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."
Jefferson's election was often referred to as the "Revolution of 1800." Jackson's election in 1828 was also seen as a radical turn of events. As you say, there was much difference between the ideas that Hamilton or Adams had about the federal government and those that Jefferson represented. The old Federalists who supported the Washington administration were increasingly alienated in Jefferson's and then in Jackson's America. Some second generation Jeffersonians were similarly estranged by Jackson's victory, though their more radical fellows might have embraced him.
The Civil War did mark a break, but was it so catastrophic a break as to constitute the creation of a new Republic? In some of its policies, Lincoln's America represented a return to Washington's and Madison's view of government after the long Jacksonian hiatus. In other ways it was truly radical, but the radicalism wasn't necessarily something the Republicans intended to impose on the country in 1860, but was an outgrowth of war, emancipation, and the defeat of the South.
One major reason why Lincoln's America looks so different was the rise of industry. Different sorts of people came to power after 1860. Politics in an industrial nation will always look and be different from those in a more rural republic, but it would be a mistake to conclude from that that Jefferson's or Jackson's views on the Constitution were the same as those of Washington or Adams or that it was Lincoln's ideas about government that destroyed their America.
If the "Second Republic" did perish it's likely that it did so in 1860 with secession. The idea that those who destroyed the old union represented the "real Constitution" is an illusion. They felt that the Constitution of 1789 didn't provide them with sufficient protection for their interests and that a new departure was necessary. Whatever came after 1860 was bound to be different, regardless of who prevailed in Congress or on the battlefield.
It's also worth noting that when Republicans Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were in the White House, they adopted some of the Federalist policies that they had criticized when they were in opposition. Lincoln could cite some Jeffersonian Republican precedents for his policies, and he and his idol Clay never particularly thought of themselves as Hamiltonians. Jefferson himself was a swing figure between constructive statesmen like Madison and Monroe and more radical figures like John Randolph and John Taylor.
If Jefferson's reputation has fallen in recent years one reason surely is that he was all over the map: pro-slavery but anti-slavery, libertarian but willing to countenance nationalist and restrictive policies, a revolutionary and radical with a conservative side, an agrarian isolationist republican who put the country on the road to empire, an egalitarian aristocrat. The many-sidedness that made Jefferson such an attractive, provocative, and intellectually fruitful figure in previous generations, now looks like something of a muddle and a mess. There's still a wealth of ideas and perceptions in Jefferson, but one can't blame people for throwing up their hands.
Glad to see your're still around, also.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
That is certainly the now common claim, but it will not hold. For as the Texas sodomy ruling, and rulings like roe v wade, the connecticut condom ruling and such ... it makes the Supreme Court mightier and sovereign than the other four branches, The four branches are the Federal Executive, the Federal Legislative, the States by consentinng legislative decrees, and the People, assembled.
At the current state, the States or People could pass a marriage amendment and the Supreme Court could ruin it, directly or indirectly, say by fiat, defining strangely the terms man and woman for the purposes of legal marriage, or by declaring it's process invalid against some infinite array of arcane details of process.
The Court rules by fiat.
And there's that word again "FIAT".
You slight gold too much. Gold is immune to any "fiat" declarations, Honest and humble, is its whole intrinsic nature. Beautiful and uncommon, too.
Both fiats are ships headed to the breakers of a rocky northen coast, the wind behind them and the tillers wrecked. .
That is certainly the now common claim, but it will not hold. For as the Texas sodomy ruling, and rulings like roe v wade, the connecticut condom ruling and such ... it makes the Supreme Court mightier and sovereign than the other four branches, The four branches are the Federal Executive, the Federal Legislative, the States by consentinng legislative decrees, and the People, assembled.
At the current state, the States or People could pass a marriage amendment and the Supreme Court could ruin it, directly or indirectly, say by fiat, defining strangely the terms man and woman for the purposes of legal marriage, or by declaring it's process invalid against some infinite array of arcane details of process.
The Court rules by fiat.
And there's that word again "FIAT".
You slight gold too much. Gold is immune to any "fiat" declarations, Honest and humble, is its whole intrinsic nature. Beautiful and uncommon, too.
Both fiats are ships headed to the breakers of a rocky northen coast, the wind behind them and the tillers wrecked. .
----- 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.
I branded bootleggers criminals not farmers unless they took up arms and assaulted federal officials. Get your slanders straight.
