Anonymous Comrade submits:

"The Illusion Is Liberty, The Reality Is Leviathan:

A Voluntaryist Perspective on the Bill of Rights"

Carl Watner

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia began their
deliberations on May 25, 1787. During the hot summer months when their
arguments seemed to extend interminably, Benjamin Franklin observed that
life went on around them despite their debates. At one point, he "is said
to have warned the delegates: 'Gentlemen, you see that in the anarchy in
which we live society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes
last too long, that the people do not come to think they can very easily
do without us'."(1) While this story may be apocryphal, James Iredell,
another delegate, noted that if the confederation continued as it was, it
might as well "resolve into total anarchy at once, of which indeed our
present condition falls very little short." (2) These introductory
remarks demonstrate that the federalist supporters of the Constitution
were highly perceptive politicians and strategists. They realized that if
they fumbled too long, their efforts at structuring a new government
would fail and they would not attain the legitimacy which their new
political enterprise required.

This article was sparked by an essay written by Forrest McDonald entitled
"The Bill of Rights: Unnecessary and Pernicious," in which he presents
the thesis (which he shares with some other historians) that the first
ten amendments to the federal Constitution were essentially a
legitimizing device used by those favoring a strong central government.
In other words, many Americans who otherwise might not have supported the
new central government were won over to it by the adoption of the Bill of
Rights. Reading McDonald's article led me to review some of the history
of the adoption of the Bill of Rights, of the conflict between the
Federalists and their opponents, the Anti-Federalists, of the strategy
adopted by the Federalists in urging the ratification of the
Constitution, and to consider the ultimate significance of the Bill of
Rights. Would we, as late 20th Century Americans, have been better or
worse off had the Bill of Rights never been adopted? What would American
constitutional history look like if there had been no Bill of Rights? The
purpose of this article is to examine these topics from a voluntaryist
perspective, and to decide what position the committed voluntaryist would
have taken during the struggle for the ratification of the Constitution
and the adoption of the first ten amendments.

In order to understand the place of these amendments in American history,
it is first necessary to comprehend the voluntaryist view of the
Declaration of Independence and Revolutionary War. (3) Despite the
seemingly libertarian nature of the revolution, even the Declaration of
Independence was a statist document. For example, it concluded with the
statement that the representatives of the United States of America do
declare "That these United Colonies are, and of Right, ought to be Free
and Independent States; ... and that as Free and Independent States, they
have full power to levy War; conclude Peace, contract Alliances,
establish commerce and to do all the other Acts and Things which
independent States may of right do." In other words, the signers of the
Declaration intended to create a new State to replace the one they were
"throwing off." As Albert Jay Nock observed, there was great dissension
about the form of the political institutions which came after the
Americans won the war, "but [there] was none about its nature. ...
Dissatisfaction was directed against administrators, not against the
institution itself." Those who fought and led the rebellion against Great
Britain meant to have a State of their own to control, not one under the
control of a far away British Parliament and monarch. The bottom line,
after all is said and done, is that colonial-era Americans, after having
won the battle against Britain, simply swapped one State for another.

Nonetheless, the first American central government, The Articles of
Confederation and Perpetual Union, was relatively weak because "most men
of the Revolutionary period took it for granted that it was the nature of
all governments to seek to acquire more power. ... [Their attitude was
that] all power corrupts and all power tends to become absolute." (4)
Hence, they were jealous of political power. Many on the frontier were
independent and self-reliant to the point of being nearly ungovernable.
They "were improvident and anti-social; they did not take kindly to any
form of authority which inevitably to them meant order, limitations on
freedom of action, mutual obligations, and, worst of all taxes. ...
Generally speaking and aside from statesmen, merchants, and the veterans
of the Revolution, the idea of a National Government had not [yet]
penetrated the minds of the people. They managed to tolerate State
Governments, because they had always lived under some such thing; but a
National Government was too far away and fearsome, too alien and
forbidding for them to view it with friendliness or understanding." (5)

