What is a republic?

The word derives from Latin, res publica, in which it means simply state or government.

In English (and all European languages?) it came to refer to the form of the Roman government before the end of the Roman Civil Wars with the reign of Augustus as the first of what we now call the Roman emperors.

And people began to call the semi-hereditary military dictatorship that started with Augustus an empire, in contrast to the republic Rome had had before.

But later usage has not complied with this, both essentially accepting dictatorship as compatible with republicanism and denying heredity power of any kind, such as that of the Roman senators, could be republican.

Certainly, the Americans of the time of the founders thought life tenure of office holders compatible with republicanism, though barely, and though they rejected Hamilton’s plan for life tenure for the presidency and senate in addition to federal judges.

And this may actually be the only feature we can be reasonably confident belongs to republican government, as understood by the Americans of that time.

And that may be the only light we can shed on the meaning of this otherwise mysterious provision of the US constitution.

Article IV, Section 4.

The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.

And that, by the way, seems also to be what everybody in Europe and Latin America meant by republicanism throughout the 18^th and 19^th Century period of rebellions against the ancien regime, there and here.

Compared to the Roman government before the Emperors, a modern republic is plebeian.

Compared to the ancien regime, it is rule by the Third Estate - everyone not a Lord, either Temporal or Spiritual.

But that does not make it necessarily a democracy or very democratic, at all.

And it is pretty clear, I think, that only this republican rejection of caste and hereditary power, or even social status and prestige, that Jefferson and the others meant in the Declaration by that ringing phrase, "all men are created equal."

Though that would have been quite enough to make the loyalists in flight to Canada and the numerous monarchists who stayed behind, whether for lack of ability to flee, or out of ambition, or out of loyalty to their American homeland, blanch, right alongside the slave owners without Jefferson's guilty conscience or political schizophrenia.

Hamilton, for instance, along with a few others at the convention in Philadelphia.

And of the future Federalist Party.