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’...
;>)
... Hamilton's Republic is a hostile gloss on Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson: Schlesinger tried to trace the New Deal to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Michael Lind wants to trace the Great Society to Henry Clay.
...
Does all of this run as smoothly as Lind thinks into modern liberalism -- even a liberalism purged, as Lind would like it to be, of pacifism and multiculturalism? Clearly something changed between the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution and the welfare state. Roughly speaking, Lind's earlier heroes wanted to help employers; FDR wanted to help the unemployed; LBJ wanted to help the unemployable. Alexander Hamilton, who supported taxing the poor to make them work, and who liked factories because they exploited the labor of women and children (sentiments not quoted here) would be puzzled by the progeny Lind has fathered on him.
Lind is also unnecessarily harsh on Hamilton's great rival, Thomas Jefferson. Lind chides the third President for holding fanciful notions of minimal government, unrealistic attitudes on foreign policy, and crackpot views on race. These criticisms are just. But Jefferson and his supporters were also pioneers of the rhetoric of resentment and class hostility, assailing their enemies (Lind's heroes) as tools of bankers and secret monarchists. The same arguments, suitably updated, have served Democrats in the twentieth century (who are also Lind's heroes). It seems ungracious of Lind to disdain the man who furnished FDR with so many useful tropes.
Hamilton and Washington took steps to ensure that the country would survive its early years. Simply taking Hamilton for the Dark Side of the force obscures his very real contributions to the infant nation. The connections between Hamilton and politicians of the 20th Century are as much in Lind's mind as anywhere else. The manichean good vs. evil view of American history is overturned by the discovery of evil even on the good side and vice versa. Many a good citizen in the 1840s and 1850s, confronted with the Democrats' love of militarism, expansionism and slavery opted for the Whigs or Republicans as a libertarian alternative.
Lincoln had been a Whig and thus in some ways a decendant of Hamilton, but what's lost on Lind and Di Lorenzo is the different coloration these ideas had in New York Salons and on the Illinois frontier. What Lind takes for theft or deception is the inevitable and desirable cross-fertilization of political tendencies. The side of Lincoln that promoted opportunity for ordinary people gets left out of Di Lorenzo's skewed picture. As does a view of how planter elites systematically suppressed the liberties of those over whom they ruled.
BTW, in Lind's book, he also tries to connect FDR and LBJ to Hamiltonianism. Am I supposed to react to that? Why not connect him with Hitler, while you're at it?