The Founding Debate on Trust in America

In the fall of 1791, mobs in western Pennsylvania took up arms against the federal tax collector. The Whiskey Rebellion was triggered by resentment at Alexander Hamilton’s whiskey tax and at the federal government’s pattern of ignoring settlers’ requests for protection against attacks by Indians. The uprising posed the greatest threat to federal authority since Shays’s Rebellion five years earlier, when armed, tax-protesting farmers had mobbed a federal armory in Massachusetts. In both cases, Hamilton insisted on the need to empower the national government to defend itself against the insurrectionist mob. And in both cases, Thomas Jefferson pleaded for leniency for the farmers.

The Whiskey Rebellion crystallized the opposing views of Hamilton and Jefferson, as heads of the newly emerging Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, about the question of trust in government. Hamilton believed that citizens owed a “duty of confidence” to trust the government, particularly between elections, and that dissent should be channeled through the ballot box. Jefferson, believing in a public right to hold accountable an overreaching government, supported mass demonstrations and generally opposed the use of force to suppress them.

As our nation grapples with growing mistrust of all institutions, including the federal government, it’s important to remember that this is not a new debate, but one that has been embedded in the American mind from the beginning. The debate over the Whiskey Rebellion was part of a broader disagreement between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans about the role of citizens in a democracy. The Federalists envisioned passive citizens who would allow representatives to deliberate in their name and abide by the outcomes of those deliberations. The Democratic-Republicans sought to cultivate active citizens who could express their views in popular assemblies. Hamilton’s Federalists believed that the people had a responsibility to express confidence in the government to strengthen its legitimacy. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans believed that the people had a responsibility to keep watch over the government in order to protect liberty.

In Federalist 23, Hamilton expressed the Federalist Party’s view that the people should entrust the government with broad powers to meet its obligations of providing security and safety. “Government ought to be clothed with all the powers requisite to complete execution of its trust,” he wrote.  “A government, the constitution of which renders it unfit to be trusted with all the powers which a free people OUGHT TO DELEGATE TO ANY GOVERNMENT, would be an unsafe and improper depositary of the NATIONAL INTERESTS.” In Hamilton’s view, it would be an “absurdity” to confide to “a government the direction of the most essential national interests, without daring to trust it to the authorities which are indispensible [sic] to their proper and efficient management.”

Jefferson took the opposite view. He described the Constitution as a “compact” and argued that states had the unilateral power to nullify federal laws. Jefferson rejected the Federalist claim that the people had a duty to give government their confidence. “It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights,” he wrote. “[C]onfidence is every where the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence.”

In Jefferson’s view, “[O]ur Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go,” and he worried that through an excess of blind confidence, a gullible people risk accepting mistreatment from their government. Waving the banner of “nullification,” he concluded by calling on each state to take the law into its own hands, drafting “measures of it’s [sic] own for providing that neither these acts, nor any others of the general government, not plainly & intentionally authorized by the constitution, shall be exercised within their respective territories.”

The Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian views about trust in government have held each other in check throughout most of American history. At times, however, an overabundance of Jeffersonian skepticism in government has exploded in dangerous ways. Civil war has broken out only once, but insurrections and mob violence have recurred throughout our history, from the tax rebellions of the Founding era, to antibank insurrections of the Jacksonian era, to the Ku Klux Klan lynch mobs that subverted Reconstruction, to the labor riots of the Gilded Age, to White resistance to the civil rights movement, to Jan. 6, 2020. During the peaceful stretches that have defined most of American history, however, coexistence between the competing principles of Jefferson and Hamilton has prevented our politics from descending into violence.

Today, trust in government—and in institutions more generally—is at an all-time low, as social media and other technologies undermine the confidence that Hamilton thought was necessary for the union to flourish. The language of nullification and secession is once again in the air. The fact that Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed about trust in government suggests that debate is an enduring feature of American history. Still, except in their more despairing moments, both Hamilton and Jefferson were committed to the project of the union itself. As their example suggests, America thrives when citizens entrust the government with a measure of confidence—while insisting that the government be worthy of our trust.

Jeffrey Rosen is president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. His new book is The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.