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."
The English have a point about the European Union being a threat to their liberties. It would be a good idea to keep such a union weak. But the French, Germans, Spanish and others understand that smaller government units are no guarantee of liberty. So it was with "state's rights": it was not sure guarantee that the rights of individuals would be respected.
A lot of Jefferson's appeal came from his manysidedness. People with very different views could still claim to be Jeffersonians. But it makes it hard to talk about his influence. If for one person, Jefferson means liberty and only liberty, while another sees his agrarian, or egalitarian, or revolutionary, or racist, or democratic, or aristocratic, side as equally or more important, it can be hard to have a debate. Likewise if you define Jefferson as liberty. Then Hamilton or Adams ends up being tyranny, and what you've lost the actual historical Jefferson, and you're not talking about his ideas or actions and their possible consequences for today, but just about liberty and tyranny.
I'll agree that there's much to be said for what a passionate and unyielding attachment to liberty on the part of the governed. But carry it too far and you have every state, city, town, family or individual taking up arms at the least suggest that government can perform some public function or that the level of government to decide a question will be different from what one would wish.
There is something to be said for Hannah Arendt's idea that the true victory of the American Revolution was in establishing a lasting and workable system of ordered liberty that avoided the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. To the degree that Jeffersonians work to preserve that system they are to be applauded, but at some times Jeffersonians have opposed the compromises necessary to constitutional government with a "my way or the highway" spirit.
When you look at how the Democratic-Republicans attacked Hamilton's plans when Jefferson was in opposition and how they went on to support many of the same programs when Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were in power, you get an idea of how American politics works. Taking those angry remarks made by the first opposition as the whole wisdom of constitutional interpretation would be a mistake.
They weren't afraid of John Adams.
[Lifting glass] The Maryland Four Hundred! Your most ob'd't., "LG"
The extreme reading of Jefferson's ideas -- shared by many in 19th century America and revived by some today -- gives us powerful states with great powers over individuals and a weak central government.
Wrong.. -- Jeffersonian ideas are fully compatible with the 14th amendment, which reins in "powerful states".
Think of the Articles of Confederation, and of the kind of sweeping powers states exercised over particular classes of citizens right up to the 1960s. Is this necessarily a prescription for greater liberty?
The 14th was violated.. And still is.. Your point?
The English have a point about the European Union being a threat to their liberties. It would be a good idea to keep such a union weak. But the French, Germans, Spanish and others understand that smaller government units are no guarantee of liberty. So it was with "state's rights": it was not sure guarantee that the rights of individuals would be respected.
Do you think you made a point with that last sentence? What?
A lot of Jefferson's appeal came from his manysidedness. People with very different views could still claim to be Jeffersonians. But it makes it hard to talk about his influence. If for one person, Jefferson means liberty and only liberty, while another sees his agrarian, or egalitarian, or revolutionary, or racist, or democratic, or aristocratic, side as equally or more important, it can be hard to have a debate. Likewise if you define Jefferson as liberty. Then Hamilton or Adams ends up being tyranny, and what you've lost the actual historical Jefferson, and you're not talking about his ideas or actions and their possible consequences for today, but just about liberty and tyranny.
Another meaningless diatribe, imo. Feel free to revise for logic..
I'll agree that there's much to be said for what a passionate and unyielding attachment to liberty on the part of the governed. But carry it too far and you have every state, city, town, family or individual taking up arms at the least suggest that government can perform some public function or that the level of government to decide a question will be different from what one would wish.
Are these lines in reply to something I wrote?
There is something to be said for Hannah Arendt's idea that the true victory of the American Revolution was in establishing a lasting and workable system of ordered liberty that avoided the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. To the degree that Jeffersonians work to preserve that system they are to be applauded, but at some times Jeffersonians have opposed the compromises necessary to constitutional government with a "my way or the highway" spirit. When you look at how the Democratic-Republicans attacked Hamilton's plans when Jefferson was in opposition and how they went on to support many of the same programs when Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were in power, you get an idea of how American politics works. Taking those angry remarks made by the first opposition as the whole wisdom of constitutional interpretation would be a mistake.
