Woody Holton

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Woody Holton | "Divide et Impera": Federalist 10 in a Wider Sphere | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

"Divide et Impera": Federalist 10 in a Wider Sphere

A month before publishing Federalist 10, James Madison sent his friend Thomas Jefferson a confidential summary of its thesis. "Divide et impera, the reprobated axiom of tyranny," Madison wrote, "is under certain qualifications, the only policy, by which a republic can be administered on just principles." Historians have shied away from the republican Madison's embrace of the strategy of divide and rule, which Americans of his era associated with that archetypical counselor to despots, Niccolò Machiavelli.¹ One way to make sense of Madison's statement is to place it in two insufficiently studied contexts: the discussion of the proper size of polities and legislative districts among his contemporaries and the contests over taxation and debt on which the dimensions debate was, to a large extent, based.	1
Most of the men who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 joined Madison in the belief that transferring certain crucial duties from the thirteen states to a polity of continental proportions would solve one of their most vexing problems. As Douglass G. Adair pointed out in his 1943 doctoral dissertation, the framers ensured that the one popularly elected branch of the new national government, the House of Representatives, would be "carefully checked and balanced by a quasi-aristocratic (or plutocratic) senate, the electoral college, the presidential veto, and by judicial review." Some of the convention delegates proposed a battery of additional restraints on tyrannical majorities, including life terms for some elected officials, high property qualifications for voters (and still higher ones for officeholders), a congressional veto of state laws, and indirect election of the House of Representatives. These proposals put the framers in a quandary: how could they place the new government sufficiently beyond the reach of popular influence to ensure that it acted responsibly without making it so unresponsive to the popular will as to not only violate their highest ideals but also jeopardize ratification?²	2
The delegates' solution was to reject the most blatant restrictions on popular power in favor of subtler ones. For instance, the convention defeated Madison's inflammatory proposal to allow the national legislature to overturn state laws, but quietly gave that power to the federal courts. The framers also discovered that they could limit popular influence over the most crucial government functions, especially the levying of continental (federal) taxes and the regulation of debtor-creditor relations, simply by shifting them from the states, where the median population was two hundred fifty thousand souls, to a new national government that encompassed all 3.5 million Americans. Because congressional districts would encompass about ten times as many voters as the constituencies where state assemblymen were chosen, federal elections stood a much better chance of producing responsible officeholders.³ Furthermore, after the Constitution shifted certain vital government duties to a polity that combined the territory of all thirteen states, grassroots efforts to pressure elected officials would rarely acquire that essential ingredient of political power: unity.	3
Yet not all categories of citizens would find unity equally elusive. Some interest groups—those the federal convention delegates and like-minded men considered the most virtuous—would outdo others at the art of coalescing. Well-to-do city dwellers (especially merchants), veteran officers, and investors in government bonds were much likelier than ordinary farmers to achieve the level of internal cooperation that was needed to exert influence on a government that embraced the combined territories of the thirteen states. Taking note of this disparity in organizing ability, the supporters of the Constitution affirmed that it would filter out unjust efforts to influence public officials but allow salutary influences to pass through.	. . .

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