Inventing Alexander Hamilton
The troubling embrace of the founder of American financeWelcoming visitors to the U.S. Treasury Building’s columned entrance, which faces Pennsylvania Avenue on the green edge of the National Mall, is a statue of Albert Gallatin. A Swiss-born sophisticate who was dandled as a child on Voltaire’s knee, Gallatin served as the nation’s fourth treasury secretary, first under Thomas Jefferson and then under James Madison. His statue was erected in 1947. For sixty years, Albert Gallatin has been represented as the founding father of the Treasury Department.
Behind the building stands Alexander Hamilton. The first treasury secretary, Hamilton was for all practical purposes the creator of modern American finance and the founding wealth of the United States. This is, by rights, his house, and he’d be horrified to see his mortal enemy, whom Hamilton once tried to hang for treason, lording over its entrance while his own likeness is consigned to its back end.
Hamilton’s weakened position came partly from changes in city planning: the original front is now the back. But Gallatin’s symbolic prominence is no accident. The move to erect the statue began during the New Deal, when the Democratic Party was carrying on a romance with all things Jefferson. Great Depression–era Democrats identified the true founding not with the first election of 1788 but with that of 1800, when Jefferson’s party beat Hamilton’s, whose legacy New Dealers condemned as elitist and anti-democratic. There is rich irony, of course, in New Deal Democrats’ claims on Jefferson, who objected to Hamilton’s policies precisely because they relied on federal activism and central economic planning—approaches to government that FDR took to extremes. The party in power nonetheless busied itself with carving Jefferson’s face on the nickel and on a mountain, building him a big white memorial as opulent as Lincoln’s and Washington’s and, for decades in both public and academic history, pushing his reputation at the expense of Hamilton’s. The injustice at the Treasury doors is only the lowest blow in a long fight to take Hamilton down.
Now, a Hamilton revival is not only under way but an accomplished fact. Wrestling anew with Hamilton’s contributions to national politics and economics could be both fascinating and worthwhile. But Neo-Hamiltonians, like the latter-day Jeffersonians of the ’30s and ’40s, have been eagerly chopping up the past to make it conform to their political aims. Hamilton’s national vision and founding economics are far more troubling—and therefore more compelling—than his promoters acknowledge. And because Hamilton’s legacy is being invoked as a beacon for current policy, the emerging picture is a dangerous one.
The rehabilitated Hamilton was first presented to general readers in two biographies, Richard Brookhiser’s Alexander Hamilton: American (1999) and Ron Chernow’s best-selling tome, Alexander Hamilton (2004). The authors share a thesis: today’s America is not Jeffersonian but Hamiltonian—a blend of high finance, central banking, federal strength, industrialization, and global power for which we are indebted to the rare imagination and existential derring-do of our founding treasury secretary. “The Man Who Made Modern America” is how Brookhiser put the argument in the subtitle of an exhibit he curated for the New-York Historical Society in 2004. Short on substance, long on projecting gigantic videos of such things as modern bridges and contemporary military training, and full of relentlessly one-sided portrayals of Hamilton’s critics as driven by myopia and animosity, the exhibit was lavishly produced and promoted as a blockbuster.
This year, Hamilton crossed all the way over to pop. The once “forgotten founder” is now the subject of a PBS American Experience feature, which aired in the spring and is likely to live on in classrooms on DVD. Between scenes of bewigged actors reciting their characters’ written prose in awkward soliloquy, Chernow and a raft of other historians relate an even more vaulting story than those told in the exhibit and the biographies. Some of the talking heads give Hamilton virtually sole credit not only for founding the American financial system, but for the country’s very nationhood.
There’s a wonkish side to the Hamilton revival too. Certain policy writers, way ahead of the curve, have been contributing to its torque, shooting Hamilton’s legacy past history buffs and toward the halls of power. In 1997 David Brooks and William Kristol published a Wall Street Journal op-ed making an early case for what the authors called “national-greatness conservatism,” a theme they’d been developing in articles for the Weekly Standard, which Kristol helped found and where Brooks was senior editor. Looking for activist-government leaders that Republicans could love, they came up with Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Clay, and Alexander Hamilton—anything but bleeding-hearts of what Brooks and Kristol called “the nanny state”—who nevertheless saw an important role for the federal government in setting and achieving ambitious national aims at home and abroad.
Since then, as Brooks has become a New York Times columnist and TV pundit, he’s pressed the theme that Hamilton personifies national-greatness conservatism. In a major essay in the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 2004, he described Hamilton as author of a conservative tradition favoring limited government activism in service of social mobility and national unity. That same year he raved up Chernow’s biography in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Indeed, pairing the national-greatness theme with Hamilton grew more intense after September 11. For the swearing-in of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in 2006, President George W. Bush’s speechwriters went out of their way to note the importance of Hamilton’s legacy, and Paulson himself remarked that his father had been “a real Alexander Hamilton fan.” The Hamilton cause drew financial support—for both the Historical Society exhibit and online components of the PBS special—from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History, whose founders Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman have backgrounds in such conservative organizations as the Club for Growth and the Project for the New American Century.
Neo-conservative claims on Hamilton came to a head when Brooks, in a June 8 New York Times column on economic issues in the 2008 election, announced outright that he and like-minded others were “Hamiltonians,” who hold the rational balance among radical populists, tinkering liberals, and knee-jerk anti-government conservatives.
Hamilton’s reputation has bloomed on the liberal side, too, with the Brookings Institution’s “Hamilton Project,” which is dedicated to proposing “pragmatic policy responses that will create new opportunities for middle class affluence, bolster economic security, and spur more enduring growth.” Emphasizing Hamilton’s immigrant status and impoverished background, the project describes Hamilton as a representative of American traditions of opportunity and upward mobility. “Broken Contract,” a widely discussed paper by the project’s policy director, Jason Bordoff, published in the September issue of Democracy, sets out an agenda clearly inspired by this vision of Hamilton. An essential promise of American democracy—families who work hard and prize education can expect their children to advance economically—is in danger of being broken, Bordoff argues, but the extreme solutions coming from the left and the right will fail. He proposes instead maintaining mandatory forms of social insurance, making heavy investments in training and education, and increasing individual responsibility. The Hamilton Project’s advisory council boasts Democratic Party luminaries such as Robert Rubin, Roger Altman, and others redolent of both the Clinton-era pragmatism and New Deal liberalism espoused by Bordoff.
That the Hamilton revival admits conservatives and liberals alike gives it obvious appeal. But if opinion-shapers really want to strengthen democracy by enhancing competition, opportunity, and mobility, Hamilton is not their man. Nor did he want to be. Neo-Hamiltonians of every kind are blotting out a defining feature of his thought, one that Hamilton himself insisted on throughout his turbulent career: the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.
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That’s putting the matter bluntly, and bluntness is necessary. Time and again this galvanizing principle in Hamilton’s political life has been denied, ignored, and glossed over by his proponents, who thereby risk distorting the entire founding period. One can gain a refreshingly focused picture of Alexander Hamilton simply by looking at episodes in his public life, far from minor, that the rehabilitation industry’s guiding storytellers have done their best to downplay or leave out all together.
Among the most revealing of these was his participation in the dramatic events known as the Newburgh Crisis. Passed over in silence by the PBS biography, this affair launched the mature stage of Hamilton’s relationship with George Washington and placed him for the first time at the center of public finance. As such, it was nothing less than a profoundly formative experience in Hamilton’s life as a political actor.
In 1782, fresh from serving as a battalion commander at the Battle of Yorktown, Hamilton, 27, joined the Confederation Congress as a delegate from New York and entered into a scheme to threaten the Congress with a military coup. As executed by the Congress’s superintendent of finance (and Hamilton’s finance mentor), Robert Morris, his assistant Gouverneur Morris (no relation), and Hamilton (their promising young protégé), the idea was to encourage Continental Army officers—deployed, after victory at Yorktown, in a cantonment at Newburgh, New York—to refuse to lay down their arms unless the states acquiesced in Robert Morris’s longstanding insistence that the Articles of Confederation be amended to permit the collection of federal taxes from the whole American people. In Morris’s plan these taxes, collected not by weak state governments but by a cadre of powerful federal officers, would be earmarked for making hefty interest payments to wealthy financiers—including Morris himself, along with his friends and colleagues—who held millions of dollars in federal bonds, the blue-chip tier of domestic war debt.
