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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Other posts in this series:

• The Probability Broach