While Madison and Hamilton were deeply concerned about the dangers states posed to the national government, it seems unlikely that they actually believed in their “common interest” theory of collective state monitoring.  Not only did they distrust the state legislatures, but they also understood that state interests varied greatly and sometimes sharply.  More obvious, both advanced the theory that a “large state” would protect republicanism because its “extended” sphere would encompass so many different factional interests rooted in different parts of the country that none would be able to dominate the central government.  Self interest and property claims, Madison declared, are “an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests.” 

Thus, it seems highly unlikely that Madison, let alone Hamilton, had any faith in their “common interest” theory but simply found it a needed ploy in the ratification debate.  Indeed, Madison’s tenth Federalist–the locus classicus of his large state theory–invoked generalities about human nature and “property” but did not hazard a specific mention of the two hottest-button issues that most divided the states at the Philadelphia Convention, population size and slavery.  That absence further suggests that the Federalist’s “common interest” theory of collective state monitoring was far more an abstracted forensic confection than a credible analysis of likely state behavior.  Monitoring American Federalism comes closest to the mark when it suggests that the theory was essentially “a rhetorical argument designed to address the objections of Anti-federalists” (32). 

Emphasizing the Federalist’s repeated advocacy of interposition, the book notes but underplays Hamilton’s differences from Madison.  While Madison did rely fundamentally on ideas of interposition and multiple checks and balances, Hamilton gave greater weight to the necessity of an authoritative national judiciary, a powerful central administration, and a strong national executive.  At the convention itself Hamilton expressed doubts about the strength of Madison’s version of the large state theory, and in the Federalist he relied more on the idea that a large state would remain a republic not because it would be checked by state interposition but because its greater power would enable it to suppress factions, with force if necessary.  While Madison equated diversity and local interests with protections for republican government, Hamilton equated them with bias and political dysfunction.  There was “much to fear,” Hamilton insisted, “from the bias of local views and prejudices and from the interference of local regulations.”  While Madison readily acknowledged the weaknesses that limited human reason, Hamilton boasted of the power that the “correct and unprejudiced mind” had to recognize and apply “axioms as simple as they are universal.”  However much Madison’s Federalist essays advocated the true “original” version of interposition and assumed the efficacy and desirability of state monitoring, Hamilton’s contributions saw interposition as a strictly limited–probably unavoidable--procedure and maintained that the true monitor of federalism was not the state legislatures but the central government and its Supreme Court.

Monitoring American Federalism frequently cites Federalist 46 where Madison promoted interposition by explaining why states would be able to effectively check the central government.  Due perhaps to the book’s thesis that Madison’s interposition theory was pacific and procedural, it gives slight attention to the role of state militias.  But Federalist 46 made it clear that state militias were key instruments of federalism, armed tools of state power and potential resistance. 

More salient today, state militias were important because their organization highlighted both the Founders’ racism and their race-based understanding of the Second Amendment.  When Congress enacted the Militia Act of 1792, it restricted militia service to free “white male” citizens.  That racial exclusion followed directly on the heels of the Second Amendment’s ratification, and it provided strong evidence of the Founders’ understanding of the amendment’s intended meaning.  Because there were free Blacks even in some Southern states, the statute’s racial exclusion suggests that Madison and his colleagues could not possibly have intended the amendment to guarantee those Blacks an individual constitutional right to possess firearms.  Neither Madison nor virtually any white Southerner would have tolerated such a result.  Indeed, in Federalist 46 Madison–who drafted the Second Amendment and shepherded it through Congress--used its critical phrase “bear arms” to refer specifically to military service, not to any “individual” right.  Thus, the Militia Act’s racial provision supports the conclusion that Madison and the Founders intended the Second Amendment to guarantee only the states’ right to maintain their militias as structural elements of federalism and interpositionism, not to establish any personal and individual right to possess firearms. 

Professor Fritz’s book raises an unavoidable question about word usage.  Put simply, what does the word “interposition” properly mean?  The book points out that neither the Federalist nor other early commentaries used the word “interposition” and that the term did not even surface in state protests against Chisholm v. Georgia (1793) which led to the adoption of the Eleventh Amendment.  While Madison did use the word “interpose” in 1798 in his third Virginia Resolution, it was only in the early decades of the nineteenth century that the term began to appear commonly and then came to be used to justify more aggressive state actions including defiance, nullification, and ultimately secession.  Following the Civil War interposition’s original procedural meaning was largely forgotten, the book continues, but that “did not stop its practice” (258) and after 1900 “state interposition resurfaced as a key component of American political life” (288).  Clearly stretching the term’s meaning, the book states that in the early twenty-first century the interpositionist principle lives on in a variety of resistance forms including a reoriented Supreme Court jurisprudence that “aided state resistance to perceived excesses of federal congressional power” (304).  If the term “interposition” is used in such a generalized and elastic way, it can refer to any kind of oppositional action in the name of the states and loses any clear and specific meaning.  Indeed, considering the Supreme Court’s “pro-federalism” jurisprudence as another form of interposition gives the word a meaning diametrically opposed to the Federalist–and certainly Hamiltonian–principle that the Court is the protector of the central government, not the guardian of the states.