The first tax Morris wanted Congress to pass was a duty on foreign goods, known then as an impost. Both Chernow and Brookhiser focus exclusively on the impost, but Morris assured his supporters that once Americans were accustomed to paying federal tax, a slate of land taxes, poll taxes, and taxes on domestic products would soon follow. The idea, in Morris’s phrase, was to “open the purses of the people” in order to enrich the interstate investor class, place American wealth in a few powerful hands, and create a unified nation poised to become an empire.
The officers at Newburgh were disgruntled because, with the war effectively over, promises about pay and pensions had not been met (Morris routinely paid financiers before soldiers). When they sent a delegation to Congress to demand payment, Hamilton and the Morrises urged them to make common cause with the investor class by insisting on pay in federal bonds. Hamilton channeled Congress’s panic about military takeover by insisting in resolutions from the floor that federal taxes be dedicated not just to officer pay but to funding all bondholders. He also took the immense risk—executed with remarkable coolness—of writing to Washington, on whose military staff he’d once served, to invite him to lead the threatened coup. But Washington’s loyal officers spurned the Morrises’ overtures, and when the conspirators in Congress reached out to Washington’s enemy General Horatio Gates, a mutinous plan developed at the Newburgh camp to give Gates command of the army.
It was all quite a scene. A high point was reached when, at a meeting in Newburgh, Washington leveraged his officers’ affection to disable Gates, quell mutiny, and prevent military takeover of Congress. Hamilton’s correspondence during and after the crisis reveals a young man working assiduously to cover every bet: he subtly adjusted his solicitation of Washington when it became obvious the great man wouldn’t play; he didn’t scruple to criticize, even partly rat out, his fellow conspirators; and he confessed to Washington certain aspects of his own participation in the conspiracy, while covering up others; in one letter draft he even crossed out a reference to it. A reader of this richly entertaining bob-and-weave can only stand in awe of Hamilton’s conjuring a role as Washington’s congressional informant and confidant from participation in a treasonous conspiracy. He set up his entire career!
Certain aspects of the Newburgh Crisis are worth arguing about. (How willing were the Morrises and Hamilton to support an actual coup? Were they gambling on avoiding one at the last minute? How would they have controlled events if the Gates mutiny had succeeded?) What hasn’t been at issue in any serious way since E.J. Ferguson and Richard Kohn wrote about these events in the 1960s and ’70s is Hamilton’s eagerness to avoid applying the rule of law to his view of what was best for the country. He was developing an urgent desire for authoritarian government, whose well-funded debt, supported by nationally enforced taxes, would increase the wealth of the richest class of Americans and yoke that class to national purpose. He bet everything, including his reputation as a loyal patriot, on forging a common project between the military and the investor classes to override the will of elected governments.
Hamilton’s gambit with the Morrises illuminates the style in which he would conduct his entire political career. So it is not surprising that both Chernow and Brookhiser usher readers hurriedly past Newburgh. Chernow’s narrative (which takes up only four of his 731 pages) omits the participation of Hamilton’s all-important mentor Robert Morris, whose controversial, at times openly corrupt efforts of the 1780s were instrumental to Hamilton’s successes in the 1790s. Chernow claims that Hamilton feared, rather than encouraged fear of, military outbreak, yet a few sentences later shows Hamilton “playing with combustible forces” by suggesting that Washington take the lead. Chernow characterizes Hamilton’s writing to Washington as mere deviousness, which he excuses by noting that Gouverneur Morris (not identified by Chernow as Robert Morris’s assistant) pursued the same stratagem with other officers.
Also contextless in Chernow’s rendering is the situation at the Newburgh camp itself, which somehow, inexplicably, grew “more incendiary”: we do not learn that Robert Morris stoked the fire by offering Gates support for outright mutiny. Sustaining the distortion by quoting selectively from the Hamilton-Washington correspondence, Chernow describes Hamilton applauding Washington’s judgment in quelling the coup. He persistently gives glimpses of Hamilton where glimpses favors him, snatches him out of sight where he is manifestly implicated, acknowledges a little naughtiness, and declines to tie the threads together. The result is falsification of the Newburgh episode and a picture of Hamilton cleansed of all the existential daring, so outrageous and so troubling, that was the true source of his brilliance, and which would mark all of his later successes and failures.
Brookhiser makes the most dramatically revealing episode in Hamilton’s early career disappear completely. His background on Newburgh consists of one sentence informing readers that the desire to raise money through federal taxes was motivated by a need to pay soldiers, implying that paying interest to creditors was a tertiary consideration necessary only to acquiring a foreign loan. Gone are the bondholders, whom Hamilton and Morris themselves told Congress were a primary consideration; for them, paying foot soldiers was literally never an issue. Absent from Brookhiser’s treatment is the work of Ferguson, who devoted a detailed book to Revolution-era finance that is required reading for anyone trying to explain Hamilton. Brookhiser’s only cited sources for his discussion of Newburgh are two of Hamilton’s most enthusiastic, least probing earlier biographers.
The fuzziness that both biographers bring to pivotal moments like the Newburgh Crisis extends to the nature of the Revolutionary War debt itself, thus also obscuring Hamilton’s all-important relationship to it. Chernow claims that nationalists like Hamilton and Madison wanted to place Congress in a position to “retire the huge war debt.” Precisely the opposite is true: led by Morris, the nationalists wanted, as they said repeatedly, to fund the debt—a distinction key to Hamilton’s national vision and to the finance plan he carried through Congress at the dawn of the 1790s. Both in his book and in the PBS biography, Chernow treats the debt as something that, having been run up, somehow, to regrettable proportions during the war, confronted Hamilton as an unfortunate problem when he became treasury secretary. In fact, Hamilton had spent all his time in Congress, influenced by Morris and his own reading in finance theory, trying to protect and swell the debt. When he took office in Washington’s cabinet, Hamilton brought years of frustrated effort to fruition at last.
Brookhiser doesn’t say that Hamilton wanted to retire the debt, but his discussion of the funding plan again makes something disappear: the blue-chip tier of bonded debt held by Hamilton’s and Morris’s friends, to which Hamilton showed considerable devotion. Brookhiser describes instead the kind of debt represented by the government’s wartime IOUs; he rehashes Madison’s attempt to distinguish between chits still held by soldiers and farmers and chits that soldiers and farmers had already sold to speculators. But Ferguson, as well as Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, in their magisterial The Age of Federalism (which Brookhiser cites elsewhere), showed years ago that the distinction between original holders and speculators was largely bogus and distracting. Hamilton certainly thought it was. That’s because the most significant portion of the debt was held by few people and moved very little; speculators in lower tiers of debt included people like Morris and his cohort, who were also “original holders” of the best tier.
David Brooks, for his part, embraces the thrust of Hamilton’s finance plan, writing that Congress’s decision to fund the federal debt at Hamilton’s urging formed the basis of “the fluid capital markets that are today the engine of world capitalism.” The quick-and-dirty textbook version is that Hamilton gave the country sound credit. What that means is rarely made explicit: the first treasury secretary found ways to support, at all costs, the federal bondholders whom he and Morris had been frustrated in supporting in the 1780s. In 1791 Hamilton finally got the U.S. Congress to commit to paying reliable interest on its debt instruments, halting both their face-value depreciation and the free-for-all speculation in them, making them articles of rational trade in high-finance marketplaces. (Following British models, Hamilton also used proceeds of the U.S. Post Office to create a “sinking fund”; such funds were dedicated to paying down each issuance of a public debt, making bonds reliable.) Hamilton’s idea, bold and creative, was to let the government get its hands on easy money by letting bondholders and traders grow American fortunes lending that money.
Brooks also associates Hamilton’s authorship of modern capitalism with what historians call “assumption”: Hamilton persuaded Congress to assume the states’ war debts in the federal one, thus swelling the federal obligation to massive proportions. But that idea wasn’t original with Hamilton, and by overlooking its history Brooks and other Hamiltonians obscure its purposes. Robert Morris too had wanted the Confederation Congress to assume state debts, placing all public debt in federal hands and making it so big that federal taxes would have to be levied to pay interest on it. That dream came true when the U.S. Congress, having agreed to assume state debts, ran up a deficit, as Hamilton was happy to report in December of 1790.
