We Worship Jefferson, But We Have Become Hamilton's America [Wall Street Journal article]

Wall Street Journal | February 4, 2004 | Cynthia Crossen

[HenryLeeII]

We Worship Jefferson, But We Have Become Hamilton's America

EVERYBODY WHO IS anybody was there -- at least among those 750 or so Americans who adore Alexander Hamilton. Representatives of the Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr factions also turned out in force.

Two hundred years ago this summer, Hamilton died from a single bullet fired by Burr, then America's vice president, in a duel in Weehawken, N.J. Hamilton's early death, at the age of 47, denied him the opportunity -- or aggravation -- of watching America become a Hamiltonian nation while worshipping the gospel according to Thomas Jefferson.

Now, some Hamiltonians have decided to try to elevate their candidate to the pantheon of great early Americans. Last weekend, scholars, descendents and admirers of Hamilton gathered at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan to kick off their campaign and sing the praises of America's first treasury secretary, who created the blueprint for America's future as a mighty commercial, political and military power.

The conference was sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

But the overflow crowd also had to grapple with the unfortunate fact that many Americans have negative impressions of Alexander Hamilton. Perhaps Ezra Pound expressed their feelings most poetically when he described Hamilton as "the Prime snot in ALL American history."

YET, AS ONE HAMILTON acolyte, Edward Hochman, a Paterson, N.J., lawyer, asked the assembled experts: If Hamilton's vision of America "won" in the long run, "why do we love Jefferson?"

"Because," historian John Steele Gordon responded dryly, "most intellectuals love Jefferson and hate markets, and it's mostly intellectuals who write books."

Even Hamilton's detractors, including members of the Aaron Burr Association, concede that he was a brilliant administrator, who understood financial systems better than anyone else in the country. He laid the groundwork for the nation's banks, commerce and manufacturing, and was rewarded by being pictured on the $10 bill. "We can pay off his debts in 15 years," Thomas Jefferson lamented, "but we can never get rid of his financial system."

Jefferson's vision of America was the opposite of Hamilton's. Jefferson saw America as a loose confederation of agricultural states, while Hamilton envisioned a strong federal government guiding a transition to an urban, industrial nation. He is often called the "father of American capitalism" and the "patron saint of Wall Street."

The Hamiltonians have much historical prejudice to overcome. The real Hamilton was a difficult man, to put it mildly. He was dictatorial, imperious and never understood when to keep his mouth shut. "He set his foot contemptuously to work the treadles of slower minds," wrote an American historian, James Schouler, in 1880.

In the turbulent years of America's political birth, naked ambition for power was considered unseemly, except in the military. After the war, Hamilton, a courageous and skillful soldier, grabbed power aggressively and ruthlessly, indifferent to the trail of enemies he left behind. As a political theorist, he was regarded as a plutocrat and monarchist, partly because he favored a presidency with a life term.

JOHN ADAMS, America's second president, dismissed Hamilton as "the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar" and "the Creole" (Hamilton was born in the West Indies, and his parents never married). George Mason, the Virginia statesman, said Hamilton and his machinations did "us more injury than Great Britain and all her fleets and armies."

"Sure, he made mistakes," concedes Doug Hamilton, a Columbus, Ohio, salesman for IBM, who calculates he is Hamilton's fifth great-grandson. "He was only human. But family is family."

Hamilton had at least one, and probably several, adulterous affairs (Martha Washington named her randy tomcat "Hamilton"). He was also a social snob and dandy. Hamilton, wrote Frederick Scott Oliver in his 1920 biography, "despised . . . people like Jefferson, who dressed ostentatiously in homespun." He "belonged to an age of silk stockings and handsome shoe buckles."

Historians find Hamilton something of a cipher. He didn't have the opportunity, as Adams and Jefferson did in their long retirements, to "spin, if not outright alter, the public record," noted Stephen Knott, author of "Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth."

Joanne Freeman, Yale history professor and editor of a collection of Hamilton's writings, agreed that "there are huge voids in our knowledge of him." Consequently, his legacy has been claimed by various political interests. Among his illustrious admirers are George Washington, Jefferson Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, Warren Harding and the French statesman Talleyrand.

At the 1932 Democratic convention, however, Franklin Roosevelt blamed "disciples of Alexander Hamilton" for the Great Depression.

By the time of Hamilton's death, he had dropped out of public life and returned to his law practice. Even so, wrote Frederick Oliver, "the world mourned him with a fervor that is remarkable, considering the speed with which it proceeded to forget him."

[GigaDittos]

What do you mean 'bump for later'? Later what? Why do people spend so much bumping around here? *ARRGGGGAYAHYHHHAAAAAA* PRIMAL SCRREAM

[GigaDittos]

Hehehe, I love that line about "for there is not one which ingenuity may not torture into a convenience in some instance or other"! It's great.