The Confederation, agreed upon by the Second Continental Congress on
November 15, 1777 became effective in 1781. It was based upon an alliance
of the thirteen newly independent states. The central government they
created had no power to tax, field soldiers, regulate commerce, or even
enforce its own laws.Whatever revenue it raised was done by assessing the
legislatures of the individual states, who then, in whatever form they
wished, levied upon their citizenry. It was an intolerable situation for
any government, much less a national one. Consequently, American
political leaders realized that they must assume control over the
financial and military aspects of the country in order to truly govern.
They required sufficient money and soldiers to protect the new nation
from foreign aggressors, criminals, and recalcitrant states or taxpayers.
In order to accomplish these goals, they crafted a new document, known as
the Constitution of the United States, which was distributed to the
various state governments for their approval in September 1787.

The Constitutional Convention was originally called to amend the
Articles, not supersede or annul them. Under the Articles of
Confederation, the states were pledged to a perpetual union, and no
provision had been made for dissolving their association - except that
any changes in the Confederation had to be done by the unanimous
agreement of all the States. Thus, there are only two ways to view the
Constitutional Convention. Either the individual States had the right to
secede (without the agreement of the other States) or else the Founding
Fathers instigated a revolution to change the governing institutions of
the country. In the latter case, they "assumed constituent powers,
ordained a new constitution, and demanded a plebiscite thereon over the
head of all existing legally organized powers. Had Julius [Caesar] or
Napoleon committed these acts, they would have been pronounced a coup
d'etat." (6) The fact that the Articles of Confederation were still the
fundamental law of the thirteen states was simply ignored by the members
of the Constitutional Convention.

Although the States never seem to have formally withdrawn their consent
to the Articles, in each State a special ratifying convention was held to
approve or reject the Constitution. In Rhode Island, the first ratifying
convention rejected the Constitution. It was during the struggle for the
ratification (September 1787 to June 1788, when the new constitution
actually went into effect in the first nine ratifying states) that the
first political parties in American took shape. Despite the chasm between
Federalists and Anti-Federalists, one very important point is usually
overlooked. Both were supportive and approved of some sort of central
statist authority over the thirteen states. All assumed that some sort of
government was necessary to protect man's rights. As Herbert Storing in
THE COMPLETE ANTI-FEDERALIST put it, "If the Federalists and
Anti-Federalists were divided among themselves, they were, at a deeper
level, united with one another." They all "agreed that the purpose of
government is the regulation and thereby the protection of individual
rights and that the best instrument for this purpose is some form of
limited republican government." (7) The Federalists and Anti-Federalists
were not arguing about whether there should be a government to rule men -
but rather what form that government should take.

Many historians have often seen the Anti-Federalists as libertarian
opponents of the newly proposed federal Constitution. This, however, is a
mistake. Alexander Hamilton pointed out that the Anti-Federalists were
really trying hard to reconcile the contradiction of "limited
government." (8) How could a coercive organization that retained a
monopoly on the use of violence be kept in check? The Anti-Federalists
recognized that such a monopoly carried with it the potential for
unbounded tyranny. Many features of the new Constitution frightened them:
A lifetime judiciary "removed from the people might 'enforce harsh and
arbitrary laws'." In the combined role of the President as
commander-in-chief and chief executive officer of the government they saw
the powers of a military dictator. They were also skeptical about how a
government might be kept limited if Congress could pass any laws
"necessary and proper" to carry out its enumerated powers.

One commentator has claimed that the Anti-Federalists "thought the goal
of the American Revolution was to end the ancient equation of power where
arrogant, oppressive, and depraved rulers on one side produced
subservience and a gradual erosion of self-respect, capacities, and
virtue of the people on the other side. The result was an increasing
corruption and degeneracy in both rulers and ruled. Unless this cycle
could be broken, [the Anti-Federalists thought] independence would mean
little more than the exchange of one tyranny for another. The intense
Anti-Federalist suspicion of corruption, greed, and lust for power" was
not without merit, but not one of them recognized the error of the
Federalist claim that "the true principle of the American Revolution was
not hostility to government, but hostility to tyrannical government." In
fact, that was their error: they objected to tyrannical government,
believing that some form of government might not be tyrannical. In this
they were wrong. History has not only sustained the Anti-Federalists in
their claims that "corruption and tyranny would be rampant ... when those
who exercised power felt little connection with the people," but has also
shown that all government, by its very nature, is tyrannical. (9)

