American empire

William Appleman Williams’s Empire As A Way of Life is a far from perfect book, but one of the striking things is the surprisingly open way America’s founders spoke of the US as an empire. “No constitution was ever before as well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self-government.” Not what you expect from Jefferson.

Madison claimed that extensive territory was not a threat to Constitutional freedoms but the guarantee of them. Extending US territory was of a piece with cultivating competing interests and preventing any single interest from dominating the whole: “This form of government, in order to effect its purpose, must operate not within a small but an extensive sphere . . . .

“Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probably that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all to feel it . . . to act in unison with each other.” The logic is the same as the logic of the First Amendment.

Jefferson agreed: “the larger our association the less it will be shaken by local passions.” And in his 1801 inaugural address, he said that America’s success “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only in a small territory. The reverse is the truth.”

George Washington said in 1783 that the US was a “rising empire,” and William Henry Drayton of South Carolina celebrated “a new Empire, stiled the United States of America . . . . That bids fair, by the blessing of God, to be the most glorious of any upon Record.”

Walt Whitman’s “I chant the new empire” was not a new or an unusual sentiment.