Um.. Sure.. OK..
Thank you. The name is no threat to your faith, I assure you. It is from the name of my novel, which in turn is taken from the metaphorical Gods of the Copybook Headings in Kipling's poem, who return with terror and slaughter, when Mankind goes too far down the primrose path promoted by Socialist delusions.
The Kipling poem provides the theme for both the novel and the web site; and I believe correctly foretells our future, if we do not rapidly reverse current trends.
William Flax
I think the connection between Southern concepts of honor and the origins of the Civil War are valid; the study guide to which you thoughtfully include a link in your post, for students reading Bertram Wyatt-Brown on honor and violence, interestingly contradicts the Marxian scholars who point to slavery as "the" cause of the Civil War.
His statement is interesting, that the South rose because of a challenge to honor and manhood, and it explains much better than any assignment to interest (slavery, tariffs) or sectionalism the reaction of the fire-eaters to the challenge of Abolitionism, especially delivered from the pulpit by people like Henry Ward Beecher, who armed the anti-slavers in Kansas and fomented, like John Brown, civil war as a moral imperative.
Looked at in those terms, it may be that the cause of the Civil War was the migration of the discussion about chattel slavery from the sphere of intellectual discussion to moral challenge, delivered from the pulpit. Some future writer may discover, therefore, that the real, underlying cause of the Civil War was New England Calvinist Yankee moral cocksureness and willingness to rank over others, especially when handing down final moral judgments about people one didn't know.
However, having parsed your post reasonably carefully, I see no brief yet for any imputed hot-headedness on Jefferson's part. If he had been a moral absolutist, particularly on the subject of race, how then did he find his way into Sally Hemmings's bed? -- assuming arguendo that he did. Or even if the DNA contributor, detected at so great a distance, were another Jefferson, nevertheless the cohabitation of blacks and whites (which was proscribed by public law in some of the colonies, after some white women began marrying free blacks) shows that the most punctilious elaboration of black-white relations and codes of conduct was a post-Civil War phenomenon rooted in the white-supremacy movement, and symptomatic of a time Jefferson did not know and wouldn't have recognized.
I think Hannah may have dropped a stitch in American history. I think 620,000 dead in a power struggle over an article in the Constitution qualifies as "extreme".
There was a book that came out not too long ago arguing a case somewhat to that effect. I haven't obtained a copy but I read some of the reviews, which contain the gist of its author's argument. It's called Disowning Slavery by Joanne Melish and essentially argues that, despite having a 150 year history of brutal slavery of their own, the yankees - after they abolished it through indirect non-moralistic means - essentially swept it under the rug for their own territories. After literally "disowning" their own slavery, they assumed a moral superiority for themselves. She apparently argues that the yankees also began to resent the south for the fact that blacks lived among them. They could never bring themselves to admit that those blacks were the descendants of slaves that their own ancestors had brought to Massachusetts, so instead they blamed it all on the south (which through slavery induced the slaves to flee up north) and went about trying to wall off blacks from their own borders. The result? There was essentially a statutory wall called the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi that banned blacks from crossing or living in any state to the north.
She was probably too busy sleeping with Heidegger when they were teaching that part. It's also testament to why junk 20th century philosophers are of little relevance to any quest for the truth: there's hardly a single one of em who's worth his or her weight in spit and it shows.
Many a past Southern writer has said just that, and some have tried to revive that interpretation, but it's quite tired and tendentious. If you want to go that way, you might consider that the real change came in Southern attitudes, from shame about slavery to defense and celebration of it.
One problem is that "cause" is not a simple term. What people mean by "cause" can vary. One could start with Aristotle's four causes -- formal, material, efficient, and final -- and adapt the terminology to history. Slavery was undoubtedly the biggest difference between North and South, and the deep fissure that made war possible. Just why slavery flourished in some places and died out in others, and just why war came when and in the way that it did are the results of other factors or "causes."
