Dangers from Disagreements Between States

The last three papers described the dangers we would face in disunion from the arms and arts of foreign nations. I turn now to dangers of a different, and perhaps still more alarming, kind. These would flow from quarrels between the states themselves, and from factions and upheavals within them. I have touched on them already, but they deserve a fuller look. A man must be lost in utopian dreams to doubt what would follow if these states were wholly disunited, or joined only in partial confederacies. The pieces they broke into would fall, again and again, into violent contests with each other. To deny that they would have motives for such contests is to forget that men are ambitious, vengeful, and greedy. To expect lasting harmony among many independent, unconnected sovereignties packed into the same neighborhood is to ignore the whole course of human events.

The causes of hostility among nations are countless. Some act generally and almost constantly on whole societies: the love of power and the wish to dominate, or the jealousy of power and the desire for equality and safety. Others work within a narrower sphere, like the rivalries of commerce between trading nations. Still others arise entirely from private passions, from the loves, hatreds, hopes, and fears of leading individuals. Such men, whether favorites of a king or of a people, have too often abused the trust placed in them. Under the cover of some public motive, they have sacrificed the peace of the nation to their own advantage. Pericles is one example. To gratify the resentment of a courtesan, he attacked and destroyed the city of the Samians, at great cost in his countrymen’s blood and treasure. Later, driven by private pique and by charges he wished to escape, the same man became the original author of the Peloponnesian War. That war, after long twists and turns, ended in the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth. Cardinal Wolsey is another. As prime minister to Henry VIII, he let his vanity reach for the papal crown, and hoped to win it through the Emperor Charles V. To court that powerful monarch’s favor, he plunged England into war with France against the plainest good policy, risking his own kingdom and the peace of Europe. The private passions of a few women at court likewise shaped the wars and settlements of much of Europe, in cases too familiar to repeat. To pile up such examples would only waste time; any reader will recall his own. One recent case among ourselves will serve. Had Shays not been a desperate debtor, it is very doubtful that Massachusetts would have been plunged into civil war.

Yet in spite of this testimony of experience, there are still visionary or scheming men who defend the paradox of perpetual peace among the states, even after they are broken apart. The genius of republics, they say, is peaceful. The spirit of commerce softens men’s manners and cools the passions that so often kindle into war. Commercial republics like ours, they insist, will never waste themselves in ruinous quarrels with one another. Governed by mutual interest, they will cultivate mutual friendship and concord.

But is it not the true interest of all nations to cultivate that same generous spirit? And if it is, have they in fact pursued it? On the contrary, passing passions and immediate interests have always ruled human conduct more powerfully than remote considerations of policy or justice. Have republics in practice been less warlike than monarchies? They are run by men, just as monarchies are. They feel the same aversions, rivalries, and desires of unjust gain. Popular assemblies feel the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, and greed, and their decisions are often steered by a few trusted individuals and colored by those individuals’ passions. Has commerce done anything more than change the objects of war? The love of wealth is as grasping and bold a passion as the love of power or glory. Since commerce became the ruling system of nations, there have been as many wars from commercial motives as there once were from the mere lust for territory. Let experience, the least fallible guide of human opinions, answer these questions.

Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Carthage were all republics; two of them, Athens and Carthage, were commercial. Yet they went to war, in attack and defense, as often as the neighboring monarchies of their day. Sparta was little more than a well-ordered camp, and Rome was never sated with conquest. Carthage, though a commercial republic, began the very war that ended in her destruction. Hannibal had carried her arms to the gates of Rome before Scipio overthrew him in Africa and conquered the state. Venice, too, waged wars of ambition, until a league formed by Pope Julius II broke the pride of that haughty republic. And the provinces of Holland, before debts and taxes overwhelmed them, took a leading part in Europe’s wars; they fought England for command of the sea, and were among the most stubborn enemies of Louis XIV. In Britain the people’s representatives form one branch of the legislature, and commerce has been the nation’s chief pursuit for ages. Yet few nations have gone to war more often, and many of those wars sprang from the people themselves. There have been almost as many popular wars as royal ones. Again and again the cries of the nation and the pressure of its representatives have dragged the monarch into war, or kept him in it, against his own wishes and even against the true interests of the state. In the long struggle between the houses of Austria and Bourbon, the antipathy of the English toward the French prolonged the war beyond what sound policy allowed. The wars between Britain and France have grown largely from commercial rivalry: the desire to supplant, and the fear of being supplanted, in trade. The last war but one between Britain and Spain shows it plainly. It arose from British merchants’ attempts to trade illegally on the Spanish main. Spanish severity answered them and went beyond just retaliation, and many Englishmen seized on the Spanish coast were sent to dig in the mines of Potosi. Resentment soon confused the innocent with the guilty. The merchants’ complaints kindled a violent flame in the nation and in the House of Commons; letters of reprisal were granted, and a war followed that overturned the very alliances formed twenty years before.