The inconsistent and unprincipled attitude of most Anti-Federalists shows
how they were manipulated into supporting the Constitution. At first,
they argued that the Articles of Confederation were preferable to the
newly proposed Constitution, but as more and more state ratifying
conventions approved the Constitution, they began to realize that they
had better cut their losses. They began calling for amendments in order
to safeguard and protect the rights of individual citizens, as well as to
reserve the unenumerated powers of governing to the individual State
governments. Furthermore, if the Anti-Federalists had a strategy for
opposing the Constitution it was flawed from the beginning. Instead of
objecting to the legal irregularities of the Philadelphia convention and
boycotting the proceedings, some of the Anti-Federalists participated in
the convention and had a direct role in creating the compromises
incorporated into the new Constitution. By arguing against specific
details of the Constitution, they gave it a legitimacy which it otherwise
could not have obtained. If they were opposed on principle to the new
Constitution, they should have stated their opposition to it and refused
to debate the details. By participating in the debates over ratification
in the States, the Anti-Federalists implied that they were willing to
accept the decision of the special conventions called together in each
State to decide whether or not that State would accept the Constitution.
How could the Anti-Federalists reject the vote of the majority of
delegates to special ratification conventions if they participated in the
political campaigns that led to the selection of those delegates?

Initially, the Federalists had a clear-cut goal. Their objective was to
get the new Constitution ratified by the conventions in nine States as
quickly as possible. Otherwise, they would be in danger of losing their
new Constitution altogether. "The Federalists were determined that
Americans not be diverted ... from the main task of providing themselves
with effective government. ... The main political business of the
American people ... was ... not to protect themselves against political
power, but to accept the responsibility of governing themselves. The
Federalists did not deny that government, once established, may need
protecting against, but they tried to make" that a secondary
consideration. (10) Thus in June 1788, when New Hampshire became the
ninth state to ratify the Constitution, both the Federalists and
Anti-Federalists underwent a sudden change of strategies. The
Anti-Federalists began campaigning for a new constitutional convention,
which was permissible under Article V of the newly adopted Constitution.
They hoped that they would have the required political clout to change
some of the objectionable features of the new Constitution. On the other
hand, many of the Federalists who had hitherto resisted supporting a call
for any constitutional amendments, changed their tune. James Madison
became the leader of those advocating the incorporation of a bill of
rights into the new Constitution. In June 1789, he proposed twelve
amendments to the Constitution, ten of which were adopted in 1791 and
which later became known as the Bill of Rights.

Originally, most of the Federalists had been opposed to any bill of
rights. Alexander Hamilton, for example, pointed out that there was no
reason to limit the powers of the federal government in areas where it
was not constitutionally granted any powers. Nevertheless, Madison
believed, and rightfully so, that his suggested amendments would help
keep the Constitution intact and protect it from destruction by the
Anti-Federalists. His objective, as he said in his speech of June 8,
1789, was "to give satisfaction to the doubting part of our
fellow-citizens." (11) His proposal for a bill of rights was designed to
forestall a call for a new constitutional convention and to counter the
efforts of the Anti-Federalists to revise the powers and basic structure
of the new government. His hope was to save the constitution "by pushing
forward a set of amendments that almost everyone could accept and that
excluded all the Anti-Federalists' [radical and] fundamental proposals."
(12) The most significant of these had been the suggestion from several
of the States that direct taxes and excises not be collected in any State
raising its own quota of money for the federal government.

