The Probability Broach, chapter 9

L. Neil Smith has a serious grudge against the Constitution.

It’s not just that he disagrees with its goals, as you’d expect from an anarchist. Like a good sovereign citizen, he claims the whole thing was illegal. He denounces it as a grand conspiracy led by Alexander Hamilton. As Smith’s narrator Win Bear tells it:

He and his Federalists had shoved down the country’s throat their “Constitution,” a charter for a centralist superstate replacing the thirteen minigovernments that had been operating under the inefficient but tolerable Articles of Confederation. Adopted during an illegal and unrepresentative meeting in Philadelphia, originally authorized only to revise the Articles, this new document amounted to a bloodless coup d’état.

Funny—as near as I remembered, these were the same events that had happened in my own world. But in the eyes of my new friends, historic figures like John Jay and James Madison became villainous authoritarians. Of seventy-four delegates chosen to attend the Constitutional Convention, nineteen declined, and sixteen of those present refused to sign. Of the thirty-nine remaining, many of whom signed only reluctantly, just six had put their names to the original Declaration of Independence.

It’s true that not all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were willing to sign, but that’s not surprising. It’s easy to reach agreement that an existing system isn’t working; it’s harder to agree on what to replace it with. Governing always involves compromise, and no political system makes everyone happy. That’s not a challenge unique to America, but something that every band of revolutionaries throughout history has discovered.

Smith roars that the Constitutional Convention was an “illegal” meeting, but he omits a relevant fact: the delegates met to revise the Articles of Confederation because it was very clear that they weren’t working.

Under the Articles, America was more like a loose alliance of thirteen separate nations. There was a national Congress, but it had no power to levy taxes. To fund anything it voted for, it had to beg the states to contribute.

This created a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation. Each state had a selfish incentive to sit out and let the others do the unpopular work of raising revenue—and because they all reasoned the same way, almost none of them ever did. In 1786, Congress requested $3.8 million from the states to pay national obligations, and got… $663.

The early American republic was chronically broke and hamstrung. It couldn’t pay the debts it had taken on while fighting for independence. It couldn’t even pay its own soldiers.

Smith puts huge importance on the Whiskey Rebellion. But there were other, equally serious crises that he ignores because they don’t fit with his worldview that blames centralized government for all evils.

In March 1783, in the so-called Newburgh Conspiracy, officers in the Continental Army were enraged over not receiving their promised pay and pensions—in some cases, for years on end. They circulated a letter hinting at plans to overthrow Congress. George Washington personally intervened to defuse the conspiracy.

But he couldn’t stop the next one: the Pennsylvania Mutiny of June 1783, when Congress was surrounded, mobbed and threatened by hundreds of angry, rebellious soldiers demanding their promised pay. They had to flee Philadelphia, the seat of government at the time.

Last but not least, there’s Shays’ Rebellion. It was an uprising of rural Massachusetts farmers, many of them veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were angry about state taxation when they themselves hadn’t been paid for their service. They attacked local courts, preventing them from meeting, and tried to storm a federal armory and seize its weapons to overthrow the government. Once again, the federal government was helpless to intervene. An alliance of private citizens paid out of their own pockets to fund a private militia to suppress the rebellion.

Meanwhile, America faced pressure from foreign powers. Spain, which controlled the Mississippi River, closed it to American navigation—strangling trade from western regions—and pressured Americans to swear allegiance to Spain in exchange for access. Once again, there was nothing the U.S. government could do.

These repeated crises made it clear that the fledgling American state was too weak to govern, and risked being torn apart by internal uprising or subjugated and carved up by European powers. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, there was widespread recognition that something better was needed. It wasn’t a sinister conspiracy, as Smith imagines.

Smith’s fuming about a “coup d’etat” or the Constitution being “shoved down the country’s throat” ignores another obvious fact: the delegates to the Constitutional Convention didn’t force a new government on the nation at gunpoint. How could they have?

There was no skullduggery or subterfuge. The new Constitution was presented and debated in public over the course of several years. It took until 1790, but all thirteen states ratified it democratically. To assuage some holdouts’ concerns, the Bill of Rights was added—arguably a step up from the Articles, which had no such thing!

After the Constitution was ratified, Smith’s alternate history proceeded the same as ours, until the Whiskey Rebellion. We’ve already heard about Albert Gallatin, and he makes another appearance in this chapter.