From this summary of what has happened in other countries whose situations most resembled ours, what reason have we to trust these reveries? They would seduce us into expecting peace and good will between the members of this confederacy once they are separated. Have we not seen enough of the falseness of those idle theories, the ones that promise us escape from the evils that beset every society? It is time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age. We must accept a plain maxim: that we, like the rest of mankind, are still far from any empire of perfect wisdom and virtue. Let the facts speak for themselves: how low our national dignity and credit have sunk, the disorders felt everywhere from weak government, the revolt in part of North Carolina, the recent alarms in Pennsylvania, and the actual rebellion in Massachusetts. The common sense of mankind has long since hardened this into a kind of political axiom: that nearness of situation makes nations natural enemies. As one intelligent writer puts it, neighboring nations are natural enemies of each other, unless their common weakness draws them into a confederate republic whose constitution removes the frictions of neighborhood. Such a union extinguishes the secret jealousy that tempts every state to grow at its neighbors’ expense. That observation points out the disease and the remedy at once.

People sometimes ask, with an air of triumph, what could tempt disunited states to make war on one another. A full answer would be: precisely the same temptations that have drenched every nation in the world in blood. But unfortunately for us, a more particular answer exists. We have watched such disputes strain the states even under a federal constitution, and that experience tells us what to expect if its restraints were removed.

Territorial disputes have always been one of the most fertile sources of hostility between nations; perhaps most of the wars that have desolated the earth sprang from this origin. This cause would operate among us in full force, for we hold a vast tract of unsettled territory, and several states still press discordant and undecided claims to parts of it. The dissolution of the Union would lay a foundation for similar claims between them all. The states have already argued heatedly over the ungranted lands known at the Revolution as crown lands. The states whose colonial borders contained those lands claim them as their property. The others answer that the crown’s rights passed to the Union, especially over the Western territory that Great Britain held until the treaty of peace. That territory, they argue, was in any event won for the Confederacy by compact with a foreign power. Congress has prudently calmed the controversy by persuading the states to cede these lands to the United States for the benefit of the whole, and if the Union continues, the dispute promises to end amicably. A dismemberment of the Confederacy would revive this dispute and create new ones. Much of the vacant Western territory is now, by cession at least, the common property of the Union. If that ended, the ceding states would be apt to reclaim the lands once the motive for the grant had ceased, while the others would insist on a share by right of representation. They would argue that a grant once made cannot be revoked, and that the justice of sharing territory won by the Confederacy’s joint efforts remains undiminished. Even if every state conceded the others’ right to a share, a rule of apportionment would still remain. Different states would propose different principles, each serving its own interest, and interests so opposed would not settle peacefully.

The wide field of Western territory thus offers an ample theatre for hostile claims, with no umpire or common judge to stand between the contending parties. Judging the future by the past, we have good reason to fear that the sword would sometimes decide their differences. The dispute between Connecticut and Pennsylvania over the land at Wyoming warns us not to expect such quarrels to settle easily. The Articles of Confederation obliged the parties to submit to a federal court, which decided for Pennsylvania. Yet Connecticut showed strong dissatisfaction until negotiation found her something like an equivalent for her supposed loss. I intend no censure: she sincerely believed herself injured, and states, like individuals, yield with great reluctance to decisions that work against them. Those of us who saw the inside of the controversy between our own state, New York, and the district of Vermont can vouch for the opposition we met, from uninterested states as well as interested ones. We can attest how far the peace of the Confederacy might have been endangered had New York tried to assert its rights by force. Two motives drove that opposition: jealousy of our future power, and the interest of influential individuals in neighboring states who held land grants under Vermont’s actual government. Even the states that pressed claims against ours, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, seemed more eager to dismember New York than to establish their own pretensions. New Jersey and Rhode Island showed a warm zeal for Vermont’s independence, and Maryland shared their views until signs of a connection between Canada and Vermont alarmed her. These small states looked with an unfriendly eye on the prospect of our growing greatness. In such transactions we can trace some of the causes likely to embroil the states with one another if disunion should prove their unhappy destiny.

