that long had a place in English political thought.^[4] Accordingly, the Continental Army was disbanded upon the completion of its task, victory in the Revolutionary War. In the ensuing years, the disparate interests of the Founders gradually converged on the maintenance of a standing army, which became fundamental to the preservation of the union.

Alexander Hamilton stands out among the Constitution’s most dedicated defenders. He saw a world cut by boundaries across which the new states would watch one another at best warily and at worst jealously, devising their own Western and commercial enlargement and not inclined naturally to cooperation. Mere republicanism did not, according to Hamilton, ensure peace: republics fought “popular” wars as often as monarchies fought “royal” ones.^[5] In any case, distinguishing categories with such adjectives does little to ameliorate the noun. To maintain a general peace, Hamilton proposed that the United States needed a powerful central government that could wield power directly and energetically. In Federalist 28, Hamilton, conjecturing about governance at a time when the consensus ran resolutely against standing armies, gently hinted at his desire that one indeed be used to buttress the federal government. He wrote that

there might sometimes be a necessity to make use of a force constituted differently from the militia, to preserve the peace of the community, and to maintain the just authority of the laws against those violent invasions of them, which amount to insurrections and rebellions.^[6]

Since governments don’t exert authority that is not, in their own books, “just,” this statement in defence of the Constitution’s standing army is tantamount to advocacy of government by the bayonet. Thomas Jefferson, writing to William S. Smith, expressed the counter-balancing opinion, naming lethargy among the people “the forerunner of death to the public liberty” and continued: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”^[7] Jefferson’s view of the relationship between citizens and their governments was one of collaboration, rather than domination. Somewhere between these two poles of opinion fell that which was generally accepted.

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That of Hamilton, however, first had the power, and was thus the first to be tested. Federalists faced rebellion in the infancy of the United States, including the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries’ Rebellion. Both of these were attempts by Pennsylvanians to resist indirect federal taxation of income (whiskey and windows both being good measures of income in the backcountry). The leaders of these rebellions were tried and convicted for treason, the “usurpation of the authority of government,” as Judge Paterson defined it, and “high treason by levying of war.”^[8] Notice that the Judge generalized this usurpation of authority to all government, not only that of the United States or, more pointedly, its authority to tax. Such a broad interpretation of these revolts gave the energy to Federalists in power to act broadly, and the Constitution’s standing army gave them the requisite tool. Since the regular army was tied up in Ohio, President George Washington tapped into the other realm of federal military strength, one that was much greater than his few thousand regular soldiers: federal direction of state militias. He ordered that fifteen thousand men be concentrated in western Pennsylvania from that state and its neighbors, thus easily crushing the rebels.^[9] While this militia force would not fit within the marginal definition of a standing army, the President’s ability to rapidly draw together a large military presence under his own direction certainly constituted a standing force, with or without federal funding, and the force of an army, both physical and metaphysical, is what mattered. Those who objected to standing armies objected to their force, rather than their mere existence.

After the Whiskey Rebellion, the federal government dramatically expanded its military capacity, thus creating what would, by any construct of the word, constitute a standing army. This legacy of the Rebellion, Hamilton felt, “would do us a great deal of good and add to the solidity of every thing in this country.”^[10] To the roughly three thousand regular troops that were garrisoned in the West, a “New Army” of twelve thousand was added for the defence of the East, augmented by ten thousand reserve soldiers, and Federalists Washington and Hamilton were put in charge of it.^[11] They worked to fill their officer corps with fellow Federalists; because, as historian Gordon Wood has observed, “the army was designed not only to resist the French but presumably to put down domestic insurrection, and even political opposition.”^[12] The threat that such an army posed to the expression of rural and Southern interests was immense.

