The Ideas of America’s Founders: The Compound Republic

It is a mistake to think that the American form of government is a democracy. The Founding Fathers emphatically believed that it was not, and that a democracy poses grave threats to liberty and prosperity in a country. Rather, the American form of government is a republic — more specifically, a compound republic.

Unlike a democracy, the American republic does not directly consult the people on all matters. For a republican government, it is sufficient that all persons administering it be appointed either directly or indirectly by the people (Federalist 39). Unlike a democracy, a republican government can provide checks against majority faction by “refining and enlarging the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens” whose outstanding virtue, wisdom, and ability leads to a government more just than the sheer will of the majority (Federalist 10).

Thomas Jefferson, writing to John Adams, expressed the framers’ conviction that a republic should enable the natural aristocracy of talent to rise to positions of civic responsibility and ensure a good, efficient government that secures rights.

In the compound republic, the power is divided between two distinct levels of governments-national and state-and each portion of power is then subdivided among distinct and separate departments, whence arises a “double security” to the people’s rights, since the different levels of government and departments can check and control one another (Federalist 51).

In Federalist 9, Publius cites Montesquieu’s claim that a confederated republic affords both the external security of a monarchy with the internal liberty and harmony of a republic, while suffering neither the small republic’s weakness to external threats nor the monarchy’s internal corruption and frequent violation of rights.

The compound republic contains both federal and national elements. The federal elements recognize the states as sovereignties, while the national elements recognize the sovereignty of the great body of the people. Representation in the House of Representatives is on a basis proportional to population, while representation in the Senate is equally allocated among the states.

The House’s composition is national; that of the Senate is federal; the President is elected through the electoral college, which mixes both elements; the operation of the general government is national, but the extent of its powers is federal: the general government was originally supreme within the sphere of its delegated powers, but had no authority outside them-in the realm of “police powers” traditionally reserved to the states (Federalist 39).