Alexander Hamilton Was an Authoritarian Jerk

This first ran in Splice Today.
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Back in high school, my AP History teacher presented American government as one long argument between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. On the one hand, federal centralization and unity; on the other, decentralization and liberty. Two great thinkers thinking great thoughts, founding our national discourse as founding fathers will.

What my history teacher didn’t tell us was that Alexander Hamilton was a paranoid, war-mongering loon.

In the late 1790s, when Britain and France were locked in war, the Federalist President John Adams was desperately trying to maintain neutrality and not drag the US into a massive conflict for which it was ill-prepared. Hamilton, on the other hand, was thrilled at the prospect of war. In part, this was because he hated the French Revolution, and its attack on central authority and monarchy. But it was also because he figured he could use the war to attack the pro-French Republicans led by Jefferson, a man who he later denounced as “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics”. Placed at the head of an army raised to repel a possible French invasion, Hamilton got it into his head that Virginia was arming against the central government, and almost marched on the state. Dissuaded from starting a Civil War, he turned instead to infringement of civil liberties. After some initial hesitation, he supported the notorious 1798 Alien and Sedition acts to limit immigration and punish dissent. Then, when Adams managed to secure peace with France, Hamilton was so upset that he wrote a 50 page diatribe denouncing Adams and concluding that the President had lost “the respect of friends and foes” alike.

So, to sum up, Hamilton was bitterly partisan, eager to engage in avoidable wars, and prone to using the machinery of government to stifle dissent and persecute his enemies, real and imagined. He sounds, in other words, remarkably like Dick Cheney.

What’s interesting in comparing Hamilton to Cheney is that, while the behavior seems consistent, the political terms don’t quite match up. Hamilton was a statist big government anti-revolutionary who wanted to increase centralized federal power. Cheney was…what? In theory the Republican party doesn’t like big government. But in practice Cheney was all for everything that Hamilton was all for — militarization, civil liberties infringement in the name of crushing internal enemies, the works.

People often talk as if inter-party tension is worse now than it ever was, but as far as I can tell Hamilton was actually more scurrilously partisan than Cheney. There are Republicans who will insist outright that their opponents are traitorous scum, but they don’t tend to be leaders; even Cheney was at least somewhat circumspect in this regard. But Hamilton, one of the most influential Federalists, pretty much came out and said that the Republicans would betray us all to the French regicides.

The difference, then, isn’t so much the partisanship as the fact that with Hamilton and Jefferson, the partisanship made more sense. Maybe it was because the battle lines were new back then, or maybe it was because the revolutionary anti-government libertarians just hadn’t ever been in power yet, or maybe it was because everything got scrambled when the U.S. became an imperialist superpower.

In any case, the point is, in those early days, when America was America and men wore wigs, the pro big intrusive government authoritarians were pro big intrusive government authoritarians. They didn’t demand enormous armies on the one hand and bewail the power of centralized government on the other. They were pseudo-monarchists and proud of it. And, similarly, the radical anti-government folks like Jefferson were really anti-government; they were radicals who supported the French Revolution even on up to (in Jefferson’s case) the Terror. Jefferson declared he would rather see, “half of the earth desolated; were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.” When he said he believed in liberty, he meant he believed in liberty for everybody. Except the slaves, of course.

In short, back then we had a clear choice between naked paranoia and open hypocrisy. Now, alas, in these decadent times, it’s hard to tell which is which.

 

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13 thoughts on “Alexander Hamilton Was an Authoritarian Jerk

  1. Noah, great essay as usual, but I will now pick a nit, as is my wont. Concisely, Jefferson believed in freedom for the slaves and even worked to achieve it. He just didn’t believe strongly enough to allow it to hurt his pocketbook. I know what you’re thinking; you already alluded to this with the phrase “open hypocrisy,” but please allow me to pedantically elucidate anyway.

    Jefferson helped delegitimize the international slave trade in America as President. Furthermore, most attentive schoolchildren know that the draft of the Declaration of Independence he submitted for review included a tirade against the British for getting the colonies involved in slavery. The Continental Congress rapidly excised that portion. Jefferson also supported emancipation throughout his life. He did not support unilateral emancipation at his own expense, although he manumitted a few of his hundreds of slaves.

    Jefferson began his adult life “suspecting” that whites were intellectually superior to blacks, but hoping that the differences he observed were due to nurture and not nature. I remember reading an excerpt from a letter he wrote in later life wherein he admitted that familiarity with educated blacks had changed his mind. I’ve been unable to find that letter in the cursory research I did for this comment. I did learn that he was considered a relatively kind slave owner, in that he attempted to limit physical punishment and separation of families — again, at least up to the point that it started costing him significant money. Regardless, he believed slavery was wrong because he believed blacks’ moral discernment — the true test of humanity, in Jefferson’s eyes — to be equal to that of whites.