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A new tax, Hamilton told Congress, was the only way to solvency. He proposed not only expanding duties on imports (the old, embattled impost had finally been passed in the first session) but far more significantly, he urged Congress to impose the first federal tax on an American product. Just as Morris had hoped, assumption of state debts had become the wedge for “opening the purses of the people,” enforcing domestic federal taxation to support federal bondholders. In fact, passing a federal domestic tax (on distilled liquor, a fact that has helped obscure its real purpose) was so important that in the first funding proposal he submitted to Congress Hamilton appended a fully drafted bill. It was characteristically Hamiltonian (and reminiscent of health-care-reform-era Hillary Clinton), replete with distilling and tax-policy minutiae and overwhelmingly, even patronizingly, thorough, with every loophole closed, every question pre-answered, every problem sure to be caused by Congress’s financial ineptitude solved. The bill was controversial, and Hamilton’s patience must have been tried when Congress, seeming to bumble, passed funding and assumption yet ignored the whiskey tax—the brilliant law that would pay for them. But he was becoming a politico. In reporting the deficit, he calmly referred Congress back to the tax law he’d already written for them almost a year earlier. They were politicos too. They passed it—now that they had to—almost unmodified.
The structure of that tax sharply qualifies assertions made by Brooks and others that Hamilton wanted government power to enhance opportunity, mobility, and democracy. The reasons Hamilton gave Congress for going beyond a foreign impost and imposing domestic taxation are telling, both for what he said and for what he left unsaid. In the same 1790 report Hamilton reminded Congress that merchants, naturally, paid import duties, and that since merchants had always been the class most committed to American nationhood, taxing them further would be onerous and disaffecting; hence the need for a new tax not on imports but on a domestic product. What he did not explicitly point out was that the merchant class was also the bondholding class: they’d long been nationalists because federal power—the very kind Hamilton was wielding now—had long seemed to be where their interest lay. Today we might expect investors to be content with steady, tax-free income (there was, of course, no income tax). For Hamilton, shoring up and concentrating bondholders’ wealth meant paying that income with funds drawn not from the small bondholding class but from a tax collected from the large class of people who would never own a bond. And he structured the tax around aspects of the distilling process itself, so that big-time distillers (industrialists, members of the bondholding class) would be charged a lower tax while small-time producers (people engaged in a wide variety of work as farmers and artisans, with whiskeymaking often their sole source of cash and credit) would be charged a substantially higher tax, in many cases a crushing one. It was no accident. The bill was modeled on a series of whiskey taxes passed by British governments. Driving small and occasional producers out of business served imperial economic aims of efficiency and consolidation. In the same year that Congress passed Hamilton’s whiskey tax, the Irish Parliament stopped merely “dis-incentivizing” small distilling, and made it illegal to operate a still of less than 500-gallon capacity.
Hamilton wanted to turn the country into an efficient global competitor. As he would argue before Congress in his famous 1791 “Report on Manufactures” (which was far less successful than his funding plan but just as eager to stun all comers with its depth of research on hemp, nails, hats—wool hats, fur hats, and also fur-and-wool hats—and so on), labor power should not be dissipated in small, generalist farms and one-man artisan shops but efficiently marshaled, stabilized, and deployed on commercial farms and in factory towns like the one he founded in Paterson, New Jersey. And of course he wanted to use federal power to achieve that national vision.
The effect of the whiskey tax was precisely to render American distilling efficient through consolidation bordering on cartelization: even as the tax threatened to ruin small producers, Hamilton busily restructured army buying practices to make it impossible for small distillers to sell to army commissaries. In western Pennsylvania, where small distillers had managed to gain an economic toehold, Hamilton went even further: he made the region’s richest, largest-scale distiller the federal tax collector. Paid both a federal salary and a commission on what he took from his less successful neighbors, and charged with enforcing the federal tax that directly benefited his business, this distiller/collector had close relatives—again, federally commissioned, correspondents of both Hamilton and Washington—in the commissary office of the local army post. Business was sewn up.
Brooks routinely characterizes Hamilton’s use of federal power as intended to spur competition and furnish opportunity. But the control of business near the Ohio headwaters by a government-connected family and its pals was a direct consequence of Hamilton’s policy, and it was anything but unintended. “Government is really bad at rigging or softening competition,” Brooks has written by way of praising Hamilton’s economic policies. Yet the rigging inherent in Hamilton’s tax aggravated ordinary people’s existing problems. Farmers and artisans who were losing their weak grip on economic well-being and falling into foreclosure, as federally connected commercial farmers, Eastern real-estate speculators, and entrepreneurs in brick, glass, iron, and other rising industries—the sort Hamilton always said he wanted to promote—bought up more and more of the best Western land. Descendants of the pioneers who had cleared the land found themselves working as day laborers in the factories of their creditors, which was anything but a bleak outcome by Hamilton’s reckoning.
Thus did the first federal domestic tax—linchpin to Hamilton’s finance plan, culmination of nationalists’ decade-long efforts to unite the country, first step in making the American economy a global competitor—operate regressively, comprehensively, and deliberately. Its avowed purpose of wealth concentration and industry consolidation was intended to restructure the country along the “modern American” lines now hymned by so many neo-Hamiltonians. Such extreme and systemic results can’t be what Jason Bordoff and others at the Hamilton Project mean to support by invoking Hamilton’s legacy. But it is what Morris meant by opening the people’s purses, and it’s what Congress made law, at Hamilton’s behest, in 1791.
In his June 8 column, Brooks pits his “Hamiltonians” against modern populists who want, he says, to “fundamentally rewrite the rules” and obstruct policies they see as benefiting only the rich. He would brand as “populists” the many former foot soldiers of the Revolution who rose up against the whiskey tax—the so-called whiskey rebels. To them, American independence now seemed to have been gained for the exclusive benefit of a military-industrial cartel run by and for the privileged and staffed by the well-connected. Western Pennsylvania populists wanted a fair shot at “modern America” too. They wanted access to cash and credit. They wanted to grow their businesses. They were not anti-tax. They were against taxes that straitjacket markets, restrict opportunity, reduce competition, punish small operators, cripple local economies, and offer government cronies bonanzas at the direct expense of other citizens. Most important, they were against what they called taxes that don’t operate “in proportion to property.”
At least that’s what they said they were against, in published resolutions, letters, and petitions. Brookhiser and Chernow caricature them as drunk hillbillies (Brookhiser) whom scholars study merely because they are “colorful” (Chernow). But the essential fact remains that, during the nation’s formative years, the explicit idea that an essential promise of republican democracy lies in fostering opportunities for economic advancement and upward mobility is found not in Hamilton’s funding plan, but in the resolutions of the ordinary people who became whiskey rebels.
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So how have neo-Hamiltonians managed to remake Hamilton in their own image, diminishing his outrageous charisma and ruthless political intelligence in the process?
One way today’s Hamiltonians connect their hero’s economics to the American Dream is through the needle’s eye of his disadvantaged background and remarkable success. “Hamilton came from nothing,” Brooks wrote in his New York Times Magazine piece, “and spent his political career trying to create a world in which as many people as possible could replicate his amazing success.” Or, as one of the PBS talking heads informs viewers, Hamilton believed that “if you worked hard, you should get ahead.”
It’s more likely that Hamilton believed exceptional, bright boys like him should erupt like meteors across the night sky. Blending creative genius with an almost mad degree of thoroughness and tenacity, he strove to dominate everyone he encountered, a quality that brought enormous success but also marred his life and may have shortened it. The idea that Hamilton spent his career trying to create conditions for replicating such a rise seems fantastic. One searches his letters and public statements in vain for thoughtful reflection on ordinary families’ economic struggles or respect for their goals and hopes for their children’s betterment. He is unconcerned about using government power to encourage the rise of laborer’s descendants and would not have related upward mobility to democracy—a dirty word to Hamilton.
