The Theory of Social Revolutions

"The truth is, that the general genius of a Government is all that can be substantially relied upon for permanent effects. Particular provisions, though not altogether useless, have far less virtue and efficiency than are commonly ascribed to them; and the want of them will never be, with men of sound discernment, a decisive objection to any plan which exhibits the leading characters of a good Government." After an experience of nearly a century and a quarter we must admit, I think, that Hamilton was right. In the United States we have carried bills of right and constitutional limitations to an extreme, and yet, I suppose that few would care to maintain that, during the nineteenth century, life and property were safer in America, or crime better dealt with, than in England, France, or Germany. The contrary, indeed, I take to be the truth, and I think one chief cause of this imperfection in the administration of justice will be found to have been the operation of the written Constitution. For, under the American system, the Constitution, or fundamental law, is expounded by judges, and this function, which, in essence, is political, has brought precisely that quality of pressure on the bench which it has been the labor of a hundred generations of our ancestors to remove. On the whole the result has been not to elevate politics, but to lower the courts toward the political level, a result which conforms to the a priori theory.

The abstract virtue of the written Constitution was not, however, a question in issue when Washington and his contemporaries set themselves to reorganize the Confederation. Those men had no choice but to draft some kind of a platform on which the states could agree to unite, if they were to unite peacefully at all, and accordingly they met in convention and drew the best form of agreement they could; but I more than suspect that a good many very able Federalists were quite alive to the defects in the plan which they adopted.

Hamilton was outspoken in preferring the English model, and I am not aware that Washington ever expressed a preference for the theory that, because of a written fundamental law, the court should nullify legislation. Nor is it unworthy of remark that all foreigners, after a prolonged and attentive observation of our experiment, have avoided it. Since 1789, every highly civilized Western people have readjusted their institutions at least once, yet not one has in this respect imitated us, though all have borrowed freely from the parliamentary system of England.6

Even our neighbor, Canada, with no adverse traditions and a population similar to ours, has been no exception to the rule. The Canadian courts indeed define the limits of provincial and federal jurisdiction as fixed under an act of Parliament, but they do not pretend to limit the exercise of power when the seat of power has been established. I take the cause of this distrust to be obvious. Although our written Constitution was successful in its primary purpose of facilitating the consolidation of the Confederation, it has not otherwise inspired confidence as a practical administrative device. Not only has constant judicial interference dislocated scientific legislation, but casting the judiciary into the vortex of civil faction has degraded it in the popular esteem. In fine, from the outset, the American bench, because it deals with the most fiercely contested of political issues, has been an instrument necessary to political success. Consequently, political parties have striven to control it, and therefore the bench has always had an avowed partisan bias. This avowed political or social bias has, I infer, bred among the American people the conviction that justice is not administered indifferently to all men, wherefore the bench is not respected with us as, for instance, it is in Great Britain, where law and politics are sundered. Nor has the dissatisfaction engendered by these causes been concealed. On the contrary, it has found expression through a series of famous popular leaders from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt.

The Constitution could hardly have been adopted or the government organized but for the personal influence of Washington, whose power lay in his genius for dealing with men. He lost no time or strength in speculation, but, taking the Constitution as the best implement at hand, he went to the work of administration by including the representatives of the antagonistic extremes in his Cabinet. He might as well have expected fire and water to mingle as Jefferson and Hamilton to harmonize. Probably he had no delusions on that head when he chose them for his ministers, and he accomplished his object. He paralyzed opposition until the new mechanism began to operate pretty regularly, but he had not an hour to spare. Soon the French Revolution heated passions so hot that long before Washington's successor was elected the United States was rent by faction.

The question which underlay all other questions, down to the Civil War, was the determination of the seat of sovereignty. Hamilton and the Federalists held it to be axiomatic that, if the federal government were to be more than a shadow, it must interpret the meaning of the instrument which created it, and, if so, that it must signify its decisions through the courts. Only in this way, they argued, could written limitations on legislative power be made effective. Only in this way could statutes which contravened the Constitution be set aside.7

Jefferson was abroad when Hamilton wrote The Federalist, but his views have since been so universally accepted as embodying the opposition to Hamilton, that they may be conveniently taken as if they had been published while the Constitution was under discussion. Substantially the same arguments were advanced by others during the actual debate, if not quite so lucidly or connectedly then, as afterward by him.

Very well, said Jefferson, in answer to Hamilton, admitting, for the moment, that the central government shall define its own powers, and that the courts shall be the organ through which the exposition shall be made, both of which propositions I vehemently deny, you have this result: The judges who will be called upon to pass upon the validity of national and state legislation will be plunged in the most heated of controversies, and in those controversies they cannot fail to be influenced by the same passions and prejudices which sway other men. In a word they must decide like legislators, though they will be exempt from the responsibility to the public which controls other legislators. Such conditions you can only meet by making the judicial tenure of office ephemeral, as all legislative tenure is ephemeral.

