Hamilton and Jefferson

 

Editorial

Ron Chernow has written a big book, Alexander Hamilton, 818 pages of small print, a work of scholarship that is easy to read. You only need patience. Historians have argued for years which of Hamilton or Jefferson was the noblest in the founding of the country. This book suggests that Hamilton was the greater of the two.

Hamilton was born in St. Croix, a small island in the Caribbean, of a father of little worth and a mother who died of a fever when her two boys were young. They received nothing from her estate. Alexander was taken into the home of Thomas Stevens, a well-respected merchant who thought well of the little boy. Around 1772, he sailed to America and New York as a recipient of a subscription to pursue an education. Fluent in French from life in the Indies, he was a brilliant intellect. He left behind a notebook in Greek crammed with passages from the Iliad. He crammed to learn Latin, Greek and advanced math.

When the Revolutionary War engulfed the country, he exchanged a pen for a sword and was as brilliant in war as he had been in learning. At 21 he was made Captain of a Company of Artillery and won the respect of all the officers who knew him. Patriots in the army were not well disciplined, slovenly and dejected, given to drink, while the British fought with skill. Hamilton was decisive in battle, with no slipshod indecision, staying in the heat of battle in the face of overwhelming odds. He earned the respect of Washington. In the retreat from White Plains when the Americans were overwhelmed, Hamilton provided cover for the retreating troops, making it possible for a counter-attack at Princeton. January 20, 1777, Washington invited Hamilton to become his aid-de-camp. Hamilton was volatile, needing a steadying hand, which Washington gave, but, even at his young age, he had intellectual depth, administrative genius, and policy knowledge that could not be matched. For 22 years, these two gave a stability to the war and, later, to the presidency.

War experience convinced Washington and Hamilton that the country needed a central government. The separate states did not provide the necessities of the soldiers during the war and at the conclusion had little interest in paying the arrears of the soldiers, which, in some cases, were of six years. (Before the country was founded, Jefferson did not believe in a central government in time of peace, thinking a committee good enough. The praise of state sovereignty, in opposition to a central government, was so strong that delegates did not bother attending meetings of a national government.) Soldiers were not paid and the new country faced the prospect of a rebellion from those who had fought for independence. With the counsel of Hamilton, Washington squashed a rebellion of his own men and promised to petition Congress on their behalf. A committee chaired by Hamilton granted the officers a pension equal to five year’s pay. Whether they could make good on their promises was another matter, but the country was saved from an internal revolution shortly after defeating the British.

At the end of the Revolution it took $167 continental dollars to buy one dollar’s worth of gold or silver. Hamilton established the Bank of New York in an effort to make one country from many independent states. The states, in addition to Congress, issued currency, so that one had to be a mathematician to know fluctuating currencies. Agrarians of the south opposed banks such as Hamilton proposed, preferring “land banks,” which Hamilton thought a “wild and impractical scheme,” because land was not readily converted into cash, or had little liquidity. Most Americans thought banks evil, children of the devil, tools of merchants to rob the poor. This was a foreshowing of Jefferson’s later revulsion against all Hamilton’s economic programs.

After five years in the Revolutionary War, Hamilton turned to law to make a living. Law, he thought, was the quickest way to political power. The tradition was that students had to clerk with a practicing attorney for three years, but he preferred to educate himself. He raced through the studies in six months, passed the bar exam, was licensed as an attorney, and could argue cases before the New York Supreme Court. He was also qualified as a “counsellor,” akin to a barrister in the English tradition. This was the beginning a career that made him the country’s most prominent attorney and the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution.

The Federalist papers, supervised and largely written by Hamilton assisted by Madison and Jay, outlined an alternative to the inept Articles of Confederation. Money was a dominating force for change. Foreign countries were demanding payment for service and  supplies during the war, but states ignored the demands. “They have power to enforce their demands,” said Hamilton, “and sooner or later they may be expected to do so.”

