What would Hamilton do?

AuthorMcConnell, Michael W.
PositionAlexander Hamilton - Thirtieth Annual Federalist Society National Student Symposium

On July 14, 1804, Gouverneur Morris stood by an open coffin at the front of Trinity Church in Manhattan and addressed a massive crowd that filled every nook of the sanctuary and spilled out into the street of lower Broadway. (1) Morris had been one of the most active and influential delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Now he was at Trinity Church to eulogize his friend, Alexander Hamilton, who had tragically been shot and killed at a dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey, by the Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr. Hamilton himself had shot high and wide, but the Vice President shot straight and true, and his bullet found its mark. (2) Morris reminded the audience of his friend's valor during the Revolutionary War, his unflagging advocacy of the Constitution, and his exemplary public service as first Secretary of the Treasury and counselor at the bar. (3) At the end of his oration, Morris offered the assembled mourners some practical advice about how to decide difficult political questions in the future: Pay more attention to acts than "professions," he warned. (4) And most significant: "[O]n a doubtful occasion ask, Would Hamilton have done this thing?" (5)

What would Hamilton have done? Not a bad question to ask, even today. But I doubt anyone in the United States in 2011 is doing that. For all his brilliance and influence on the Founding, Hamilton stands as the odd man out in the current ideological divide. Conservatives today tend to favor limited government and strict constitutional construction--ideas Hamilton rejected in favor of energetic administration and broad construction. Even so, one might still expect some, like the Federalist Society, to champion Hamilton's legacy. After all, Hamilton was the progenitor of the Federalist Papers and founder of the Federalist Party. (6) Yet it is the portrait of James Madison--a Jeffersonian Republican--that graces the Federalist Society logo, not Hamilton's.

Modem liberals are no more inclined to take their cues from the Hamilton legacy. To be sure, modern progressives tend to advocate big government and loose constitutional construction-ideas Hamilton originated. (7) But every year Democrats sponsor Jefferson-Jackson Dinners, which are named for the biggest scourges of Hamiltonian policy. From the modern progressive point of view, Hamilton was too much a believer in private property, too much the advocate of sound conservative finance, too much the critic of the French Revolution, too inclined to use American military power abroad, and too much a believer that American prosperity would come from profit and markets.

Thus, neither the tea partiers nor the Obama Democrats are likely to honor Hamilton as an example. But perhaps this lack of modern adulation makes it all the more worthwhile for us to take a new look at Hamilton's constitutional vision for America. In undertaking a study of what Hamilton stood for, it helps to recall first what Hamilton did. Whatever one's opinions of his ideas, Hamilton's life is an impressive, indeed amazing, exemplar of the American Dream. No prominent American statesman rose so quickly, from so little, to excel so splendidly in so many things.

Alexander Hamilton arrived in this country in about 1772, (8) on the eve of the Revolution, at about the age of seventeen--his exact birth date is unknown--penniless and family-less, an object of charity from back home. (9) John Adams called him "the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar," which was true. (10) But his early history was even less prepossessing than that. Hamilton was born on the West Indian island of Nevis, where slaves out numbered the free population by a ratio of four to one. (11) His maternal grandfather was a Huguenot who fled France after revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and his mother, Rachel Faucette, was rumored to be half or a quarter black. (12) She married a Dane, Johann Lavien (or possibly Levine), who may have been a Sephardic Jew. (13) Whatever his background, Lavien was a coarse, repulsive, and violent fellow. After giving birth to a son, Rachel left him. Lavien accused her of adultery and had her jailed for several months in a dank medieval fortress usually reserved for pirates and runaway slaves. (14) After her release, Rachel fled Nevis. She could not obtain a divorce, though Lavien, as the wronged party and the male, was free to divorce her and remarry. (15)

Rachel took up with James Hamilton, fourth of eleven children of a minor Scottish laird. Unsuccessful in business, he had migrated to the West Indies, where he repeated his pattern of failure. The two began a fifteen-year relationship, which ended when Alexander was about ten years old and James abandoned his family; (16) Alexander never saw him again. They maintained correspondence, however, and Alexander assisted James financially in James's old age. (17) Alexander Hamilton certainly regarded James Hamilton as his father, but evidence suggests this was not the case. Most likely, Hamilton's biological father was one Thomas Stevens, a gentler and more successful man whose son was the spitting image of Alexander. (18)

