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."
Strange ideas? You mean like claiming a tax clearly specified in the Constitution was unconstitutional?
The claim was made that the tax could not be uniform, because whiskey was a regional product at the time. The argument won. The tax was repealed.
One could reasonably claim it was an unwise tax or an unfair tax or criticize it on several grounds but there is no way it can be rationally claimed to have been unconstitutional.
You lose, -- it was reasonably claimed unconstitutional on the uniformity grounds emnumerated. The tax was also unwise & unfair..
This statement will likely generate more insults and dancing around the issue rather than deal with what is actually said within the Constitution concerning allowable forms of taxation.
See the 'bold' part of Sec. 8, quoted above, for what is "actually said" ..
Those who hold the W. Pa. insurgents out to be paragons of virtue and defenders of freedom have not done any real research into their backgrounds or motivations. For the most part they would give lowlifes of any era a bad name.
Looks to me that YOU are the one generating "more insults and dancing around the issue rather than deal[ing] with what is actually said within the Constitution"..
Pitiful again, jsuati..
Putting loaded words in my mouth, Ditto? Thought you were bigger than that.
No, I said he had big-government ideas and bad friends. Also that he was a Federalist, which means he didn't want to preserve American liberty as much as the Antifederalists did, who embodied and upheld the ideas and ideals of the American Revolution.
The Federalists were about "the business of America is (my) business". The Antifederalists were about freedom and independence.
Indeed......as much as these Hamiltonian foamers claim to despise the cultural narrowness of the South, when it comes to governance and constitutional law, they transform themselves and become exponents of the Darrell Waltrip "hold muh beer, boy, an' watch this sh!t!" school of driving.
Yeeee, Haaaaa.
My heart bleeds for the patriots (you obviously mean Patriots = Federalists, but I'll overlook the slur on the Antifederalists), but I think your tenderness is misplaced. "Your" faction found that way........by following Lincoln's artillery.
He wasn't "lukewarm", he was ambivalent. On first blush, he detested the idea of a re-electable chief executive, and the excesses of Franklin Roosevelt taught us his wisdom on this point, so we amended the Constitution.
What he actually said was,
There are very good articles in it~ and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland ... would have sufficed to set me against a chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one. And what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life.
-- Letter to Wm. Smith, 1787
Read it in context here.
My own opinion (which tpaine and lentulusgraccus value SO highly) is that had he been within the country he probably would have opposed ratification if he had no hand in creating it.
Slur. You're the limbo poster: how low will you go?
He was very reluctant to work with superior intellects and support what they produced unless he led the effort.
Lower.
the convention was not called to write a new constitution so the Master's of the Universe could not have even known that J should be gotten out of the way.
Oh, yeah? If it wasn't called to write a new constitution, how come Hamilton showed up with one? "Oh, and by the way, I just happen to have here.............a whole new scheme of government (and by the way my pals in New York will get rich off their government bonds)......"
There you go, slurring again.....this time it's the Anglo-Celts, the Scots-Irish, those troublesome people who settled the Southwest, taught the Indians who was the new apex predator of the continent, and then fought both Santa Anna and Abraham Lincoln for the same basic reason: freedom.
Imagine if you will that Bill Clinton, or John Kerry or George McGovern or Al Gore had said that the Russian or Chinese Revolution was justified if only one man and one woman were left in each country to carry on, or that the tree of democracy had to be watered once in every generation with the blood of reactionaries and progressives. Wouldn't you find him provocative and unreliable? Jefferson's rhetoric was typical of the revolutionary era, but it did make him look reckless and untrustworthy in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. In office, Jefferson tended to behave more responsibly, but so many of his fans admire precisely his worst traits and the most unrealistic parts of his philosophy.
Conservatives should naturally oppose tyranny, but should also recognize the dangers in anarchy, lawlessness, civil violence and disorder. I don't say that the two dangers were equally bad or that one should try to remain equally distant between the two, but both were and are dangerous. Coercive utopianism is a great danger as well, but there's something to be said for skepticism about other naive, unrealistic, or impracticable ideas. Was Jefferson an anarchist or a promoter of lawlessness? No, but his contemporaries weren't wrong in detecting such tendencies in his thinking. It would be a mistake to argue that radical state's rights theories or anti-government thinking were especially conservative, let alone the heart or essence of conservatism (and it would also be wrong to argue that a thoroughgoing state's rights view is particularly libertarian).
Any American political philosophy and any American conservative philosophy is going to have to give Jefferson his due, and accord him a place of honor. But those who want to drink Jefferson whole, down to the dregs don't do him or American conservatism or the country a service (I'd say something similar about Hamilton -- a great man, but one who's ideas shouldn't be taken whole and undiluted, either). Fully-fledged, uncompromising radical republicanism of Jefferson's or Robespierre's sort doesn't work, and those who wish to impose it often cause much unnecessary suffering. Forrest McDonald makes an interesting contribution to the study of Hamilton's conservatism and Jefferson's radicalism.