If these states are not united under a federal government, they will infallibly have wars with each other and their divisions will subject them to all the mischiefs of foreign influence and intrigue.

Hamilton’s hope was to elect representatives not of the leveling kind, for he was suspicious of demagogues who would flatter the people to conceal their despotism.

Give all power to the many; they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few; they will oppress the many.

With their conservative outlook, Federalists were reviled as promoters of monarchism, the ascendancy of the rich, and the abolition of the states; but the final vote on the constitution gave approval. Hamilton was so lionized by admirers they wanted to rename New York, Hamiltonia.  He never took payment from the government while in office, depending on income from his private practice earned in his spare time, something neither Washington, Madison, or Jefferson dared to do, but he was an administrative genius and brilliant intellect unmatched in the founding of the country.

Jefferson and Hamilton were opposites. Hamilton, an illegitimate waif from St. Croix, a tiny island in the Caribbean, had no prospects save what came from intelligence, character, and energy.  Jefferson, born to great wealth had little common sense with money.  An incurable spender when he was in Paris, he was deeply in debt to British creditors, borrowing money against the credit of his estate. On coming home, he shipped 86 crates of costly French furniture, porcelain, and silver, as well as books, paintings, prints, and 288 bottles of French wine. He brought along one of his slaves who had studied cooking with a French chef.  While Secretary of State, he maintained a household of five servants, four horses and a maitre d’hotel from Paris. Notwithstanding this display of wealth, his dress was casual, almost sloppy, when he became part of the American government, a perfect show for a crafty man who had ambition—according to Hamilton. While in France, he was unmoved by the violence of the people and could only think of the oppression of the government—which was real. Eventually, he was compelled to admit French violence in the populace and of those in power, but he could never reconcile himself to a government based on honest commerce, the dream of Hamilton. The rift became so bad that Southerners fired the rhetoric formerly used against the British at the Federalists—the doctrines of Washington and Hamilton. Jefferson’s affection for the British ended with the Revolution and declined further when Richmond was pillaged. So did it when, as Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, Jefferson fled the capital, allowing government records and munitions to fall into enemy hands. When word came that British cavalry were approaching Monticello, he rode off to find secrecy in the woods. Hamilton might have been killed, but he would never have behaved as Jefferson did.

The financial folly of Jefferson was not limited to his youth. He died bankrupt, squandering his inheritance.  Perhaps the slave economy was so inefficient that it was impossible for him to make a living for himself and his slaves. He was always a dandy, however, playing with his hobbies, and he was good at his hobbies, but he was successful only with his pen and political ambition.

The partisan bickering between Hamilton and Jefferson developed in the first cabinet; reflecting their differing interests. The North was the home of commerce where the understanding of the Constitution presented by Hamilton united the people. They called themselves Federalists, cleverly suggesting their opponents did not believe the Constitution or the new country. Jefferson, Madison, and their supporters, were also clever, calling themselves Republicans, harking back to the ancient Roman republics, and suggesting Hamilton and his followers were not real republicans but monarchists. The North had many self-made men such as Hamilton. Republicanism in the South was hidden under slavery and the immense inherited wealth of people like Jefferson. Slavery outlined clear disparities of wealth, which were less noticeable in the North.

Hamilton was the intellectual genius in the presidency of George Washington but Jefferson, while Secretary of State, attacked and undermined domestic and foreign policy.  He hired the poet Philip Freneau as a translator, a ruse as Freneau only knew French, in which Jefferson was proficient. Freneau described Washington as vain, close-minded, easily manipulated by flattery.  Hamilton was described as a monarchist whose interest was the destruction of the Constitution. Failing to convince Washington that Hamilton was a danger to the new country, Jefferson intensified his attacks.

