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You have, I fear, taken a final leave of America and of those that love you here. I saw you depart from Philadelphia with peculiar uneasiness, as if foreboding you were not to return. My apprehensions are confirmed and, unless I see you in Europe, I expect not to see you again. This is the impression we all have.
Hamilton had supported John Laurens’s futile effort to emancipate southern slaves who fought for independence. He had expressed an unwavering belief in the genetic equality of blacks and whites—unlike Jefferson, for instance, who regarded blacks as innately inferior—that was enlightened for his day.
When Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of his home state, Virginia. Slaves in South Carolina outnumbered whites.
Garrison recalled of Burr, “His manner was patronizing. . . . As he revealed himself to my moral sense, I saw he was destitute of any fixed principles.”39
As would often occur in the future, his avowed preference for an elite based on merit was misconstrued by enemies into a secret adoration of aristocracy.
“George Clinton’s friends considered him a man of the people; his enemies saw him as a demagogue.”
During most of his time in office, this pooh-bah of the people sported the pretentious title “His Excellency George Clinton, Esquire, the Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief of all the militia, and Admiral of the Navy of the State of New-York.”
Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism. George Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr all came to incarnate that dread for Hamilton.
This persuaded Hamilton that unless a new federal government with a monopoly on customs revenues was established, disunion would surely ensue. As individual states developed interests in their own taxes, they would be less and less likely to sacrifice for the common good.
In 1776, John Adams had predicted accurately that “the most intricate, the most important, the most dangerous and delicate business” of the postwar years would be the creation of a central government.
Many Americans were as debt-burdened as their legislatures. Even as the Annapolis conference unfolded, rural turmoil erupted in western Massachusetts as thousands of indebted farmers, struggling with soaring taxes and foreclosures on their lands, grabbed staves and pitchforks, shut down courthouses, and thwarted land seizures by force. As Hamilton had feared, after eight years of war violent protest against authority had become habitual. The farmers’ uprising was dubbed Shays’s Rebellion after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former militia captain and suddenly a folk hero. At moments, it
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Where Madison thought a weak republic would only invite disorder, Jefferson reacted to the turmoil with aplomb. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison loftily from Paris, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
To Colonel William Smith, Jefferson sent his famous reassurance: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
On May 30, Edmund Randolph presented a plan, formulated chiefly by Madison, that sought to scuttle the articles altogether and create a strong central government. This “Virginia Plan” made a clean break with the past and contained the basic design of the future U.S. government. It provided for a bicameral legislature, with both houses based on proportional representation. (As the most populous state, Virginia had a vested interest in this approach.) It concentrated extra power in the executive branch by calling for a one-person executive (i.e., a president) with a seven-year term, rather than
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On Monday morning, June 18, the thirty-two-year-old prodigy rose first on the convention floor and in the stifling, poorly ventilated room he spoke and spoke and spoke. Before the day was through, he had given a six-hour speech (no break for lunch) that was brilliant, courageous, and, in retrospect, completely daft.
Hamilton feared that the Senate and House might try to impose their wills on each other: “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”
Fearing aristocrats as well as commoners, Hamilton wanted to restrain abusive majorities and minorities.
Northern states finally agreed that five slaves would be counted as equivalent to three free whites, the infamous “federal ratio” that survived for another eighty years. The formula richly rewarded the southern states, artificially inflating their House seats and electoral votes and helping to explain why four of the first five presidents hailed from Virginia.
establishment of a son of the present [British] monarchy in the supreme government of this country with a family compact.”11 Impelled by such fears, Hamilton flung himself into defending the Constitution. Throughout his career, he operated
Jay naturally handled foreign relations. Madison, versed in the history of republics and confederacies, covered much of that ground. As author of the Virginia Plan, he also undertook to explain the general anatomy of the new government.
Publius Valerius had toppled the last Roman king and set up the republican foundations of government.
Jay wrote the next four numbers, then had to drop out because of a severe bout of rheumatism. In the final tally, The Federalist Papers ran to eighty-five essays, with fifty-one attributed to Hamilton, twenty-nine to Madison, and only five to Jay.
Whether in legal briefs or sustained polemics, he wanted to convince people through appeals to their reason.
For all his charisma, Alexander Hamilton was essentially an intellectual loner who took perverse pride in standing against the crowd.
At this crossroads, Hamilton and Madison must have seemed an odd pair in the New York streets: 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.
It was Madison who wrote in Federalist number 44, “No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized.”
If Madison displays a broader knowledge of theory and history in The Federalist, Hamilton betrays wider knowledge of the world.
When Jay fell ill, Madison brilliantly leaped into the void with his celebrated Federalist number 10, the most influential of all the essays, in which he took issue with Montesquieu’s theory that democracy could survive only in small states.
Not only would taxes underwrite operating expenses, but they would enable the country to pay off its debt, restore its credit, and raise large loans in wartime.
Broaching the vital doctrine of implied powers in numbers 30–34, Hamilton asserted that in politics “the means ought to be proportioned to the end. . . . [T]here ought to be no limitation of a power destined to effect a purpose.”
“There are strong minds in every walk of life that will rise superior to the disadvantages of situation and will command the tribute due to their merit, not only from the classes to which they particularly belong, but from the society in general. The door ought to be equally open to all.”
In turning to the executive branch (67–77), Hamilton wrote about the part of government in which he had the keenest interest and which he considered the engine of the entire machinery.
More than anyone else, Hamilton engineered the transition to a postwar political culture that valued sound and efficient government as the most reliable custodian of liberty.
Both as a matter of temperament and policy, 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.”
Hamilton told Troup that he understood the financial sacrifice, but “he thought it would be in his power in the financial department of the government to do the country great good and this consideration outweighed with him every consideration of a private nature.”
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.
Washington’s administration had to create everything from scratch. Hamilton was that rare revolutionary: a master administrator and as competent a public servant as American politics would ever produce.
“Hamilton was an administrative genius” who “assumed an influence in Washington’s cabinet which is unmatched in the annals of the American cabinet system.”
Because the Constitution made no mention of a cabinet, Washington had to invent it. At first, this executive council consisted of just three men: Hamilton as secretary of the treasury, Jefferson as secretary of state, and Henry Knox as secretary of war.
Vice President John Adams was largely excluded from the administration’s decision-making apparatus, a demotion in power that could only have sharpened his envy of young Hamilton.
Hamilton continued to ransack British and French history for ideas. He had inordinate admiration for Jacques Necker, the French finance minister who had argued that government borrowing could strengthen military prowess,
Back in the 1690s, the British had set up the Bank of England, enacted an excise tax on spirits, and funded its public debt—that is, pledged specific revenues to insure repayment of its debt.
Public credit had enabled England to build up the Royal Navy, to prosecute wars around the world, to maintain a global commercial empire.
At the same time, government bonds issued to pay for the debt galvanized the economy, since creditors could use them as collateral for loans.
Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debts because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality:
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.”
“ardently wishes to see it incorporated as a fundamental maxim in the system of public credit of the United States that the creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment.”
“The general rules of property, and all those general rules which form the links of society, frequently involve in their ordinary operation particular hardships and injuries,”
“Yet the public order and the general happiness require a steady conformity to them. It is perhaps always better that partial evils should be submitted to than that principles should be violated.”
Ever since his inaugural address, President Washington had consulted regularly with Madison on matters ranging from etiquette to the selection of ambassadors. By dint of his seminal role at the Constitutional Convention, his Bill of Rights, and his work on The Federalist Papers, Madison was the most influential congressman.
