Federalist Paper No. 6

Hamilton begins his second Federalist Paper with a brief review of the “innumerable” ‘causes of hostility among nations’. He also makes the rather snarky comment that

A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.

In other words, the idea of peace between separate or confederated states is a pipe dream.

I have to say, Hamilton was not the most optimistic guy. He had an unfailing lack of faith in people (and apparently, especially in women: ‘The influence which the bigotry of one female, the petulance of another, and the cabals of a third, had in the contemporary policy, ferments, and pacifications, of a considerable part of Europe, are topics that have been too often descanted upon not to be generally known.’). So, with this in mind, it’s not really surprising that he spends most of this Paper detailing historical evidence for the greed, vagaries and perfidies of people and states throughout history. He also rightly points out that it is not only statesmen who may determine a state’s peace, but the average citizen as well. He invokes recent (for him) history: Daniel Shays and his Regulators, noting, ‘If Shays had not been a DESPERATE DEBTOR, it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.’

I should also probably note that despite Hamilton’s misgivings about statesmen, he concluded the ideal form of government had represented all the interest groups, but maintained a hereditary monarch to decide policy. In Hamilton's opinion, this was impractical in the United States; nevertheless, the country should mimic this form of government as closely as possible. He proposed, therefore, to have a President and elected Senators for life (surprising, really, that TJ and Madison couldn’t stand him).

I confess that I misread the seventh and eighth paragraphs the first three times. I thought that Hamilton was arguing that despite all of this, however, there is still hope! (which should have been my first clue that I was mistaken). In actuality, he says that visionary men ‘stand ready to advocated the paradox of perpetual peace between the States’ (written eight years before Kant’s Perpetual Peace). They argue that ‘Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other’: the Enlightenment Era version of the ‘Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.’

Hamilton counters that republics, even commercial republics, are still just as likely to get into wars. Commerce, instead of eliminating causes of war, simply provides other incentives: war as commerce by other means. As evidence, he cites Sparta, Athens, Rome, Carthage – ‘the aggressor in the very war that ended in her destruction’, Venice, Holland, Britain, Austria, Bourbon, France, England and France involved in Austria vs. Bourbon, etc. In essence, if separate, composed as neighbors, states will fight. Here, he doesn’t offer any explicit evidence that states won’t fight even if they are united (and in fact his mentions of North Carolina’s revolt, the ‘late menacing disturbances in Pennsylvania’ and the insurrections and rebellions in Massachusetts makes me wonder that states will become embroiled in violence no matter what), except to quote Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, l’Abbé de Mably:

NEIGHBORING NATIONS (says he) are naturally enemies of each other unless their common weakness forces them to league in a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC, and their constitution prevents the differences that neighborhood occasions, extinguishing that secret jealousy which disposes all states to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their neighbors.

The quote sums up the Paper nicely, as Hamilton notes with his final line: “This passage, at the same time, points out the EVIL and suggests the REMEDY,” which I must assume he addresses in the next Paper, as there are only the two on Dissensions between the States.