Please list for me:
a) the "big bureaucracy" that Alexander Hamilton advocated and established;
b) the steps Jefferson took to dismantle this infrastructure during his tenure as President;
and c) the role Lincoln played in resurrecting the Hamiltonian Leviathan.
And spare me the rest of that BS about Hamilton favoring "the rich" and the rest of that class warfare rhetoric. BTW, Jefferson was "rich." Har!
The centralizers won. Read the constitution. The Federal government is supposed to do very little. One of the few things it's supposed to do, protect the borders it doesn't do.
Allow me to ‘start the ball rolling,’ with a few observations courtesy of John Taylor of Caroline:
'On the same day [June 18, at the Philadelphia convention], Colonel Hamilton read a plan of government, containing, among others, the following proposals: "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, and the other the senate," excluding the word Congress, "with power to pass all laws whatsoever, subject to the negative hereafter mentioned. The senate to consist of persons elected to serve during good behaviour. The supreme executive authority of the United States to be vested in a governor, to be elected to serve during good behaviour. 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 the power of pardoning all offences, except treason, which he shall not pardon without the approbation of the senate. The senate to have the sole power of declaring war. 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."
'It is needless to waste time in proving, that this project comprised a national government, nearly conforming to that of England...
'By Colonel Hamilton's project, the states were fairly and openly to be restored to the rank of provinces, and to be made as dependent upon a supreme national government, as they had been upon a supreme British government. Their governors were to be appointed by the national government, and invested with a negative upon all state laws; and all their laws, contrary to the laws of the supreme government, were to be void. The frankness of this undisguised proposition was honourable, and illustrates the character of an attempt to obtain a power for the federal government, substantially the same, not by plain and candid language, like Colonel Hamilton's, but by equivocal and abstruse inferences from language as plain, used with the intention of excluding his plan of government entirely. A power in the supreme federal court to declare all state laws and judgments void, which that court may deem contrary to the articles of the union, or to the laws of Congress; and also to establish every power, which Congress may infer from those delegated; comes fully up to the essential principle of Colonel Hamilton's plan; except that the court will both virtually, and directly, control the legislative, executive, and judicial state departments, by a supremacy exactly the same with that exercised by the British king and his council over the same provincial departments.'
John Taylor of Caroline, New Views of the Constitution of the United States, 1823
(italics in the original)
Mr. Hamilton’s plan did indeed ‘nearly conform to the government of England.’ Please note Mr. Hamilton’s specific language: “The supreme legislative power of the United States of America to be vested in two distinct bodies of men...with power to pass all laws whatsoever...” Quite frankly, I could scarcely believe Mr. Hamilton dared use the phrase – “pass all laws whatsoever.” The words enjoyed a certain notoriety:
But why should we enumerate our injuries in detail? By one statute it is declared, that parliament can "of right make laws to bind us in all cases whatsoever." What is to defend us against so enormous, so unlimited a power?
Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of taking up Arms, July 1775
In other words, Mr. Hamilton was proposing to reinstate a government with some of the same characteristics which had just caused the colonists to 'take up arms.' Tell us: would an American government modeled on that of Britain have qualified as a "big bureaucracy?" Fortunately, Mr. Hamilton’s plan for a national (rather than federal) government was rejected by the constitutional convention. But, as John Taylor noted almost two centuries ago, “(a) power in the supreme federal court to declare all state laws and judgments void, which that court may deem contrary to the articles of the union, or to the laws of Congress; and also to establish every power, which Congress may infer from those delegated; comes fully up to the essential principle of Colonel Hamilton's plan” – and that would seem to be a rather accurate description of our current state of affairs. In other words, Mr. Hamilton apparently did ‘advocate’ a "big bureaucracy" – a bureaucracy which seems, in fact, to have been established...
;>)
I have just enough time to ‘throw another log on the fire:’
Unlike many of the figures in the Hamiltonian tradition of American democratic nationalism, Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) needs no introduction...Among his contemporaries, Lincoln was distinguished neither as a thinker nor as a policymaker (such originality is not part of the job description of great politicians). His task as President, as he saw it, was to save the Union and to help his fellow Republicans in the Cabinet and Congress enact the Hamiltonian economic agenda that had been thwarted for decades by states’-rights Southern Democrats. In both tasks, he suceeded.
Lincoln himself contributed to later misunderstandings by his rhetorical appropriation of the words and image of Thomas Jefferson in his antislavery and pro-Union speeches. There was not a single element of the Jeffersonian program – states’ rights, agrarianism, strict construction of the federal constitution – that Lincoln, as a Whig and then as a Republican politician, did not reject with passion. Nevertheless, he realized that if the Republican party was to be more successful than the failed Whigs, it had to recruit Democratic voters in the West and the border South who idolized Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Lincoln’s solution was to turn Jeffersonian rhetoric against Jefferson’s own Southern Democratic political heirs, by a kind of intellectual ju-jitsu. Lincoln’s Jefferson was little more than the author of the Declaration of Independence, which itself was reduced to the phrase “all men are created equal.” Although the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement...had no significant roots at all in Jefferson’s or Locke’s secular natural-rights doctrines, Lincoln pretended that the antislavery movement was a natural development of Jefferson’s Enlightenment belief in human equality. What is more, like a mathematician demonstrating a topological inversion, Lincoln turned the Declaration of Independence, a manifesto of secessionism, into a symbol of Unionism, arguing that the preservation of the Union was necessary to achieve the goal of the Declaration: equality. This was sophistry of the highest order. Thus did Lincoln, one of the most cunning debaters in American history, enlist Jeffersonian rhetoric for Hamiltonian ends ... Lincoln as a great but conventional Hamiltonian nationalist may be a less inspiring figure than the alternate “Lincolns,” but the others are phantoms of the patriotic imagination ... Lincoln should be remembered as the Great Nationalist, the greatest of all of the American statesmen in the Hamiltonian tradition of democratic nationalism. Lincoln more than any other individual saved the Union from disintegration and set it on the road to becoming the dominant military and industrial power of the twentieth century.
Michael Lind, Hamilton’s Republic, 1997
"Lincoln should be remembered as the Great Nationalist, the greatest of all of the American statesmen in the Hamiltonian tradition of democratic nationalism. Lincoln more than any other individual...set [the Union] on the road to becoming the dominant military and industrial power of the twentieth century." And that, my friend, is from one of Mr. Hamilton’s ‘biggest fans’...
;>)