In the second administration of Washington, Hamilton wanted to use foreign loans to repay a government loan of two million dollars from the Bank of the United States. Still partial to the French Revolution, Jefferson feared that this money would be diverted from payments to France and offered as a reward to speculators who had invested in the Bank of the United States. Congress passed resolutions demanding Hamilton give an accounting of the loans, a reckoning of the balances between the government and the central bank, and a comprehensive report of sinking fund purchases of government. The time frame for the resolutions was March 3, reckoning from January 23. The time demand on Hamilton was immense. Republicans believed an inability to answer the resolutions would be evidence of guilt; the Federalists believed Hamilton would be proved incorruptible. That Hamilton answered the resolutions and was proved incorruptible did not sway his critics; the display of his capacity for work and prodigious gifts persuaded Republicans he was the greater danger.

At the beginning of Washington’s second term Fisher Ames said of Jefferson and the Republicans,

They thirst for vengeance. The Secretary of the Treasury is one whom they will immolate. . . . The president [Washington] is not to be spared. His popularity is a fund of strength to that cause which they would destroy. He is therefore rudely and incessantly attacked.

The bitterness revolved around the French Revolution. Was it harmonious with the American Revolution or a violent, evil revolution in another direction? Washington and Hamilton, and the Federalists they led, thought the incendiary French Revolution revolting while Jefferson and the Republicans dismissed the atrocities as propaganda. “Rather than it should have failed,” said Jefferson, I would have seen half the earth desolated.” Hamilton saw the revolutionaries of France emphasizing liberty to the exclusion of order, morality, religion, and property rights.  If the love of liberty shown by France were adopted in the United States, the United States would be engulfed in the chaos shown in France.

France declared war on England and did what it could to involve the United States in War against England, as a reward for French help during our revolution. Washington, Hamilton, and the Federalists voted for neutrality. They also believed that, notwithstanding our troubles with England, American principles were of the British tradition.

April 9, 1793, Citizen Genet of France arrived in South Corolina and received a tumultuous reception. He blustered blindly into the warfare between Hamilton and Jefferson. His goal was for the United States to provide funds to France and strike blows against British and Spanish possessions in North America. In spite of the doctrine of neutrality of the United States, Jefferson became his accomplice—while a member of the American cabinet!

Genet had “letters of marque” which authorized him to convert private vessels of the United States into privateers. They were to capture unarmed British vessels as prizes, providing money for the captors and military benefits for France. He assembled a sixteen-hundred-man army to invade St. Augustine in Florida.  On his way north to present his credentials to Washington, his vessel Embuscade pounced on the British ship Grange, and hauled it into Philadelphia. Jefferson could not contain his joy at this violation of U.S. law. He said to James Monroe,

Never before was such a crowd seen there and when the British colors were seen reversed and the French flag flying above them, they burst into peals of exultation.

Genet reached full absurdity when he took advantage of Washington’s absence in Mount Vernon to say that he rejected the American doctrine of neutrality and planned to go above Washington’s head and appeal directly to the American people! This was too much for Jefferson. “He renders my position immensely difficult,” he said. This did not mean the end of his animosity toward Hamilton and Washington.  In response to Hamilton’s arguments for neutrality, He urged Madison to attack.

For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him [Hamilton] to pieces in the face of the public.

The attacks on Hamilton continued during the presidency of Adams, who also attacked Hamilton. The attacks were successful in the election of Jefferson to the presidency. Once he had attained this goal, Jefferson continued what Hamilton began. The notion that Washington and Hamilton were monarchists was nonsense. Whether or not Jefferson believed his rhetoric, it was enough to bring the Federalists into disrepute and him to the presidency.

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Historians have argued about the comparative worth to our country between Hamilton and Jefferson. There is no question Jefferson has been a great blessing with his pen, but, even with his pen, he sometimes lacked judgment. (His suggestion of a separation of church and state was an aberration. The Constitution forbad the establishment of a religion, not its denial.) Washington is truly the father of the country but, after Washington, my vote goes to Hamilton as the greatest of the founding fathers.     *

“It is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protections and favors.” –George Washington