The Federalist No. 7

by Allison Jones

17 November 1787, Alexander Hamilton continues the argument for union from safety.  This paper addresses the reasons the states, if separate, would have for going to war with each other.  They are “precisely the same inducements, which have, at different times, deluged in blood all the nations in the world.”

The most common cause of war is territorial disputes.  While today, the boundaries between the states are mostly set; this was not the case when the Constitution was being ratified.  And there are even still arguments   over who has access to what resource.  In the west, arguments over water rights are prominent.  Without a joint national government there is “an ample theatre for hostile pretensions, without any umpire or common judge to interpose between the contending parties.

Another source of conflict would be commerce.  “It is not at all probable that this unbridled spirit [of enterprise] would pay much respect to those regulations of trade, but which particular States might endeavor to secure exclusive benefits to their own citizens.  The infractions of these regulations on one side, the efforts to prevent and repel them on the other, would naturally lead to outrages, and these to reprisals and wars.”  Hamilton provides examples of such competition between some of the states in his day.  Even today, some states have concentrations of one industry or another and serious competition from another state could seriously harm their economy.  Our federal government is in charge of regulating interstate commerce so that such conflicts do not escalate.

Another reason for the states to remain united under one government was the public debt that they had collectively accrued from the Revolutionary War.  Even if equally distributed between the states, some would find the debt more burdensome than others.  Some of the states couldn’t even agree that paying back the debt was important.

There could also be laws in one state that conflicted with preexisting private contracts involving people from other states.  There needs to be some sort of uniting law between the states if citizens of one state are to be able to freely work with citizens of another state.

The final cause of conflict addressed by Hamilton in this letter is that separate states would have different and even conflicting interests and alliances.   This would lead the states to side with their own trade partners in Europe at the expense of their neighboring states and “by the destructive contentions of the parts, into which she [America] was divided would likely to become a prey to the artifices and machinations of powers equally the enemies of them all.”  Separate the states are more vulnerable to manipulations from other nations.