It is vain to pretend, continued he, in support of fixity of tenure, that the greater the pressure on the judge is likely to be, the more need there is to make him secure. This may be true of judges clothed with ordinary attributes, like English judges, for, should these try to nullify the popular will by construing away statutes, Parliament can instantly correct them, or if Parliament fail in its duty, the constituencies, at the next election, can intervene. But no one will be able to correct the American judge who may decline to recognize the law which would constrain him. Nothing can shake him save impeachment for what is tantamount to crime, or being overruled by a constitutional amendment which you have purposely made too hard to obtain to be a remedy. He is to be judge in his own case without an appeal.

Nowhere in all his long and masterly defence of the Constitution did Hamilton show so much embarrassment as here, and because, probably, he did not himself believe in his own brief. He really had faith in the English principle of an absolute parliament, restrained, if needful, by a conservative chamber, like the House of Lords, but not in the total suspension of sovereignty subject to judicial illumination. Consequently he fell back on platitudes about judicial high-mindedness, and how judges could be trusted not to allow political influences to weigh with them when deciding political questions. Pushed to its logical end, concluded he, the Jeffersonian argument would prove that there should be no judges distinct from legislatures.8

Now, at length, exclaimed the Jeffersonian in triumph, you admit our thesis. You propose to clothe judges with the highest legislative functions, since you give them an absolute negative on legislation, and yet you decline to impose on them the responsibility to a constituency, which constrains other legislators. Clearly you thus make them autocratic, and in the worst sense, for you permit small bodies of irresponsible men under pretence of dispensing justice, but really in a spirit of hypocrisy, to annul the will of the majority of the people, even though the right of the people to exercise their will, in the matters at issue, be clearly granted them in the Constitution.

No, rejoined Hamilton, thus driven to the wall, judges never will so abuse their trust. The duty of the judge requires him to suppress his will, and exercise his judgment only. The Constitution will be before him, and he will have only to say whether authority to legislate on a given subject is granted in that instrument. If it be, the character of the legislation must remain a matter of legislative discretion. Besides, you must repose confidence somewhere, and judges, on the whole, are more trustworthy than legislators. How can you say that, retorted the opposition, when you, better than most men, know the line of despotic legal precedents from the Ship Money down to the Writs of Assistance?

Looking back upon this initial controversy touching judicial functions under the Constitution, we can hardly suppose that Hamilton did not perceive that, in substance, Jefferson was right, and that a bench purposely constructed to pass upon political questions must be politically partisan. He knew very well that, if the Federalists prevailed in the elections, a Federalist President would only appoint magistrates who could be relied on to favor consolidation. And so the event proved. General Washington chose John Jay for the first Chief Justice, who in some important respects was more Federalist than Hamilton, while John Adams selected John Marshall, who, though one of the greatest jurists who ever lived, was hated by Jefferson with a bitter hatred, because of his political bias. As time went on matters grew worse. Before Marshall died slavery had become a burning issue, and the slave-owners controlled the appointing power. General Jackson appointed Taney to sustain the expansion of slavery, and when the anti-slavery party carried the country with Lincoln, Lincoln supplanted Taney with Chase, in order that Chase might stand by him in his struggle to destroy slavery. And as it has been, so must it always be. As long as the power to enact laws shall hinge on the complexion of benches of judges, so long will the ability to control a majority of the bench be as crucial a political necessity as the ability to control a majority in avowedly representative assemblies.

Hamilton was one of the few great jurists and administrators whom America has ever produced, and it is inconceivable that he did not understand what he was doing. He knew perfectly well that, other things being equal, the simplest administrative mechanism is the best, and he knew also that he was helping to make an extremely complicated mechanism. Not only so, but at the heart of this complexity lay the gigantic cog of the judiciary, which was obviously devised to stop movement. He must have had a reason, beyond the reason he gave, for not only insisting on clothing the judiciary with these unusual political and legislative attributes, but for giving the judiciary an unprecedented fixity of tenure. I suspect that he was actuated by some such considerations as these:

The Federalists, having pretty good cause to suppose themselves in a popular minority, purposed to consolidate the thirteen states under a new sovereign. There were but two methods by which they could prevail; they could use force, or, to secure assent, they could propose some system of arbitration. To escape war the Federalists convened the constitutional convention, and by so doing pledged themselves to arbitration. But if their plan of consolidation were to succeed, it was plain that the arbitrator must arbitrate in their favor, for if he arbitrated as Mr. Jefferson would have wished, the United States under the Constitution would have differed little from the United States under the Confederation. The Federalists, therefore, must control the arbitrator. If the Constitution were to be adopted, Hamilton and every one else knew that Washington would be the first President, and Washington could be relied on to appoint a strong Federalist bench. Hence, whatever might happen subsequently, when the new plan first should go into operation, and when the danger from insubordination among the states would probably be most acute, the judiciary would be made to throw its weight in favor of consolidation, and against disintegration, and, if it did so, it was essential that it should be protected against anything short of a revolutionary attack.