Though many in the South feared the trajectory of the Federalist government, they agreed to stay beneath the federal umbrella—for the time being. John Taylor minced no words when he wrote to Jefferson, his fellow great mover of the Republicans, in 1798 that

I see nothing to change the opinions which have long obtruded themselves upon my mind—namely—that the southern states must lose their capital and commerce—and that America is destined to war—standing armies—and oppressive taxation, by which the power of the few here, as in other countries, will be matured into an irresistible scourge of human happiness.^[13]

For many Southern founders, the Army offered the solution to this problem, which itself derived from the Army. It offered a tool with which the new government could avoid such a crisis. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith gave voice to the Republican estimation of New World frontier farmers: “a planter who cultivates his own land, and derives his necessary subsistence from the labour of his own family, is really a master, and independent of all the world.”^[14] The countryside, lacking the rigorous economic specialization of cities, housed men in whom the butcher, brewer, and baker were one. This contrasted with the lives of laborers and manufacturers, as Jefferson observed in his Notes on the State of Virginia:

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistance, [sic] depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. [. . .] the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. ^[15]

The idea was that city dwellers required the help of their neighbors and often compelled such assistance when in the majority, either illegally as mobs or legally at voting booths, which was the sure way toward a republic’s death. Virtuous farmers, on the other hand, who produced what they needed and felt little interdependence with others, could vote without consideration of as many marginal interests, their own existence being secured by their own efforts.

In order to expand this form of virtue of the American voting base, and alleviate population pressure in the Eastern cities, Jefferson and other Republicans looked to the West.

Every prairie that could be wrested from the Indians and partitioned into workable plots removed additional Americans from urban subservience. To Hamilton, on the other hand, the West was a great sponge that soaked up capital in massive conflicts with natives that had little to offer Eastern cities. The best thing for the United States was to urbanize along the coast and keep good relations with natives, whom he usually characterized as trade partners rather than competitors for land. Establishing a greater standing army in the West, he wrote in 1795, would “tend to rescue the country from what is at present its greatest scourge, Indian wars” by allowing the federal government to establish firm, peaceful relations with native peoples, who would fight amongst themselves rather than against the United States.^[16] His great contemporary hope was finally overseeing the British withdrawal from the West, which he referred to consistently as “an object of primary consequence in our affairs,” because he assumed that, in the absence of the British, the Indians would lose the energy that had propelled them to fight against the Americans and tensions would naturally calm.^[17] As in the East, Hamilton envisioned the standing army establishing peaceful rule in the West.

This perspective on the origin and role of government was characteristic of the Federalists. Gordon Wood has noted that “the Federalists believed that no nation-state could exist without a powerful army,” citing a declaration of Washington during Shays’s Rebellion that “influence is no government,” that it must instead be obtained through force.^[18] A contemporary Hamilton expressed the crux of his own political ideology: “government can never [be] said to be established until some signal display, has manifested its power of military coercion.”^[19] When Fries’ Rebellion broke out, Hamilton doubled down, encouraging those in power to break the back of rebellion and “appear like a hurcules, and inspire respect by the show of strength,” warning that “employing, in the first instance, an inadequate force” may mean “magnifying a riot into an insurrection.”^[20] According to this ideology, the people inherently do not wish to be ruled over and must be made to submit. Within this framework, the standing army fits well.

Washington’s more seasoned perspective checked Hamilton’s optimism yet maintained the underlying assumptions of government. While acknowledging that the difficulties that the federal government had with native groups derived from that Britain’s presence and influence, Washington warned that defensive measures would not only be “impracticable against such an enemy, but the expence attending them would be ruinous both to our finances and frontier settlements.”^[21] Instead, he called for fast strikes against the Indians and the establishment of peace on American terms, guarded by new networks of forts, built more deeply throughout the West, to be used “for the protection of our trade with these people, and to restrain settlements on the Indian lands.”^[22] These two things, the restriction of Western settlement and the continuation of trade, would be the two greatest demands that native groups would bring in negotiating peace. Being able to ensure Indian leaders of these things by and while projecting real government power into the West would, by Washington’s reckoning, be the true way to obtain a beneficial peace in the West. Both Hamilton and Washington agreed on the paramount importance of ending the expensive Indian wars and emphasized Indian trade over the conquest of land.