Between the ages of ten and fourteen, Alexander experienced a series of misfortunes that staggers the imagination. Soon after his father absconded, both Alexander and his mother caught a tropical disease, and she died in their shared bed. (19) At her death, all her property was seized by her first, and legitimate, son, Peter Lavien. Alexander and his brother went to live with a cousin; a month later, the cousin committed suicide and was discovered dead in his bed in a pool of blood. Another relative took them in and promptly died. (20) Young Alexander's troubles did not end there; he survived one of the fiercest hurricanes ever to strike the West Indies, with fifteen-foot waves crashing through the town and destroying everything in their wake. (21)

Hamilton thus endured illegitimacy, poverty, disease, the death of three sequential guardians, abandonment, and natural disaster. And yet, by the age of fourteen, young Alexander Hamilton had won a trusted position as clerk in an export company on St. Croix. (22) By sixteen, he was so knowledgeable and so capable that the owners left him in charge when they were out of the country. (23) As a teenage boy, Hamilton issued orders to ship captains, handled money in multiple currencies, kept the books, and managed the business. So impressed were the merchants of St. Croix with this "bastard brat" that they raised a subscription to send him to New York to obtain a proper education. (24)

Hamilton undertook his studies at King's College, now Columbia, a pillar of the Anglican and Tory establishment. (25) He distinguished himself there with precocious essays and speeches denouncing British misrule and supporting the nascent cause of Independence--and incidentally orchestrated the rescue of the Tory rector when a patriot mob attacked his residence. (26) At twenty-one, at the outbreak of war, he was selected to serve as a captain of the artillery. General George Washington noticed the young officer and made him his aide de camp--essentially his right hand man and the manager of the Continental Army. (27) Of Washington's written orders during the war, most are in Hamilton's handwriting. (28) But Hamilton was not content with this vital and central role; he wanted combat. In the final stages of the war, Washington gave him command of three battalions of light infantry, and he led the bayonet attack on the British fortifications at Yorktown, making him one of the military heroes of the war. (29) Later, during John Adams's presidency, the President promoted Hamilton to the rank of major general and put him in charge of the forces preparing for war against France. (30) Had that war broken out--as he imprudently wished--Hamilton might be remembered even more as a military leader than as a leader in finance and law.

More interesting and ultimately more significant than his Revolutionary War military exploits were his ventures into economic and constitutional theory. Despite the demands of his job and the privations of military service, Hamilton spent the depths of the war gaining insights into human nature from Cicero, Bacon, Montaigne, and Hobbes. (31) He took notes in the blank pages of a pay book, filling 112 pages during the war. From the moderns, particularly the Scots, he learned the "new sciences" of economics and politics. Among his favorite sources was Malachy Postlewayt's Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a cross between an almanac and an economics textbook. (32)

Hamilton did not just read. He formulated ideas that would later be central to the new Republic's foundations. In the winter of 1780-81, he composed and sent two significant letters. The first letter, addressed to his friend James Duane, a member of Congress from New York, criticized the then-new Articles of Confederation. It suggested a plan for a new and much stronger constitution--the first detailed proposal for a new constitution by anyone in the nation. (33) In its basic outline--particularly the powers that would eventually be allocated in Article I, Section 8--this plan closely resembled what would later come out of the Philadelphia Convention. (34) Hamilton's second letter, to the newly appointed Secretary of Finance Robert Morris, outlined an economic plan for restoring the public credit and economic health of the nation. (35) This lengthy letter, which Hamilton wrote at the age of twenty-five while serving full-time as a military officer during the war, lays out almost the entirety of the plan Hamilton would put into effect a decade later as the first Secretary of the Treasury. (36) Reading the two letters in tandem is the best possible way to see the connection between constitutional reform and economic reform at the Founding.

After the war, Hamilton numbered among the prime supporters of the campaign to summon a constitutional...

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