    Jefferson also believed that slavery damaged whites’ moral character. In his book Notes on the State of Virginia he expressed a lot of the opinions I’ve expressed above and specifically his opinion that slavery bred the manners and morals of tyrants in its masters. In my reading of the text, he was speaking of his own experience in addition to the observation of others. Notes is a remarkable volume. Jefferson took so much pride in having authored it that he published it anonymously in Europe.

    I should note that Jefferson’s scheme for emancipation involved education prior to manumission and subsequent expatriation to Africa. He believed whites’ prejudice and blacks’ righteous anger would prevent the two groups from living together in peace.

    So in summary, Jefferson’s opinions and actions on slavery were complex and conflicted, a little like William Jefferson Clinton’s feminism.

    Postscript: Religion was another nuanced area of Jefferson’s life. Despite the charges of Hamilton and others, he was no atheist. Based on his own writings, he was a theist who believed in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, but not his divinity. Jefferson was perhaps the single most ardent supporter of religious freedom, but he was never anti-religion.

  2. Yeah, I know Jefferson’s attitude towards slavery was complicated. I think “Hypocrisy” still covers it…especially considering he didn’t even manumit his slaves upon his death (not even those who were his own children.) Talk isn’t nothing, but it’s still kind of cheap.

  3. Okay, Noah. I was confident you knew all this, but I wanted to tell the whole story for anyone who didn’t. He still deserves credit for adding to the political and religios foundation that people like Lincoln, Douglass, and King later used to advance freedom. We tend to simplify complex issues in history just like we do current events, and while it makes for good rhetoric, it’s a mistake in both cases. I think Suat wrote an essay recently that discussed the danger of idealistic activism combined with a simplistic understanding of the issues.

  4. I really liked your points about the differences between polarized politics then and now, though. The arguments were much more meaningful then, when we were still trying to figure out what we stood for. Now we argue vehemently over what are often relatively small differences in platform, then proceed to violate the principles of those platforms in the practice of governing. It’s like the old theological arguments over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, except not so harmless.

  5. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater with Hamilton.
    Authoritarian jerk or not, it’s the Hamiltonian school of thought that has paved the way for a large number of progressive constitutional victories starting with McCulloch vs. Maryland. The Jeffersonian school of thought gave us the Civil War, the Hamiltonian school of thought, the Reconstruction amendment. Sure, Hamiltonian thought gives us the neocons, but it also gives us the New Deal. Jeffersonian thought gives us racist ranchers who don’t want their cattle to eat for free.

    As long as we’re comparing Hamilton to Jefferson:

    https://www.nyhistory.org/web/africanfreeschool/history/manumission-society.html

  6. Dean Milburn has already provided the necessary defense of Alexander Hamilton’s political and economic legacy, so I will point out: America may or may not have been adequately prepared for war with France (and Spain) in 1798. But we were certainly better prepared for that than we were for war with Britain – the greatest power in the new world – in 1812, which is what Thomas Jefferson’s protégé, James Madison, DID in fact get us into, with Jefferson’s approval.

    (Jefferson to John Adams, June 11, 1812: “The possession of that country [Canada] secures our women and children forever from the tomahawk and scalping knife, by removing those who excite them; and for this possession orders, I presume, are issued by this time; taking for granted that the doors of Congress will re-open with a declaration of war. That this may end in indemnity for the past, security for the future, and complete emancipation from Anglomany, Gallomany, and all the manias of demoralized Europe… is the sincere prayer of yours affectionately.”)

    As for parallels to the present day, an obvious one is between the old Republicans’ idiotic belief that they could conquer Canada with militia and the new Republicans’ that they could occupy Iraq on the cheap. Less obvious but more salient is the parallel to modern American perceptions of Russia under Yeltsin versus Putin, of the Chavistas in Venezuela, of the “color revolutions” (including the current events in Ukraine), and so on. Over and over again, we see American liberals cheering for neo-liberal plutocrat despoilers of their own countries, because they have not considered anything beyond the fact that the other side has committed human rights abuses. Likewise, since at least the New Dealers, some American liberals have concluded that Hamilton’s authoritarian tendencies mean Jefferson was the good guy (or at least the lesser evil), never mind that Jefferson’s decentralizing agrarianism would have left the northern states unindustrialized and accordingly weak, and the southern states – well, you know.

  7. Is anybody besides me embarrassed that we’ve invaded Canada twice and failed miserably each time? Man, if I were Canadian, I’d never shut up about that. Of course, they probably keep quiet to prevent wounding our egos and inciting a third try.

  8. Thanks very much, Graham. Of course it’s a Canadian complaining about bad Canadian behavior. We probably failed to notice.

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