In 1794, a Pennsylvania gentleman stepped into the fray. A former Swiss financier, Albert Gallatin disapproved of the way Alexander Hamilton handled the nation’s checkbook. He organized and led the farmers and began convincing federal soldiers they were fighting on the wrong side…

Thus “fortified,” the 80-proof revolution marched on Philadelphia. Washington went to the wall, Hamilton fled to Prussia and was killed in a duel in 1804. Gallatin was proclaimed president.

Smith acknowledges (vaguely) that the Articles of Confederation gave rise to some problems, which he tries to address as follows:

Economic problems that had precipitated the Constitution Conspiracy were solved with a new currency, backed by untold acres of land in the undeveloped Northwest Territories.

…Gallatin’s land certificates were redeemed, the last money ever issued by a United States government. He served five four-year terms in all, and lived long enough to see his own peculiar brand of anarchism begin spreading throughout the world.

There’s a lot of furious handwaving in this passage. I’ll limit myself to pointing out the top two problems.

In Smith’s history, America’s Revolutionary War debts were settled by a new currency, backed by land in the Northwest Territories. Except… the Northwest Territories were occupied at that time—by the British—who refused to relinquish them because, again, the Articles of Confederation government was shirking its financial obligations under the Treaty of Paris that ended the war!

Smith expects us to believe that the British crown would accept land they already controlled as payment for the debt we owed them.

In reality, the British didn’t withdraw from those territories until the 1794 Jay Treaty, negotiated by that villainous authoritarian John Jay. (There were also Native Americans living there—more about this next week.)

Second, to re-raise a point I made before: How can a currency be backed by land, unless there’s a central government that can protect and adjudicate claims of ownership?

In the anarchist society that Smith envisions, there’d be nothing to stop crowds of claim-jumpers and squatters from taking over territory that other people thought they owned. Any currency whose value was predicated on being able to redeem it for parcels of land would rapidly become worthless.

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The Probability Broach, chapter 9

Safe and sound (for the moment), Win Bear continues his research into why history unfolded so differently in this anarchist universe:

I hunched over the Telecom, a stranger in a strange land, trying to figure out how we both got so strange. What real differences were there between the Encyclopedia of North America and the smattering of history I could recall?

…What really differed was interpretations.

In 1789, the unlucky year 13 A.L., the Revolution was betrayed. Since 1776, people had been free of kings, free of governments, free to live their own lives. It sounded like a Propertarian’s paradise. Now things were going to be different again: America was headed back—so Lucy and the encyclopedia said—toward slavery.

The fiend responsible for this counter-revolutionary nastiness was Alexander Hamilton, a name Confederates hold in about the same esteem as the word “spittoon.” He and his Federalists had shoved down the country’s throat their “Constitution,” a charter for a centralist superstate replacing the thirteen minigovernments that had been operating under the inefficient but tolerable Articles of Confederation.

Headed back toward slavery? That’s a cringeworthy turn of phrase, given that even in L. Neil Smith’s alternate timeline, America still had real, actual slavery at this point.

“People” most certainly weren’t “free to live their own lives” in that era… unless by “people”, he meant “white men”. As I’ve mentioned, this is a persistent blind spot of his.

We’ll discuss more about the North American Confederacy’s history later, but for now, here’s a quick reminder: In their world, as in ours, the Constitution superceded the Articles of Confederation. The divergence point is the Whiskey Rebellion against the nascent federal government.

In our world, it fizzled out. In the Confederate world, it succeeded. George Washington was executed, the Constitution was scrapped, and the United States government was overthrown, giving rise to an anarchist society.

To hear Smith tell it, centralized government is the source of all evil. Once the Constitution was abolished, America experienced an immediate renaissance – not just technologically, but morally.

A case in point is his treatment of slavery, as told by Win:

Confederate history after the Rebellion was a mishmash of the familiar and the fantastic. Gallatin adopted a new calendar and a system of weights and measures, both devised by Thomas Jefferson.

…Jefferson enjoyed an even more illustrious career than back at home. Fourth president, after Edmond Genêt, he’d almost single-handedly lectured, argued, and shamed the country into giving up slavery, freeing his own slaves in 31 A.L. On the lecture circuits, four years later, an irate reactionary put a nine-inch dagger into his leg, leaving Jefferson with a limp and a cane he carried the rest of his life. They hauled the assassin out with a faceful of pistol lead, as the inventive future president had mounted the rostrum bearing a repeating sidearm of his own design. He finished the speech before he’d see a doctor. Slavery was abolished in 44 A.L., the year Jefferson ascended to the presidency.

