Government In An Independent New York

I'm currently planning a TL where the thirteen colonies are allied independent nations with diverse goverments, and I have plans for every other colony goverment except New York. So, what do you guys think an independent New York's government will be like? Will we see something like Hamilton's plan for government, like an elected monarchy? Or will it be something else?
 
Some of the states have had (and in some cases, still do) constitutional provisions which set them apart from the practices of other states as well as the federal government. New York has a few different constitutions. Go through them and pick out some of those ideas.
 
I've often heard reference to the diverse approaches to republicanism the many colonies pursued between independence and the 1787 Constitution.

For that matter, in theory any state today could diverge radically from aping the pattern of the Federal government more or less and still be quite "republican," though the bric a brac of accumulating Federal laws based on the presumption of mimicking Federal forms might cause some awkward conflicts that might prejudice judges against agreeing that perfectly republican forms are acceptable. The most radical divergence of any modern state from the Federal template I know of is the state of Nebraska, which has merged its legislature into a single body, officially called a "senate" but generally, if I am to believe Wikipedia anyway, referred to as "The Unicameral." The body is small in size like a Senate, 80 members I believe. Also, officially it is non-partisan, which I find hard to believe works without massive hypocrisy that could prove downright dysfunctional though I gather the Nebraskans are happy enough with it, the majority anyway. Certainly I'd like to know more about procedures such as committee formation, to see whether the pretense of non-partisanship is really a means of eliminating minority rights, or whether it has procedures to guarantee minority rights without party mechanisms--which would be very instructive if there were any way to get modern American legislatures to adopt proportional representation and if that resulted in there being more than two parties functionally on a routine basis. But that is as radical as it gets nowadays though I hear a few states kept some other quite unusual approaches for some time, or experimented with new ones from time to time. Nebraska still has a separate executive branch and I while I might be wrong in my wry prediction that a modern American federal court would practically demand a state conform to the Constitutional Federal model, I am pretty sure that a minimum the judiciary has to be of similar model to the US federal system and what is customary in the majority of states.

But it did not have to be that way! While I don't know about the individual states, the Articles of Confederation Congress was a quite different model; reading the Articles, I get no sense of a concept of the elaborate system of checks and balances and separated branches and so on we so pride ourselves in today. The Articles Congress was a simple if not popularly representative legislature that could do any damn thing, like a highly purified Parliament answering to no king; checked pretty much entirely by some specified supermajority requirements, including specifying or requiring unanimity for some operations, and practically by the cutthroat rivarlies between the separate states making such large majorities unlikely. If the states had submitted to an obligation to pay taxes as the Congress demanded, permitted a national standing army and the supermajorities were pruned back a bit, in theory the Articles Congress could have evolved into a tremendously power central government, one that appoints executive functions to chosen individuals that are its separate creations; by my analysis, even the judiciary, even one as elaborate as we have evolved (in the Articles period the only provision for a Congressional judiciary was by Jefferson's Northwest Ordinances, establishing territorial judiciaries, who logically would have to be Federal since they weren't state yet) would be ultimately subject to being overruled by act of Congress.

What I too would very much like to see is references to any studies done on the diverse forms of state republican power developed in the revolutionary and post-war Articles period, including how fast they tended to convert to the familiar modern form of a Congress-mimicking bicameral state legislature, with a separately elected Governor overseeing all executive functions, and so on. I am far from convinced we have this uniformity mainly because this approach is so very fantastic and wonderful all rational people would adopt it; outside the USA this form hardly dominates unchallenged! I'm pretty sure it was adopted in the hope it would be better, piggybacking as it were on the presumed wisdom of the Constitutional compromises, and very largely because Federal and interstate relations go smoother when the formats are similar on both scales or across state lines. If we had a great diversity of possible forms life might be quite challenging for a Federal judge or a Congressman in DC trying to pass some reform; easier for the former to grumpily declare that a basically Parliamentary form with annual election of a rotating pool of Archons by the general public is "not republican" without specifying why so as to force the goofy nonconforming state to mimic the way things are done by normal Americans, never mind why the people of the state preferred the other way. And for the latter to rant against anything divergent from usual practice as unAmerican, anti-democratic, no doubt foreign influenced or the work of ivory tower intellectuals and generally lobby until the diverging states give in.

So, while I very often see passing mention of interestingly diverse systems, in places like the Federalist Papers where the authors draw on one example or another in passing, assuming general familiarity and not stopping to explain rival systems in any detail as integrated wholes, I have never seen a study devoted to their pros and cons, not even from the polemical point of view of trying to prove the generic Constitutional format the best, let alone one respectful of the different approaches tried and their reasons and history.

Failing the existence of such a study, some references to primary sources on the exact form of the old diverse formats would be really nice too. I am often reluctant to go to the source but rarely regret it if I do! (Well, I do often find people disagree with me sharply on how to read a given primary text, and these can be sharp enough either I am insane, or people are reading those text really really badly!)

Anyway I note that you, @Alexander Helios, have plans for the other 12 or 13 states (dunno if you count Vermont--seeing how NY regarded it as stolen from their claims, you might not!) so may I ask what information did you derive those from?

NY state is interesting too, I believe Hamilton, being a New Yorker, often referenced its system in the Federalist. Not necessarily with approval, I don't think NYS ever adopted Hamilton's specific notions, not all of them anyway.

The main thing I like about Hamilton is his method of proportional representation, which he did not develop for legislatures but for apportioning the states seats in the House, just as Jefferson's method of proportional assignment was developed for that purpose as well. This may help explain why Hamilton's method is the most inclusive, shifting power just slightly toward the smallest factions, while Jefferson's seems the most centrally aggrandizing of all PR methods, tending to scant smaller factions in favor of shifting toward the biggest. Neither was thinking of people being represented in a legislature. To be sure it seems plain neither one set out do develop a system with hidden agendas either. The math in Hamilton's method is pretty easy, and straightforward--to apply Jefferson's method you either have to kludge around guessing as to numbers to add or subtract from the quota to make the whole number fractions come out right, or do a gazillion iterations. I love Hamilton's method the most for its inclusiveness though, which might have been the opposite of his intentions, and I don't suppose Jefferson realized his approach would tend to bias toward the single majority faction either.
 
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