By Jeffrey Rosen President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Jeffrey Rosen explains how a debate between Hamilton and Jefferson has framed the epic battles about how to balance liberty and power that have unfolded throughout American history.
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence begins. In 1776, Thomas Jefferson went on to define America’s “one people” in terms of three shining ideas: liberty, equality, and government by consent.
But just a decade later, after the new Constitution was drafted in 1787, Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton began a heated debate about the meaning of the phrase “one people.” That initial debate between Hamilton and Jefferson has framed the epic battles about how to balance liberty and power that have unfolded throughout American history.
Hamilton believed in the Union and national sovereignty; Jefferson believed in local self-government and state sovereignty. As a result, Hamilton believed in the supremacy of “We the People of the United States” and Jefferson believed in the supremacy of “We the People of the Several States.” For Jefferson, the growth of centralized power always threatened liberty; for Hamilton, a vigorous national government could help to secure liberty. Jefferson, author of the Declaration, was determined to expand democracy; Hamilton, defender of the Constitution, viewed democracy as a turbulent force to be filtered and checked. Jefferson construed the Constitution strictly to limit federal power; Hamilton construed the Constitution liberally to expand federal power.
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Constitution, with sectional tensions rising and Civil War on the horizon, former President John Quincy Adams sided with Hamilton and nationalism rather than Jefferson and state sovereignty. According to Adams, with the signing of the Declaration, “the one people of the United States of America, became one separate sovereign independent power, assuming an equal station among the nations of the earth.”
Although the Declaration created an indissoluble Union of the “one people” of the United States, in Adams’s view, “this one people did not immediately institute a government for themselves.” Instead, under the Articles of Confederation, “their delegates in Congress …. instituted a mere confederacy.” By substituting “an assumed sovereignty of each separate state” for the sovereignty of We the People, “this confederacy totally departed from the principles of the Declaration of independence” and soon degenerated into chaos. In Adams’s view, “the Constitution of the United States was a return to the principles of the Declaration of independence, and the exclusive constituent power of the people.” He concluded that the Constitution “was the work of the ONE PEOPLE of the United States; and that those United States, though doubled in numbers, still constitute as a nation, but ONE PEOPLE.”
The competing views of Hamilton and Jefferson over the meaning of the phrase “one people” came to a head in the debates over nullification and secession. “[T]he several states who formed [the Constitution], being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction,” Jefferson wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions in 1798, and “a nullification, by those sovereignties, of all unauthorized acts done under colour of that instrument, is the rightful remedy.”
The great nationalists, Hamilton, Washington, John Jay, James Wilson, and John Marshall, disagreed. In his farewell address, drafted by Hamilton, George Washington had expressed hope that the “unity of government which constitutes you as one people, claims your vigilant care and guardianship—as a main pillar of your real independence, of your peace, safety, freedom, and happiness.” In Federalist No. 2, John Jay emphasized that “one people” had created the Union: “To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people. . . . As a nation we have made peace and war; as a nation we have vanquished our common enemies; as a nation we have formed alliances, and made treaties, and entered into various compacts.” On the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall paraphrased Jay’s language. “That the United States form . . . a single nation has not yet been denied,” Marshall wrote in his most eloquent expression of Hamiltonian nationalism. “In war, we are one people. In making peace, we are one people. In all commercial regulations, we are one and the same people.”
When he upheld the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States at Hamilton’s urging, and over Jefferson’s objection, Chief Justice Marshall explicitly rejected Jefferson’s vision of state rather than national sovereignty. The Constitution, he wrote, had been ratified by conventions deriving their authority from the people, not the states. “From these conventions the Constitution derives its whole authority. The government proceeds directly from the people [and] is ‘ordained and established’ in the name of the people,” Marshall wrote. “The Government of the Union . . . is, emphatically and truly, a Government of the people.”
Daniel Webster quoted Marshall’s language (without attribution) when he insisted on the floor of Congress in 1830 that South Carolina’s attempt to nullify the hated Tariff of Abominations was unconstitutional because the Constitution was not a compact between sovereign states, as Jefferson claimed, but a nationalist document ratified in the name of We the People of the United States. “In war and peace, we are one; in commerce, one; because the authority of the General Government reaches to war and peace, and to the regulation of commerce,” Webster said. In a moment of high drama, Webster then shook his finger at Vice President John C. Calhoun, who insisted the Constitution was a compact among the states. “It is, sir, the People’s Constitution, the People’s Government; made for the People; made by the People; and answerable to the People.”