Brooks cites remarks from “Report on Manufactures” as evidence of Hamilton’s hope that people would advance socially by moving from agrarian scatteredness to industrial centralization. “When all the different kinds of industry obtain in a community,” Hamilton argued, “each individual can find his proper element.” He also defined as a goal of industrial policy “to cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise.” Where many founders were farmers and planters, Hamilton (like Franklin and Samuel Adams) was an urbanite, and he made an appealing case for the creative synergy to be found in cities. He certainly wanted people “mobile” enough to get off the farm, out of the artisan shop, and into the mill, and he had a forward-looking fondness, at once emotional and practical, of encouraging meritocracy over aristocracy in responsible government positions.
But it is a feat of intellectual acrobatics to ascribe to Hamilton, on the basis of these remarks, a broad policy of encouraging, much less sustaining, widespread upward social mobility through hard work among succeeding American generations. For Hamilton, the “hard work/get ahead” equation, which revivalists want to call a democratic legacy, applied only to the sort of people he deemed it wise to encourage. He had cogent national and financial reasons for carefully dismantling the few ways—which already involved manufacturing and selling—that people had of “getting ahead.” They involved consolidating land, money, opportunity, and power in the West, while obstructing both mobility and democracy. He was explicit about this.
Chernow, straining to detect Hamilton’s sympathy for the impossible difficulties faced by the debtor class, misreads a minor Federalist essay, number six. He suggests that Hamilton felt sorry for Daniel Shays, leader of a 1787 debtor uprising in Massachusetts, arguing that federal assumption of state debts was intended to relieve small-farming debtors. While it’s true that Hamilton objected to vacillations from leniency to aggressiveness in Massachusetts finance policy, his essay as a whole makes clear his disdain for the vaunting ambition and criminal tendencies of all such as Shays, on whom he lays personal blame for the anti-creditor movement sweeping the western part of the country, the real basis and wide scope of which Hamilton always impatiently declined to acknowledge.
To the extent that he thought about it at all, Hamilton wanted people to stop talking nonsense about their own economic aspirations and get ahead his way and his way alone, by becoming efficiently organized laborers and farm workers for the financiers and industrialists. If people wouldn’t do that, he’d make them.
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Wanting to get ahead in their own ways, and seeing Hamilton’s economic policy menacing the unalienable right to the political and economic participation they’d suffered for, the whiskey rebels crossed the line and became criminals. Hamilton crossed the line too, and with a vengeance, when he engaged yet again in what some might prefer to write off as a youthful fling with militarism at Newburgh.
The rebels, fatally romanticized by both progressive and libertarian historians, were militarists too. They tortured and terrorized officials and civilians, took over militias and courts in western Pennsylvania, marched against soldiers of the U.S. Army, came close to burning Pittsburgh, purged the region of wealthy citizens, and threatened the union with secession. What is salient here, however, is how Hamilton chose to interpret those threats and frame the government’s response. Long before the rebels took military action, Hamilton was eager to define what were only a few, scattered crimes as acts of war. He pressured Washington to subdue, police, and occupy the entire area with overwhelming force. Frustrated by cabinet moderates’ insistence on due process, as set in out the Bill of Rights, Hamilton worked with allies in the attorney general’s office to serve summonses that he knew would fan the flames of rebellion, overriding new rules by which Congress was trying to remove inflammatory provisions.
When matters reached a fevered pitch in the summer of 1794, Attorney General William Bradford engaged in sham negotiations with the rebels to buy time for a secret military buildup run by Hamilton, who had eagerly volunteered to lead the mission. To give the impression that the government sought a peaceful resolution to the conflict, Hamilton told Henry Lee, governor of Virginia, to postdate orders calling out the Virginia militia. When the buildup was complete, Hamilton took command of a 20,000-troop operation. His letters to Washington managing that sleight-of-hand (he’d been confirmed by the Senate to manage the Treasury Department, not to wage war or police the citizenry) make fascinating reading. Washington wisely led the troops only part of the way, then turned back, leaving the dirty work to Hamilton.
Citizens throughout Western Pennsylvania were subjected to door-kicking mass arrest and round-up, at Hamilton’s behest, on what he knew—even, at times, said—was no evidence. The writ of habeas corpus was not suspended, as required in such cases by the Constitution, yet men were detained by the hundreds without charge and for indefinite periods. They were also threatened with worse punishment, at times personally by Hamilton, in an effort to extract false testimony against other rebel citizens. The judicial branch was explicitly subordinated to military authority, and the federal judge who accompanied the troops said later that despite insufficient evidence, he’d feared for his own safety at the hands of the troops should he fail to charge at least some of the detainees.
The fact that juries convicted almost none of the men who were marched across the mountains to Philadelphia in the middle of winter (some of whom hadn’t even been charged) and then left for months in jail awaiting trial, has been taken—by cockeyed optimists—as a victory for the jury system. That reading ignores Hamilton’s stated goals, which had nothing to do with trying legal cases and achieving convictions. His letters to Washington, who grumbled about Hamilton’s failure to capture legitimate suspects, are a primer in goal-shifting. Having at first assured Washington that the adventure was worth undertaking because many such suspects would be captured, Hamilton airily dismissed the issue when they weren’t, and refocused Washington’s attention on the necessity of leaving an occupying force in the region to prevent further outbreaks. That occupation subjected law-abiding citizens, who had already been terrorized by the rebels, to martial law; as their scarce food and supplies were impressed, soldiers went from house to house administering loyalty oaths.
Contemporary accounts and affidavits make clear that some of the testimony Hamilton tried to extract from detainees was intended for use not against the rebels, but against Hamilton’s political enemies William Findley and Albert Gallatin, elected representatives who acted as moderating influences—at great personal risk—during the rebellion. Hamilton hoped to use the false evidence to silence his political opponents by hanging them for treason
Unleashed, the existential hero was in a white heat. Using the military to trounce the rule of law and violate civil rights was integral to his vision of federal power, national wealth, and a strong union.
The historian Joseph Ellis, in Founding Brothers, is one of the few recent popular writers on the founding period who take a clear-eyed look at the latter phase of Hamilton’s career, which began with suppressing western Pennsylvania. He cites the all-important source Richard Kohn, concluding that Hamilton’s success in the Whiskey Rebellion inspired an almost obsessive military focus as he grew older. Out of office, Hamilton continued to order around his hacks in the Adams cabinet (or as the PBS biography puts it, he “advised” them), hoping to contrive an all-out war with France. Hamilton also envisioned leading the U.S. army into Spanish Florida, then continuing into Central and South America. He also suggested that the federal government should put the entire state of Virginia “to the test” militarily, something his fans write off as mere venting and posturing, but which Ellis takes seriously.
Hamilton is routinely credited as favoring a strong executive branch. What he really favored, from Newburgh through the Whiskey Rebellion, from the quasi-war with France through his response to the anti-federalism of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, was an executive branch run by him, strong enough to do anything it deemed in the national interest. For Hamilton, personal and military force, unrestrained by the slightest consideration of law, were joined ineluctably to American wealth, American unity, and America modernity.
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About the Author
William Hogeland is the author of The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty.
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Barbara Clark Smith,
Revolutionary Consent
It's the first I've heard of such a thing (I must be totally ignorant).
What I heard was this: Hamilton warned about not being organized politically (centrally). Which means not having a strong enough military. Which could lead to the thing Hamilton warned about (for example a War.)
You know which war I'm talking about; the one that force Madison to do the things Hamilton warned everyone to do (including Jefferson). Like taxing the public to pay for a navy that could protect the coastal states - something the coastal states had refused to do on their own initiative.
This article is like the DeLorenzo one about Lincoln being atheist (if I sat in his history classes I would keep my mouth shut at all times.) If Lincoln was smart enough to become atheist (after all those bible readings)then wasn't his decision to invade the south a good one ?
Tell me the truth; am I that ignorant about our history ?
In his history of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay writes: "Hamilton’s reservations about the masses and [his] advocacy of energetic government are softened by generous and sincere pronouncements on behalf of reason and humanity."
