The State as a Person

In a sermon delivered in April 1781 Joseph Huntington described for his parishioners in Coventry, Connecticut, the similarities between the general government of the tribes of ancient Israel and the government of the American states. "We have our Sanhedrim, i.e. our General Congress," Huntington noted, "answering for substance to the seventy elders of Israel that were over all the tribes as their supreme council; we have our distinct states as they had their distinct tribes, and it is really worthy of notice that our number should be exactly the same, even in the first establishment of our independency." His listeners, familiar with the traditional descriptions of New England as a New Canaan, were probably not used to hearing the other states described in biblical terms. The analogy was not readily apparent. Huntington had to remind his audience that, counting the subdivision of the tribe of Joseph, thirteen tribes descended from Jacob's twelve sons, not the customary twelve. Against a tradition of political biblical interpretation that claimed that God had not mandated one particular form of civil government over another, Huntington maintained that God had "given us the sum and substance of the most perfect form of civil government in his word" as witnessed by "that ancient plan of civil policy, delineated for the chosen tribes of Israel." Like the United States of America, the "Thirteen United States or tribes of Israel" had "no king, no despot, no emperor, no tyrant, no perpetual dictator" but had instead "by divine appointment a general congress, with a president at their head; Moses was the first, Joshua succeeded him, so on till the days of Samuel, when the constitution was subverted." Huntington probably did not need to remind his audience (for it was a moment constantly alluded to in the political sermons of the day) that the wise judge Samuel had unsuccessfully protested against the creation of a monarchy for Israel, but the voices of the people had overwhelmed him, precipitating the appointment and anointment of King Saul and the end of the Mosaic theocracy. Given all the similarities, auditors paying attention may have asked, wouldn't a monarchy inevitably sprout up in America?

Huntington's typology stopped short of predicting the monarchical subversion of the Confederation, but the reference to Samuel was perhaps comically irresistible to the minister, whose older brother, Samuel Huntington, was an associate justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut and the current president of the Continental Congress. In any event, comparisons between the "president" of ancient Israel and the head of the Continental Congress stretched the analogy and exposed the real differences between the United States of Israel and of America. The Confederation was obviously not a theocracy. Peyton Randolph, the first president of the First Continental Congress in 1774 and hence the American equivalent of Moses, had been elected by the other delegates in Congress, not appointed by God. And Huntington did not mention that Article IX of the Articles of Confederation, which had been drafted in 1777 but ratified only a month before the minister spoke in 1781, stipulated that the person selected to preside over Congress could serve only one year out of every three. Although the delegates had returned Huntington's brother to the office of president for two years in a row, this was no indication that the constitution of the Confederation had been subverted; it attested instead both to the political inexpediency of adopting such term limits while the Articles remained unratified and to the difficulty of finding someone willing to take the job.

The analogy between the United States and ancient Israel bestowed legitimacy on a confederated national government, but the bulk of Huntington's sermon was devoted to expounding an analogy between the civil nation-state and the human body. When he came to publish the sermon later that year in Hartford he entitled it A Discourse ... on the Health and Happiness, or Misery and Ruin of the Body Politic, In Similitude to that of the Natural Body. In a sense, the Bible and the body were intimately connected, for Huntington argued that "we of this nation have now for substance, that very same plan of government, which infinite wisdom and goodness pointed out to the chosen the much beloved tribes of Israel, in the constitution of which we see a political man perfect, [showing] how the community ought to be organized and regulated, as clearly as we see in the formation of the human body."

Huntington used the word "constitution" in its older, bodily sense rather than in the sense of the textual organization and limitation of power that the term had acquired during the previous half-decade, the years when eleven states framed constitutions. (Rhode Island and Huntington's own state of Connecticut had been the only states not to draft new constitutions; they simply enacted their colonial charters as fundamental law.) Huntington's "political man" consisted of separate and distinct members, each representing part of the national commonwealth. The head (the "seat of thought, council, and understanding") was a perfect analogy for the legislative powers, the arms and hands stood for executive powers, religious ministers like Huntington resembled the heart or "inward parts" as well as the "prevailing spirit," and the human frame in general and the legs in particular represented "the body of the people of which a nation is composed."