Hold on just a minute! I want to hear more about how Thomas Jefferson peacefully talked all slaveholders into freeing their slaves.

Smith doesn’t linger on this. He makes the claim, then hastily segues to a different image – a badass Jefferson blowing an assassin away – almost as if he’s trying to distract readers so we don’t ask for more details. (No surprise we don’t hear any of the actual words of these magically persuasive speeches.)

In our world, defeating slavery took the bloodiest conflict ever fought on American soil. Does Smith expect us to believe that all this death and devastation was unnecessary? Could Abraham Lincoln have prevented the Civil War if only he’d been a better speechwriter?

Smith drastically underestimates how simple it is to convince people to give up racist beliefs, especially racist beliefs they benefit from. He believes that once the right political system is in place, all prejudice will melt away and everyone will lose their desire to dominate others. Ironically, that’s very similar to what communists believe, only in service to more or less the opposite conclusion.

Of course, Smith has to say this, because he’s an anarchist. If people won’t freely make the right choice – for example, if they choose to enslave, oppress or discriminate against others based on race – the only other option is a state or state-like power to compel them. He can’t abide that, so his ideology requires him to believe that bad beliefs are easy to overcome. But his ideology patently clashes with reality.

All libertarians have to grapple with an inconvenient historical truth. The Anti-Federalists – the founders who were most in favor of limited government – didn’t hold this view out of devotion to an abstract concept of liberty. They held this view so that government didn’t interfere with their ability to own slaves.

For example, Patrick Henry – he of “give me liberty or give me death” – was an outspoken opponent of the Constitution. Why? Because he feared that it would give Congress the power to free the slaves:

“They will search that paper, and see if they have power of manumission. And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? There is no ambiguous implication, or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point. They have the power in clear unequivocal terms; and will clearly and certainly exercise it.”

(See also this paper, and this article arguing that the Second Amendment was ratified to protect the legitimacy of slave-patrol militias.)

The enslavers who opposed the Constitution were explicit about their reasoning: With a weak central government, they’d be able to do as they pleased. But a strong central government might one day come under pressure to liberate its enslaved citizens, and would be capable of doing so.

Meanwhile, although Smith loathes Alexander Hamilton for being the architect of strong central government, he did more than most founders to fight slavery.

Hamilton founded the New York Manumission Society, which called for (and achieved) the abolition of slavery in the state. During the American Revolution, he lobbied for enslaved people to be permitted to join the Continental Army in exchange for their freedom.

After the war, he argued that enslaved people who escaped to freedom on the British side shouldn’t be returned to slavery after Britain’s surrender: “as odious and immoral a thing as can be conceived… to bring back to servitude men once made free.” And after the Haitian Revolution, where a slave rebellion succeeded in overthrowing colonial rule and creating a free society – and terrifying the colonizing powers of the Western world – Hamilton was one of the few who advocated trade and diplomatic relations with the new Haitian government.

To be fair, Hamilton didn’t have completely clean hands. Despite his abolitionist advocacy, he married into the wealthy, slaveholding Schuyler family. He also swallowed the pro-slavery clauses of the Constitution to win Southern support for ratification.

Given how deeply slavery permeated the early American economy, none of the founders were free of its taint. However, it’s fair to say that Hamilton was more anti-slavery than most – both in his words and his deeds.

As for Thomas Jefferson, he talked a good game about ending slavery. He wanted to put anti-slavery language in the Declaration of Independence, though it was deleted at the insistence of slaveholding delegates. As president, he signed a law banning the international slave trade, which he called “violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa”.

Nevertheless, when it came to the most obvious thing he could have done – freeing his own slaves, both for their sake and as an example to others – Jefferson failed. He didn’t even emancipate them in his will.

For all his rhetoric, he was acutely aware that the wealthy, plantation-owning class of which he was a member depended on the labor of enslaved people to support them and enable their aristocratic lifestyle. If slavery were abolished, that economic system built on exploitation would collapse. That was a sacrifice he wasn’t willing to make.

This fact doesn’t sit well with L. Neil Smith. So he rewrites history to conform to what he thinks “should” have happened.

He erases Alexander Hamilton’s anti-slavery advocacy so as to more easily villainize him. He recasts Jefferson the slaveholder as a principled hero of abolition. In doing so, he bulldozes the messy, inconvenient facts of real history, so he can put all the “good” people on his side and all the “bad” people on the other side.

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