Jefferson's impulsiveness shows in his reaction to the French Revolution, and in his later militancy about sectional questions. But one could argue that Jefferson's impulsiveness or extremism were a characteristic of his time, rather than of his personality: in the 1770s and again in the 1790s a passionate, "paranoic" approach to politics was the exception rather than the rule. Like many of his followers, critics and enemies, Jefferson was marked by the political style of particularly tumultuous and antagonistic times.
For Jefferson personally, though, you might take a look at Conor Cruise O'Brien's article at TheAtlantic.com. O'Brien goes too far and few would follow him all the way to his own radical conclusion, but he has picked up on an ideological recklessness and extremism in Jefferson that was long ignored. Jefferson was long a hero to both right and left, but lately both sides can find things to reproach in him, and that's bound to affect his reputation.
Some of Jefferson's rhetoric -- talk of the tree of liberty needing to be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, or the necessity of a revolution every twenty years, or of the French Revolution having been worth it if only one man and one woman being left in every country to replentish the earth -- may strike one as standard late eighteenth century political rhetoric. But if one isn't used to it or immunized by exposure to it and one reads such phrases literally, they can be quite horrifying and excessive.
Maybe it's unfair to Jefferson, but the scandals in the Jefferson and Randolph families do make one consider him as more erratic than perhaps he actually was himself. Scandals there were in the other founding families: the Adamses, Hamiltons, Custises, and of course, the Franklins, but not murder. The Ann Randolph story, and the murders committed by Jefferson's nephews may color one's view of Jefferson's world.
Why is it "tired" -- because someone raised it a long time ago? Or are people up North just tired of hearing it?
And I'm not sure why you would consider the argument tendentious, unless it had no force. Having experienced Yankee moral arrogance directed at me personally as a Hoosier expatriate who acquired a little bit of a Southern accent during my dad's Air Force tours in the South, and knowing while I listened to the spew how slight was the authority on which it was offered by people so sure of themselves and of me, I can assure you that the argument is not an airweight canard.
If you want to go that way, you might consider that the real change came in Southern attitudes, from shame about slavery to defense and celebration of it.
Why would subsequent changes in Southern attitudes toward slavery nullify a posteriori an observation that Southerners had previously made about Yankees?
You are whacked out.
You should also notice that Jefferson spent the war safe in Montechello, rather than offering to participate in the watering as Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Marshall, Monroe and most others did. His actions never quite lived up to his words.
The hamiltonian philosophy ignores many of those same principles. Why do you defend them?
Jefferson opposed ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton argued in favor of it.
I am not attacking Jefferson. I am talking to people in the here and now who treat Jefferson as some sort of biblical profit while treating Hamilton as some sort of biblical Satan. The truth is that Jefferson at that point was not a realist --- he was a dreamer who would have allowed the nation to fall apart rather than admit that his dreams were impractical in the real world.
And especially the notion that Washington, Madison, et. all conspired to keep Jefferson away from the Constitutional convention. That is complete nonsense. The fact is that the Constitution was not created as some sort of profound statement of political philosophy. It was nothing of the sort. It was written by very practical men to establish a practical form of government to keep this nation from falling apart, which it was rapidly doing in 1787. Jefferson would have had very little to add to that discussion since he was a dreamer, not a doer.
Jefferson opposed ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton argued in favor of it. I am not attacking Jefferson. I am talking to people in the here and now who treat Jefferson as some sort of biblical profit while treating Hamilton as some sort of biblical Satan.
No one here is doing either.. You're hyping the issue.
The truth is that Jefferson at that point was not a realist --- he was a dreamer who would have allowed the nation to fall apart rather than admit that his dreams were impractical in the real world. And especially the notion that Washington, Madison, et. all conspired to keep Jefferson away from the Constitutional convention. That is complete nonsense.
More hype.. Who's said there was a such a conspiracy?
The fact is that the Constitution was not created as some sort of profound statement of political philosophy. It was nothing of the sort. It was written by very practical men to establish a practical form of government to keep this nation from falling apart, which it was rapidly doing in 1787.
It was "falling apart" as the founders created its greatest document? -- The rational mind boggles.
Jefferson would have had very little to add to that discussion since he was a dreamer, not a doer.
You failed to even address my question in your zeal to bash Jefferson.. Odd political stance..
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