The Federalists' Cold War: The Fries Rebellion, National Security, and the State, 1787-1800 Paul Douglas Newman University of Pittsburghat Johnstown Toforbear ...from taking navaland military measures to secure our trade, defend our territory in case of [French] invasion, andprevent, or sup- press domestic insurrection would be to offer up the United States a cer- tainprey to Europe and exhibit to the World a sad spectacle of national degradationand imbecility. James McHenry, Secretary of War, April, 1798' ...the business of defence would be very imperfectly done, if [Congress] confined their operations of defence to land and navalforces, and ne- glected to destroy the cankerworm which is corrodingin the heart ofthe country... there are a great number of aliens in this country from that nation [France] with whom we have atpresentalarmingdifferences...there are emissaries amongst us, who have not only fomented our differences with that country, but who have endeavored to create divisions amongst our own citizens. They are.. assiduously employed at this moment, and it is much to be lamented that there exists no authority to restrain this evil. Samuel Sitgreaves, U.S. Rep. PA, May 17982 In the spring of 1798, as war with France loomed on the horizon, James McHenry and Samuel Sitgreaves surveyed the state of national security, exter- nally and internally, and found it wanting. The national government should be stronger, they worried, for in power lies real security. Rewind eleven years. At 9:00 am on Monday morning, June 18, 1787, Alexander Hamilton rose to his feet on the floor of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. He stood to denounce the democratic, individual state-centered "New Jersey Plan" for a central government. For nearly six hours on one of that summer's hot- test days, Hamilton held the floor in an uninterrupted conditional endorse- ment of the "Virginia Resolves." He favored the latter for its strength, but to his mind, the national government should be much stronger than a federal union would allow. "...IWIe must establish a general and national govern- ment, completely sovereign," Hamilton demanded, "and annihilate the state distinctions and state operations." It was not the state governments them- selves that Hamilton feared, but their local orientation and tendency to bend to the sway of the people, who "seldom judge or determine right," that influ- 64 Pennsylvania History enced him to advocate an aristocratic, sovereign national government based on the British model. As much as the specter of popular democracy, the omni-presence of well fortified European forces surrounding the infant na- tion haunted Alexander Hamilton. Foremost among the defects of the demo- cratic Confederation of independent states, Hamilton lamented, were secu- rity matters: that the states "can raise no troops nor equip vessels before war is actually declared. They cannot heretofore take any preparatory measure be- fore an enemy is at your door." So here we see Hamilton at his most conser- vative, and his most monarchical. In order to attain an internal security, or "individual security" as he deemed it, Hamilton called for a limited electorate of elites, lifetime tenures for Presidents and Senators, and a national govern- ment veto of state laws. This powerful, sovereign, and energetic national state, invigorated with "public strength," could then provide a military de- fense to meet external security threats. Hamilton had two ends in mind that day, first, the creation of an omipotent, "completely sovereign" national state, and of course that end would be the means toward securing the survival of the country and its republican experiment. Hamilton concluded his oratory at about three in the afternoon, surprisingly to no general disapprobation. On Tuesday, the delegates went back to discussing the merits of the Virginia and New Jersey Plans, almost as if Monday had never occured. Although the federal document that emerged from Philadelphia would create a significantly weaker nation state than Hamilton thought prudent, it was a start, and one that he enthusiastically endorsed in his home state of New York and around the country in The Federalist. Like infants, nations too are born weak, he surmised, and if properly conditioned by doting parents both can mature to be strong adults. Hamilton's quest to build a national state of immense power did not end that steamy June afternoon in Philadelphia; rather it had just begun. For the twelve years to follow, Hamilton would work as a Treasury Secretary, a General, and a lobbyist to enact policies that would create a vibrant and varied national economy, ensure the public credit, and provide internal and external security not only as ends in themselves, but as means to the ultimate goal of finishing what he believed was started at Phila- delphia--the establishment of a "national government, completely sovereign." (He would work with and through several of the most conservative members of the Federalist elite, whom earlier historians have referred to as "The High Federlists." This essay terms them "Hamiltorians" and will identify them be- low.) Viewing this activity, especially the development of those internal and external security systems, through the lens of the modern "national security state"concept can do two things at once; it can rationalize what has heretofore been considered actions of irrational Federalist paranoia in the 1790s while at the same time revealing Hamilton for the true Machiavellian that he was.3 The Fries Rebellion, National Security, and the State, 1787-1800 65 The National Security State and the Early Republic During the hottest days of the Cold War, Southern historian C. Vann Woodward lamented that America's "age of free security" had come to an end with the close of World War II.4 Woodward as well as historians of American foreign policy have maintained that prior to 1945, oceanic buffers and weak neighbors in the Western Hemisphere afforded the U.S. a "free" national se- curity in two ways. These conditions not only precluded expensive defensive measures during peacetime, but they saved Americans from increased govern- mental authority and incursions upon their liberties. During this era, America erected military schemes only during wartime and relaxed its defensive pos- ture during peacetime. Thus, the tensions natural to a democratic-state be- tween guarding the individual liberties of its citizens and providing for na- tional security rarely surfaced. In the last two decades, historians of the Cold War have described the post-War American reaction to a perceived Soviet threat as the creation of a "national security state." Jet propulsion, nuclear weapons, and intercontinen- tal delivery systems shrunk the world and destroyed America's natural barriers of defense. Meanwhile, most Americans feared a Communist conspiracy to destroy America and dominate the globe. They feared the possibility of mili- tary invasion or nuclear attack. But just as much, Americans worried that the Communists would infiltrate American society and government, spread the ideology of socialism, and corrode the Americans' attachment to their own core values of independence, democracy, capitalism, and the free exercise of religion. The nation would then become ripe for Communist revolution and Soviet invasion. This popular attitude of anti-Communism sanctioned the national government's augmentation of power and authority during peace- time through the implementation of: (1)foreign and domestic policies such as containment, intervention, and the communist-hunting of McCarthyism (2)institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Defense and (3)legislation like the Taft-Hartley Act, the McCarran Act, and massive tax increases. Americans willingly and otherwise sacrificed their tax dollars and, more important, their individual liberties for the preservation of shared national core values. In the 194 0s and 1950s the threat seemed real enough, and many people, all too agreeably, complied. Fear motivated a democratic people to accept governmental strictures designed by national security advisors and military personnel whom they did not elect. Fear also led them to champion the oppressive policies, legislation, and bom- bastic anti-communist antics of some men they did choose. According to most historians of American foreign relations, the age of "free security" died with the close of the Second World War.5 Even the most recent edition of a very popular reader for undergraduates on American foreign relations from the Revolution to 1920 still opens with C. Vann Woodward's 1960 article describing the era as an "age of free security."6 66 Pennsylvania History Indeed, in Cold War America, national security came with a very high price tag. But this does, not mean that during America's first century and a half that security was always free.7 When we judge the national security con- cerns of earlier policymakers by the benchmarks of popular attitude, policies, institutions, legislation, and perceptions of power relationships, the national security state model emerges as a useful tool for understanding the intercon- nection of America's foreign relations and domestic policies during the pre- Cold War era--especially the 1790s. In that decade, the Hamiltonian Feder- alists attempted to build their own version of a national security state, al- though obviously to a lesser extent than did their Cold War followers. Their reaction to French Jacobinism in many ways