Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

“The changes in the human condition are uncertain and frequent. Many, on whom fortune has bestowed her favours, may trace their family to a more unprosperous station; and many who are now in obscurity, may look back upon the affluence and exalted rank of their ancestors.”

Changing fortunes

In times of such commotion as the 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. The due medium is hardly to be found among the more intelligent. It is almost impossible among the unthinking populace. When the minds of these are loosened from their attachment to ancient establishments and courses, they seem to grow giddy and are apt more or less to run into anarchy.

“By stopping the progress of their conquests and reducing them to an unmeaning and disgraceful defensive, we destroy the national expectation of success from which the ministry draws their resources.”11

“As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.”16

Only unity could wring from skittish foreign creditors the large loans necessary to conclude the war.

“It must be conceded that the legislature of one state cannot repeal the law of the United States.”46

“a great man, a great lawyer, a man of integrity, very ambitious,” but “anxious to effect that ruinous measure, a consolidation of the states.”10

Jefferson sent his famous reassurance: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“a national government ought to be established consisting of a supreme legislative, executive and judiciary.”

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.

“Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”

all states would enjoy equal representation in the Senate (a sop to small states) while representation in the House of Representatives would be proportionate to each state’s population (a sop to large states). This broke the deadlock, though the Senate’s composition introduced a lasting political bias in American life in favor of smaller states.

“He has often declared to me that he considered our new constitution as an experiment on the practicability of republic government... [and] that he was determined the experiment should have a fair trial and would lose the last drop of his blood in support of it.... I do believe that General Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government.”

The American Revolution and its aftermath coincided with two great transformations in the late eighteenth century. In the political sphere, there had been a repudiation of royal rule, fired by a new respect for individual freedom, majority rule, and limited government. If Hamilton made distinguished contributions in this sphere, so did Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. In contrast, when it came to the parallel economic upheavals of the period—the industrial revolution, the expansion of global trade, the growth of banks and stock exchanges—Hamilton was an American prophet without peer. No other founding father straddled both of these revolutions—only Franklin even came close—and therein lay Hamilton’s novelty and greatness.

“The stamping of paper is an operation so much easier than the laying of taxes that a government in the practice of paper emissions would rarely fail in any such emergency to indulge itself too far.”

“I firmly believe, if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the southern and northern states unless more candour and less intrigue, of which I have no hopes, should prevail,”

Hamilton continued to define his views on American foreign policy: that it should be based on self-interest, not emotional attachment; that the supposed altruism of nations often masked baser motives; that individuals sometimes acted benevolently, but nations seldom did.

If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

“War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies and debts and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

In later years, he congratulated himself that he had restrained Hamilton, who “save for me would have involved us in a foreign war with France and a civil war with ourselves.”

Hamilton’s appeal may count as the most high-handed and undemocratic act of his career.

“The true theory of our Constitution,” Jefferson told Gideon Granger, was that “the states are independent as to everything within themselves and united as to everything respecting foreign nations.”

The personal recriminations of the 1800 election can obscure the huge ideological shift that reshaped American politics and made the Republicans the majority party.

The people had registered their dismay with a long litany of unpopular Federalist actions: the Jay Treaty, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the truculent policy toward France, the vast army being formed under Hamilton and the taxes levied to support it. The 1800 elections revealed, for the first time, the powerful centrist pull of American politics—the electorate’s tendency to rein in anything perceived as extreme.

The intellectual spoilsport among the founding fathers, Hamilton never believed in the perfectibility of human nature and regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics: thou shalt always be optimistic when addressing the electorate. He shrank from the campaign rhetoric that flattered Americans as the most wonderful, enlightened people on earth and denied that they had anything to learn from European societies. He was incapable of the resolutely uplifting themes that were to become mandatory in American politics. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.

one must add that the celebration of the 1800 election as the simple triumph of “progressive” Jeffersonians over “reactionary” Hamiltonians greatly overstates the case. The three terms of Federalist rule had been full of dazzling accomplishments that Republicans, with their extreme apprehension of federal power, could never have achieved. Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions that would guarantee the strength to preserve liberty. They activated critical constitutional doctrines that gave the American charter flexibility, forged the bonds of nationhood, and lent an energetic tone to the executive branch in foreign and domestic policy. Hamilton, in particular, bound the nation through his fiscal programs in a way that no Republican could have matched. He helped to establish the rule of law and the culture of capitalism at a time when a revolutionary utopianism and a flirtation with the French Revolution still prevailed among too many Jeffersonians. With their reverence for states’ rights, abhorrence of central authority, and cramped interpretation of the Constitution, Republicans would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve these historic feats.

Hamilton had promoted a forward-looking agenda of a modern nation-state with a market economy and an affirmative view of central government. His meritocratic vision allowed greater scope in the economic sphere for the individual liberties that Jefferson defended so eloquently in the political sphere. It was no coincidence that the allegedly aristocratic and reactionary Federalists contained the overwhelming majority of active abolitionists of the period. Elitists they might be, but they were an open, fluid elite, based on merit and money, not on birth and breeding—the antithesis of the southern plantation system. It was the northern economic system that embodied the mix of democracy and capitalism that was to constitute the essence of America in the long run. By no means did the 1800 election represent the unalloyed triumph of good over evil or of commoners over the wellborn.

(Without this so-called federal ratio, John Adams would have defeated Thomas Jefferson in 1800.) The Constitution did more than just tolerate slavery: it actively rewarded it.

“Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by their passion,”