From the time of the founding the political push for a consolidated, centralized, monopolistic government came overwhelmingly from northerners like Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, John Adams, and Abraham Lincoln. Southern Jeffersonians were the main opposition. In his 1828 book, New Views of the Constitution of the United States, based partly on Madison’s then recently-published notes on the Constitutional convention, U.S. Senator John Taylor of Virginia observed the following:
“The hostility of consolidated sovereignties to human happiness, is frequently demonstrated by their recourse to paradoxical arguments, in order to defend their measures. They contend, that the greater the [government] revenue, the richer are the people; that frugality in government is an evil; in the people, a good; that local partialities are blessings; that monopolies and exclusive privileges [granted by government] are general welfare; that a division of sovereignty [i.e., states’ rights] will raise up a class of wicked, intriguing, self-interested politicians, in the states; and that human nature will be cleansed of these propensities by a sovereignty consolidated in one government.”
Robert E. Lee was aware of what fellow Virginians like John Taylor thought would be the result of a consolidated American empire: despotism at home and military adventurism abroad, as he put it in his 1866 letter to Lord Acton, commenting on the final victory of the consolidationists.
(Taylor’s book was republished in 2002 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., in Union, NJ).
1:27 pm on August 14, 2006
