Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Hamilton churned out twenty-one straight essays in a two-month period.

"why do you write like you're running out of time?"

published six in one spectacular week when writing on taxation.

His collected papers are so stupefying in length that it is hard to believe that one man created the...

his account books are crammed with purchases for thousands of quills, parchments, penknives, slate pencil...

To understand Hamilton’s productivity, it is important to note that virtually all of his important work was journalism,

He never wrote as a solitary philosopher for the ages.

He had an incomparable capacity for work and a metabolism that thrived on conflict.

One who knew his habits of study said of him that when he had a serious object to accomplish, his practice was to reflect on it previously. And when he had gone through this labor, he retired to sleep, without regard to the hour of the night, and, having slept six or seven hours, he rose and having taken strong coffee, seated himself at his table, where he would remain six, seven, or eight hours. And the product of his rapid pen required little correction for the press.

Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them.

Hamilton, thirty-two, the peacock, wearing bright colors and chattering gaily, and Madison, thirty-six, the crow in habitual black with a quiet, more reflective manner.

The two shared a grim vision of the human condition, even if Hamilton’s had the blacker tinge.

“The ability of a country to pay taxes must always be proportioned, in a great degree, to the quantity of money in circulation and to the celerity [what economists now call velocity] with which it circulates.”

At moments, it seems clear that while scribbling The Federalist, Hamilton was daydreaming about becoming treasury secretary.

Those who criticize Hamilton for having engaged in a propaganda exercise in The Federalist must reckon with the tremendous continuity that connects the Federalist essays to both his earlier and later writings.

In the next essay, he defended the small, elite Senate against charges that it would grow into “a tyrannical aristocracy”

Madison

Throughout his career, he showed special solicitude for an independent judiciary, which he thought the most important guardian of minority rights but also the weakest of the three branches of government: “It commands neither the press nor the sword. It has scarcely any patronage.”

The power of the judiciary has continuously increased. Its too powerful today.

By the year 2000, it had been quoted no fewer than 291 times in Supreme Court opinions, with the frequency of citations rising with the years.

Hamilton believed that revolutions ended in tyranny because they glorified revolution as a permanent state of mind. A spirit of compromise and a concern with order were needed to balance the quest for liberty.

Patrick Henry, the leading antifederalist, warned delegates who supported the Constitution, “They’ll free your niggers.”108 George Washington noted the hypocrisy of the many slaveholding antifederalists: “It is a little strange that the men of large property in the South should be more afraid that the Constitution will produce an aristocracy or a monarchy than the genuine, democratical people of the East.”

So exuberant was the lionization of Alexander Hamilton that admirers wanted to rechristen the city “Hamiltoniana.”

Hamilton had never courted the masses, and never again was he to enjoy their favor to this extent.

That Hamilton could be so sensitive to criticisms of himself and so insensitive to the effect his words had on others was a central mystery of his psyche.

The political genius of Aaron Burr was to lie in figuring out endless ways to profit from the partisan wrangling in his home state. For three years, he had engaged in little political activity. Now his dormant ambition was beginning to awaken.

This tallies with one observer’s comment that Washington seldom laughed and that even when encircled by young belles his countenance “never softened nor changed its habitual gravity.”

In May, when a Senate committee took up the explosive issue of titles, Adams suggested that Washington be addressed as “His Highness, the President of the United States of America and Protector of their Liberties.”34 Adams provided fodder for contemporary wags and was promptly dubbed “His Rotundity” or the “Duke of Braintree.”

Washington was taciturn, once advising his adopted grandson, “It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”36 Such a circumspect president formed a striking contrast with the loquacious Hamilton.

Remarkable how Washington rarely needed to defend himself because others always rushed to his defence.

Taken aback, Washington replied, “I always knew Colonel Hamilton to be a man of superior talents, but never supposed that he had any knowledge of finance.” “He knows everything, sir,” Morris replied. “To a mind like his nothing comes amiss.”

with him every consideration of a private nature.”68 A man of irreproachable integrity, Hamilton severed all outside sources of income while in office, something that neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Madison dared to do.