The competitions of commerce would be another fruitful source of contention. States placed less favorably would want to escape the disadvantages of their local situation and to share in the advantages of their more fortunate neighbors.

Each state, or separate confederacy, would pursue a commercial policy peculiar to itself, and the resulting distinctions, preferences, and exclusions would breed discontent. Since we have traded on equal terms from the country’s earliest settlement, these causes of discontent would cut all the keener. We would be ready to call things injuries that were in reality the justifiable acts of independent sovereignties pursuing a distinct interest. The spirit of enterprise that marks commercial America has never let an occasion for displaying itself pass unimproved.

It is not likely that this unbridled spirit would pay much respect to trade regulations by which particular states seek exclusive benefits for their own citizens. Violations on one side, and efforts to prevent and repel them on the other, would lead naturally to outrages, and these to reprisals and wars. Commercial regulations would also let some states render their neighbors tributary, a position the tributary states would bear impatiently; the situation of New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey offers an example. New York, needing revenue, must lay duties on her imports, and a great part of those duties falls on the people of Connecticut and New Jersey, who consume what we import. New York would be neither willing nor able to give up this advantage. Her citizens would never consent to remit a duty they pay themselves in favor of their neighbors’ citizens, and she could not in practice tell the two sets of customers apart. Would Connecticut and New Jersey long submit to being taxed by New York for her exclusive benefit? Could we long keep quiet possession of a metropolis our neighbors find so odious, with Connecticut pressing on one side and New Jersey on the other? Only temerity would answer yes.

The public debt of the Union would be a further cause of collision between the separate states or confederacies: dividing it among them, and then gradually paying it off, would alike breed ill-humor and animosity. Scarcely any rule of apportionment can be proposed that is free from real objections, and the adverse interests of the parties would exaggerate them. The states do not even agree on the principle of paying the domestic debt. Some, less impressed with national credit, or because their citizens hold little immediate stake, feel indifference or even repugnance to paying it at all, and would magnify the difficulties of a distribution. Others, whose citizens are creditors of the public beyond their state’s share, would press for some fair and effective provision. The procrastination of the first would excite the resentment of the second; settlement would be postponed by real differences and staged delays; interested citizens would clamor, and foreign powers would urge their just demands. The peace of the states would then hang on the double contingency of external invasion and internal contention.

Suppose the states overcame these difficulties and agreed on a rule. Experience would still probably show it bearing harder on some states than on others. The sufferers would naturally seek to lighten their burden, while the rest would just as naturally resist a revision likely to increase their own. Their refusal would give the complaining states an all-too-plausible pretext for withholding contributions, and that noncompliance would breed bitter discussion and altercation.

Even if the rule proved fair in practice, delinquencies would still arise from other causes: (1) a real shortage of resources; (2) mismanaged finances; (3) accidental disorders in government. Add to these the common reluctance of men to part with money for purposes that have outlived the need that produced them. Delinquencies, from whatever cause, would produce complaints, recriminations, and quarrels. Nothing disturbs the tranquility of nations more than a common obligation that does not benefit all equally and at once, for nothing makes men quarrel so readily as the payment of money. Laws that violate private contracts are another probable source of hostility, since they amount to aggressions on the rights of the states whose citizens they injure. Nothing entitles us to expect a more liberal or equitable spirit in the state legislatures hereafter, unrestrained by new checks, than has already disgraced too many of their codes. The enormities of Rhode Island’s legislature have already excited a spirit of retaliation in Connecticut. In similar cases we may reasonably infer that a war, not of parchment but of the sword, would punish such breaches of moral obligation and social justice.

Earlier papers have shown how likely the separate states or confederacies would be to form incompatible alliances with foreign nations, and what that would mean for the peace of the whole. The conclusion is plain: if America is not connected, or joined only by the feeble tie of a simple league, offensive and defensive, such jarring alliances would entangle us in the pernicious labyrinths of European politics and wars. Torn by the destructive contentions of our own parts, we would become prey to the artifices of powers that are enemies to us all alike. Divide et impera, divide and command, must be the motto of every nation that either hates or fears us.