What Are The Best Sources For An Anti-Alexander-Hamilton-Hagiography Argument?

[Huerta88]

At least since the Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton came out, I seem to be encountering a prevailing middlebrow-conservative cult of personality about how great Hamilton was.

I went to a New-York Historical Society exhibition last year that appeared largely drawn from the Chernow book or similar sources, that went way over the top (IMHO), and over-simplified matters, in casting Hamilton as a sympathetic, prescient, omni-competent seer who built all that is right in our modern society and economy.

Okay, the contrarian in me got to wondering. Was he really all that? Now, I don’t want to start a pro-Hamilton/anti-Hamilton GD here. I’m looking for something more narrow: I just want to identify the best arguments and sources for a skeptical reevaluation of Hamilton.

I found a couple of threads on here that basically cast doubt on whether either he or Burr could be declared right/wrong/blameless in the squabble that led up to the duel. That’s useful, but I want to go broader.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=265606&highlight=alexander+hamilton

I expect my devil’s advocate position “against” Hamilton would also include a “rehabilitation” of Jefferson – the museum exhibit in particular seemed to use Jefferson as a whipping boy, simplistically portraying him as an agrarian dreamer who lacked Hamilton’s hard-headed business acumen and modernist impulses. Especially from a conservative point of view (and conservatives seem foremost among the modern-day Hamilton groupies), Jefferson’s position seems to have amounted to more than this simplifed caricature – specifically, his doubts about the centralization of government and the dangers of a centralized fiscal policy/national bank (and Hamilton’s apparent naivete in discounting the dangers of surrendering liberty to a national government/fisc) seem like something that modern conservatives need to reasses, in view of the metastization of federal government, spending, and the federal incursions into local and personal matters that have been abetted thereby.

I’d also point out that Hamilton’s alleged “visionary business” skills weren’t necessarily a whole lot more practical than Jefferson’s alleged preference for a nation of farmer-legislators – Hamilton’s one big “futuristic” scheme was to set up a national economy based on waterwheels, as far as I can tell, and the “Society For Useful Manufactures” that he started to aid this goal ended up a big old failure.

There are also a few sources portraying Burr as an admirable, or at least complex and in some romantic sense, appealing character, whose personal flaws and political foibles weren’t necessary worse, on a black and white basis, than those Hamilton exhibited in his many personal feuds and peccadillos.

http://www.nypress.com/13/27/news&columns/oldsmoke.cfm

So – any other arguments or sources you can point to for making a frankly-partisan attempt to debunk the Hamilton mythos? Again, I don’t ask anyone to accept my devil’s advocacy, and don’t want to debate the merits here – I’m mainly just looking to locate the best sources for a “contra Hamilton” case to be made from.

[BrainGlutton]

Well, in modern terms, Hamilton was definitely both a national-statist and an elitist, and suspicious of popular democracy; judge the value of that for yourself. The plan he presented at the Constitutional Convention called for a Governor (chief executive) serving for life; a two-house legislature with members of the upper house likewise serving for life; and the national legislature appointing the state governors and having authority to veto state legislation. See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=281447 I’ve also read (no cite) that Hamilton proposed establishing a “national university” to train a “mandarin” class of career national bureaucrats.

BTW, it’s not only conservatives* who idealize Hamilton. Don’t forget, from the New Deal well into the current Bush Admin, “states’ rights” was identified with social/political/economic conservatism and “national democracy” with liberalism. See Hamilton’s Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition, by Michael Lind – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684831600/qid=1125346987/sr=8-8/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i8_xgl14/102-8721172-1967333?v=glance&s=books&n=507846.

*And by that I assume you mean pro-business-interest conservatives and warhawk conservatives. Big- and small-l libertarians, and populist conservatives – America Firsters, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan – have always elevated Jefferson above Hamilton; some appear to regard Hamilton as something close to the Antichrist. Even social-religious conservatives usually are able to hold their noses, overlook Jefferson’s skepticism and anticlericalism, and look to him as a hero.