Daft. Those farmers making whiskey were not "bootleggers" until congress decreed them to be guilty of breaking a 'law' that was unconstitutional.. One that prohibited them from making whiskey..
Bootleggers were selling booze which was illegal without a license and were criminal just as crack sellers are criminals today.
There you have it. -- You believe our constitution gives the states & feds the power to prohibit property by licensing & taxation. I don't see such a power enumerated.
We don't get to pick and choose which laws are acceptable to us much as you and Mr. Galt might like to.
Who does if not 'we' the people?
-- Obviously, you are of the opinion that hamiltonian elites have that power..
You will learn otherwise, at some point..
That's an interesting comment. It says money is ALL relative.
Why the same logic might be applied to the Constitution -- the Constitution only means what others agree it is! Those others being, perhaps, the Supreme Court, or maybe the Democratic Caucus, or maybe the Trial Lawyers. It's all relative too!
Or to the Bible, why that only means what others agree it means! It has no absolute meaning.
Fiat everything!
Doesn't work. Oh, for a while it does. Sure. Small meanders are transitive. One can find one's way from point A to point B with assurance. But in after some time the accumulation becomes a tight knot of cornel bark, its intricate twists and turns no longer allow any examination of value. There's nothing to say about it besides that it is a tight complex knot, incapable of ever being untied.
Do you see the knot of paper? Of fiat money?
It is there, it is huge, it is complex as all get out.
;>)
There happens to be an entire book about, of all things, salt. I read it and learned some fascination facts. Ancient Rome paid it's soldiers in salt. China based it's wealth and currency on it, for more than two milling. They taxed, they used it, they dedicated images to it. There were wars in Italy, for centuries, over its production. There's NOTHING " relative " to my statements at all.
And YES, all currencies are " relative ", in that it's worth what everyone accepts it is; just as with gold, for that matter.
For a lot of the 20th century, gold was worth what our government said it was.That is a fact.
Currencies are traded and they are worth what the market says they are. How else would Soros and his kind, be able to bring down nations, by investing methods ?
But keep right on talking about subjects you neither understand,or know much about. That way, everyone will know to ignore your posts. ;^)
Missed a lot of history classes, eh ?
Our experience with the Federal Reserve System, as Nobel-Prize winning economist Milton Friedman has long noted, is that our economy has been more unstable and has had slower economic growth ever since the Federal Reserve was established.
No wonder you're so utterly confused. Your reading comprehension is in dire need of help.
But do continue to be obtuse and post junk. You aren't nearly as " clever " as you suppose. LOL
You've got to be kidding me. Almost everything that Hamilton called for in his plan to the Constitutional Convention was in direct conflict to what conservatives today view as being the vision of the Founders
1St. The Supreme Legislative Power of the United States of America to be vested in two distinct Bodies of Men, the one to be called the Assembly, the other the Senate, who together shall form the Legislative of the United States, with Power to pass all Laws whatsoever, subject to the negative hereafter mentioned.Senators for life, President for life, and the measly states (at least in the view of Hamilton) had their governors appointed by Congress I assume? That's not a Federal Republic.2d. The Assembly to consist of Persons elected by the People to serve for three years.
3d. The Senate to consist of persons elected to serve during good behavior, their election to be made by electors chosen for that purpose by the People. In order to this the States to be divided into election districts. On the death, removal, or resignation of any Senator his place to be filled out of the district from which he came.
4th. The Supreme Executive Authority of the U. States to be vested in a Governor to be elected to serve during good behavior. His election to be made by Electors chosen by Electors chosen by the people in the election districts aforesaid. His Authorities and Functions to be as follow.-to have a negative upon all Laws about to be passed, and the execution of all laws passed.-To have the intire direction of War when authorized or begun.-To have, with the advice and approbation of the Senate, the Power of making all Treaties.-To have the sole appointment of the Heads or Chief-Officers of the departments of Finance, War, and Foreign Affairs.-To have the nomination of all other Officers (Ambassadors to Foreign Nations included) subject to the approbation or rejection of the Senate.
10th. All Laws of the particular States contrary to the Constitution or laws of the United States to be utterly void. And the better to prevent such Laws being passed; the Governor or President of each State shall be appointed by the General Government and shall have a Negative upon the Laws about to be passed in the State of which he is Governor or President.
Of course granted we don't live in a Federal Republic anymore, so I imagine Hamilton would be quite pleased with what his vision, and those that so willingly followed it (Clay and the other guy), brought upon the citizens of the respective states
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