[GigaDittos]

What's a Monticello? /sarcasm

[Publius]

There were two expeditions sent out against the Indians both of which were defeated and the St.Clair led one was slaughtered in the most devastating loss to Indian tribes yet.

And that was what I meant by Lord Dorchester (Sir Guy Carleton) and his attempts to destroy this country. Carleton up in Montreal played a key role in fomenting the Indian wars in question.

Arthur St. Clair had one shining moment. Just after the battle of Trenton, St. Clair suggested to Washington using a new road to bypass Cornwallis' troops and move on them from the rear at Princeton. It worked. But his behavior at Ticonderoga proved him an ass as a field general, and the Indian battles sealed his fate with military historians.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Rachel was not an uncommon name for a gentile and most names were from the Bible. Hamilton's mother was Rachel Faucett or Fawcett apparently from the Huguenot strain. She was of French extraction and there is no question that she was NOT Jewish, her mother's name was Uppington. Not much is known of her background but she was married in an Episcopal church.

He did attend a school when four or five where the teacher was Jewish but that does not mean much. There is some dispute over whether Rachel's husband was Jewish and it seems as though he might have been but he was not Alexander's father per court ruling.

His appearance is that of a Scotsman/Frenchman blond hair, blue eyes, sharp features. Whereas Lavien was Jewish in appearance.

His friend in New York was Hercules MULLIGAN not Mulliganstein. What does Hercules have to do with Jewishness away?

[Ditto]

If I were a farmer living out in the Appalachian highlands during the 1790s and I were told that the U.S. Government had just passed an excise tax on the whiskey I produced, I could certainly see myself asking, "Hey -- why not pass an excise tax on tobacco or cotton? Oh, wait a minute . . . We couldn't possibly do that -- those are the things that all you guys in Congress grow on your lands.

The "Rebels" of 1794 did not even have the support of most of their neighbors. In fact, the people they killed were pioneer settlers just like them. Once the militia organized, those "brave rebels" sobered-up and begged for mercy.

There was nothing to admire about them or their rebellion. They were a drunken mob.

[tpaine]

Who is John Galt? wrote:

I have not read through all of the posts here - have you informed these folks that you consider James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to have been "treasonous;" that you consider Mr. Jefferson "scum;" and that you believe it would be 'constitutional' for a D@mocrat Congress to appoint Hillary Clinton 'Queen of the United States?'

Caveat emptor

_____________________________________


Give him time and he will do so.. An example is this post, where he again brands the whiskey making farmers as "criminals":



----- "Residents of Appalachia don't just distrust the fedgov they distrust all outsiders and all governments.
Criminals, by nature, hate all authority. And that is what bootleggers were romantic as you might like to consider them."
152 posted on 02/05/2004 12:48:11 PM PST by justshutupandtakeit



----- Justi boyo, that takes todays cake for biizarro reasoning..

The feds created a 'crime'; -- of making untaxed booze.. -- And you come rushing romantically in, defending the cause of what you see as 'justice'..

- When all rational folk see an unconstitutional taxation scheme which was a bald infringement of personal liberty.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Gold or other metals will never be a monetary standard again anymore than bleeding will be re-introduced as a cure-all. To move to such a standard would cause an immediate shrinkage of the money supply and collapse the economy.

Actual use of a gold standard has been quite limited whenever there has been a strong state in play. The first thing that happens in a crisis is that convertibility is suspended. Even when there was such a standard debasement, clipping and other manipulation caused immense problems. Metals are not a panacea and are inherently deflationary. No state is going to place its money supply in the hands of arbitrary discoveries of metals in this day and age.

It should be recalled that the demand for a central bank started in the 1880s in the West (where gold and silver were mined) because of a chronic lack of money. Money center banks in the East opposed it for decades because their power would have been reduced by such a bank. Most of the gold/silver wound up there drained away from the rest of the country.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I have read the Flexner but the best biographies of Hamilton are Forrest MacDonald's, Robert Hendrickson's (2 vol and the 1 vol. Rise and Fall of Alexander Hamilton) and Broadus Mitchell's 2 vol.

MacDonald's is the clearest wrt the financial program.

[Verginius Rufus]

Hercules Mulligan sounds Belgian, like Hercule Poirot. Perhaps the name was really Hercule Moule-Le Gant.

[justshutupandtakeit]

I think there is a typo in that quotation which significantly changes things. It occurs in the sentence "...and the objects to which it may be appropriated are no less comprehensive, than the payment of the public debts, and the providing for the national defense and 'general welfare'." The first comma seems to me to be out of place and the quote should read "...no less comprehensive than the..."

