The Theses of Luther Martin

Our readers will so far have been well justified in asking, “Amongst all the rants and foolery, where is the promised discussion of Anti-Federalism and the side of the debate opposing the present Constitution of the United States?”

We will therefore now inaugurate (without actual consultation of animal entrails) a periodic feature presenting the thinkers and thoughts who and which opposed the tyrannical wiles of Hamilton and the road-to-Hell good intentions of Madison in the secret conclave that buried the several States under a “Federal” regime.

Luther Martin is chosen as the first Anti-Federalist opponent of the Aristocratick Combination to receive this featured treatment.  He is chosen both for his clear view of the real nature and prospects of the proposed national government and for the fact that he is not amenable to the hagiography and myth-making that has gilded in sainthood and martyrdom those whose machinations he opposed.

In other words, he had the right ideas and spoke up about them loudly and clearly, but, after they were overcome, ended up a petty pursuer of pointless feuds who drank himself into oblivion.

We care about the ideas because they were obviously correct at the time, and have been proven so since by deeds and events soaked in two centuries and more of blood, misery, and oppression.

We care about the decline into debauched debility because we are interested here not in glorifying men, but in upholding truth and true principles, and in assessing soberly the risks and costs of defying manipulators and their mobs.

Luther Martin was an early Revolutionary, pursuing in his practice of the law the promotion of the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation.  Attorney General of Maryland and elected to the Confederation Congress, it was natural that he be elected to represent his State in the 1787 convention at Philadelphia that was presented as having as its object the revision of the Articles of Confederation to meet the circumstances of the day.

From the moment that this convention became a cabal by imposing a rule of secrecy upon its proceedings, Martin objected, as sadly too few did.  How might history have been more beneficent had the schemers of the Aristocratick Combination been required to engage in their fantastic fear-mongering and malicious whispering in the light of day and under the gaze of the people and the world?

Readers here will also understand well Martin’s persistent, perspicacious and prescient objection to the arrogation of the name “Federal” to mean “centralized” and “national”, not “freely agreed by entities which remain independent and sovereign”, the original and true meaning.

(How like the proponents of tyranny, then and now, to take a word and turn its meaning on its head to manipulate the minds of the many;  Luther Martin needed no George Orwell to teach him the theory and practice of Newspeak!)

Seeking a single national constituency, all the easier to manipulate as a mob at the expense of States and individuals, the nationalist “Federalists” proposed in their “Virginia Plan” a bicameral legislature in which the members of both houses would be chosen proportional to population, giving the big States, New York and Virginia in particular, effective domination over the rest.  Behold in this light the overweening power of the coastal metropolitan states today compared to that of “flyover country”.

Martin was the delegate to rise and denounce this scheme in a three-hour oration, leading to the “Great Compromise” for which Madison has been given the credit: a population-based House of Representatives checked and balanced by a Senate with equal representation for each State.  This remains one of the last vestiges of true federal function by which the continent-wide elites can be restrained.

Seeing another great danger we have since come to know all too well, Martin insisted that the members of the new Congress be paid by their home States, not from a central pork barrel apportioned by themselves.  Likewise that they should be limited in the terms they could consecutively serve in the national Congress.  Who can now say that he was mistaken, save perhaps Ted Stevens or Robert Byrd?

For those who prate about the inability of the framers of the Constitution to foresee the troubles which plague this later age, let us read Martin’s “Anti-Federalist No. 83“, in which he rightly and clearly shows the danger of a “Federal” judiciary that operates without juries, as trier of both law and fact.  How many of the abuses and tyrannies of our own day can be laid to the unrestrained caprice of partisan and perpetual “Federal” judges!

In these days of “Camp X-Ray” and the casting aside of Posse Comitatus, how prescient indeed can we regard Luther Martin and other “Anti-Federalists” who fought in the convention against the plans of Hamilton for a military dictatorship, by successfully inserting limitations on the raising and maintenance of standing armies.  How could a gathering, so many of whose members had been present in the Continental Congress only 11 years before when they made a Declaration of Independence in large part over the military exactions and abuses of King George, have been so ready to hand legal power to Hamilton to raise and maintain a force for the clear purpose of enforcing the decrees of the new central power upon the States and the people?

Oh, would any claim that this was not the intent of the prime mover of the Philadelphia Convention?  Let such look forward from it a mere four years (a scant two from the ratification of its product, scarcely time to raise it!) to that same Hamilton leading precisely such an army in its first action ever - against its own citizens.

(The United States had, through the strict federal (true meaning) nature of its revolution, avoided the horrors that would shortly culminate in the Reign of Terror in France, but in 1787 in Philadelphia began the true career of a would-be Napoleon.  What a debt we may all owe Aaron Burr!)

Luther Martin and his fellow Maryland delegate, John Francis Mercer, finally walked out of the convention when they could not even get it to accept the need for a Bill of Rights, something all present had esteemed most highly when they had had one as English subjects under King George!

Rightly deeming the proceeding to be a conspiracy against the freedom, independence, and sovereignty of the States and their people, Martin cast aside its rule of secrecy and exposed its machinations.  In “Anti-Federalist No. 71“, for example, he told the truth about the way the term of the elected monarch, the “Federal” President, was fixed (in two senses of the word).

In these days of Washington takeovers of banks and businesses that will force the plumber in Ohio - yes, and his grandchildren! - to sweat for the benefit of the fatcat in New York or Detroit, of executive orders that make secret wars across the globe and hale citizen and stranger alike into durance worthy of the medieval Inquisition without charge, evidence, or recourse, who can now deny that Martin was right in refuting the rosy claims of Hamilton and Madison and declaring the Constitution’s aim and course “to abolish and annihilate all State governments, and to bring forward one general government, over this extensive continent, of a monarchical nature”?

Imagine, good reader, where the United States and the world would be today without equal state representation in the Senate, without limitations on the use of standing armies, particularly against citizens of the United States, and most of all, without the Bill of Rights?  They and we may yet find ourselves there regardless, but even more likely would have been there already had it not been for Luther Martin.

Horatius