Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson

I used to write columns for the Cavalier Daily in college and I remember reading Shelby Foote’s The Civil War and wanting to write about the Battle of Chancellorsville.  My editors were opposed to it mainly because they felt it was jumping the shark a little bit and because there wasn’t really an opinion behind the column besides the fact that Hooker lost his nerve and it was really an incredible upset on Jackson’s part.  Writing about Alexander Hamilton now has that same feeling.  What’s the point?  I don’t know.  But I find the guy fascinating.  I had a vaguely negative impression of him based on my recollection of high school and the way he came across in the John Adams mini-series on HBO.  Clearly, I’m not an academic on the Founding Fathers.

At any rate, I just finished Ron Chernow’s wonderful biography on this incredible figure in American history and I feel compelled to jot down some things that I found interesting, as is my wont and my luxury.  There are a bunch of historical ideas that hadn’t formed in my mind and then two or three broader life/business/professional themes that I took from his life as well.

If you’re not familiar with Hamilton, I encourage you to read this book.  It presents a fascinating portrait of a complicated man and, importantly for me, it presents a radically different portrait of some figures that I’d only viewed positively in the past, namely Thomas Jefferson, who I know view as an important but necessary evil in our history.  That’s only as of right now but still.  Based on Chernow’s portrayal, he is not the man that has been canonized at my alma mater, The University of Virginia.

Some specific observations about Mr. Jefferson below:

Where I come from, Mr. Jefferson is a saint.  I’d always thought of him as the man that wrote the Declaration of Independence.  I admired his deism, given my own distrust of organized religion.  I loved the affectations he had around his university where the campus is The Grounds, underclassmen are referred to by year rather than by titles of seniority, etc.

But, the picture that emerges of him when viewed from both Hamilton’s point-of-view and from the facts of history render a wholly different portrait.

He was a hypocrite. There’s no two ways about it.  In so many different facets of his life, he advocated a certain set of positions and then did not live by that same code in his personal dealings.  He portrayed himself as a humble citizen, the South as a group of simple agrarians.  His Jeffersonian Republicans constantly felt that the Hamilton’s Federalist party were crass, merchant-oriented, imperialists intent on reestablishing a British monarchy while the innocent farmers of the South merely desired a freedom from tyranny and the oppression of a large central government.

Except for the fact that these simple citizen-farmers bought, sold and depended on their ownership of other human beings to drive their economy.  The fact of slavery is simply irreconcilable with the language of the Declaration of Independence and the further fact that Jeffersonians were able to so successfully portray Hamilton as money-hungry imperialists while they wielded the true scepter of despotism over so many is the basest irony and hypocrisy.

But it goes deeper than slavery.  It’s really about class.  Jefferson didn’t like the nouveau riche of the North and didn’t respect that Hamilton didn’t have the proper background.  Again, for all their protestations about simple agrarian living, it really seems an argument about a class and caste system strikingly similar to the English one they pretended to disavow.

And he was wrong about his notion of America.  Hamilton was right.  Hamilton embedded the seeds of our financial markets, from scratch, with more vision and foresight than anyone else possessed at the time and his view of America as a country of merchants and, essentially, entrepreneurs was ultimately the view that prevailed.  And for the best.  It lifted millions out of poverty, gave opportunities to small businesses, and laid the foundation for the economic powerhouse that America ultimately became.  He believed in a national army when many didn’t.  That same national army that saved the Western World almost 200 years later in Europe.  Jefferson, Adams, Madison: These people didn’t even believe in banks!  They didn’t understand the power that credit and liquidity brought to a financial system or how a diverse economy was set free by a strong system of central credit and, ultimately, trust.  They thought commerce was gauche and ungentlemanly.  Truly, their vision of our country was of a landed gentry, all under the auspices of simple citizens, that depended for their economic foundation and liberty on other human beings.  That they owned, bought and sold.

Hamilton was an abolitionist.

And then there’s the fact that, as Jefferson condemned what he thought where the Tory loyalists in New York, and while he supported the “citizen uprising” during the French Revolution, he lived in mansions, had legions of attendants including, of course, Sally Hemings, and accumulated vast stores of possessions.  When he became Secretary of State, under Washington, he had 26 crates of French furniture, china, porcelain and other assorted odds and ends shipped back to New York.

Just a simple citizen farmer, huh?

While the party system was not really developed (Jefferson and Hamilton represent the start of the two party system in the States actually), Jefferson was part of Washington’s cabinet and colleagues with Hamilton yet constantly worked to undermine both of them, going as far as funding anti-administration newspapers using federal monies (!).  All  while he was supposed to be serving President Washington.  He specifically provided different messages than the official White House position to the French government under both Washington and Adams.

Finally, he was rather callous and bloodthirsty yet showed no valor or bravery in battle.  As has been commonly quoted, he remarked that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”   He was rather nonchalant about the French Revolution despite the agony, tyranny, violence and pointless bloodshed that characterized those years in France.  He sounded like George Bush talking about the early years of Iraq.  Meanwhile Hamilton warned that tyrants often hide under the guise of “the common man” until they’re able to seize power and reveal themselves as despots.  He accurately predicted Napoleon’s rise in France and, of course, years later, the likes of people like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others.  Despite his more measured approach to the French Revolution, Hamilton had numerous instances of courage and bravery under fire.  Jefferson’s most famous moment on the fields of battle when he abandoned Richmond to the British and fled to the hills of Charlottesville.

Last point.  When Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr, Jefferson remarked in a letter that he was “Colonel Hamilton” which is basically just him being an assh*le since Hamilton had been promoted to General when we raised an army under Adams at the possibility of war with France (the so called Quasi-War).

There are a lot of counters.  It was probably helpful to have the Republicans focus on smaller government and diminishing the power of the federal government and the executive as a counterweight to Hamilton’s notion of a strong executive.  And slavery was bigger than just Jefferson.  And this is all from one person’s POV, namely his arch-nemesis and his lifelong political rival.  But, nevertheless, the portrait that’s been painted to me of Jefferson via our educational institutions and culture had none of this nuance and none of this balance.  Jefferson and Adams got to write the history books because Hamilton died so early but there needs to be a more serious reevaluation of Jefferson as a man.

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