In the convention, indeed, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina suggested that Congress should be empowered to negative state legislation, but such an alternative, for obvious reasons, would have been less palatable to Hamilton, since Congress would be only too likely to fall under the control of the Jeffersonian party, while a bench of judges, if once well chosen, might prove to be for many years an "excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body."9

I infer that Hamilton and many other Federalists reasoned somewhat thus, not only from what they wrote, but from the temper of their minds, and, if they did, events largely justified them. John Jay, Oliver Ellsworth, and John Marshall were successively appointed to the office of Chief Justice, nor did the complexion of the Supreme Court change until after 1830.

What interests us, however, is not so much what the Federalists thought, or the motives which actuated them, as the effect which the clothing of the judiciary with political functions has had upon the development of the American republic, more especially as that extreme measure might have been avoided, had Pinckney's plan been adopted. Nor, looking back upon the actual course of events, can I perceive that, so far as the movement toward consolidation was concerned, the final result would have varied materially whether Congress or the Supreme Court had exercised control over state legislation. Marshall might just as well, in the one case as the other, have formulated his theory of a semi-centralized administration. He would only have had uniformly to sustain Congress, as an English judge sustains Parliament. Nor could either Congress or the Court have reached a definite result without an appeal to force. Either chamber might expound a theory, but nothing save an army could establish it.

For two generations statesmen and jurists debated the relation of the central to the local sovereignties with no result, for words alone could decide no such issue. In America, as elsewhere, sovereignty is determined by physical force. Marshall could not conquer Jefferson, he could at most controvert Jefferson's theory. This he did, but, in doing so, I doubt if he were quite true to himself. Jefferson contended that every state might nullify national legislation, as conversely Pinckney wished Congress to be given explicitly the power to nullify state legislation; and Marshall, very sensibly, pointed out that, were Jefferson's claim carried into practice, it would create "a hydra in government,"10 yet I am confident that Marshall did not appreciate whither his own assertion of authority must lead. In view of the victory of centralization in the Civil War, I will agree that the Supreme Court might have successfully maintained a position as arbitrator touching conflicting jurisdictions, as between the nation and the states, but that is a different matter from assuming to examine into the wisdom of the legislation itself. The one function might, possibly, pass by courtesy as judicial; the other is clearly legislative.

This distinction only developed after Marshall's death, but the resentment which impelled Marshall to annul an act of Congress was roused by the political conflict which preceded the election of 1800, in which Marshall took a chief part. Apparently he could not resist the temptation of measuring himself with his old adversary, especially as he seems to have thought that he could discredit that adversary without giving him an opportunity to retaliate.

In 1798 a Federalist Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, whose constitutionality no Federalist judge ever doubted, but which Jefferson considered as clearly a violation of the fundamental compact, since they tended to drive certain states, as he thought, into "revolution and blood." Under this provocation Jefferson proclaimed that it was both the right and the duty of any state, which felt itself aggrieved, to intervene to arrest "the progress of the evil," within her territory, by declining to execute, or by "nullifying," the objectionable statutes. As Jefferson wrote the Kentucky Resolutions in 1798 and was elected President in 1800, the people at least appeared to have sustained him in his exposition of the Constitution, before he entered into office.

At this distance of time we find it hard to realize what the election of 1800 seemed to portend to those who participated therein. Mr. Jefferson always described it as amounting to a revolution as profound as, if less bloody than, the revolution of 1776, and though we maybe disposed to imagine that Jefferson valued his own advent to power at its full worth, it must be admitted that his enemies regarded it almost as seriously. Nor were they without some justification, for Jefferson certainly represented the party of disintegration. "Nullification" would have been tantamount to a return to the condition of the Confederation. Besides, Jefferson not so many years before had written, in defence of Shays's rebellion, that the tree of Liberty could never flourish unless refreshed occasionally with the blood of patriots and tyrants. To most Federalists Jefferson seemed a bloodthirsty demagogue. In 1796 Oliver Ellsworth had been appointed Chief Justice by General Washington in the place of Jay, who resigned, and in 1799 John Adams sent Ellsworth as an envoy to France to try to negotiate a treaty which should reëstablish peace between the two countries. Ellsworth succeeded in his mission, but the hardships of his journey injured his health, and he, in turn, resigned in the autumn of 1800. Then Adams offered the Chief Justiceship to Jay, but Jay would not return to office, and after this the President selected his Secretary of State, John Marshall, one of the greatest of the great Virginians, but one of Jefferson's most irreconcilable enemies. Perhaps at no moment in his life did John Adams demonstrate his legal genius more convincingly than in this remarkable nomination. Yet it must be conceded that, in making John Marshall Chief Justice, John Adams deliberately chose the man whom, of all his countrymen, he thought to be the most formidable champion of those views which he himself entertained, and which he conceived that he had been elected President to advance. Nor was John Adams deceived. For thirty-four years John Marshall labored ceaselessly to counteract Jefferson's constitutional principles, while Jefferson always denounced the political partiality of the federal courts, and above all the "rancorous hatred which Marshall bears to the government of his country, and … the cunning and sophistry within which he is able to enshroud himself."11

