THE NECESSARY BUT PROBLEMATIC STATE:

Alexander the Great: Yet another unappreciated founding father: a review of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow (Matthew Dallek, April 2004, Washington Monthly)

Two very distinct views have guided our understanding of America's Revolutionary generation: the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, as historian Joseph Ellis points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Founding Brothers. Alexander Hamilton saw the American Revolution as a collectivistic enterprise designed to forge a coherent nation under a strong centralized federal government. The Hamiltonians wanted a state that had the power to raise a militia, regulate trade and banking, and perhaps more importantly, unify the 13 colonies, fearing that the new nation would be riven by internal strife. In addition, Hamilton viewed urban centers, brimming with crafts, shipping, and manufacturing, as one key to America's self-sufficiency. President Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, disdained the federal government as a likely repository of tyrants. Jeffersonians favored an agrarian society with strong individual rights (primarily for white men), and in contrast to Hamilton, supported the practice of slavery. In many respects, these splits--urban versus rural, federal versus local--define our politics to this day.

In his exhaustive and engaging biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow, (who has authored biographies of John D. Rockefeller Sr., and J.P. Morgan) describes Hamilton as the indispensable revolutionary. Chernow's gripping story sheds new light not only on Hamilton's legacy but also on the conflicts that accompanied the republic's birth. He passionately believed that if America were going to survive, order had to be balanced with liberty. In Hamilton's view, economic institutions, properly conceived, could foster manufacturing, protect private property, expand opportunity, and impose order on society. Chernow contends that more than any other founder, Hamilton's vision paved the road to America's future. [...]

Ultimately, it was as President Washington's secretary of the treasury that Chernow argues Hamilton made his greatest contribution.

In riveting passages, Chernow describes the rise of the modern economy. Opposed to slavery based on the horrors Hamilton had witnessed during his West Indian boyhood, Hamilton wanted to end an institution he viewed as both backwards and brutal. Though frightened by the prospect of war between the South and the North, he spent his political capital pushing for the creation of strong central institutions he believed vital to the survival and prosperity of the new republic.

Almost single-handedly, the treasury secretary won passage of bills that established a U. S. bank, common currency, customs service, and coast guard. Hamilton negotiated a deal in which the capital would be moved from New York to Philadelphia to, ultimately, Washington, D.C., and in exchange the federal government would assume debts incurred by the states during the Revolution. (In assuming these debts, the federal government also assumed the authority to raise taxes to pay off those debts.) The power of the federal government to levy taxes had been enshrined into law.

When Hamilton's critics accused him of resurrecting a British monarchy in America, Hamilton retorted that his economic reforms would glue the states together and that they were consistent with the spirit of 1787.

If Hamilton deserves greeat credit for being the one Founder who most clearly understood the Industrial age that was coming, it must be recognized that the Anti-Federalists were right and that the whole-hearted embrace of a national government meant the eventual death of federalism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2004 4:36 PM