Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

Ironically,The Federalist failed in its original goal.

It was a lonely battle—“Our adversaries greatly outnumber us,” he told Madison upon arriving—yet he showed unflagging courage as he stared down a large audience of hostile faces.

He wrote non-stop for 7 months, the book flopped in his home state, in his hone state he and his ideas were held in great antipathy, and he would discourse on the topic for 6 weeks straight to people who did not want to hear it. He really believed in this cause despite all opposition.

“In politics, as in war, the first blow is half the battle.”

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.

“Your private character is still worse than your public one

“We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.”

The Churches also kept a private box at the Drury Lane Theater and befriended the spendthrift playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The School for Scandal, who once refused to satisfy his creditors on the grounds that “paying only encourages them.”

“Betsey and myself make you the last theme of our conversation at night and the first in the morning,”

“If a Government appears to be confident of its own powers, it is the surest way to inspire the same confidence in others.”

securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions.

“luxuries of every kind lay the strongest hold on the attachments of mankind, which, especially when confirmed by habit, are not easily alienated from them.”

His vision, however, was fixed on America’s future, not the partisan bickering of the moment. He was laying the groundwork for a great nation.

This supreme rationalist, who feared the passions of the mob more than any other founder, was himself a man of deep and often ungovernable emotions.

“It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.”

The weight of that debt, created by his own extravagance, perhaps prevented Thomas Jefferson from being the person he would ideally like to have been.

Albert Gallatin, later treasury secretary under Jefferson and Madison, was to call Madison “slow in taking his ground, but firm when the storm rises.”

If politics is preeminently the art of compromise, then Hamilton was in some ways poorly suited for his job. He wanted to be a statesman who led courageously, not a politician who made compromises. Instead of proceeding with small, piecemeal measures, he had presented a gigantic package of fiscal measures that he wanted accepted all at once.

he made it a point of honor never to break promises to his children.

As

“The spirit of gaming, once it has seized a subject, is incurable. The tailor who has made thousands in one day, tho[ugh] he has lost them the next, can never again be content with the slow and moderate earnings of his needle.”

Ships are lying at the wharves,” he wrote that summer, “buildings are stopped, capitals are withdrawn from commerce, manufactures, arts, and agriculture to be employed in gambling, and the tide of public prosperity almost unparalleled in any country is arrested in its course and suppressed by the rage of getting rich in one day.”

A blessing to America or a curse to Britain?

I have been so much in the habit of seeing him mistaken that I hold his opinion cheap.”

For Hamilton, the federal government had a right to stimulate business and also, when necessary, to restrain it.

“Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation,”

He was launching too many initiatives, crowded too close together, as if he wanted to remake the entire country in a flash.

I suppose rivalries are good. One extreme counterbalances the other. The good rises to the top of both, albeit sometimes in tandem with its weaknesses.

Hamilton and Washington regarded much of the criticism fired at their administration as disloyal, even treasonous, in nature.

It was France, not England, that had long been associated with despotic government, and Hamilton’s high praise for England was not as heretical as Jefferson pretended it was.

“Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” Jefferson later said. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”29 No code of conduct circumscribed responsible press behavior.

“Like birds of game . . . they make sport to the public as their party prompts or supplies them with materials. By this practice our elective privileges are converted into a curse.”

raise a ferment, and then ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.”

George

Anyone who thought otherwise, he told Jefferson, must regard the president as “too careless to attend to them or too stupid to understand them.”

I feel it a religious duty to oppose his career.

But

In

“Let the blood of traitors flow,”

“A struggle for liberty is in itself respectable and glorious,” he opined. “When conducted with magnanimity, justice, and humanity, it ought to command the admiration of every friend to human nature. But if sullied by crimes and extravagancies, it loses its respectability.”

“You certainly never felt the terrorism excited by Genêt in 1793,” Adams chided Jefferson years later, “when ten thousand people in the streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his house and effect a revolution in the government or compel it to declare war in favor of the French Revolution and against England.”42

Its a miracle this didn't happen

I know how I could be much happier, but circumstances enchain me.”

“no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.” If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end “that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.”

resorting to war only if attempts at reparations failed.

“Wars oftener proceed from angry and perverse passions than from cool calculations of interest.”

the letter was a hot-blooded defense of a cool-eyed policy.

This prompted one Republican wag to opine that the royal family should adopt Alexander Hamilton to sire a new line in America. With Hamilton’s well-known attraction to the ladies, the British monarchy would never need to worry about a shortage of heirs in America.

“it is long since I have learnt to hold popular opinion of no value.”

Washington had recently asked Congress for plans to retire the public debt and “prevent that progressive accumulation of debt which must ultimately endanger all government.”

“Damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t damn John Jay. Damn everyone that won’t put up lights in the windows and sit up all night damning John Jay.”

“If we suppose them sincere, we must often pity their ignorance; if insincere, we must abhor the spirit of deception which it betrays.”