Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

For a year after his mother’s death, Alexander was held in painful suspense by the probate court and perhaps absorbed the useful lesson that people who manipulate the law wield the real power in society.

Perhaps the true legacy of his boyhood was an equivocal one: he came to detest the tyranny embodied by the planters and their authoritarian rule, while also fearing the potential uprisings of the disaffected slaves. The twin specters of despotism and anarchy were to haunt him for the rest of his life.

the education of this future abolitionist was partly underwritten by sugarcane harvested by slaves.

Hamilton was reading the skeptical Scottish philosopher David Hume, and he 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 was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.

he also sounded a theme that was to resonate straight through the Revolution and beyond: that the best government posture toward religion was one of passive tolerance, not active promotion of an established church.

present, while the passions of men are worked up to an uncommon pitch, there is great danger of fatal extremes. The same state of the passions which fits the multitude, who have not a sufficient stock of reason and knowledge to guide them, for opposition to tyranny and oppression, very naturally leads them to a contempt and disregard of all authority.

colony had ever succeeded in breaking away from the mother country to set up a self-governing state, and the declaration signers knew that the historical odds were heavily stacked against them.

Both Washington and Hamilton came to think in terms of the general welfare, while many other officers and politicians got bogged down in parochial squabbles.

When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.

countries follow their interests, not their sympathies—was

All along, the American Revolution had been premised on a tacit bargain that regional conflicts would be subordinated to the need for unity among the states. This understanding dictated that slavery would remain a taboo subject.

Cornwallis had grown so desperate that he infected blacks with smallpox and forced them to wander toward enemy lines in an attempt to sicken the opposing forces.

What an asshole!

Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.

Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.

Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. 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. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.

Hamilton warned that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”37

Hamilton disputed that America would be an Eden governed by a special providence: “Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?”

Still true in 2024

What mattered was that people trusted the government to make good on repayment: “In nothing are appearances of greater moment than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it and this is affected by appearances as well as realities.”24 Hamilton intuited that public relations and confidence building were to be the special burdens of every future treasury secretary.

the first holders were not simply noble victims, nor were the current buyers simply predatory speculators. 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. In this manner, Hamilton stole the moral high ground from opponents and established the legal and moral basis for securities trading in America: the notion that securities are freely transferable and that buyers assume all rights to profit or loss in transactions.

From the controversy over his funding scheme, we can date the onset of that abiding rural fear of big-city financiers that came to permeate American politics.

the rift between Hamilton and Madison precipitated the start of the two-party system in America.

It was testimony to the political genius of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that they diverted attention from the grisly realities of southern slavery by casting a lurid spotlight on Hamilton’s system as the paramount embodiment of evil.

Jefferson had one trait that the marble bust failed to capture: his slack-jointed movements. When William Maclay met the new secretary, his slouching figure seemed to lack ministerial dignity. Maclay groused, “He sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other. . . . [H]is whole figure has a loose, shackling air.”4

This is why Daveed Diggs plays him like that!

Jefferson fancied himself a mere child of nature, a simple, unaffected man, rather than what he really was: a grandee, a gourmet, a hedonist, and a clever, ambitious politician.

Jefferson’s objections to Hamilton’s plan had philosophical roots. In his view, the smaller the government, the better the chances of preserving liberty. And to the extent that a central government was necessary, he wanted a strong Congress with a weak executive. Most of all, Jefferson wished to preserve state sovereignty against federal infringement. Since Hamilton’s agenda was to strengthen the central government, bolster the executive branch at the expense of the legislature, and subordinate the states, it embodied everything Jefferson abhorred.

The question of the capital served as a proxy for the question of whether America should assume an urban or agrarian character.

Historian Gordon Wood has written, “Although late-nineteenth-century Americans honored Hamilton as the creator of American capitalism, that honor became a liability through much of the twentieth century.”1 All the conflicting emotions stirred up by capitalism—its bountiful efficiency, its crass inequities—have adhered to Hamilton’s image.

In a nation of self-made people, Hamilton became an emblematic figure because he believed that government ought to promote self-fulfillment, self-improvement, and self-reliance.

Hamilton 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 legal disputes; and offer patents and other protections to promote invention.

Among the well-intentioned men who were woefully backward in finance, if forward-looking in politics, were Hamilton’s three most savage critics of the 1790s: Jefferson, Madison, and Adams. These founders adhered to a static, archaic worldview that scorned banks, credit, and stock markets. From this perspective, Hamilton was the progressive figure of the era, his critics the conservatives.

“If the abuses of a beneficial thing are to determine its condemnation, there is scarcely a source of public prosperity which will not speedily be closed.”

“No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power for doing it is included.”26

No.

employed in gambling.”50 Hamilton had brought the modern financial world to America, with all its unsettling effects.

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

The financial turmoil on Wall Street and the William Duer debacle pointed up a glaring defect in Hamilton’s political theory: the rich could put their own interests above the national interest.

Today we cherish the two-party system as a cornerstone of American democracy. The founders, however, viewed parties, or “factions” as they termed them, as monarchical vestiges that had no legitimate place in a true republic.

Nevertheless, it was Hamilton, inadvertently, who became the flash point for the formation of the first parties. The searing controversy over his programs exploded idyllic fantasies that America would be free of partisan groupings. His charismatic personality and far-reaching policies unified his followers, who gradually became known as Federalists. By capitalizing the term used for supporters of the Constitution, the Federalists tacitly implied that their foes opposed it. The Federalists were allied with powerful banking and merchant interests in New England and on the Atlantic seaboard and were disproportionately Congregationalists and Episcopalians. At the same time, the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican. Alluding to the ancient Roman republic, this was also a clever label, insinuating that Federalists were not real republicans and hence must be monarchists. Often Baptists and Methodists, Republicans drew their strength from rich southern planters and small farmers. They defined their beliefs, in large measure, by their dread of Hamilton’s system and employed anti-Hamilton rhetoric as shorthand to express their solidarity.

Jefferson distinguished the two parties by saying that Federalists believed that “the executive is the branch of our government which needs most support,” while Republicans thought that “like the analogous branch in the English government, it is already too strong for the republican parts of the Constitution and therefore, in equivocal cases, they incline to the legislative powers.”11

The Federalists saw themselves as saving America from anarchy, while Republicans believed they were rescuing America from counterrevolution.

It had been their violated rights as Englishmen that had driven the colonists to revolt.

Jefferson understood very well the power of laying down a paper trail.