For example, Hamilton was opposed to slavery. In a letter to John Jay, then President of the Continental Congress, in 1779, he wrote the following: "The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks makes us fancy many things founded in neither reason nor experience...[an unusual anti-essentialist statement for the era] ... An essential part of the plan [to enlist African-Americans as soldiers in the Revolution] is to give them their freedom with their muskets. This will secure their fidelity, animate their courage, and I believe will have a good influence on those that remain by opening a door to their emancipation. This circumstance, I confess, has no small weight in inducing me to wish the success of the project; for the dictates of humanity and true policy equally interest me in favour of this unfortunate class of me."
To Gouvernor Morris Hamilton wrote in 1777, "“That instability is inherent in the nature of popular governments, I think very disputable … A representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislature, executive, and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable.”
For example, in Federalist #76, Hamilton writes, "The supposition of universal venality in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning than the supposition of universal rectitude. The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind, which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence. “
Of habeas corpus and aristocracy, he wrote in The Federalist #84, "The establishment of the writ of habeas corpus, the prohibition of ex post facto laws and of TITLE OF NOBILITY... are perhaps greater securities to liberty and republicanism than any it [the Constitution] contains. ...[T]he creation of crimes after the fact ... and the practice of arbitrary imprisonments have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny" (caps original).
In 1788 he stated to the New York Legislature, "“While property continues to be pretty equally divided, and a considerable share of information pervades the community, the tendency of the people’s suffrages will be to elevate merit even from obscurity. As riches increase and accumulate in a few hands; as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.”
In the same speech, he declared: “The true principle of a republic is that the people should choose whom they please to govern them. Representation is imperfect, in proportion as the current of popular favor is checked. The great source of free government, popular election, should be perfectly pure, and the most unbounded liberty allowed.”
He concluded on a personal note: "What reasonable man, for the precarious enjoyment of rank and power, would establish a system, which would reduce his nearest friends and his posterity to slavery and ruin? If they [those who oppose ratifying the constitution] imagine, that I contemplate, with an ambitious eye, the immediate honors of the government; yet, let them consider that I have my friends--my family--my children, to whom the ties of nature and of habit have attached me. If, to day, I am among the favored few; my children, tomorrow, may be among the oppressed many. These dearest pledges of my patriotism ... I have troubled the committee with these observations to show that it cannot be the wish of any reasonable man to establish a government unfriendly to the liberties of the people."
To imply that such statements, and many others like them, were not truthful revelations of Hamilton's beliefs is to reduce the complexity of an unusually complicated man and thinker to that of a fascist thug.
Hamilton lived not on Bermuda but on Nevis and St. Croix. And it was his mother's first husband who was a Jew, not his mother. Hamilton did have some early lessons in Hebrew as a small boy and could recite the ten commandments in that language. And he did have helpful mentors, in particular a Presbyterian minister on St. Croix named Knox.
judgement not ideology. True conservatism is anti ideological. It always seeks the reality of things.
Today both left and right misrepresent Hamilton. He was not a liberal capitalist. He was a conservative traditionalist and a Christian.
His policy was to create a strong republican government and ensure it would not fall in a world hostile to that experiment.
David Brooks is a 19th century liberal as is the editor of the National Review. Hamilton would have loathed the revolutionary aspects of their celebrated Capitalism which destroys family and tradition positing material progress and money making in an abstract market place as man's destiny. Hamilton understood man has a supratemporal destiny
A good book toward understanding Hamilton is Henry Cabot Lodge's biography. It is blessedly non academic and non ideological.
>Hamilton was a statesman governed by prudent
judgement not ideology. True conservatism is anti ideological. It always seeks the reality of things.<
Ah, but of course! Conservatism, the One True Religion!
The output of Brooks, Brookhiser and Chernow on historical events -- Hamilton especially -- are the cumulative observations of journalists who are intent on shaping current events despite having neither a background nor a commitment to historical standards.
Brooks, Brookhiser and Chernow write tracts with impact in the political marketplace, and much to be accounted in that respect, but of little interest and still less value to historians or students of history.
JFK: Camelot
Bill Clinton: Rock Star
None of them were saints, and any hagiography that would make them so is a disservice to us. I'm still more-or-less a Hamiltonian, but such essays as this are a useful and necessary corrective. So thanks.
Hamilton no doubt engaged in certain actions for his own betterment. However, Mr. Hogeland seems to suggest that Hamilton's concern for his interests and those of his allies trumped his interest in securing the long-term viability of free and mobile society. That to me is a very tortured interpretation of both his words and actions.
Two very general points to support this view. A complete reading of Hamilton's papers and analysis of his actions shows a man who genuinely believed his interests were aligned with those of the greater interests of the nation. While one can no doubt point to instances of self-deception, by and large, he was correct.
Secondly, Hamilton's support for the abolition of slavery was staunch and unwavering (unlike Mr. Jefferson). There was no upside to such consistent, vocal support and it was most certainly a political liability.
Also egregious is the omission of what happened after Hamilton's Federalists lost power. Many of the policies they had promoted remained in place. Would the Jeffersonians (including Gallatin) have left the Hamiltonian financial system mostly intact if it was all for the benefit of wealthy bondholders who supported Hamilton?
Hamilton’s remarks to Morris should be read in context. Hamilton begins his assessment of New York's constitution this way: "That there is want of vigor in the executive, I believe will be found true. To determine the qualifications proper for the chief executive magistrate requires the deliberate wisdom of a select assembly, and cannot be safely lodged with the people at large." Then follows the sentence CVH quotes. CVH's ellipses replace this: "When the deliberative or judicial powers are vested wholly or partly in the collective body of the people, you must expect error, confusion, and instability." In the sentence on representation that CVH quotes, the clause "where the right of election is well secured and regulated" means something like "where access to the franchise is qualified and the qualified have easy access."
Hamilton is thus making a fairly standard republican case (somewhat inchoate, too; he was in his very early twenties) for representation in government; along with a less standard but far from original one for a powerful executive chosen outside representative process. He hasn't yet rejected outright the idea he refers to as "democracy" -- but even here, he doesn't mean by it anything like what we do, or, perhaps more significantly, what 18th-century radical democrats wanted: "manhood suffrage," for one thing, with no property qualification on voting, as well as such things as low or no property qualifications on office-seeking, new counties erected in timely fashion to reflect growing populations, weak executives, popular election of local judges, and laws to prohibit monopolies, limit land and industry consolidation, and ease credit through low-interest government loans and emissions of paper currency.
CVH's *Federalist* reference is also problematic. The Publius essays, intended to overcome objections to ratifying the U.S. Constitution, probably show both Hamilton and Madison, in particular, at their most enduring but don't necessarily make a good guide to either man's politics. In light of projects he would be soon be carrying out as Treasury Secretary, Hamilton's hymning the Constitution's protection for habeas corpus can lend some of his Publius writings a quality perhaps best described as creepy. (And I can't tell whether CVH knows that this quotation comes from the essay in which Hamilton expounds his objections to a bill of rights.)
The impassioned plea of 1788, also for ratification, shows Hamilton embracing a form of republicanism, not democracy: again, "the people" and "popular" meant to few Whig-influenced republicans of the 18th century what they mean to most of us. The context here is Hamilton's explaining, with characteristic clarity and logic, why a comparatively small, less pervasively representative House (the "lower," elected chamber of the proposed U.S. legislative branch) need not lead to aristocracy. Associating governmental stability and fairness with what Hamilton calls "pretty equal" property distribution was among the common tropes of Whig-influenced speechmaking. In regions where unrest had inspired Hamilton's (and others') desire for the national government he was here urging, that association in no way accorded with the economic facts, as Hamilton knew them and would soon bend every effort to shape them.
There's a more profound issue. As the posted comments show, for every Hamilton quotation a CVH may cite, there will be Hamilton quotations cited by others to refute it. Exchanging volleys of references won't make Hamilton good, bad, right, wrong, or even "complex." Looking at the most important things he did, however, and what he said and left unsaid about them, can lead to a variety of interesting conclusions. As Eric (#15) makes clear, you’re free to remain a Hamiltonian and to take seriously what I say in the essay.
Nobody, though, has a basis for concluding or suggesting -- I certainly don't do so, J.D. (#16) to the contrary -- that Hamilton was out to line his own pockets. As I've said, he remained persistently intent, to an astonishingly singleminded degree, on the strength of the nation. And if I thought Hamilton's opposition to slavery qualified, amplified, or bore any useful relation to any point in my essay, I would of course have addressed it.