Delivered during the American Revolution, Huntington's sermon was one of the last sustained accounts of the civil state as a "political man." For Huntington, the Revolution itself could be read in bodily terms, since "all tories and traitors ... all mal-contents that would stir up rebellion, anarchy, and confusion in the bowels" of the body politic were not really part of the body so much as "the very excrement of the body politic," who might also be compared to "a gangrene, or to a baneful putrefaction which calls for the instruments of incision, that it may be discharged; or to any nauseous infection which must be purged out, or distemper that must be subdued, before perfect health can return."

Head, heart, arms, legs, and excrement did not constitute a fully anatomized body, at least by the standards of late eighteenth-century medicine; nor, by the standards of late eighteenth-century political thought, did they describe a fully formed state. Huntington's state supported religion, and so it was easy to find an imaginative place for religious ministers like himself in the body politic. But in separating powers, Huntington failed to locate the anatomical equivalent of the judiciary-a bizarre oversight for the brother of a sometime judge. But that oversight may have had more to do with contemporary conceptions about the structure of the Confederation and the powers of the Continental Congress itself, a body whose principal function (was it legislative, executive, or diplomatic?) confused even John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. And, aside from the claim that all should "act in perfect union and concert, guided and actuated by the same soul, the same will," he had ignored completely the vexing subject of sovereignty. His listeners must have seen in this performance a kind of throwback to older ways of thinking at odds with contemporary politics.

And it was. He described a fantasy of corporate solidarity, a body that had more to fear from internal disorder than from the external threats from other political bodies. Huntington's thesis is easily summarized: "in the political man, the commonwealth, the head and every member must keep their respective places or it becomes a hideous and horrid monster." Throughout his sermon Huntington contrasted the unanimity of a healthy body with a monstrous image of bodily disorder. "What a wretched thing would the human body be," he asked, "if the head and vitals, limbs, organs and members were alternately to changes their places, and assume the offices of each other?" "What man is there that wishes to have his head and feet change places with each other?" he asked, "Or to have his breast and his back transposed? Who wishes to see with his ears, or hear with his eyes, or to taste with his nose, and smell with his mouth?" If we "set the arms to hear and see and direct, and the head to strike the blow for the execution, ... what then would ever come to pass?" "[P]lace the heart where the head is," he said, describing ministers and magistrates, "and the head where the heart is, and the man would not survive the exchange." For officers to change places was bad, but by far the greatest danger involved usurpations by the people: "it is altogether as monstrous to see the legs where the arms should be, as the arms where the legs should be; it is as great an evil to have the feet growing on the head as the head growing on one of the feet." "For people in general to turn guides and counsellors, and refuse to be guided and counselled by rulers, to say what ought, and what ought not to be done, in the highest and most important concerns of the state, of which, indeed, most people are utterly ignorant, is just as if a madman should endeavor to pluck his eyes from his head, and place them in sockets made in his feet for that purpose, or with his ears grafted on either leg, and the senses which are seated in the head removed to the lower parts of his body."

Huntington's metaphor of the body politic belonged to a tradition of political metaphorics stretching back to the classical period. The political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle developed limited organic conceptions of the state, theories resting on the primary division between head and members but lacking any real anatomical specificity. But the kind of thinking that Huntington articulated in the 1780s was more medieval than classical. Truly intricate analogies between government and the body first began to appear in the twelfth century, particularly in John of Salisbury's Policraticus (1159). Here a prince is said to rule a city in the same way a head rules a body, but the image is fuller: a senate is like a heart; judges and sheriffs are likened to the senses; financial officers resemble stomach and intestines; hands are fitting analogues for both tax collectors and soldiers; the feet are the peasantry; and clerics are like the soul, not really a part of the body and hence separate in some sense from the city. As it developed after Policraticus the organic metaphor allowed for differentiation with order, reconciling disparate interests by stressing not only hierarchy but also mutual dependence. The notion that republican governments are themselves living beings, with their own life expectancies and cycles, can be found in the writings of Machiavelli in the sixteenth century. Such conceptions helped to distinguish the state from the person of its ruler, but the separation was never really complete, and it is only with the political writing surrounding the English Civil War of the seventeenth century that the metaphor begins to assume the kind of emphases that Huntington gave it in 1781.

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