Securing the State

At a session of the Confederation Congress on February 19, 1787, James Madison rose to reflect on the federal government's failed attempts to mobilize an armed force to quell the Massachusetts Regulation, commonly known as Shays's Rebellion. The uprising, led by the Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, had begun in August 1786 and was wreaking havoc throughout central and western Massachusetts and neighboring states. After a series of frustrated attempts to muster the militia to repress the “traitorous proceedings” in the fall of 1786, Secretary of War Henry Knox and the Massachusetts authorities, led by the old revolutionaries James Bowdoin and Samuel Adams, decided to invite the central government to claim new powers over domestic rebellion and forcibly put an end to the tumult. While the central government embraced the idea of new power, Congress was even more powerless to act than the state government and could only observe as the rebellion raged through Massachusetts during the winter of 1786–1787. In Madison's analysis, the problem of federal power boiled down to constitutional, institutional, and ideological factors. First, “it appeared rather difficult to reconcile an interference of Congress in the internal controversies of a State with the tenor of the Confederation which does not authorize it explicitly, and leaves to the States all powers not expressly delegated.” Second, Congress did not possess the fiscal or military capacity to act. It did not control a body of soldiers to deploy, and its attempts to request money from its constitutive states to raise a new army were met with indifference. Finally, federal imposition did not accord with republican ideology. Such action violated “the principles of Republican Gov.,” he noted, “which as they rest on the sense of the majority, necessarily suppose power and right always to be on the same side.”1

Economic history · Government (linguistics) · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Political Theory and Influence · Public Administration

• When the People Rule

  Open Access•Elizabeth Markovits, Elizabeth K Markovits et al.•When the People Rule•2023

  Add to list

• A Lost Theory of American Emergency Constitutionalism

  Open Access•John Fabian Witt•Law and History Review•2018

  Add to list