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Chapter 2 Order As is clear in the language used by the Lehigh Kirchenleute, liberty was the most significant component of the American conception of republican politics. But it is one of the great historical ironies of the period that, despite the unifying power of the desire for liberty, American Revolutionaries never actually agreed on its meaning.1 For some, it originated from a desire to free government from English corruption and to establish the rule of popular sovereignty; for others it meant the expansion of popular participation in government and the protection of citizens against their leaders while pursuing individual happiness. Out of this confusion, many Americans, including the Kirchenleute, emerged from the war with a broadened concept of liberty that gave rise to heightened expectations of participation in their government and, therefore, a greater determination to protect the conditions, especially private property, that afforded such privilege. At the same time, others worried that too much liberty could lead to democracy and anarchy, and they believed that true liberty was found in a republican commonwealth that required submission of individual freedoms for the good of the whole.2 Some began to sense that the expansion of liberty's definition was leading the Confederation toward a democratic politics of selfinterest , the decline of deference, and the decay of republican virtue. In drafting the federal Constitution, they stressed the need for an energetic national government led by a natural aristocracy that could ensure an ordered republican liberty for the American community.3 Federalists like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton typified this stance. When Hamilton rose to speak at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he advocated a vigorous, centralized government: «we must establish a general and national government, completely sovereign;' Hamilton demanded, «and annihilate the state distinctions and state operations." In reality, it was not the state governments themselves that Hamilton feared; it was their localist orientation and tendency to bend to the sway of the people, who «seldom judge or determine right;' that influenced him to advocate an aristocratic, sovereign national government based on the British model.4 Order 49 As much as the specters of localism and popular democracy, the omnipresence of well-fortified European forces surrounding the infant nation haunted Alexander Hamilton. Foremost among the defects of the democratic Confederation of independent states, Hamilton feared, were security matters: the states "can raise no troops nor equip vessels before war is actually declared. They cannot heretofore take any preparatory measure before an enemy is at your door." In order to attain an internal security, or "individual security" as he deemed it, Hamilton called for a limited electorate of elites, lifetime tenures for presidents and senators, and a national government veto of state laws. This powerful national state, invigorated with "public strength;' could then provide a military defense to meet external security threats. Security could also be achieved by consoli~ating and funding a national debt to foreign and domestic creditors, tying their economic interests to the survival of the republic and justifying national schemes of taxation to pay the interest and fortify the military . Hamilton's liberty was a national independence that relied on the wealthy and the powerful and intentionally sought to overrepresent their interests. While most supporters of a federal government in 1787 were unwilling to go to the lengths advocated by Hamilton, events in the ensuing years, including Fries's Rebellion, pushed many in that direction.5 Resisting the Hamiltonian push for a stronger national government in 1787 were Antifederalists, who were more willing to put legislative, military, and taxing powers at local and state levels, closer to the people. They were quicker to court popular political participation, and they were more jealous of protecting individual civil liberties.6 Despite such ideological differences, most delegates to the Philadelphia convention and the state ratifying conventions did agree on one thing: liberty, however defined, depended upon the security of private property, and republican governments at the state and national levels provided that protection.7 Private property and the contracts that secured it served the interests of landed and mercantile wealth, while simultaneously affording basic economic and political liberty for small farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers, attaching their interests to those of their more prosperous neighbors and fastening their loyalty to governments. The Federalist Party that emerged during the 1790s-especially the Hamiltonian Federalists-clung to the notion of liberty with order.8 Although the Federalists had a sincere commitment to republican government and agreed with their Republican Party adversaries on...

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