Madison purposefully crafted his proposals to quickly help legitimize the
new government. He avoided statements detailing perpetual standards or
maxims "to which a people might rally" because he realized "that they
tended to undermine stable and effective government." Since the new
federal government needed (and in his opinion deserved) a presumption of
legitimacy and permanency, it would have been foolish of him to include
any reference to first principles that would have undermined that
presumption. For this reason, Madison limited his proposals to "specific
protections of traditional civil rights" rather than embrace a statement
of first principles like those found in the Declaration of Independence
or the Virginia Bill of Rights. Congress showed that it understood this
need for legitimacy when on September 25, 1789 it submitted the completed
constitutional amendments to the States and noted that "their acceptance
would extend 'the ground of public confidence in the government'." (13)

Madison's amendments were simply window dressing for public consumption.
First of all,they did not curtail any of the substantive powers of the
central or state governments. Secondly, they had little legal or
constitutional significance because many of the critical rights of
Americans were already respected without a bill of rights. (14) A few
like the prohibition on "ex post facto" laws had originally been included
in the Constitution. (Indeed, some had questioned the propriety of the
prohibition's inclusion there arguing that "there was no lawyer, no
civilian who would not say that 'ex post facto' laws were void in [and
of] themselves. It cannot be necessary to prohibit them." (15) Others,
like the presumption of innocence, were considered so basic and
self-evident that they never required constitutional recognition. Under
the English common law "basic, natural, and fundamental individual rights
were protected whether enumerated specifically in the Constitution or
not." (16) Consequently, the personal security of those living under the
common law at that time did not "really depend upon or originate in any
general proposition contained in any written document." The enactment of
constitutions or bills of rights or parliamentary statutes were "records
of the existence of a right" rather "than statutes which conferred it."
Freedom for Americans at the time of the adoption of the Bill of Rights
grew out of custom and tradition, not written law. (17)

As several observers have pointed out, it would be interesting to
speculate how our constitutional liberties would have evolved without a
Bill of Rights or what would have occurred had the amendments not been
set off by themselves at the end of the Constitution. (Madison originally
opted for their insertion at various places within the document.) Hadley
Arkes, in his essay "On The Danger Of A Bill Of Rights" comments that
justification for interference with personal liberties would still have
to be made whether or not a particular liberty was embraced in the Bill
Of Rights. (18) Herbert Storing wrote that "Without a Bill Of Rights our
courts would probably have developed a kind of common law of individual
rights to help test and limit governmental power." (19) What we do know,
for sure, is that several violations of individual rights were and still
are found right in the Bill of Rights. For example, according to the
Third Amendment, soldiers may be quartered in private homes during war
time without the homeowners consent. (As one commentator noted, the
government has bypassed even this requirement "by simply removing the
citizens from their houses and conscripting them into the army, navy, and
air force.") (20) By the Fourth Amendment, the government may conduct
searches and seizures so long as they are of a reasonable nature. The
wording of the Fifth Amendment implies that people may be deprived of
their property so long as such confiscation is countenanced by due
process of law. Private property may be taken for public purposes so long
as just compensation is paid by the government. The Seventh Amendment,
which provides for jury trials in civil suits, also provides that "no
fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined by any Court of the
United States, than according to the rules of the common law." "By
implication, limiting the exemption to a reexamination of facts
effectively confirmed the power of appellate courts to overturn jury
findings in matters of law." (21) Thus it was that juries lost the final
say in matters of law.

Forrest McDonald in his essay mentioned at the beginning of this article
labeled the Bill of Rights as "Unnecessary and Pernicious." They were
unnecessary because most of them were already embraced by the common law.
They were pernicious because they helped legitimize the Constitution in
the minds of the American people. Furthermore, McDonald points out that
"The Bill of Rights has never been an especially effective guarantor of
rights." (22) "One by one, the provisions ... [of the Constitution] have
been eaten away, and nobody seems to have noticed or cared. The illusion
is liberty. The reality is Leviathan." (23) Whenever the government's
revenues have been threatened, whenever the nation has been gripped by
some sort of national emergency, or by a major war, the Bill of Rights
and other provisions of the Constitution have usually been laid aside.
One need only mention Lincoln's violation of civil liberties during the
Civil War, the Legal Tender and Gold Cases, the Red Scare during World
War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the
imprisonment of tax resisters during this century to see how little
protection the Bill of Rights has offered Americans.