Your essay is a wide-ranging argument that Hamilton was an authoritarian, and yet you see no relevance to the fact that he, unlike many others, strongly opposed the worst type of authoritarianism of his time (that would be slavery)? That seems odd to me, but thanks anyway for your discussion.
Does the author believe Hamilton was an enemy to democracy? Of course he was, as was every framer.
[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. James Madison, Federalist #10
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams
The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Charles Francis Adams, editor (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850), Vol. VI, p. 484, to John Taylor on April 15, 1814.
Concluding he did not have the best interest of the nation in mind, is disproved by his actions in the field of
battle, as well as his clear support of Republican Government. Another defense of Hamilton's taxes is that it became law, correct? Did not the Congress and President pass his plan? There was no illicit behavior, is this not consent of the governed?
Hamilton's honor, and humility as a man, is also seen from his admission, and subsequent revealing words, of his adulterous affair, not to say he was not an
arrogant man, but, that he was a humble man, never to allow prevailing rumors to shatter his professional integrity.
Maybe some of his decisions were not the most prudent; who among us can match his brilliance in law, administration, and leadership? A Father of American
Jurisprudence, James Kent, said of him "in law, there is no superior."
He wanted our best citizens to govern the nation, which seems only right and proper in a Republican Government. His words in the Federal and Ratifying Conventions disprove his will for an aristocracy; all, should seek to be the most enlightened.
His faith in Jesus Christ is how I like to remember him.
Affirming the Gospel in most likely 1794:
"An attack was first made upon the Christian revelation, for which natural religion was offered as the substitute. The Gospel was to be discarded as a gross imposture, but the being and attributes of GOD, the obligations of piety, even the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments, were to be retained and cherished."
Hamilton commenting on the French Revolution, which officially renounced Christianity in 1793.
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?
option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1385&chapter=92676&layout=html&Itemid=27
Hamilton affirming the thousand year millenial reign of Christ in 1793:
"The triumphs of vice are no new thing under the sun, and I fear, till the millennium comes, in spite of all our boasted light and purification, hypocrisy and treachery will continue to be the most successful commodities in the political market."
~ To Richard Harrison (1793)
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1387&chapter=93250&layout=html&Itemid=27
I posted these verses not to preach but to show Hamilton's faith while he helped form the nation.
Thank you for your essay.
"He has confirmed, in this instance [the defeat at the Battle of Camden], the opinion I always had of him. ... What think you of the conduct of this great man {speaking sarcastically]? I am his enemy personally, for unjust and unprovoked attacks upon my character; therefore what I say of him ought to be received as from an enemy, and have no more weight than as it is consistent with fact and common sense. But was there ever an instance of a general running away, as Gates has done, from his whole army? And was there ever so precipitate a flight? One hundred and eighty miles in three days and a half. It does admirable credit to the activity of a man at his time of life. But it disgraces the general and the soldier. I have always believed him to be very far short of a Hector, or a Ulysses. All the world, I think, will begin to agree with me.
But what will be done by Congress? Will he be changed or not? If he is changed, for God’s sake overcome prejudice, and send Greene. You know my opinion of him. I stake my reputation on the events, give him but fair play."
If Hamilton wanted the sovereignty of the state govts reduced, he wanted so because he knew, as did Washington and all the others, that it would kill our country, just as faction had done throughout world history. This very letter by Hamilton also suggests that idea. I seriously question, after having researched his writings for over 3 years, that Hamilton was doing this to accumulate power and wealth. His letters to his personal friends indicate that he desired nothing but to retire and tend to his family. He was involved in politics because he sincerely believed that it was his duty to his country.
By the way, the accusation which Hamilton referred to in the above quote was Gates accusation that Hamilton wanted to convince the army to overthrow Congress and establish Washington as dictator for life. Hamilton obviously viewed these accusations as untrue and slanderous. Hamilton was accused of even making a speech in a coffee house trying to rally the troops to march on Congress, by another anonymous individual, and Hamilton wrote a letter in reply, (in 1780, again) to say that he never recalled saying any such thing, and that such were not his sentiments.
Some good quotes that show Hamilton's true views on politics and government can be found on the first post here:
http://alexanderhamiltonspeaks.blogspot.com/
As to Hamilton's religion, and the Founding Fathers' views on pure democracy, I must echo the words of OFT above.
"Washington leveraged his officers’ affection to disable Gates, quell mutiny, and prevent military takeover of Congress... and he confessed to Washington certain aspects of his own participation in the conspiracy, while covering up others; in one letter draft he even crossed out a reference to it. A reader of this richly entertaining bob-and-weave can only stand in awe of Hamilton’s conjuring a role as Washington’s congressional informant and confidant from participation in a treasonous conspiracy...Hamilton’s eagerness to avoid applying the rule of law to his view of what was best for the country. He was developing an urgent desire for authoritarian government, whose well-funded debt, supported by nationally enforced taxes, would increase the wealth of the richest class of Americans and yoke that class to national purpose. He bet everything, including his reputation as a loyal patriot, on forging a common project between the military and the investor classes to override the will of elected governments.>>
Contrary to the words of General Hamilton in the Federalist, and the Ratifying Conventions, etc. without direct sources, and his own admission, I cannot believe he would betray his country, which, is what this essay is promoting.
To protect his professional integrity, he embarrassed his wife, and entire family with his public acknowledgement of an adulterous affair; so no one could claim he was a crook. I'm not saying he wasn't involved in a conspiracy, but, without the sources, it doesn't carry the strongest weight.
OFT.
Now, I am just a simple existing Individual, and no-doubt lack the noble genius to grasp the more informed intellectualism of a master journalist, but would it be too much to ask of the good Mr. Hogeland to enlighten his readers on the thoughts of such men as David Hume, Vattel, Blackstone, Neckers, Steuart, and Machiavelli, and how those illustrious sages theories pertained to Gen. Hamilton's motives and actions? Now being just a social dabbler in Political philosophy I can hardly claim expertise on such matters the way a journalistic savant such as Mr. Hogeland displays, however, even I find it remarkable just how much Hamilton's deeds seem to reflect their influence and treatises. Somehow I missed through all of Hamilton's Letters and writings exactly how Robert Morris was his main influence and most likely his devil's familiar. I am now wondering how Hamilton ever got to write the Federalist Papers and his State Reports without Morris's red pen being involved, hmmmm?
Perhaps I also might be able to take the zealous Mr. Hogeland a bit more seriously then I am, but alas, after reading the following ditty; and, of course, regaining my composure after a good chuckle, I found myself supposing:
"In 1791 Hamilton finally got the U.S. Congress to commit to paying reliable interest on its debt instruments, halting both their face-value depreciation and the free-for-all speculation in them, making them articles of rational trade in high-finance marketplaces. (Following British models, Hamilton also used proceeds of the U.S. Post Office to create a “sinking fund”; such funds were dedicated to paying down each issuance of a public debt, making bonds reliable.) Hamilton’s idea, bold and creative, was to let the government get its hands on easy money by letting bondholders and traders grow American fortunes lending that money."
Suppose, just suppose here, that Hamilton's agenda had nothing to do with trying to create fortunes but to put the accumulated capital in the hands that new how to use it. If, for one fleeting moment, the zero sum theory of economics was realized as a falsehood(too which it certainly is) then perhaps Hamilton was acting on the truth that wealth is created - and hence capital must find its way into the hands who knew how to use it, for in the hands of those men wealth would be increased for everyone. If Mr. Hogeland could explain to his readers the dealings of the Bank of the United States(In Philedephia in 1786), and the ridiculousness of the Dutch gentry of New York(Livingstons) and the loathing that both incidents created in Hamilton he just might have a bit more trouble in his thesis here of Hamilton pandering to the wealthy.
The entire effort in this piece upon the Whiskey rebellion would make for great fiction but then again, that would be a possible career ender since there might be a legitimate scholar or two left who would bring plagiarizing charges seeing that the Oligarchs, oops I mean "Republicans", already penned this in the late 18th century. I must assume this is an editors mistake seeing as journalistic integrity is most assuredly upheld by the esteemed Mr.Hogeland.