No one, at this day, would be disposed to dispute that the Constitution, as a device to postpone war among the states, at least for a period, was successful, and that, as I have already pointed out, during the tentative interval which extended until Appomattox, the Supreme Court served perhaps as well, in ordinary times, as an arbiter between the states and the general government, as any which could have been suggested. So much may be conceded, and yet it remains true, as the record will show, that when it passed this point and entered into factional strife, the Supreme Court somewhat lamentably failed, probably injuring itself and popular respect for law, far more by its errors, than it aided the Union by its political adjudications.

Although John Marshall, by common consent, ranks as one of the greatest and purest of Americans, yet even Marshall had human weaknesses, one of which was a really unreasonable antipathy to Thomas Jefferson; an antipathy which, I surmise, must, when Jefferson was inaugurated, have verged upon contempt. At least Marshall did what cautious men seldom do when they respect an adversary, he took the first opportunity to pick a quarrel with a man who had the advantage of him in position.

In the last days of his presidency John Adams appointed one William Marbury a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia. The Senate confirmed the appointment, and the President signed, and John Marshall, as Secretary of State, sealed Marbury's commission; but in the hurry of surrendering office the commission was not delivered, and Jefferson found it in the State Department when he took possession. Resenting violently these "midnight" appointments, as he called them, Jefferson directed Mr. Madison, his Secretary of State, to withhold the commission; and, at the next December term of the Supreme Court, Marbury moved for a rule to Madison to show cause why he should not be commanded to deliver to the plaintiff the property to which Marbury pretended to be entitled. Of course Jefferson declined to appear before Marshall, through his Secretary of State, and finally, in February, 1803, Marshall gave judgment, in what was, without any doubt, the most anomalous opinion he ever delivered, in that it violated all judicial conventions, for, apparently, no object, save to humiliate a political opponent.

Marshall had no intention of commanding Madison to surrender the commission to Marbury. He was too adroit a politician for that. Marshall knew that he could not compel Jefferson to obey such a writ against his will, and that in issuing the order he would only bring himself and his court into contempt. What he seems to have wished to do was to give Jefferson a lesson in deportment. Accordingly, instead of dismissing Marbury's suit upon any convenient pretext, as, according to legal etiquette, he should have done if he had made up his mind to decide against the plaintiff, and yet thought it inexpedient to explain his view of the law, he began his opinion with a long and extra-judicial homily, first on Marbury's title to ownership in the commission, and then on civil liberty. Having affirmed that Marbury's right to his office vested when the President had signed, and the Secretary of State had sealed the instrument, he pointed out that withholding the property thus vested was a violation of civil rights which could be examined in a court of justice. Were it otherwise, the Chief Justice insisted, the government of the United States could not be termed a government of laws and not of men.

All this elaborate introduction was in the nature of a solemn lecture by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to the President of the United States upon his faulty discharge of his official duties. Having eased his mind on this head, Marshall went on, very dexterously indeed, but also very palpably, to elude the consequences of his temerity. He continued: The right of property being established, and the violation of that right clear, it is plain that a wrong has been committed, and it only remains to determine whether that wrong can be redressed under this form of procedure. We are of opinion that it cannot, because Congress has no constitutional power to confer upon the Supreme Court original jurisdiction in this class of litigation. In the lower courts alone can the relief prayed for be obtained.

Of all the events of Marshall's life this controversy with Jefferson seems to me the most equivocal, and it was a direct effect of a constitutional system which has permitted the courts to become the censor of the political departments of the government. Marshall, probably, felt exasperated by Jefferson's virulence against these final appointments made by John Adams, while Marshall was Secretary of State, and for which he may have felt himself, in part, responsible. Possibly, even, he may have taken some of Jefferson's strictures as aimed at himself. At all events he went to extreme lengths in retaliation. He might have dismissed the litigation in a few words by stating that, whatever the abstract rights of the parties might have been, the Supreme Court had no power to constrain the President in his official functions; but he yielded to political animosity. Then, having taken a position practically untenable, he had to find an avenue of retreat, and he found it by asserting a supervisory jurisdiction over Congress, a step which, even at that early period, was most hazardous.12