Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute of Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

Remembering Alexander Hamilton, Perhaps the Most Important Figure in American History Who Never Attained the Presidency

In recent days, despite the virtual abandonment of the teaching of American history in our schools, there has been renewed interest in the colonial period and in the Founding Fathers and their political philosophy.

This has manifested itself in such best-selling books as David McCullough’s John Adams, Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson.

An important contribution to this growing body of literature is Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, which brings to life the man who was a principal designer of the federal government, the catalyst for the emergence of the two-party system, and the object of both idolatry and loathing on the part of his peers. Hamilton was perhaps the most important figure in American history who never attained the presidency, but he had a more lasting impact than many who did.

An illegitimate, largely self-taught orphan from the Caribbean, Hamilton rose to become George Washington’s aide-de camp, a battlefield hero, a member of the Constitutional Convention, the leading author of the Federalist Papers, and head of the Federalist Party. As the first treasury secretary, he forged America’s tax and budget systems, Customs Service, Coast Guard and central bank.

Chernow notes that:

Few figures in American history have aroused such visceral love or loathing as Alexander Hamilton. To this day, he seems trapped in a crude historical cartoon that pits “Jeffersonian democracy” against “Hamiltonian aristocracy.” For Jefferson and his followers, wedded to their vision of an agrarian Eden, Hamilton was the American Mephistopheles, the proponent of such devilish contrivances as banks, factories, and stock exchanges. They demonized him as a slavish pawn of the British crown, a closet monarchist, a Machiavellian intriguer, a would-be Caesar. . . . Hamilton’s powerful vision of American nationalism, with states subordinate to a strong central government and led by a vigorous executive branch, aroused fears of a reversion to a royal British ways. His seeming solicitude for the rich caused critics to portray him as a snobbish tool of plutocrats, who was contemptuous of the masses. Hamilton’s unswerving faith in a professional military converted him into a potential despot . . .

Hamilton was at once a thinker and a doer, a theoretician and a strong executive. He and James Madison were the prime movers behind the summoning of the Constitutional Convention and the chief authors of the Federalist Papers, which Hamilton supervised. In Chernow’s view.

He had a pragmatic mind that minted comprehensive programs. In contriving the smoothly running machinery of a modern nation-state—including a budget system, a funded debt, a tax system, a central bank, a customs service, and a coast guard—and justifying them in some of America’s most influential state papers, he set a high-water mark for administrative competence that has never been equaled. If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft. No other Founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America’s future political, military and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together.

Hamilton, a careful reader of the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, quoted his view that in framing a government “every man ought to be supposed a knave and to have no other end in all his actions but private interests.” The task of government, he believed, was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good. In starting to outline the contours of his own vision of government, Hamilton was spurred by Hume’s dark vision of human nature that corresponded to his own. From the First Philippic of Demosthenes, he plucked a passage that summed up his conception of a leader as someone who would not pander to popular whims. “As a general marches at the head of his troops,” so should wise politicians “march at the head of affairs, insomuch that they ought not to wait the event to know what measures to take, but the measures which they have taken out to produce the event.”

Hamilton was concerned about the feebleness of the Articles of Confederation, which left the colonies powerless against any potential enemies. He thought that the sovereignty of the states enfeebled the union. “The fundamental defect is a want of power in Congress,” he declared. He favored granting Congress supreme power in war, peace, trade, finance and foreign affairs, Instead of bickering congressional boards, he wanted strong executives and endorsed single ministers for war, foreign affairs, finance, and the navy.

As soon as he left Washington’s staff, Hamilton began to convert his private opinions into closely reasoned newspaper editorials. In July and August 1781, he published four essays in The New York Packet entitled “The Continentalist.” These were a precursor to The Federalist Papers. He introduced a critical theme: that the dynamics of revolutions differed from those of peacetime governance; the postwar world had to be infused with a new spirit, respectful of authority, or anarchy would reign:

An extreme jealousy of power is the attendant of all popular revolutions and has seldom been without its evils. It is to this source that we are to trace many of the fatal mistakes which have so deeply endangered the common cause, particularly that defect which will be the object of these remarks, a want of power in Congress.

Where revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. “As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.

Notwithstanding his preference for a strong president, Hamilton applauded many checks on presidential power. To protect the country from a president corrupted by foreign ministries, Hamilton approved the provision requiring presidents to obtain two-thirds approval of the Senate to enact treaties. In a similar vein, he approved the presidential power to appoint ambassadors and Supreme Court judges, subject to Senate confirmation, which would check “a spirit of favoritism in the President.” In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton was as quick to applaud checks on powers as those powers themselves, as he continued his lifelong effort to balance freedom and order.

In some areas, Hamilton appears decidedly shortsighted. Many foes of the Constitution were demanding a bill of rights as a precondition for ratification.

In Federalist 84, he said that this would be superfluous and even potentially hazardous:

For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?

He also thought the Constitution had already guaranteed many rights ranging from habeas corpus to trial by jury. Chernow declares that

Where Hamilton often seems oracular in the Federalist, he was frightfully wide of the mark when it came to a bill of rights, one of his real failures of vision.

Now, as we have seen government power grow dramatically, it is the Bill of Rights which continues to protect basic freedoms.

