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."
That wasn't the conclusion I drew from reading Friedman & Schwartz's Economic History of the United States. If you have a copy handy, could you point me towards the most persuasive chapter? I have the common paperback version, we might even have the same edition.
We lost it quite a bit before then.
Several years ago I read an essay stating that we really weren't all that different from the French because we had experienced 4 republics. This was a bit different from Yale historian Bruce Ackerman's 3 republics based on constitutional interpretation, and different again from Jude Wanniski's 4 republics. (I'm still trying to find that essay.) I'll try to sum the essay quickly and forego my usual pedantic writing style.
Where did we 'lose it' before 1900?
The First Republic functioned under the Articles of Confederation but failed after only a decade, killed off by trade wars between the states. There was no common currency. Things fell apart. The Second Republic was founded by Hamilton and Madison and functioned under the Constitution. During the ratification debates, anti-Federalists (adherents of the First Republic) saw the Constitutional Convention as treason and a betrayal of 1776. Read the "Anti-Federalist Papers" to get the gist of the argument. The Federalist impulses of Washington and Hamilton were derailed by Jackson who went to a full states' right regimen. Jackson's impact was so great that to restore Hamiltonian governance required cracking the Union and fighting a war. Things fell apart.
Quite convoluted theory. -- IMO, the 'states rightists' were direct anti-constitutionalists. They meant to destroy the union, and almost did.
The Third Republic was founded by Lincoln and functioned under a greatly amended version of the Constitution. It was a purely Hamiltonian construct, created when Lincoln refused the states what they felt was the ultimate state's right: To leave peacefully.
The states had no enumerated power to leave. By leaving, they were violating the constitutional rights of state residents who enjoyed US Constitutional protection from the dictates of majority rule.
Big Business ran the country. During the Second Republic, the Jeffersonian impulse was exercised via states' rights and a weak federal government, but the Civil War and the amended Constitution had killed that off.
The 14th amendment 'killed off' Jeffersonian principles? - It's intent was to restore them.
As a result, during the Third Republic the Jeffersonian impulse (via the Progressive Movement) favored Big Government protecting the people from Big Business, i.e. Jeffersonian ends achieved through Hamiltonian means. Theodore Roosevelt made the first strides in this direction.
You just jumped over about 50 years of working jeffersonian republic, as I mentioned in my first line, above..
Today we call it "compassionate conservatism." A business panic related to easy credit from the Federal Reserve led to a depression blamed on Big Business. Things fell apart. The Fourth Republic was created by Franklin Roosevelt and functioned under Executive Orders. The Constitution meant what hired judges said it meant, and Earl Warren had as much power as the president. This republic was not so much Democratic Socialism as Government Capitalism with a large bureaucracy running the country and the people insulated from ruling themselves. Presidents and Congresses came and went, but the courts and bureaucracy continued on.
Sure glad you weren't so pedantic.
Technically speaking, the Jeffersonian republic ended when Lincoln decided to go Hamiltonian and won the argument in 1865.
I think it continued for nearly 50 more years, until the prohibitionary socialists gained control..
FDR created a semi-socialist version of the Jeffersonian republic, but it's getting to expensive to maintain. Eventually things will fall apart – but when?
They are falling now -- as we speak, literally..
I see hamiltonian-socialism/statism on one side of this political gulf, and jeffersonian-republican/conservatism on the other, both defined by our view of the principles of our constitution. Far too many citizens are willing to ignore our base principles for the political issues of the day.
That is, the words --- some words -- are there, anchored, at the most primary level of existance and not mutable by social and personal disposition, climates and times.
Without those absolutist words even kaos, chaos, and the Devil, himself, with Schrodinger's cat cuddled in his arms can naught ever be.
Fight to keep it, with all it's richness history.
When it was over, there was a long silence. George Washington, presiding officer of the Convention, cleared his throat and uttered the 18th Century equivalent of "Next!". Even Madison was embarrassed for his old friend.
Hamilton had misread the situation and gone too far.
You're going to have to explain that one to me -- I'm not sure that's true at all.
Lincoln could cite some Jeffersonian Republican precedents for his policies, and he and his idol Clay never particularly thought of themselves as Hamiltonians.
Clay was elected to Congress the same year that Hamilton died, and he immediately picked up the fallen standard of Hamilton with respect to the tariff and Hamilton's vision of a nation built on manufactures. Clay's "American Plan" was but an extention of Hamiltonian principles.
;>)
Our friend justputmeoutofmymisery has insisted (repeatedly ;>) that Mr, Hamilton 'went too far' only because he wanted the convention to produce exactly what it produced. I don't know if his viewpoint could best be classified as 'rationalization' or 'wishful thinking'...
;>)
And buried at the head of Wall St. in the yard of Trinity Church next to Robert Fulton.
And how do you see the 14th Amendment as a reaffirmation of Jeffersonian principles?
I think it continued for nearly 50 more years, until the prohibitionary socialists gained control..
I see hamiltonian-socialism/statism on one side of this political gulf, and jeffersonian-republican/conservatism on the other, both defined by our view of the principles of our constitution.
Far too many citizens are willing to ignore our base principles for the political issues of the day.
Well now, help me out here. Are you saying that the 18th Amendment was the demarcating line that marked the end of the Jeffersonian republic? You would put Prohibition above the Civil War?
And how do you see the 14th Amendment as a reaffirmation of Jeffersonian principles?
Our inalienable rights to 'life liberty, and property' were old Jeffs words, writ anew in the 14th..
In effect, we fought the civil war to make it absolutely clear that NO level of government, fed/state/local, had the power to infringe upon those individual rights.
The 18ths decree of prohibition on booze was arguably the most blatant such infringment in our history.
It flat out made an edict that one group of citizens could dictate what intoxicating substances their peers could possess..
Would you support an edict that one group of citizens could dictate what type of arms their peers could possess?
That's the way it looks to us now. But Clay entered politics as a Jeffersonian Republican. Hamilton and Federalism were anathema in Kentucky. Praise of aristocracy didn't play well in lands which had only recently been frontier country.
So while today's historians might see Clay as the philosophical heir of Hamilton, he saw himself more as an outgrowth of the nationalism of Madison and Monroe. I don't have a problem with historians putting Clay or Lincoln in the Hamiltonian camp, but a footnote indicating that they probably wouldn't have seen themselves in that way might give a more accurate impression.
Thanks for the response. I have also appreciated your posts. It's undoubtedly true that the Civil War was a great divide or watershed in American history that separated two very different worlds. But some of the conclusions that people draw from that fact are much more questionable, such as the idea that Lincoln intended to bury the Old Republic or that Jefferson's was the only way to understand the Constitution.
I was a big fan of Jefferson and even of the Confederacy when I was in high school, but Jefferson and Jeffersonians tended to overplay their hand. Too often they portrayed their opponents as men without principle, and their own understanding of the Constitution as the only legitmate one. While the Jeffersonian love of liberty was commendable, they were too quick to dismiss the dangers of anarchy, civil war, and foreign domination.
Getting the American republic started was a difficult process, frought with many difficulties, and the contributions of Federalists, and later of Whigs, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Whichever side one comes down in the end, it does pay to at least consider whether there wasn't something to be said for the other side of the conflict.
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