A young Abraham Lincoln was so inspired by Webster’s speech that he embraced Webster’s conclusion that secession was unconstitutional and incorporated Webster’s words—as tweaked by a Massachusetts clergyman, Theodore Parker—into the final sentence of the Gettysburg Address, referring to “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Webster sent James Madison a copy of his congressional speech denouncing nullification and asked for Madison’s opinion. As usual, Madison carved out a middle position between Hamilton and Jefferson. “[T]he undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several states, who were parties to it and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity,” he wrote. Madison adhered to his position in Federalist No. 39 that the Constitution “is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.” Although the states retained an “inviolable sovereignty,” Madison later reiterated that he, unlike Jefferson, believed secession was unconstitutional. “I do not consider the proceedings of Virginia in 98–99 as countenancing the doctrine that a State may at will secede from its constitutional compact with the other States,” Madison wrote. “A rightful secession requires the consent of the others, or an abuse of the compact, absolving the seceding party from the obligations imposed by it.”
President Andrew Jackson had been elected to resurrect Jeffersonian democracy and states’ rights, and many congressional Democrats expected him to side with South Carolina. They invited him to play a central role at their celebration of Jefferson’s birthday in 1830, which they had held for decades on April 13. At a dinner attended by more than a hundred revelers at the Indian Queen Hotel, most of the twenty-four toasts hailed Jefferson, states’ rights, and the Virginia Resolution. Robert Hayne proposed a toast to “[t]he Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” But although Jackson was devoted to states’ rights, he was also devoted to national majority rule, and for him nullification was a step too far. His toast resounded across America: “Our Union: It must be preserved.” At the crucial moment, Jackson had sided with Hamilton and Webster over Jefferson and Vice President Calhoun.
On December 10, 1832, Andrew Jackson issued his famous Nullification Proclamation, which declared that states had no constitutional right to secede from the Union or to nullify federal laws. Jackson noted that in the Declaration of Independence, “we declared ourselves a nation by a joint, not by several acts,” and the most important goal of the Constitution was to “form a more perfect union.” Because both the Declaration and the Constitution were made in the name of “one people,” Jackson denied what he called the “alleged undivided sovereignty of the States.” As a result, any attempt by a state to break what Jackson called “the perpetual bond of our Union” was an offense against the popular sovereignty of the entire nation. “To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a nation,” he declared, always referring to the United States as a plural entity. Jackson pledged “to execute the laws—to preserve the Union by all constitutional means.”
At the end of 1860, South Carolina finally made good on its threats to secede from the Union. On July 4, 1861, defending his decision to meet secession with force, Abraham Lincoln said the crisis presented to “the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or democracy—a government of the people by the same people—can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes.” But which “government of the people by the same people” was sovereign? Again connecting the language of the Declaration to the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln sided with Washington, Hamilton, Marshall, and Webster, all of whom insisted that we are “one people” of the United States.
This led, in the Gettysburg Address, to Lincoln’s transformational call for a “new birth of freedom” that would reaffirm the principles of the Declaration (“conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”) to ensure (with language borrowed from Marshall and Webster) “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” By defining America (deriving its “just powers from the consent of
the governed”) as a nation founded by “one people” rather than by sovereign states, Lincoln sided with Hamilton and nationalism; by making clear that the goal of the new nation was government “of, by, and for the people,” he sided with Jefferson and democracy. And to synthesize the Hamiltonian means of national Union and the Jeffersonian ends of popular government, Lincoln called for a “new birth of freedom” that ultimately required amendments to the Constitution to end slavery and inscribe for the first time an explicit guarantee of equal liberty, or “liberty to all.”
Ever since the Revolution, Hamilton and Jefferson had debated the meaning of the basic principles of the Declaration: equality, liberty, and government by consent. Calling the Constitution the “frame of silver” around the Declaration’s “apple of gold,” Lincoln said both were based on “the principle of ‘liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and by consequence, enterprise, and industry to all.” By enveloping the apple of gold in the frame of silver, Lincoln insisted that Hamilton’s Constitution should be interpreted in light of Jefferson’s Declaration.
Jeffrey Rosen is President & CEO of the National Constitution Center. This essay is adapted from The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle over Power in America.