Of course, I wonder if Mr. Hogeland has forgotten to submit some smaller observations on his critique of Gen. Hamilton? I find here no mention at all about Gen. Hamilton's notion's in regard to Republics, Virtue, Law, Religion, etc. No mention of the Oligarchical society America was under until Hamilton's Meritocracy took hold - Ever wonder exactly what the Civil War was fought over - Hamiltonianism vs. Jeffersonianism? No mention of the millions upon millions of loyalist property and homes stolen by over suffraged legislatures of State Governments prior to the Constitution. No mention of Hamilton bringing the "Law Merchant" to the country and overthrowing the "Common law" structure. No mention of Hamilton's Foreign policy beliefs, especially regarding France, England, Santo Domingo(Haiti). No mention of John Marshall and Hamilton's influence on his decisions that shaped the Judiciary.
If Mr. Chernow and Mr. Brookhiser are be accused of glossing over Gen. Hamiltons real intentions, then what shall one say of Mr. Hogeland's subjective analysis? Mere over-sites, possibly?
Now, following Madison's Federalist #10 and David Hume and Vattels theories of harnessing the passions, maybe I can enlist Mr. Hogeland's fury in getting the 17th Amendment repealed. However, I suppose I would have to explain to him what the major debated issue was in the Constitutional Convention and how 1916 most infamous act of the U.S. Government has reopened the door to tyranny. Anybody ever wonder why the Founders wanted a Bicameral House, anybody, anybody? Oh wait, I must remember that the "demos" is always the voice of God, correct???
Sources: I've already mentioned the two best-regarded scholars of the episode, E.J. Ferguson and Richard Kohn: Ferguson's book is "The Power of the Purse" (University of North Carolina Press, 1961); Kohn's is "Eagle and Sword" (Free Press, 1975); both may be found in many public libraries. (But Kohn gives the most detailed citations for his Newburgh narrative only in footnote 19 to an article he published in the April 1970 "William and Mary Quarterly," number 27, available online through JSTOR in many libraries. And WMQ 29 has an interesting article dissenting from Kohn's reading--though not on Hamilton's involvement!--with what I think is a strong rebuttal from Kohn.) Also, my book "The Whiskey Rebellion" (Scribner 2006) distills (ha) what I see as the salient issues, which have been whitewashed, misunderstood, and explained away by virtually all of Hamilton's biographers, not just the most recent ones.
For those interested in supplementing Ferguson, Kohn, and me with primary research on Newburgh, see "Journals of the American Congress" for late 1782 and early '83 (and note that the officer petition and mutinous Newburgh addresses are appended to Hamilton's committee report of 4/24/1783). You can follow Hamilton's pushing the impost through Congress during the crisis, and his opposing any plan for making payoffs solely to officers, in his "Papers," motions dated 1/27/1783, 1/28/83, 1/29/83, 2/10/83, and 3/11/83. Also in the "Papers," thrill to the Hamilton-Washington correspondence, where Hamilton does, as I said in the essay, confess to part of the conspiracy, and crosses out an even more complete confession: letters of 3/12/1783; 3/17/83 (with Hamilton's crossed-out admission of having actively desired to produce a threat of coup); 3/24/83, 3/25/83; 3/31/83; 4/4/83 (with Hamilton's most complete though still partial confession); 4/15/83; 4/16/83; and 4/22/83. (All of those references also appear in notes to "The Whiskey Rebellion.") Kohn's notes will point you to important correspondence among Henry Knox, Arthur St. Clair, Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris, and other players in the drama.
To read the episode from an almost fawningly pro-Washington and decidedly anti-Hamilton viewpoint, see the relevant sections in James Flexner's standard biography of Washington. But I think Flexner, who presents Washington as victimized by Hamilton, underestimates the symbiotic complexity of the men's relationship, which I've explored in "The Whiskey Rebellion" and am continuing to explore in other contexts. It's true, for example, that nobody despised Gates more thoroughly than Hamilton -- unless it was Washington, or Hamilton's father-in-law Philip Schuyler. Hamilton and the Morrises wanted Washington taking charge of putting military pressure on the states, not Gates, whom they kept in reserve. Doing business with people one despises may not be not a common experience for H.M. and OFT; others may find Hamilton's doing just such business at the outset of his career one of the more fertile features of the Newburgh episode. It's startling to imagine what might have happened to Hamilton's career, and so to American history, if either Washington or Schuyler had ever been forced to confront Hamilton's involvement with the Morrises' offering support for Gates's mutiny.
On the other hand, given Washington's shrewd reading of the whole series of events (as expressed in the correspondence with Hamilton cited above), it's hard not to believe that, while happy to be spared any undeniable knowledge, the general did put the whole thing together, then tucked it away. That wouldn't be unlike him.
As a card-carrying member of the ACLU who read at the last Bill of Rights celebration in my city, I'm personally glad that we passed the bill of rights. Of course, our current administration, with the acquiescence of Congress, has ignored or abandoned several of them. But Hamilton didn't oppose the bill of rights because of what they said. He thought them unnecessary them because, he wrote, any rights not assigned to the government by the Constitution, remained with the people. It was a logical argument, if not a farseeing one.
I happened to be reading Washington's writings (collected by the LOA) last night. I was struck by how often GW writes Hamilton, who had gone back to his law practice, for advice. In one such letter he asks Hamilton to ask Jay for advice as well and to include Jay's letter in his response. Washington writes to another correspondent that he always solicits advice from people whose intellects he admires, compares their arguments, and chooses what makes sense to him. Yet, he remarks, he doesn't think that anyone is right about everything.
As for democracy, we still have a representative democracy. Do you object to it? Even in the age of personal computers (which not everyone owns), a direct democracy would be hard to manage. When I lived in California, I had to do serious research every election era whenever a host of propositions appeared on the ballot. Imagine doing such research all the time, even while holding down a job or being in the hospital. It would not be feasible.
What I personally would favor is proportional representation, as at fairvote.org.
"However, Hamilton's proposal regarding the funding of the national debt, approved by congress in 1790, was less expensive as well as less complicated than James Madison's rejected [impossible?] scheme of discriminating between original and subsequent holders of the debt certificates in the case of domestic creditors. This was because Hamilton was content to have the debt funded at 4% rather than at the 6% rate originally contracted."
http://www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.570/pub_detail.asp
http://www.darrellepp.com/?p=81
and franklin
http://www.darrellepp.com/?p=44
In a National Review article, addressing his conservative readers, Brookhiser says that Hamilton "was not one of us." According to my research, it is John Adams who was the favorite founder of conservatives. Of monarchy, Adams wrote, "our ship must eventually land on that shore." Regnery, the conservative press, has published a thick volume of selected writings of Adams. In The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Russell Kirk claims Adams as the founding American conservative. (He expresses doubts about Hamilton's conservatism.) HBO will soon be showing a mini-series about Adams, in which AH, whom Adams hated, will probably appear as a villain.
It's the villains-and-heroes approach to American history which I criticize. It functions as a binary opposition, and all binaries can be deconstructed, including this one. Also, Hamilton is discussed as if he were the only proponent of views commonly held by educated men, particularly in the Northeast. Many of these views stem from their reading of Greek and Roman history, as Peter Gay explains.
There is much to admire about Madison and Jefferson. But white male historians have overlooked their slave-holding, aristocratic lifestyles until quite recently. Jefferson writes some appallingly racist things in Notes on the State of Virginia. He also wrote some terribly sexist things in his personal letters. It would be easy to trash Jefferson, as you trash Hamilton here. It's not hard to seize any piece of writing, or event, in the life of one of the founders and make hay out of it (accurately or not). They were not gods. But neither are we.
In their biographies, neither Chernow nor Brookhiser is entirely positive about Hamilton; Chernow is often critical.
As his letters show, Hamilton had bouts of serious depression, both in his 20s and in his 40s, possibly more often. Since Adams described him as "effervescent," he may have been hypomanic as well (as another author has argued). This may account for some of his lapses of self-control. But in a letter to Adams, Washington said of Hamilton that "his judgment is intuitively great."
Toward the end of his life, in a letter to a friend, Hamilton disputed the account Madison gave of his thoughts at the convention. Since Madison was AH's enemy by the time he published that account, one has to consider the possibility that Hamilton had grounds to dispute it.
