Vol 1, No. 1, January 2022 FRONT AND CENTER – Introducing Al Gray Marine Leadership Forum

Today most Americans are in the habit of referring to our form of government as a democracy, but in Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution we read the following: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican Form of Government,…” Were we to ask Americans to explain what they mean by democracy, we might find some confusion, or perhaps a general sense that democracy involves voting for candidates on the basis of promises made to do one thing or another, or perhaps even the lofty-sounding but incorrect assertion that in our democracy, “we the People” are the government. If we then asked for a description of a republic, we’d likely be met with similar confusion or vague notions that suggest an idea of what a republic is, but no certain understanding of it. Interestingly, if we could travel back to 1788/89 when the Constitution of the United States was ratified, we’d find a similar situation in which people knew what they wanted for their own lives and for those of family and friends, but of the best form of government for a free people there would be differing ideas about it, but the general sentiment would have been: “Protect our country from invasions from without, from criminals within, and beyond that, leave us alone.” Nevertheless, Americans were called upon to consider in state conventions whether to adopt the Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. We might then ask about the form of government Americans thought they were adopting in the new Constitution.

As much as Americans will call our government a democracy, we tend also to speak of the “Founding Fathers” as if they were a band of likeminded visionaries on the trail of a unique experiment in liberty. However impressive many of them were, they were also, like us, human, with the ambitions and schemes for achieving them that are common to human nature. For example, in 1781 the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, our first Constitution, went into effect. Many people including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison did not like the Articles because the Articles affirmed a confederation of sovereign states with a weak unicameral legislature, often called the Confederation Congress, with no executive branch and no courts.

READ MORE

Letters between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were not uncommon. The two statesmen, in fact, exchanged more than 1,250 letters ranging from brief notes to a seventeen-page letter written by Madison following the results of the Constitutional Convention.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
28 August 1789

“I must now say a word on the declaration of rights you have been so good as to send me. I like it as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance the following alterations and additions would have pleased me. Art. 4. ‘The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak to write or otherwise to publish any thing but false facts affecting injuriously the life, liberty, property, or reputation of others or affecting the peace of the confederacy with foreign nations.”

James Madison to Thomas Jefferson
17 October 1788

“This is a truth of great importance, but not yet sufficiently attended to: and is probably more strongly impressed on my mind by facts, and reflections suggested by them, than on yours which has contemplated abuses of power issuing from a very different quarter. Wherever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done, and not less readily by a powerful & interested party than by a powerful and interested prince. The difference, so far as it relates to the superiority of republics over monarchies, lies in the less degree of probability that interest may prompt abuses of power in the former than in the latter…”