If Washington lacked the first-rate intellect of Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Adams, he was gifted with superb judgment. When presented with options, he almost invariably chose the right one. Never a pliant tool in Hamilton’s hands, as critics alleged, he often overrode his treasury secretary.

Washington’s management style was the antithesis of this. “He consulted much, pondered much, resolved slowly, resolved surely,”

“When [Henry] Knox arrived in New York City and took up his official duties,” notes biographer North Callahan, “he found little to do at first but become acquainted with his one secretary and one clerk, who at that time constituted the entire personnel of the War Department.”

Compare to modern DoD

One New York newspaper joked that anyone hoping to be treasury secretary should “appear in the streets but seldom and then let him take care to look down on the pavement, as if lost in thought profound.”

Unfortunately, Duer’s actions fed unjust scuttlebutt that the new Treasury Department was a sink of corruption. In reality, as soon as he took office, Hamilton established high ethical standards and promulgated a policy that employees could not deal in government securities, setting a critical precedent for America’s civil service.

The one place where Hamilton deviated from official policy was in applauding Britain’s refusal to hand over slaves who had defected during the Revolution. “To have given up these men to their masters, after the assurances of protection held out to them, was impossible,” Hamilton told Beckwith.

Within weeks of his confirmation as treasury secretary, Hamilton had already staked out a position as the administration’s most influential figure on foreign policy.

As with his fifty-one Federalist essays, he put in another sustained bout of solitary, herculean labor. Closeted in his study day after day, he scratched out a forty-thousand-word treatise—a short book—in slightly more than three months, performing all the complex mathematical calculations himself.

Inviolable property rights lay at the heart of the capitalist culture that Hamilton wished to enshrine in America.

The original investors had gotten cash when they wanted it and had shown little faith in the country’s future. Speculators, meanwhile, had hazarded their money and should be rewarded for the risk.

Hamilton’s supporters praised the byzantine brilliance of this program; for his foes, it smacked of impenetrable mumbo jumbo, designed to hoodwink the public.

Lik modern critique of dodd-frank

He feared this statement would be misconstrued as a call for a perpetual public debt—and that is exactly what happened.

Daniel Webster rhapsodized about Hamilton’s report as follows: “The fabled birth of Minerva from the brain of Jove was hardly more sudden or more perfect than the financial system of the United States as it burst forth from the conception of Alexander Hamilton.”

Maclay and other critics were correct that the Hamiltonian system didn’t necessarily reward the just or the virtuous, yet they missed the larger social benefits that accrued to society.

Rush objected not just to public debt but to all debt as harmful to society. “Let us not overvalue public credit,” he warned. “It is to nations what private credit and loan offices are to individuals. It begets debt, extravagance, vice, and bankruptcy. . . . I sicken every time I contemplate the European vices that the Secretary’s gambling report will necessarily introduce into our infant republic.”

And it didn’t seem to occur to Hamilton that legislators, like Caesar’s wife, should also be beyond suspicion.

“Mr. Madison is a studious scholar,” the vice president told a friend in April, “but his reputation as a man of abilities is a creature of French puffs. Some of the worst measures, some of the most stupid motions, stand on record to his infamy.”

This falling-out was to be more than personal, for the rift between Hamilton and Madison precipitated the start of the two-party system in America.

Slavery was gradually fading away in many parts of the north, but with each passing year it became more deeply embedded in the southern economy.

So this man of infinite opinions grew mute on that all-important matter, though he may have taken a secret swipe at slaveholders the following year.

Philip Marsh has argued that Hamilton, using the pen name “Civis” in a newspaper piece of February 23, 1791, penned the following telling sarcasm to Madison and Jefferson: “As to the negroes, you must be tender upon that subject. . . . Who talk most about liberty and equality . . . ? Is it not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?”

Thomas Day, who had written in 1776, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independence with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”61