Many nations have been brutally tyrannized by governments that ruled
according to constitutions, but the question about government is not
really whether it is tyrannical. The question is: Should there be a
state, however weak or strong it might be? A man who is a slave asks: by
what right is he enslaved, not whether he has a good or kind master. All
governments and all slavemasters are unjust. The weakest or strongest of
governments must necessarily make the same claims and both attempt to
exercise a monopoly of power within their borders. They must both have
exclusive possession of and control over the military and the police.
They must both demand the right to declare war and peace, conscript life,
and expropriate income and property, levy taxes, and regulate daily life.
The main point is, as Robert Nisbet has so ably put it in his essay, "The
State": "With all respect to differences among types of government, there
is not, in strict theory, any difference between the powers available to
the democratic and the totalitarian State. We may pride ourselves in the
democracies on Bills or other expressions of individual rights against
the State, but in fact they are rights against a given government and can
be obliterated or sharply diminished when it is deemed necessary." (24)
Constitutions and bills of rights are legitimizing tools of the ruling
elite. Both are badges of slavery not liberty, and should be rejected. It
is only when people awaken to these facts that they will become free.

Footnotes
1. Leonard Krimmerman and Lewis Perry (eds.), PATTERNS OF ANARCHY (Garden
City: Anchor Books, 1966), p. xv.

2. Herbert Storing (ed.), Volume II, THE COMPLETE ANTI-FEDERALIST
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) 1981, p. 14 (footnote 7).

3. Readers who are interested should consult my earlier discussions in
THE VOLUNTARYIST. On the Revolutionary War see Issue 21, "A Plague on
Both Your Houses," and on the Declaration see Issue 60, "Would You Have
Signed the Declaration of Independence?".

4. Hillman Metcalf Bishop, WHY RHODE ISLAND OPPOSED THE FEDERAL
CONSTITUTION (Providence: The Roger Williams Press, 1950), p. 38.
(Reprinted from 8 RHODE ISLAND HISTORY, 1949).

5. William E. Nelson and Robert C. Palmer, LIBERTY AND COMMUNITY:
CONSTITUTION AND RIGHTS IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC (New York: Oceana
Publications, Inc., 1987) pp. 42-43.

6. Jerry Fresia, TOWARD AN AMERICAN REVOLUTION (Boston: South End Press,
1988), p. 50.

7. Storing, op. cit., Volume I, p. 5.

8. Storing, op. cit., Volume I, p. 6.

9. Ralph Ketcham, THE ANTI-FEDERALIST PAPERS (New York: New American
Library, 1986), pp. 19-20; and Storing, op. cit., Volume I, p. 71.

10. Herbert Storing, "The Constitution and the Bill of Rights," in Robert
A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra (eds.) HOW DOES THE CONSTITUTION
SECURE RIGHTS (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public
Policy Research, 1985), p. 28.

11. Ibid., p. 20.

12. Ibid., p. 22.

13. George Anastalpo, THE AMENDMENTS TO THE CONSTITUTION (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 326.

14. Ibid. p. 45 and Bennett B. Patterson, THE FORGOTTEN NINTH AMENDMENT
(Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1955), p. 7.

15. Hadley Arkes, BEYOND THE CONSTITUTION (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), pp. 61 and 70. Chapter 4 of this book, from
which these quotations are taken, is titled "On The Dangers of A Bill of
Rights: Restating the Federalist Argument."

16. Patterson, op. cit., p. 7.

17. See the discussion in Carl Watner, YOUR DOCUMENT FOR THE USE OF
SILENCE (Boulder City: Neo Tech Research, 1984), p. 21 citing Bernard
Schwartz, THE GREAT RIGHTS OF MANKIND (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), p. 24.

18. Arkes, op. cit, pp. 69-70.

19. Storing, "The Constitution and the Bill of Rights," p. 26.

20. Forrest McDonald, "The Bill of Rights: Unnecessary and Pernicious" in
Ronald Hoffman and Peter Albert (eds.), THE BILL OF RIGHTS: GOVERNMENT
PROSCRIBED (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1997), p.
401.

21. Ibid., p. 400.

22. Ibid., p. 417.

23. Ibid., p. 420.

24. Robert Nisbet, "The State," in D. J. Enright (ed.), FAIR OF SPEECH
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 186.