[Huerta88]

@BrainGlutton

*And by that I assume you mean pro-business-interest conservatives and warhawk conservatives. Big- and small-l libertarians, and populist conservatives – America Firsters, George Wallace, Pat Buchanan – have always elevated Jefferson above Hamilton; some appear to regard Hamilton as something close to the Antichrist. Even social-religious conservatives usually are able to hold their noses, overlook Jefferson’s skepticism and anticlericalism, and look to him as a hero.

Thanks. And I guess that is the sort of conservatives whom I had in mind (the National Review crowd seems to be in the forefront of Hamilton idolatry, and more and more I associate them with just the sort of neo-con business/big militaristic government brand of ‘conservatism’ that you posit would be happy with Hamilton – I just wonder that none of the more traditional conservatives seem to have spoken up more vocally on this issue).

[BrainGlutton]

@Huerta88

There are also a few sources portraying Burr as an admirable, or at least complex and in some romantic sense, appealing character, whose personal flaws and political foibles weren’t necessary worse, on a black and white basis, than those Hamilton exhibited in his many personal feuds and peccadillos.

Not a “source,” exactly, but you probably would enjoy Gore Vidal’s historical novel Burr – http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375708731/qid=1125436134/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-4724685-2129652?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 – in which Hamilton does not feature as a major character, but it does tell the story of that famous duel from Burr’s POV.

Here’s an interesting take (from a Catholic perspective) on the relationship between Hamilton’s political views and his moral/religious beliefs – http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/us/ah0015.html:

Alexander Hamilton had helped make a nation and now was bending it more and more to his will by defeating the strong, resisting forces of localism and tradition, as the victory in his home state demonstrated. Hamilton was Caesar, and the empire of his vision was the modern, totalitarian state. In these years Hamilton, not yet a Christian, saw no real choice between Caesar and Christ, nor could he as his only reality at this time seems to have been the political, the economic, the tangible. Men were not angels, he agreed with Madison, but his pessimism went much deeper, perhaps because of his Calvinist background. The effects of what he called “the ordinary depravity of human nature” were everywhere, of “uncontrollable impulses of rage . . . . jealousy. . . . and other irregular and violent propensities.”(18) There was yet no Christ in his thinking to redeem man, no supernatural virtue of love to overcome the war raging between man and man. Like Hobbes, whose view of human nature he shared, Hamilton saw the only hope for passion-driven man in the absolute security of the Leviathan state. Talk about the virtue of republics, with Montesquieu, Locke, and Jefferson, he believed, was not only idle and utopian but dangerous. There was no “exemption from the imperfections, the weaknesses, and the evils incident to society in every shape.” (19) Not the protection of their natural rights to life, liberty, and property, but the lust for power, was the motive of men in political associations. Hamilton neither signed nor approved of the Declaration of Independence.

This pessimism about man left to himself, this fear of man’s arbitrariness, was what motivated Hamilton to seek more and more centralization of government so as to save men from themselves. In true Hobbesian fashion, he was prepared to choose security as against liberty if the choice must be made. But in Hamilton’s mind, it was not really security but the “general good” that must be served. Interspersed among his writings, as Clinton Rossiter has shown, is this phrase and many other terms like “the public safety,” “the public interest,” and even “the general will,” all vaguely describing what he viewed as that transcending, ultimate end to which politics was only a means.(20) The very concept, Rousseauian in its nebulosity, shares with the ideas of the Frenchman and Hobbes too that utopian imprecision and casualness of language—that sloganeering character which modern advertising and mind-control technology knows so well how to exploit. “The first thing in all great operations of such a government as ours is to secure the opinion of the people,” Hamilton wrote during the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Acts.(21) Public opinion was “the governing principle of human affairs,” and he had no doubt that it could be conditioned to accept the totalitarian state that alone could prevent the abuse of human liberty.(22)

For it was, in truth, man’s liberty that made Hamilton, as a secular utopian, skeptical of the Articles of Confederation government and any other loose union. Decentralization allowed man too much scope for his native unruliness. If, as Hamilton believed, it is “a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave,” it followed that “it is therefore a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.”(23) How could men like Hamilton, men of “stern virtue,” the political elect “who could neither be distressed nor won into a sacrifice of their duty”—how could they save other men from their own destructive, selfish passions except by rendering them impotent as moral agents before the ethical state, which, as Rousseau and later Hegel asserted, was freedom per se. . .