Twentieth century conservatives naturally opposed the statist aspirations of socialists. Individual freedom versus collectivism was the great issue of the day. After the New Deal and World War II, it was natural to see in Jefferson an ally against big government (though FDR was a great admirer of Jefferson himself). But some on the right took this too far and ended up at something close to anarchism. Murray Rothbard is a good -- or bad -- example of this.
Anarchy doesn't provide a stable basis for liberty, though. Those who strove to produce viable and lasting institutions for a free society deserve more respect than they got from Rothbard and his followers. Rockwellites oppose government or "the state" on principle. But some public institutions are necessary for self-defense, for the administration of justice, and the maintenance of public order. Washington and Hamilton understood this as a mandate to produce a stable political order.
Jefferson the ideologue wanted to pare away the central government to the point where such functions might be impaired. He encouraged a rebellious and insurrectionary state of mind that opposed the aspirations of other founders towards stability and continuity. Jefferson the practical politician was more constructive, but one can't ignore his radical side.
There was also some confusion in the minds of those mid-Twentieth century conservatives who were so focused on the federal threat, that they came to see the state governments as forever the allies of liberty. But carry theories of state's rights and state sovereignty too far, and you do end up with tyranny. The founders recognized this and were looking to a federal system to counter local oligarchies.
The task now is to reestablish some limits on federal power -- particularly the power of the courts -- but it would only be fair to recognize the great achievement of building a union and nation and creating a great space for free action. Rothbard and Rockwell tell people who would be content with a federal government within the limits that existed before Johnson, or Roosevelt or Wilson that they have to favor secession or a return to the Articles of Confederation to be truly free, and that's nonsense.
The problem with a lot of the arguments that Jefferson or Roosevelt or Kennedy would be a conservative today is precisely the "radical chic" element in the thought and lives of such men. After a while questions about what so and so would do if he were alive today get pretty mind-boggling, because we obviously can't simply pick someone up out of their own era and put them down today.
Dropped into today's world, JFK or FDR might find some parts of the Democratic platform horrible or frightening and others congenial and praiseworthy. Many members of elite families or graduates of elite schools and universities do gravitate towards the left, like today's Kennedys and Roosevelts. To say that a JFK or FDR or Jefferson would be a conservative today if they had any character, is to beg the question, since it's precisely their character that's at issue.
What happens in history is that one side wins and the other option falls away into oblivion. Looking back, people don't always see what that lost alternative was. Some romanticize it and assume that it was inherently better than the actual result. But you can see some of those lost alternatives if you look at other countries.
The very decentralized or state's rights system of the Articles of Confederation may look attractive now, but the reality was less appealing. When we see other countries that can't defend themselves or pay their debts or where trade and mobility are hampered by poor transportation or a defective financial system, or internal conflicts, we can get an inkling of what might have happened here.
Of course, by discussing what I thought wrong with O'Brien's attack on Jefferson, I wasn't assigning his views to you, but he does restate the Hamiltonian case, in extremely amped-up terms, and so I was replying to that. Of course, you'll be selective about which of O'Brien's statements you agree with.
Thanks for the article link to further discussion.
But it's important to honestly consider some of the charges and evidence O'Brien provides. There's plenty of material in his article to support a conservative case against Jefferson as too radical, too unrealistic, and too reckless with his tongue.
Well, I thought you would, as I say. And some of his material is simply quotation. My problem with his exposition is that he indulges in a fallacy of wrong emphasis -- a perspective problem, which he, for the sake of polemic, distorts.
O'Brien mines the vein of goodies that awaits polemicists who know how to lift an argument, or for that matter a person, out of context. Consider his, and our friend Ditto's, recrimination against Jefferson that he did not fight in the infantry against the British, using Washington's, Hamilton's, and Monroe's creditable war service as a litmus test with which a posteriori to attack Jefferson -- Ditto sinks to calling him a coward. Well, how many of the signatories of the Declaration actually bore arms, in the event? How many served as commissaries and ship-chandlers instead, or postmasters, or propagandists, or intelligencers, or committeemen, or illicit diplomats, or bursars, or messengers? Even small armies must grow tails. How many patriots sat in the Congress instead of marching with Marion and Washington? The attack is indecent, because it is tendentious, and doesn't consider the revolutionary careers of others similarly situated. All the signatories to the Declaration -- and if you credit O'Brien's further canard, their "draftsman" as well -- braved the wrath of an insulted King, against whose laws and colors they worked high treason. Why not call Jefferson a traitor as well? The shoe fits!
Well, the point of Conor Cruise O'Brien's attack is to make him look "reckless and untrustworthy" in our eyes, isn't it? But a couple of rectifying distinctions need to be made.
One, O'Brien in his tirade implicitly judges and condemns Jefferson by modern lights, which is intrinsically unfair, as has been pointed out repeatedly in discussions of historical characters in other threads. We should be used to this liberal way of lying by now, but I guess the lesson hasn't taken yet.
Jefferson's remarks resonate with O'Brien's dark purposes precisely because we possess more than 200 years of retrospective advantage over Jefferson in understanding the further consequences of various kinds of romantic extremism. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration, the Lisbon earthquake which, we are told, is the watershed event from which romanticism and totalism later flowed, was still a very recent memory. The Jacobin Terror, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution and the Third Reich all lay in the future.
