Smoking Pistoles and the Origins of the Constitution

Abstract

Had Bill Clinton been around in the 1780s-as governor, say, of North Carolina-this is the type of study he might have curled up with of an evening while he pondered the problems of public finance in a country just emerging from a prolonged, costly struggle against a foreign empire and burdened with a substantial public debt. Redeeming the Republic is a book for the public policy wonks of the 1780s. Roger H. Brown argues, quite simply, that the Federalist movement to replace the Articles of Confederation with the more energetic government of the Constitution was chiefly driven by the inability of the state governments to collect the hard money taxes they had duly levied in compliance with the requisitions of the Continental Congress. Rather than depict the legislatures as fecklessly indifferent to its plight, Brown demonstrates that the majority of states-even Rhode Island!-made good faith efforts to meet their federal obligations, and to do so with payments in the specie that Congress needed to satisfy its foreign creditors. Nearly everywhere, however, these efforts sparked popular resistance from taxpayers who in the best of times often lacked access to hard money, and who now found the demands of local tax collectors even more offensive in the depressed postwar economy. Popular clamor for tax relief compelled the responsive state legislatures to abandon their programs of taxation, reducing Congress to a near destitute condition and persuading Federalists (as Brown somewhat anachronistically calls the nationalist reformers of the mid-1780s) that no state-centered federal union could long endure. Brown develops this argument with case studies of problems of tax collection in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. The details vary from state to state, but the underlying plot remains the same. In what Brown describes as a pressure-resistance-retreat model (p. 122), state governments levied the requisite taxes and then directed local collectors to pursue appropriate legal remedies when individual taxpayers failed to com-