To Jefferson, the conquest of Indian land was crucial, and he saw Indian wars as valuable investments in the political feasibility of the United States. He used the professional army as the bones of his Western ambitions, relying on militias for the meat. After buying the massive Louisiana Territory, he sent out an Army expedition led by Capt. Meriwether Lewis to “take observations of latitude and longitude at all remarkable points on the [Missouri] river, & especially at the mouths of rivers, at rapids, at islands & other places … that they may with certainty be recognized hereafter.” The expedition’s observations were “to be rendered to the war office” for further investigation.^[23] This was an army being used by the executive in a time of peace to gather information, and therefore power, into its own hands.

A common tactic Jefferson employed to push settlement westward was, after first working an Army fort deep into Indian territory, finding it necessary to form a critical mass of settlers nearby for that fort’s defence. So prevalent was this that historian Henry Adams wrote, “This ‘principle of our government’ that the settlers protect the army, not the army the settlers, was so rigorously carried out that every new purchase of Indian lands was equivalent to providing a new army,” citing examples in the cases of the fort at Detroit, the Indiana Territory, and New Orleans.^[24] Having used the army to map the West and to negotiate with those natives it encountered for cessions of their land for forts and settlements, the governance of those settlements at last fell upon those forts. The federal government had become by far the greatest landowner in the country, and the massive territories, by Henry Adams’s account, “contained a foreign population governed by military methods”: “Old political theories” that Jefferson had once proclaimed no longer held water, as the “purchase,” “organization,” and “administration” of the West rendered them “impossible.”^[25] To support this massive internal military administration, Jefferson had the federal government spend one third of its revenue on infrastructure improvements to facilitate the fast and safe movement of troops across the countryside.^[26] During Jefferson’s presidency, the cooperation of militias with the standing army allowed for the expansion of individual land holding, thus achieving a fundamental Republican aim.

In colonial America, there was a near consensus against standing armies, which were seen a tool of despots. Nonetheless, when the thirteen colonies merged into the United States, the standing army became one of the new country’s cornerstones. In it, Federalists and Republicans found a common interest. Hamilton and Jefferson, as the loudest and greatest movers of these two political camps, engaged one another in rhetorical jousts throughout the period, but they both placed the standing army at the heart of their ideologies and actual practice. For Hamilton, the Army was a tool to promote and solidify federal authority over energetic Eastern cities that could be used to further that authority. Jefferson likewise saw it securing federal authority, though over Western farms that would stabilize the new nation. The overlap these two visions of America shared contained, in large part, the professional, standing army, which is thus one of the great reasons for the endurance of the United States. It was in the employment of that army that they differed. It was a policy disagreement, not a constitutional one.

^[1] Brutus, “Brutus 1,” New York Journal, October 18, 1787, in The Debate on the Constitution: Part One, ed. Bernard Bailyn (New York, NY: Library of America, 1993), 172.

^[2] Ibid., 174.

^[3] Ibid., 173.

[4] John Trenchard and Walter Moyle, An Argument, Shewing, that a Standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government (London, 1697); Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and the War in the Americas, 1755-1763 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 283.

^[5] John Lamerton Harper, American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32.

^[6] Alexander Hamilton, et al. The Federalist. ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 137.

^[7] Thomas Jefferson, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Federal Edition, ed. Paul Leicester Ford, vol. 5 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 362.

^[8] Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 416.

^[9] Ibid., 138.

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] Ibid., 263.

^[12] Ibid., 267.

^[13] John Taylor to Thomas Jefferson, before 13 May 1798, Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-30-02-0244.

^[14] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, Vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1904), 358.

^[15] Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 290-291.

^[16] Alexander Hamilton, The Works of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge, vol. 5 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 253.

^[17] Ibid., 176.

^[18] Wood, Empire of Liberty, 111.

^[19] Ibid.

^[20] Hamilton, The Works of Alexander Hamilton, 349.

^[21] George Washington, The Writings of George Washington, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, vol. 7 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), 71.

^[22] Ibid., 72.

^[23] “IV. Instructions for Meriwether Lewis, 20 June 1803,” Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-40-02-0136-0005.

^[24] Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America, 1986), 612.

^[25] Ibid., 614.

^[26] Ibid., 615.