This essay was originally published by Constituting America in July 2020.
To secure the unalienable natural rights of the American people, the American Founders designed a republican regime. Republics had existed long before: ancient Rome, modern Switzerland and Venice. Great Britain itself could be described as a republic, with a strong legislature counterbalancing a strong monarchy—even if the rule of that legislature and that monarchy over the overseas colonies of the British Empire could hardly be considered republican. But the republicanism instituted after the War of Independence, especially as framed at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, featured a combination of elements never seen before, and seldom thereafter.
The American definition of republicanism was itself unique. ‘Republic’ or res publica means simply, ‘public thing’—a decidedly vague notion that might apply to any regime other than a monarchy. In the tenth Federalist, James Madison defined republicanism as representative government, that is, by a specific way of constructing the country’s ruling institutions. The Founders gave republicanism a recognizable form beyond ‘no-monarchic.’ From the design of the Virginia House of Burgesses to the Articles of Confederation and finally to the Constitution itself, representation provided Americans with real exercise of self-rule, while at the same time avoiding some of the turbulence and folly of pure democracies, which had so disgraced themselves in ancient Greece that popular sovereignty itself had been dismissed by most political thinkers ever since. Later on, Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address shows how republics must defend the rule of law against mob violence; even the naming of Lincoln’s party as the Republican Party was intended to contrast it with the rule of slaveholding plantation oligarchs in the South.
The American republic had six additional characteristics. America was a natural-rights republic, limiting the legitimate exercise of popular rule to actions respecting the unalienable rights of its citizens; it was a democratic republic, with no formal class of titled lords and ladies or hereditary monarchs; it was an extended republic, big enough to defend itself against the formidable empires that threatened it; it was a commercial republic, encouraging prosperity and innovation; it was a federal republic, leaving substantial political powers in the hands of state and local representatives; and it was a compound republic, dividing the powers of the national government into three branches, each with the means of defending itself against encroachments by the others.
When considering the American course of events recorded in our histories, students of our republic might consider each event as a reflection of these features of that regime as designed by the Founders, or, in some cases, as a deviation from that regime. To do so is to see how profound and pervasive American republicanism has been, how it has shaped Americans’ lives for more than two centuries, how it continues to do so today.
A natural-rights republic. The charter of the first English colony, Jamestown, was written in part by the great English authority on the common law, Sir Edward Coke. English common law was an amalgam of natural law and English custom. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded shortly thereafter, was an attempt to establish the natural right of religious liberty. And, of course, the Declaration of Independence rests squarely on the foundation of the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God as the foundation of unalienable natural rights, several of which were given formal status in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights. As Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831, the Dred Scott case in 1857, the Civil Rights amendments of the 1860s, and the attempt at replacing plantation oligarchy with republican regimes in the states after the Civil War all show, natural rights have been the pivot of struggles over the character of America. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues in the post-Second-World War civil rights movement invoked the Declaration and natural rights to argue for civic equality, a century after the Civil War. As a natural-rights republic, America rejects in principle race, class, and gender as bars to the protection of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In practice, Americans have often failed to live up to their principles—as human beings are wont to do—but the principles remain as their standard of right conduct.
A democratic republic. The Constitution itself begins with the phrase, “We the People,” and the reason constitutional law governs all statutory laws is that the sovereign people ratified that Constitution, whereas federal statutory laws are enacted only by their elected representatives. George Washington was elected as America’s first president, but he astonished the world by stepping down eight years later; he had no ambition to become another George III, or a Napoleon. The Democratic Party, which began to be formed by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison when they went into opposition against the Adams administration, named itself for this feature of the American regime. The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for popular election of senators, the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing voting rights for women, and the major civil rights laws of the 1960s all express the democratic theme in American public life. This theme is so powerful that our most intelligent of foreign observers, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote a rather lengthy book on the subject.
An extended republic. Unlike the ancient democracies, which could only rule small territories, American republicanism gave citizens the chance of ruling themselves in a territory large enough to defend itself against the powerful states and empires that had arisen in modern times. All of this was contingent, however, on Jefferson’s idea that what his ally James Madison called our extended republic would be an “empire of liberty,” by which he meant that new territories would be eligible to join the Union on an equal footing with the original thirteen states. Further, every state was to have a republican regime, as stipulated in the Constitution’s Article IV, section iv. The extension of this republic, ‘from sea to shining sea,’ as the song lyric goes, began with the Northwest Ordinance and continued with Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Mexican War of 1848, the purchase of Alaska and the acquisition of Hawaii. The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, beginning in the 1860s, the Eisenhower Administration’s Interstate Highway Act of 1956 consolidated the extended republic. The construction of the Panama Canal, the two world wars, and the Cold War all followed from the need to defend that republic from foreign regime enemies and to keep the sea lanes open for American commerce.
A commercial republic. Although it has proven eminently capable of defending itself militarily, American was not intended to be a military republic, like ancient Rome and the First Republic of France. The Constitution prohibits interstate tariffs, making the United States a vast free-trade zone—something Europe would not achieve for another two centuries. Alexander Hamilton’s brilliant plan to retire the national debt after the Revolutionary War and the founding of the New York Stock Exchange in 1792 ensured the financial stability of the commercial republic in its early years. Above all, commerce sparks innovation: Eli Morse’s telegraph; Alexander Bell’s telephone; Thomas Edison’s phonograph and light bulb; the Wright Brothers’ flying machine; Philo Farnsworth’s television. And we’ve seen how commerce in a free market can go wrong if the legislation and federal policies governing it are misconceived, as they often were before, during, and sometimes after the Great Depression.
A federal republic. A republic might be ‘unitary’—ruled by a single, centralized government. The American Founders saw that this would lead to an overbearing national government, one that would eventually undermine self-government itself. Accordingly, they gave the federal government enumerated powers, leaving the remaining governmental powers “to the States, or the People.” The Civil War was fought over this issue as well as slavery, question of whether the American Union could defend itself against its internal enemies. The substantial centralization of federal government power seen in the New Deal of the 1930s, the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010 have renewed the question of how far such power is entitled to reach.
A compound republic. A simple republic would elect one branch of government to exercise all three powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. This was the way the Articles of Confederation worked. The Constitution ended that, providing instead for the separation and balance of those three powers. The compound character of the American republic has been eroded by such notions as ‘executive leadership’ —a principle first enunciated by Woodrow Wilson but firmly established by Franklin Roosevelt and practiced by all of his successors—and ‘broad construction’ of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. The most dramatic struggle between the several branches of government in recent decades was the Watergate controversy, wherein Congress attempted to set limits on presidential claims of ‘executive privilege.’ Recent controversies over the use of ‘executive orders’ have reminded Americans of all political stripes that government by decree can gore anyone’s prize ox.
The classical political philosophers classified the forms of political rule, giving names to the several ‘regimes’ they saw around them. They emphasized the importance of regimes because regimes, they knew, designate who rules us, the institutions by which the rulers rule, the purposes of that rule, and finally the way of life of citizens or subjects. In choosing a republican regime on a democratic foundation, governing a large territory for commercial purpose with a carefully calibrated set of governmental powers, all intended to secure the natural rights of citizens according to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, the Founders wet the course of human events on a new and better path. Each generation of Americans has needed to understand the American way of life and to defend it.
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