It makes no sense to me with the comma. I have seen other instances of this kind of thing in old documents and suspect this is another example of improper copying etc. It could be an archaic manner of punctuation but I don't think so.

Actually that quote has a number of these odd commas which confuse me at any rate.

At any rate his ending sentence refutes the claim he believed Congress could do anything it wished under the claim of "general welfare." Nor is there any instance of a proposal for legislation by him which contradicts my belief.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Well I mean cheap as in ebay cheap not flimsy and I have purchased hard bound copies of the bio when the paper back started to fall apart. SR&Union I had to read from the library. Novus was the first one I read having had it for a few yrs left unread until I got in some discussion here. I have reread it and others several times.

Vermont was a messy issue no doubt and Ethan Allen turns out to be not quite the hero we were taught he was.

I will read the new one as soon as possible.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Keep on with the distortions they really become you.

[Blue Scourge]

Bookmarked for later read and reply.

[CobaltBlue]

You are mistaken in believing that the Federal Reserve System had any monopoly on banking during the massive bank failures of the 1920's - 1930's. There were thousands and thousands of tiny state banks.

Check out the history of the McFadden Act, passed in 1927, which limited the ability of banks in the Federal Reserve System to open branches outside their home state, almost completely eliminating national banks.

It's my understanding that Canada, which had mostly national banks, had almost no bank failures.

BTW, I don't get my information solely from the Fed's own research. The Great Depression is one of my hobbies.

[justshutupandtakeit]

It took Mad Anthony Wayne to straighten out the problems on the frontier.

Turns out I attended a school, Wayne St., wherein MacDonald was teaching though I was not aware of his stature at the time :^(

[CobaltBlue]

The concept of the Jubilee year is one of the factors I weigh when handling bankruptcies. I don't like the idea of welshing on debts, but most of my clients are in so much debt they'll never get out.

[x]

It's not clear what the authority would be for arresting Pickering if he discussed dissolving the union or for breaking up the Hartford Convention. It may also be a mistake to see the Hartford convention as a prosecessionist meeting. As you yourself note, other courses were considered and decided upon. Why stigmatize New Englanders for a decision they didn't take?

No one arrested those who wanted secession in the 1850s, either. Nor were the Deep South states' secession conventions broken up in 1860. We did have the right to free speech in this country, and can't stop people from arguing.

But this shouldn't be taken as an indication that there was a right to unilateral secession, simply that Americans didn't know what to do if the issue arose. A common perception was that secession meant war -- and this turned out to be the case.

You are free to advocate communism or fascism or even violent revolution today, but at some point, a line is drawn, and it's usually at the point of taking up arms against the government or people. It's only when you provide an immediate danger that the government acts. And that is what happened in 1860.

A more moderate course on the part of Southern leaders might have yielded a more pacific and conciliatory result, but they didn't take that path. So it's folly to argue for a "right of secession." There is none. If Southern leaders had behaved differently, they might have gotten Congressional assent for their unilateral actions, but chose to act rashly and to take up the gun, with predictable results.

In general, the paleoconservative celebration of secession and the Confederacy is superficially appealing, but has real problems. The ideal is that we would have greater freedom and also greater social stability with a society based on local or regional traditions.

The reality is that the secessionist impulse and the sectional passions that underlie it promote greater disorder and end up giving more power to ambitious sectional leaders. The result tends to be war, anarchy, local oligarchy, or a compromise or imposed solution that wouldn't be so very different from what we have today.

A larger nation provides greater opportunities to get away from local majorities or strongmen and allows one to resolve conflicts through mobility. The resulting social order is less rooted in local traditions, but freer in many ways.

The paleo idea seems to be that secession would allow us to escape the tyranny of the federal government. Perhaps, though it looks like a desperate remedy. The problem is that paleos neglect the tyranny of state and local bureaucracies and oligarchies as well as the real dangers of anarchy. It's likely that had the nation permanently divided in 1860, subsequent generations of Americans would have grown up in a more turbulent and politicized atmosphereless secure and less free from the heavy hand of government.

[american spirit]

Can't really agree with you....the fact that we're now saddled with a fiat currency essentially backed by nothing has resulted in a steady decline of the dollar's buying power and virtually unpayable national debt so I don't see much value to the Fed and it should be obvious that's why the framers wanted Congress to coin money and regulate the value thereof; not some third party entity that is virtually answerable to no-one.

[Deliberator]

At any rate his ending sentence refutes the claim he believed Congress could do anything it wished under the claim of "general welfare."

It can't DO anything it wishes, e.g., suspend freedom of religion, but it can, according to Hamilton, SPEND just about however it wishes.