A few commentators above have claimed Hamilton as a Christian. He was, during his teens, and again after his eldest son was killed in a duel two years before Hamilton's own death. But for most of his life, he did not attend church (and his townhouse was only a few blocks from Trinity Church, where he is buried). His wife was certainly devout, but Hamilton's views on religion throughout most of his life are a mystery. His views on the better aspects of Christianity--the Jesus of Luke--which he expressed in response to the French Revolution--are positive, as are the views of Jefferson.
The author points out what appears like another of Hamilton's important mistakes. Yet, he fails to answer what I'm certain would Hamilton's burning question if he were alive today, "Did he get it right?"
I don't think Hamilton was attached to "being right." And this is the mark of greatness in his character. But I think he was passionately committed to getting it right, especially on the important questions. That's what the author fails to address.
For example, regardless of the truth of what system of government Hamilton argued for at the Constitutional Convention, it is clear that it was not his vision that ultimately won out. Nonetheless, no one argued or fought more vigorously for the new Constitution to be ratified.
What I find disturbing about the author's argument, especially since he seems so knowledgeable on those times, is that he does not answer for a reader like me, who is not going to take the time to learn the details that the author is so familiar with, is does he believe or not that Hamilton accomplished his task, in the larger sense, in spite of his weaknesses or mistakes?
The founding of this country was a task of the greatest importance for world history, as the last 200 plus years has borne out. Those who were called to that task not only created a new system of government with checks and balances, but they provided such checks and balances for each other in their strengths, excesses and weaknesses.
There is a profound, divinely orchestrated wisdom to who was gathered together at such a decisive historical moment. And it seems to me that were those people here today, they would cringe at their mistakes yet be burning to know, did they get it right, did they set up this country as God intended, in the best way that was attainable given the context of the times.
I would have greatly preferred if the author had raised the question not whether Hamilton has somehow been "invented" but if he raised the much deeper and more important question of whether Hamilton got it right in spite of his mistakes and accomplished his God given task.
It does not seem from many historical accounts, that there anyone more capable than him in doing it better, given the depth and breadth of his accomplishments in so many spheres. So given the current state of our country, given the author's talents, it seems more important for us to understand what Hamilton could have or should have been done better in the system he created in the context of those times.
Instead it seems that the author has succumbed to the danger of not more carefully explaining the context and the possible motives in which the events he described unfolded. From the comments, it seems this has continued the long tradition of presenting only a distorted snapshot of a man who was clearly on a mission shared mutually by those with whom he was so closely associated.
So I pose the deeper question; Given the all important context of those times, did Hamilton get it right? What could he or should he have done better? Given the lasting, if unrecognized impact he had, It seems more important to know this now, than at any time since the founding.
This is irrelevant to the question of the article; the question is, was Hamilton a part of the Newburgh Conspiracy? The author has posted some dates of letters in "Journals of the American Congress" Why don't you post the actual words, so we don't have to search for this info, or even pay for it; this is your article!
You're claiming something very disheartening from one of greatest minds, and patriots that ever lived!
According to my research, it is John Adams who was the favorite founder of conservatives.>>
In most cases he was a social liberal, on religion, etc. And only while in office, when he retired; after 1800, Adams became the ultimate liberal in all phases of his life; Jefferson helped pervert his, as well as Madison's life.
Maybe you are making more out of this than is actually there. Washington did show up at Newburgh, correct? Washington rebuked Hamilton and the Officers, which relented. The officer corp got their money after the convention, I hope with interest.
You use the word treason, when it wasn't. All the officer corp wanted was an impost duty enacted to pay them, which should have been done. You would have something against Hamilton if he by-passed Washington, but he did not. Washington empathized with them, but, wouldn't go along with it, thereby ending the ordeal.
In the end, it was a bad idea, that stayed an idea. If it was as serious as you say, treason, why didn't Washington do something about it? And what of his responsibility for not ratting out Hamilton and the others?
It must be because he didn't think any damage had been done, either do I.
You would have a massive case against Hamilton if he by-passed Washington and went through with it. It would have been a military coup, circumventing consent of the governed, and Republican Government. Thank God Hamilton realized Washington should lead this ordeal, thereby ending it.
Man is judged by actions, not ideas, for even Satan can put ideas in our mind; it is what we do with those ideas that we are judged for, not that evil thoughts are not sin, but the final judgment of them. Read C.S. Lewis on this idea.
Supporting or favoring traditional
Supporting or favoring existing
So it can be used favorably or unfavorably...
Alexander Hamilton was a conservative.
But which? The Brittan or the New America?
At a dinner, Vice President John Adams observed that the British Constitution, if “purged of corruption would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” Hamilton paused and said, “purge it of its corruption . . . and it would become an impracticable government: as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.”
The above is Jefferson's accounting of events at the dinner and depending on how you personally view things will depend on whether or not you believe it.
However you can't deny the fact that Hamilton went against what he said in the federalist papers. Like someone already said, he said that the Bill Of Rights wasn't needed because any rights not assigned to the government by the Constitution, remained with the states or the people.
Yet he himself used a loose interpretation of the Constitution to get the National bank established.
Just as today many try to use the "general welfare" part to turn this country into a collective/socialist country.
The "welfare of the United States" is not congruous with the welfare of individuals, people, or citizens according to the definition at the time. The Founding Fathers said in the preamble that one reason for establishing the Constitution was to “promote the general welfare.” What they meant was that the Constitution and powers granted to the federal government were not to favor special interest groups or particular classes of people. There were to be no privileged individuals or groups in society. Neither minorities nor the majority was to be favored. Rather, the Constitution would promote the “general welfare” by ensuring a free society where free, self-responsible individuals - rich and poor, bankers and shopkeepers, employers and employees, farmers and blacksmiths - would enjoy “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence.
"Life, liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"... "pursuit of happiness" ultimately means (and formerly meant) PROPERTY. Why? Because the most fundamental part of being happy is having your basic needs met... Shelter, food, and clothes. You can get all of those when you have property. Cut down the trees for your shelter and field/garden, grow your own food and maybe even raise some animals like a dairy cow and some laying hens, dig a well for water. either grow your own cotton and learn how to spin, weave, etc. for clothes or trade/sell some extra food for clothes.
Whether the Gov. gave you the land or you paid for it, it was yours. Then (after some other taxes are successful) the Gov. says "you can only keep this land if you pay a tax on it". So now you have to do something to earn more money to pay taxes on the land you are suppose to own.
Etc. etc. and so on.
Also someone said something to the effect of "if it was treasonous,why didn't congress or Washington do something?" Maybe for the same reasons that congress and others haven't done anything about Bush's treasons acts... scared, insecure, ignorant, misinformed, uneducated/mis-educated, or even greed (in on it and/or will profit from it)
I know I kind of went off topic but it was and is the loose interpretation of the constitution that has lead is to where we are today.
“I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”...
The danger in the hands of Senators and Congressmen was “that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”
~Thomas Jefferson
It is true that Hamilton was born in poor circumstances, but upon docking on our shores, he was welcomed by wealthy patrons such as William Livingston; he ate of their plates, seduced their daughters, and supported their cause, becoming thei most important champion. Everything Hamilton did in their service during his subsequent career was beneficial to them, and to the nation.
What I regret is that Hogeland discusses his reservations concerning Hamilton's practice, but not Hamilton's theory. Indeed Hamilton came to the rescue of the creditors as soon as his appoinitment as Treasury Secretary was effective, but does he not share Hamilton's belief that for a new government aiming at long term surival, the most important task is to gain the respect of the wealthy few? It was they that shouldered many of the costs of the revolution, and it was they that awaited most eagerly to see how the new government would start-off, Hamilton made sure to orchestrate great administrative feats to impress them and inspire their confidence in the new government. Had Hamilton not effected this, creditors might well have grown weary of an ineffective new government, organize warring factions for or against another attempt at re-writing the government, and start a civil war, which is what the founders had done as wealthy men starting the revolution over a trifling tax on tea.
Hamilton's moves were always overbearing, but he said many times how important it was to make a good first impression as to the strength and abilities of the national government, lest the wealthy leaders from powerful states entertain any ideas...