Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

“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.”

Hamilton intuited that public relations and confidence building were to be the special burdens of every future treasury secretary.

Something Timothy Geithner likewise intuited after the 2008 collapse.

To establish the concept of the “security of transfer,” Hamilton was willing, if necessary, to reward mercenary scoundrels and penalize patriotic citizens. With this huge gamble, Hamilton laid the foundations for America’s future financial preeminence.

Hamilton knew that bondholders would feel a stake in preserving any government that owed them money.

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

For the next five years, the political spectrum in America was defined by whether people endorsed or opposed Alexander Hamilton’s programs.

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.

He couldn’t be both the supreme nationalist and the supreme abolitionist.

The contretemps again demonstrated that beneath his invincible facade, Hamilton was still the hypersensitive boy from the West Indies.

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.”

The plain dress, mild manners, and unassuming air were the perfect costume for a crafty man intent upon presenting himself as the spokesman for the common people.

Ensconced at Monticello with his books, inventions, and experiments, Jefferson became an unfathomable loner.

For Jefferson, the Revolution was an unwelcome distraction from a treasured private life, while for Hamilton it was a fantastic opportunity for escape and advancement.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson came to see each other as hypocritical libertines, and this fed a mutual cynicism.

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.

Jefferson traced the formation of the two main parties—to be known as Republicans and Federalists—to Hamilton’s victory over assumption.

The federal government had captured forever the bulk of American taxing power.

Hamilton could not do things halfway: he cared too passionately, too personally, about the fate of his adopted country.

his grandiose plans left scant space for commonplace thoughts.

Hamilton had championed a humane, enlightened policy toward the Indians.

There were hidden agendas buried inside Hamilton’s economic program, agendas that he tended to share with high-level colleagues but not always with the public.

He was setting in place the building blocks for a powerful state: public credit, an efficient tax system, a customs service, and now a strong central bank.

He was the clear-eyed apostle of America’s economic future, setting forth a vision that many found enthralling, others unsettling, but that would ultimately prevail.

Hamilton did not create America’s market economy so much as foster the cultural and legal setting in which it flourished.

This hybrid character—an essentially private bank buttressed by public authority—was to define his central bank.

Aware of the widespread prejudice against banks, Hamilton knew he needed to set out their advantages.

The byzantine, interrelated nature of his programs made him all the more the bane and terror of opponents.

one could begin to glimpse the contours of two parties taking shape.

In his Life of Washington, Chief Justice John Marshall traced the genesis of American political parties to the rancorous dispute over the Bank of the United States.

He lived, in theory and practice, every syllable of the Constitution. For that reason, historian Clinton Rossiter insisted that Hamilton’s “works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live.”

Hamilton had brought the modern financial world to America, with all its unsettling effects.

For Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton was more than just dead wrong in his prescriptions. He was becoming a menace to the American experiment, one who had to be stopped at all costs.

From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood.

How he squeezed in time for these carnal interludes while compiling his Report on Manufactures is a wonder.

It was Hamilton’s vision of America as a manufacturing behemoth, not Jefferson’s of a society of yeomen farmers, that threatened the British.

Instinctively, Hamilton understood the creative ambiguity necessary for a central banker coping with a crisis.

Like Timothy Geithner in 2009.

Public infamy must restrain what the laws cannot.”

This historic Buttonwood Agreement set a minimum for brokers’ commissions and laid the foundations for what became the New York Stock Exchange.

“Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation,” he was to lecture one superintendent, with what could almost have been his personal motto.

This feud, rife with intrigue and lacerating polemics, was to take on an almost pathological intensity.

His charismatic personality and far-reaching policies unified his followers, who gradually became known as Federalists.

The Federalists were allied with powerful banking and merchant interests in New England and on the Atlantic seaboard and were disproportionately Congregationalists and Episcopalians.

the mounting fear of Hamilton among Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters cohered into an organized opposition that began to call itself Republican.

“It was between rival economic systems, each of which was aimed at generating its own men of property.”

The Federalists saw themselves as saving America from anarchy, while Republicans believed they were rescuing America from counterrevolution. Each side possessed a lurid, distorted view of the other, buttressed by an idealized sense of itself.

Sound familiar?

The brutal tone of these papers made politics a wounding ordeal.

By now, monarchy and aristocracy were standard code words for Hamilton and the Federalists.

Again and again in his career, Hamilton committed the same political error: he never knew when to stop, and the resulting excesses led him into irremediable indiscretions.

The French Revolution thus served to both consolidate the two parties in American politics and deepen the ideological gulf between them.

For Jefferson, it was not just French or American freedom at stake but that of the entire Western world. To his mind, such a universal goal excused the bloodthirsty means.