Posted on 02/04/2004 12:00:19 PM PST by 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."
There's more to it than just this. Most conservatives "love Jefferson" because it has become apparent that the America that Hamilton envisioned turned out to be thoroughly inconsistent with the ideals laid out in the U.S. Constitution. The concepts of "freedom" and "liberty" get very blurred once you have an urbanized industrial society in which people live in close proximity to each other and are practically forced to interact with each other on a daily basis.
I don't think they become "blurred"---I think they just require a greater commitment to minding one's own business.
Well, you could say that, since he died in a duel because he didn't know when to keep is mouth shut.
It is a slander of Hamilton, to suggest that he would ever have endorsed the compulsively egalitarian bent in Washington today. That was not the type of strong Federal Government, that he advocated.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Treasury Secretary Hamilton and Secretary of State Jefferson provided President Washington with the opposing arguments concerning the correct way to interpret the "necessary and proper" clause:
As can be seen, Jefferson argued that if the "necessary and proper" clause were to be construed in the liberal manner that Hamilton argued, there would be no real limit to the scope of the Federal government.
Washington sided with Hamilton's expansive view of Federal power and the Federal government was off to the races.
A real dilemma in this regard: If you live next door to me, should I be permitted to bring down the law against you if your refuse to have your children inoculated against lethal infectious diseases?
I agree with you. In fact, I would make the case that this nation as envisioned in the U.S. Constitution pretty much came to an end with the events that culminated with the Whiskey Rebellion in the early 1790s. It's pretty weird when you think about it -- this novel idea called "the United States of America" really only lasted about five years.
We are not a Hamiltonian nation so much as our federal government is precisely the tyranny that Hamilton predicted it would be when he opposed the Bill of Rights.
Hamilton [alone, as far as I know, among the founders] understood that any explicit list of rights granted to citizens would quickly degenerate from a minimal list of their rights [the rights they possess at a bare minimum] to a maximal list of their rights [beyond which they possess no further rights].
So, for instance, when the slave states sought to exercise their clear and unequivocal tenth amendment right to secede from the union, the anti-constitutionalists [led by Lincoln] were able to argue that no such right existed in the constitution precisely because no such right had been explicitly listed among the rights possessed by the states and the people.
"Freedom" and "liberty" are not properly understood as shields against any kind of impact.
(particularly with regard to things like water and air quality). Should I be permitted to play my stereo all night if it keeps you awake?
Introducing water, air, or noise pollution onto my property is a violation of my rights. While you would certainly have more elbow room to produce such pollutions and easily keep them on your own property if you lived in an agrarian society, lack of such elbow room does not blur the essential concepts of "freedom" and "liberty."
A real dilemma in this regard: If you live next door to me, should I be permitted to bring down the law against you if your refuse to have your children inoculated against lethal infectious diseases?
If inoculations are available and you have been inoculated, why would you care whether my kids have been?
I thought this point had been most forcefully advanced by Madison.
That's one way of looking at it, if you agree with Jefferson's interpretation of the Constitution. Of course, Washington and Hamilton (and a lot of other folks) didn't agree.
It's interesting, though, how many people think that this liberal view of Federal power under our Constitution all began with Lyndon Johnson, or FDR, or Wilson, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Lincoln when, in fact, it was President Washington and Alexander Hamilton who consciously (particularly in view of Jefferson's comments) decided in favor of the broad implied Federal powers that now concern many conservatives.
It was the agrarian society in which slavery thrived in the South, don't forget.
Hamilton held that the Constitution gave the Federal government only the power to provide for the common defense and encourage national greatness. It did not have the power to infringe upon citizens’ rights. Therefore, he objected to attaching a bill of rights to the Constitution. “[T]he Constitution is itself, in every rational sense, and to every useful purpose, a Bill of Rights,” Hamilton wrote in Federalist 84. “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” asked Hamilton. “Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?” He also argued that the Constitution already protected trial by jury in criminal cases and provided for habeas corpus “in the most ample manner.”More here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=hamilton+bill+of+rights&safe=offHamilton could not possibly have been more correct in his predictions in this regard; in that sense, [history has proven that] he obliterated his opponents in this debate.
Our current condition of serfdom to the federal tyranny owes much to the fact that he did not prevail in this matter.
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