How Two Vague Words Were Used to Gut the Entire Constitution

“…do we live under a limited or an unlimited government?”

To you, that question probably sounds naive because the answer feels obvious. But in 1792, Thomas Jefferson saw it as the moment of truth.

Alexander Hamilton had just laid out his vision for the “general welfare” clause. His answer was simple. “The power… is …indefinite.”

To Jefferson and his allies, this was a scam. A complete betrayal of the constitutional system that was adopted.

The clash over the meaning of these two words – general Welfare – set the stage for what became the largest government in history.

HAMILTON: WITHOUT LIMITS

To begin this story, we first need to go back to December 5, 1791.

Alexander Hamilton just published his now-famous Report on the Subject of Manufactures. His goal was to stretch the “general Welfare” clause so far that it would authorize virtually unlimited power.

“the power to raise money is plenary, and indefinite; and the objects to which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive, than the payment of the public debts and the providing for the common defence and ‘general Welfare.’”

Hamilton admitted to only three exceptions. Taxes must be uniform across the Union. Direct taxes must be apportioned by census. And no export taxes from any state. Beyond that? Nothing.

“The phrase is as comprehensive as any that could have been used; because it was not fit that the constitutional authority of the Union, to appropriate its revenues shou’d have been restricted within narrower limits than the ‘General Welfare.’”

Hamilton pushed the point even further, insisting that “general welfare” was so broad is couldn’t be defined.

“…and because this necessarily embraces a vast variety of particulars, which are susceptible neither of specification nor of definition.”

That takes us directly to the text of the Constitution, and Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:

“The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;”

FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE ARTICLES

To understand the full context of this debate, we need to go back to July 1775, at the height of the American Revolution.

A year before the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin submitted his proposed plan for Articles of Confederation to the Continental Congress. It never came to a formal vote, but Franklin circulated copies among delegates to spark discussion on how to structure a union – something he had been pushing since his Albany Plan of 1754.

One of those copies survives today with Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten notes in the margins. On the last page, Jefferson zeroed in on a phrase that would haunt debates for decades.

“qu. what ‘their mutual and general welfare’ means. There should be no vague terms in an instrument of this kind. It’s objects should be precisely and determinately fixed.”

Jefferson’s concern was simple but profound. A constitutional charter could not leave room for elastic words that politicians might twist to justify limitless power.

When the Articles of Confederation were finally adopted a few years later, the phrase “general welfare” appeared twice – including this provision in Article VIII:

“All charges of war, and all other expenses that shall be incurred for the common defence or general welfare, and allowed by the united states in congress assembled, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be supplied by the several states.”

MADISON: ENUMERATION QUALIFIES

Even there, the phrase served only as a heading to specific, limited purposes – not as an open-ended grant of power. That was exactly how James Madison understood it. When Hamilton tried to turn general welfare into a blank check, Madison called it a distortion that flipped the Constitution on its head.

“With respect to the words “General welfare” I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense, would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character, which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its Creators.”

Madison – who co-authored the Federalist Papers with Hamilton and John Jay – had already confronted this line of attack during the ratification debates. Some opponents of the Constitution argued that the “general welfare” wording amounted to an unlimited grant of power:

“It has been urged and echoed, that the power ‘to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,’ amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare.”

He mocked the claim as so absurd that it only proved how low his critics had to stoop to find fault with the plan.

“No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction.”

Madison stressed that the clause wasn’t a separate delegation of power at all. To drive the point home, he even pointed to the punctuation – noting that the list of enumerated powers followed immediately in the same sentence.

“But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon?”

He pressed the obvious question: why enumerate powers at all if the first phrase already gave everything?

“For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power?”

And he explained the widely-accepted logic of using broad language, then narrowing it with detail.

“Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars.”

HAMILTON: SUBSIDIES AS THE VEHICLE

That brings us back to Hamilton in 1791. He was proposing this broad view of general welfare as a justification for federal bounties. Today we’d call them subsidies or corporate welfare.

In short, Hamilton wanted to tax imports so he could funnel the money through government to favored industries like coal, wool, glass, and cotton.

“The true way to conciliate these two interests, is to lay a duty on foreign manufactures of the material, the growth of which is desired to be encouraged, and to apply the produce of that duty by way of bounty, either upon the production of the material itself or upon its manufacture at home or upon both.”

He knew opponents would object that no power was enumerated for government cash handouts to any industry. So Hamilton invented a new constitutional foundation: Congress would decide how much power Congress would have.

“It is therefore of necessity left to the discretion of the National Legislature, to pronounce, upon the objects, which concern the general Welfare, and for which under that description, an appropriation of money is requisite and proper.”

MADISON AND JEFFERSON: LIMITED MEANS LIMITED

Just over a month later, Madison fired back. Accept Hamilton’s view, and the entire point of a Constitution with delegated powers was finished.

“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions.”

Madison drove the point home by tying it back to the Articles of Confederation. The phrase “general welfare” had been carried over into the Constitution for a reason: everyone already understood it as nothing more than a reference to expenses tied to the specified powers.

It was intentionally chosen because it was less likely than any other wording to be twisted. And yet now, Madison warned, Hamilton was doing exactly that – turning the phrase into the very kind of blank check Madison himself had ridiculed Anti-Federalists for claiming during ratification.

