[Who is John Galt?]

Hamilton and Washington took steps to ensure that the country would survive its early years.

Would you care to comment on Mr. Hamilton’s plan of government, presented at the constitutional convention? I’ve quoted an excerpt of John Taylor’s analysis in that regard, in Post #77. Would establishing a government modeled on that of the British, which had just been thrown off, have ensured "that the country would survive its early years?"

Lincoln had been a Whig and thus in some ways a decendant of Hamilton...

Congratulations.

...(A) view of how planter elites systematically suppressed the liberties of those over whom they ruled [gets left out of Di Lorenzo's skewed picture].

“Planter elites?” Are you referring to the same Mr. Washington who “took steps to ensure that the country would survive its early years?”

;>)

[x]

The creation of the Constitution required that a variety of different plans and sketches be offered and compared with each other. Given that the British government had more or less served as a model for all American state governments, it was inevitable that one plan would follow the British example more closely. And it was all the more inevitable that someone would propose a strong government plan after the chaos of the Articles of Confederation.

The question was how Hamilton behaved when he was in the government and in positions of responsibility. On the whole he performed admirably, taking steps to put the country's financial house in order and building a sound basis for future development.

Politics in the early days of the Republic required the balancing of centralizing and decentralizing tendencies. A statesman would recognize this. An ideologue does not. Jefferson was a statesman in office and an ideologue in opposition and retirement.

The model presented by so many here of libertarian Jeffersonians and statist Hamiltonians does ignore the repression exercised by slaveholders. To be sure, such slaveowners could be Federalists or Jeffersonians, Whigs or Democrats, but here, as in the past, the tendency has been to link Jeffersonianism with the South, with agrarianism and in the end -- rightly or wrongly -- with secession and the Confederacy. Make these associations and one saddles the Democrats with some unsavory baggage, of the sort that the party in fact became weighed down with as time went on. And it does call the libertarian Jeffersonian vs. statist Hamiltonian scheme into question.

What also gets left out of Metcalf's and Di Lorenzo's picture is an understanding of just why Lincoln found Clay's ideas so captivating. It wasn't that he wanted a larger government for its own sake or to oppress people. Rather, he wanted a system that would open the doors of opportunity to effort and talent and free people from drudgery and subservience. He saw how economic development had helped him and this way and wished the same for others. This may or may not have been a good idea, and Lincoln may or may not have found good methods to implement it. But his reasons do deserve to be mentioned and taken more seriously. The ways in which planter societies oppressed and Lincoln's plan liberated ordinary people shouldn't be glossed over.

Doubtless, agrarian societies do have charms amidst the hardships, but libertarians and capitalists fail to recognize their own fathers when they attack men like Hamilton, Clay and Lincoln. For better or for worse, it was men of this stripe who created commercial, industrial, capitalist America. Jeffersonians couldn't have done it. And Jefferson himself would be appalled not just at the size of our government, but also at the results of economic development.