The Terror didn't begin until 1793, and O'Brien tries to deny Jefferson credit, even as he recognizes that he, too, backed away from the Jacobins as their wantonnessness with the guillotine became manifest. Liberals like O'Brien still refuse to get it, that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were blackhearted traitors, Izzy Stone a tool, and Lincoln Steffens an idiot, but they are ready to jump all over Jefferson for taking a whole year -- two years? three? -- to change his mind about the French Radicals he had known and had high hopes for.
Your analogy suffers the further problem that all of the men you name have had every reason, as I said about Steffens and Stone, to apprehend the true nature of Communist totalitarianism (after all, they presumably had read Orwell and Hannah Arendt -- pace our friend GOPcapitalist's criticism of her intellectual rigor and her sex life), and to draw the appropriate lessons about what the October Revolution really stood for, which wasn't liberty.
As for his "tree of liberty" remark, I take it as the libertarian's equivalent of qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum. Only a people ready to go to war at the drop of a hat to defend their liberty -- as the Confederates did (with more virtue than wisdom) -- will be able to preserve it, or to deserve it.
There is also a polemical confusion of terms at work here, that O'Brien works to his own purposes as well, and I notice that you follow him:
Conservatives should naturally oppose tyranny, but should also recognize the dangers in anarchy, lawlessness, civil violence and disorder.
Modern conservatives are defenders, by definition, of the old American conceptions of independence and liberty. That's what Barry Goldwater stood for, and he and Ronald Reagan -- and Bill Buckley -- have defined, in public life, what it is to be a conservative. Stated quite simply, in considering every public policy and institution, they all evinced a bias for individual liberty.
Emmett Tyrrell once remarked that conservatism is more a disposition than an ideology, which is another conversation. The principles on which Tyrrell, Buckley, and others have settled are, however, recognizably Jeffersonian and nineteenth-century liberal.
Conor Cruise O'Brien consistently refers to Edmund Burke as the conservative, and Jefferson as a radical. But Jefferson is the person who defined our liberty interest, and Hamilton, as an admirer of Burkean "conservatism", was actually prerevolutionary in his conception of liberty. I think Hamilton was a coffee-house libertarian only, quite content in practice to dream up a Leviathan government to replace the one we'd overthrown by revolutionary violence. By extension, then, Hamilton has to be seen as a reactionary against the Revolution who would import what he saw as the benefits of Hobbesianism (it's all good anyway, if you're near the top of society) to "moderate" the liberty of the morlocks and make them more "productive", if I may borrow a couple of modern terms. Bluntly put, Hamilton took an employer's point of view, and as such was much more a taskmaster, than an author of personal liberty.
Coercive utopianism is a great danger as well, but there's something to be said for skepticism about other naive, unrealistic, or impracticable ideas.
We know that, as I pointed out above. Jefferson didn't have the same information we do, and so it's unfair to expect him to have been, a priori, as skeptical of the Jacobins as would have been necessary correctly to anticipate their excesses, and as condemnatory as we are now.
Was Jefferson an anarchist or a promoter of lawlessness? No, but his contemporaries weren't wrong in detecting such tendencies in his thinking.
His contemporaries who criticized him were Federalists, who as Jackson Turner Main (whom I've quoted in other threads) shows in his appraisal of the Antifederalists and the ratification struggle, were mostly men of business, property, and the professions -- taskmasters, in other words, who generously proposed to drive the public agenda for us, like the Mayan and Egyptian priests of yore. The sort of people to whom Dickens once attributed the sentiment, "You must scramble up, while simultaneously scrunching down." We should always beware these people, in both private and public, and disbelieve their murmuring against a man who wrote such words as Jefferson gave us as the touchstone of our national destiny.
It would be a mistake to argue that radical state's rights theories or anti-government thinking were especially conservative, let alone the heart or essence of conservatism (and it would also be wrong to argue that a thoroughgoing state's rights view is particularly libertarian).
We disagree, then.
So which is it, x? In your last post to me, you denied that Jeffersonian, nineteenth-century liberalism and twentieth-century conservatism were equivalent, but now you identify (correctly) conservatives -- but not Rothbard? -- with anti-statism.
You seem to be contradicting yourself.
The Late and Postclassic Mayan common folk would disagree, who rose against their punk tough-guy priests, knocked them over the head, and abandoned the priests' elaborate cities to retreat into the Yucatec forest, there to live quietly and happily until they were found there, still enjoying life without a priestly slavedriver-class, by the Spanish.
The leaders of the Confederacy were correct, philosophically, on the issue of succession, and quoted the Framers at length to prove their point. Of course, there is no more solid way to lose a political debate than to lose a war over the precise issue. So, after Lee handed Grant his sword at Appomatox Courthouse, no state had any right to leave the union.
Congressman Billybob
The long Revolution could not have been prosecuted, nor could American society have functions at all, without the Committees (even thouogh they were essentially dignified vigilantes).
John / Billybob
John / Billybob
Yeeee, Haaaaa.
LOL!
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