Hamilton disagreed strongly with Jefferson and other Republicans in their view of the French Revolution. In November, 1788, Jefferson wrote to Washington of a France buoyant with hope:

The nation has been awakened by our revolution, they feel their strength, they are enlightened, their lights are spreading, and they will not be retrograde.

 

He told James Madison that within two or three years France would have “a tolerably free constitution” without “having cost them a drop of blood.”

Chernow writes that

As late as March 15, 1789, Jefferson seemed oblivious of the violent emotions churning in the breasts of the French populace. . . . By this point, desperate French peasants were looting grain wagons. The following month, the mere rumor that a wallpaper manufacturer was about to slash wages led workers to encircle his house shouting, “Death to the rich, death to the aristocrats.” The subsequent crackdown on protestors left dozens, perhaps hundreds, dead. It was richly paradoxical that Jefferson . . . long an eyewitness to French politics, was blind to the murderous drift of events while Hamilton, who never set foot in Europe, was much more clear-sighted about the French Revolution.

Hamilton wrote to Lafayette:

I dread the reveries of your philosophic politicians who appear in the moment to have great influence and who being mere speculatists may aim at more refinement than suits either with human nature or the composition of your nation.

 

Jefferson was to strike Hamilton as just such a “philosophic politician,” ignorant of human nature. He later explained to a political associate that Jefferson in Paris

. . . drank deeply of the French philosophy in religion, in science, in politics. He came from France in the moment of a fermentation which he had a share in exciting in the passions and feelings of which he shared both from temperament and situation.

 

Hamilton’s promotion of a central bank and support for manufacturing and a forward-looking economy to rival that of Europe put him at odds with Jefferson, Madison and the southern planters. Chernow writes that,

As members of the Virginia plantation world, Jefferson and Madison had a nearly visceral contempt for market values and tended to denigrate commerce as grubby, parasitic and degrading. Like landed aristocrats throughout history, they betrayed a snobbish disdain for commerce and financial speculation. Jefferson perpetuated a fantasy of America as an agrarian paradise with limited household manufacturing. He favored the placid, unchanging rhythms of rural life, not the unruly urban dynamic articulated by Hamilton. . . . Strangely enough, for a large slaveholder, he thought that agriculture was egalitarian while manufacturing would produce a class-conscious society.

 

Chernow places the differences between Hamilton and Jefferson in this perspective:

Where Hamilton looked at the world through a dark filter and had a better sense of human limitations, Jefferson viewed the world through a rose-colored prism and had a better sense of human potentialities. Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors. A strange blend of dreamy idealist and manipulative politician, Jefferson was a virtuoso of the sunny phrases and hopeful themes that became staples of American politics. He continually paid homage to the wisdom of the masses. . . . To Jefferson we owe the self-congratulatory language of Fourth of July oratory, the evangelical condition that America serves as a beacon to all humanity. Jefferson told John Dickinson, “Our revolution and its consequences will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.” At least on paper, Jefferson possessed a more all-embracing view of democracy than Hamilton, who was always frightened by a sense of the fickle and fallible nature of the masses.

 

As we have seen throughout our history, even those who express the most suspicion of government power change dramatically once they find that power in heir own hands.

Chernow notes that,

Hamilton had intuited rightly that Jefferson, once in office, would be reluctant to reject executive powers he had deplored in opposition. . . . The Virginian no longer had the luxury of being in opposition and could not denounce every assertion of executive power as a rank betrayal of the Revolution. A group of purists calling themselves Old Republicans protested that the turncoat Jefferson had violated his former principles by refusing to dismantle Hamilton’s system, including the national bank. . . . In April, 1803, President Jefferson reached the zenith of his popularity with the Louisiana Purchase. For a mere pittance of 15 million dollars, the U.S. acquired 828,000 square miles between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, doubling American territory. Hamilton was ruefully amused that Jefferson, the strict constructionist, committed a breathtaking act of executive power that far exceeded anything contemplated in the Constitution. The land purchase dwarfed Hamilton’s central bank and other measures once so hotly denounced by the man who was now president. . . . To justify his audacity, the president invoked the doctrine of implied powers first articulated and refined by Hamilton.

 

Today’s free market economy, Chernow argues, owes a great debt to Alexander Hamilton:

He did not create America’s market economy so much as foster the cultural and legal setting in which it flourished. A capitalist society requires certain preconditions. Among other things, it must establish a rule of law through enforceable contracts; respect private property; create a trustworthy bureaucracy to arbitrate contracts; and offer patents and other protections to promote invention. The abysmal failure of the Articles of Confederation to provide such an atmosphere was one of Hamilton’s principal motives for promoting the Constitution.

 

Chernow portrays the Founding Fathers—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and others—as an extraordinary group of men, truly representing a golden age in our history. The creation of the new American government clearly required both Republicans and Federalists, both a Jefferson and a Hamilton, both those jealous of individual freedom and those concerned that such freedom could only exist and be maintained with an orderly society. Finally, Alexander Hamilton has been given his proper place in this pantheon of Founding Fathers. *

 “Totalitarianism spells simplification: an enormous reduction in the variety of aims, motives, interests, human types, and above all, in the categories and units of power.” –Eric Hoffer