“It is to be remarked that the phrase out of which this doctrine is elaborated, is copied from the old articles of Confederation, where it was always understood as nothing more than a general caption to the specified powers, and it is a fact that it was preferred in the new instrument for that very reason as less liable than any other to misconstruction.”

When President Washington asked his for opinions on Hamilton’s plan, Jefferson came down hard. He pointed out that whenever government takes it upon itself to pick winners and losers, it seizes money from some and hands it to the chosen few. And abuse isn’t just likely, it’s almost guaranteed.

“Bounties have in some instances been a successful instrument for the introdn. of new and useful manufactures. But the use of them has been found almost inseparable from abuse.”

And that, Jefferson noted, is exactly why the Constitution never delegated such a power to the federal government.

“The power of dispensing them has not been delegated by the Constn. to the Genl. govmt. It remains with the state govmts. whose local information renders them competent judges of the particular arts and manufactures for which circumstances have matured them.”

In short? Hamilton’s plan was 100% unconstitutional.

THE FIRST TEST: COD FISHERIES

Meanwhile in Congress, the first real test came. A bill to “encourage” cod fisheries was seen by opponents as a federal subsidy in practice – and Madison ripped into it on the House floor.

“If Congress can apply money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may establish teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public treasury;”

And that was only the beginning. Madison warned it could pull in nearly everything — education, welfare, even local roads – all under the banner of “general welfare.”

“they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post roads;”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But to Madison, these were extreme hypotheticals – the furthest stretch of abuse he could imagine. To us, they’re the daily reality of federal power.

The result, he warned, would be federal control and federal funding of everything.

“in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation, down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress; for every object I have mentioned would admit the application of money, and might be called, if Congress pleased, provisions for the general welfare.”

THEY WEREN’T ALONE

William Branch Giles also flatly rejected any federal bounty power as totally unconstitutional.

“in no part of the Constitution could he, in express terms, find a power given to Congress to grant bounties on occupations: the power is neither directly granted, nor (by any reasonable construction that he could give) annexed to any other specified in the Constitution.”

Giles was a staunch Anti-Federalist, so his opponents could easily brush him off. But not Hugh Williamson of North Carolina. He was a Framer at the Philadelphia Convention and a strong Federalist supporter of the Constitution during the ratification debates.

His warning was brutal: it wouldn’t stop with fishermen getting subsidies. In fact, it would never stop.

“Establish the doctrine of bounties; set aside that part of the Constitution which requires equal taxes, and demands similar distributions; destroy this barrier – and it is not a few fishermen that will enter, claiming ten or twelve thousand dollars but all manner of persons; people of every trade and occupation may enter in at the breach, until they have eaten up the bread of our children.”

What he called the road to ruin is the reality we live under: every industry demanding its share of federal spoils.

JEFFERSON: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

By the end of February 1792, Jefferson finally had his meeting with President Washington. In his memoranda of that conversation, he wrote that Hamilton’s proposal had brought matters to a head.

“They had now brought forward a proposition, far beyond every one ever yet advanced, and to which the eyes of many were turned, as the decision which was to let us know whether we live under a limited or an unlimited government.”

For Jefferson, Hamilton’s plan wasn’t really about aiding manufacturers at all. It was a deliberate pretext.

“He asked me to what proposition I alluded?—I answered to that in the Report on manufactures which, under colour of giving bounties for the encouragement of particular manufactures,” 

The cover story was bounties for manufacturing. The reality was a doctrine of limitless power.

“…meant to establish the doctrine that the power given by the Constitution to collect taxes to provide for the general welfare of the U.S. permitted Congress to take every thing under their management which they should deem for the public welfare, and which is susceptible of the application of money”

THE ANTI-FEDERALIST WARNING

Jefferson nailed it in 1775 when he called general welfare a dangerously vague term. During the ratification debates of 1787-88, Anti-Federalists like Brutus gave the same warning.

“I would ask those, who reason thus, to define what ideas are included under the terms, to provide for the common defence and general welfare? Are these terms definite, and will they be understood in the same manner, and to apply to the same cases by every one?”

In his 6th essay, he predicted general welfare would be twisted exactly how Hamilton did it just a few years later.

“No one will pretend they will. It will then be matter of opinion, what tends to the general welfare; and the Congress will be the only judges in the matter.”

An indefinite and vague term like general welfare? Brutus knew – every faction could twist it to support whatever they want.

“To provide for the general welfare, is an abstract proposition, which mankind differ in the explanation of, as much as they do on any political or moral proposition that can be proposed; the most opposite measures may be pursued by different parties…”

And Brutus warned that the vagueness was the real danger – you could never know if people were honestly misreading it as a limit on power, or deliberately twisting it to grab more.

“…and both may profess, that they have in view the general welfare; and both sides may be honest in their professions, or both may have sinister views.”

In his view, calling that a limit on power was laughable. He predicted it would end with no limits at all.

“It is as absurd to say, that the power of Congress is limited by these general expressions, “to provide for the common safety, and general welfare,” as it would be to say, that it would be limited, had the constitution said they should have power to lay taxes, &c. at will and pleasure.”

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