<snip>

Hamilton, unlike Jefferson, never seems to have understood the Western concept of the person and his inalienable rights. His reading, evidently, was confined to highly selective ancient and modern authors like Demosthenes, Cicero, Plutarch, Bacon, Montaigne, Machiavelli, and Rousseau.(27) In the company of the great majority of his American contemporaries, he knew next to nothing about the Middle Ages and its Christian teaching of the primacy of the person made in the image of God. He was acquainted with natural law, for it was of course an integral part of the 18th century world-view, but from Locke’s Treatise of Government Hamilton seems to have drawn implications that led more to corporate idealism and collectivism of Rousseau than to the individualism of Jefferson. In any case, the Frenchman’s concept of the “general will” rather than Locke’s majority will was the fundamental tenet of Hamilton’s political philosophy, at leasr before 1800. Accordingly, there was no place for minority rights, natural rights to life, liberty, and property in his ideal state which he tried to construct as secretary of the Treasury and adviser to Washington.(28)

[BrainGlutton]

@Huerta88

I’d also point out that Hamilton’s alleged “visionary business” skills weren’t necessarily a whole lot more practical than Jefferson’s alleged preference for a nation of farmer-legislators – Hamilton’s one big “futuristic” scheme was to set up a national economy based on waterwheels, as far as I can tell, and the “Society For Useful Manufactures” that he started to aid this goal ended up a big old failure.

How was it a failure? True, the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufacturers never became the “national manufactory” Hamilton had envisioned, nor even succeeded in its original plan to build its own mills powered by the Great Falls of the Passaic River. Nevertheless, it founded the town of Paterson, NJ – originally a “company town”; it excavated two new raceways to concentrate the river’s power; it formed the basis (through its control of real estate and guidance of development of the same) for the industrialization of the Paterson area, including construction of water-powered textile mills; it was an inspirational model for the textile-mill industry throughout the Northeast; its state charger was a prototype for “public-private” enterprises in the 19th Century; and it remained in operation, in some sense, until the city of Paterson acquired its charter in 1945. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_the_Establishment_of_Useful_Manufactures; http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/njh/SciANDTech/Paterson/1791b.htm.

And given the state of technology in Hamilton’s time, a vision of a “national economy based on waterwheels” was pretty darned futuristic. Was the Whigs’ “American System” of “internal improvements” any less visionary just because the Erie Canal is now obsolete?

[BrainGlutton]

Sorry, I meant "state charter."

[stuyguy]

Here you go:

Comments by Pulitzer-winning co-author of Gotham, Mike Wallace.

Much of Wallace’s essay is critical of the physical logistics of the New-York Historical Society’s recent AH exhibit, but, if I remember correctly (it’s been a while since I read it) it also contains rebuttals to much of the pro-Hamilton content as well.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

I’ve read Joseph Ellis’s “Founding Brothers” and Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton,” and *highly * recommend them both.

Chernow’s bio is generally pro-Hamilton, but not completely. It’s not a hagiography. For all the praise bestowed upon its subject, it also discusses his idiocy in having an affair with Mrs. Reynolds, allowing himself to be blackmailed, and then foolishly publishing a pamphlet in which he tried to clear the air but only dug himself a deeper hole. It thoroughly covers his 1800 anti-John Adams pamphlet, which was a major factor in Thomas Jefferson’s presidential victory that year. It describes how often Hamilton wouldn’t take his own advice and hurt himself politically, needlessly diminishing his influence on both the national and New York political scenes. It lays the blame for the notorious duel pretty much equally on both participants, and notes that Hamilton - for all of his financial acumen - didn’t do nearly enough to provide for his widow and many children financially after his death, leaving Governeur Morris to secretly establish a fund for their support. Still, Mrs. Hamilton had to cadge loans from friends for many years after her husband’s death.

Chernow rakes Jefferson over the coals, but with good reason and plenty of footnotes.

I’m not a conservative, and I’m proud to be a Democrat. Although I acknowledge their faults, I’m also an admirer of Hamilton and (even more so) George Washington for all they did in establishing and guiding the early republic.

As a side note, the old courthouse in Cleveland has statues of two men in front: Hamilton and Jefferson. I suspect that both would object to being seated, for eternity, near each other.