Hamilton and Jefferson Were Just Like Us

Few politicians, judges, or scholars can ever be dissuaded from portraying the nation’s architects not as people, but as walking treatises on political philosophy, a sort of gaggle of latter-day Athenians in tricorn hats.  Thus, the Founders’ disagreements become more academic than personal or petty, and in most cases, eventually subordinated to the needs of the nation. 

As a result, the record these men produced—speeches, letters, and monographs, to say nothing of the Constitution and the Federalist essays—are viewed, at their core, as aesthetic discourses, not attempts to ruthlessly amass power for themselves and their supporters.

This is both an inaccurate and a dangerous way to treat American history.  Deifying those who founded the nation and led it during its formative years inevitably masks the bitter personal conflicts that are a good deal more reflective of our own political strife than these romantics would have us believe.

As an example, in a recent Washington Post op-ed, “The Founders’ Antidote to Demagoguery is a Lesson for Today,” Constitutional Law professor Jeffrey Rosen, president of the National Constitution Center, discussed the fear of tyranny among the Founders, especially Hamilton and Jefferson.   “They agreed about very little,” he wrote, “except for the danger of populist demagogues.” 

He quoted Hamilton, who had written to George Washington in August 1792, “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion.”  In an eerie allusion to Donald Trump, Hamilton had added, “When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity… It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

Rosen then gave examples of Jefferson voicing similar sentiments, the indication being that each man was expressing a theoretical viewpoint on which they agreed.

But that is not remotely what was going on.  The actual exchange between Hamilton and Jefferson could not have been less philosophical.  It was instead part of a remarkable series of vitriolic personal attacks with Washington in the middle, and it goes a long way to explaining why, despite Madison’s assurances in Federalist 10 that the new Constitution would encourage a series of shifting coalitions to amicably solve the nation’s problems, the United States descended quickly, bitterly, and inevitably into acrimonious partisanship. 

When the dust had settled, the seeds of our own current political crisis had been sown.

I believe it is vital to read and understand this exchange.  (I know a good bit about it because it is featured in my new book, Imperfect Union: How Errors of Omission Threaten Constitutional Democracy. Okay…I know.  Shameless plug.)  

Jefferson and Hamilton had come to loathe one another, and in the late spring and summer of 1792, with the second presidential election looming and Washington unsure about running, their feud boiled over.

On May 23, Jefferson wrote a long missive to Washington in which he fiercely attacked Hamilton’s grim portrait of the United States economy and his plan to revive it.  He accused Hamilton, the treasury secretary, of contriving a crisis for self-serving reasons, and he repeated the accusation that Hamilton was attempting to turn the nation into a monarchy.  “The ultimate object of all this is to prepare the way for a change from the present republican form of government to that of a monarchy of which the English constitution is to be the model.  That this was contemplated in the Convention is no secret because its partisans have made none of it.”  He lamented that “so many [Hamiltonians] have got into the legislature that, aided by the corrupt squadron of paper dealers who are at their devotion, they make a majority in both houses.”

Washington communicated Jefferson’s accusations to Hamilton, who eventually replied on August 18 in an extremely long discourse that is the source of Rosen’s misleading citation. Hamilton defended his policies in great detail, but he also wrote:

“I have not fortitude enough always to hear with calmness calumnies, which necessarily include me as a principal Agent in the measures censured, of the falsehood of which, I have the most unqualified consciousness. I trust that I shall always be able to bear, as I ought, imputations of errors of Judgment; but I acknowledge that I cannot be entirely patient under charges, which impeach the integrity of my public motives or conduct.”

So what Professor Rosen characterized as a statement of principles was actually an accusation.  Hamilton was not talking theoretically about tyranny, but rather, he had a specific tyrant in mind.  Hamilton’s indictment would hardly have been a surprise.  Evoking one’s enemies as potential tyrants was pretty much standard practice in 1792—as it remains today.

Hamilton’s missive prompted an appalled and distressed Washington to write to Jefferson five days later.  Predictably, he defended Hamilton, who he adored almost as an adopted son, and urged Jefferson to put aside his animus until Hamilton’s ideas had been given a fair chance. 

“How unfortunate, and how much is it to be regretted then, that whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies & insidious friends, that internal dissentions should be harrowing & tearing our vitals… And without more charity for the opinions & acts of one another in Governmental matters—or some more infallible criterion by which the truth of speculative opinions, before they have undergone the test of experience, are to be forejudged than has yet fallen to the lot of fallibility, I believe it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to manage the Reins of Government or to keep the parts of it together: for if, instead of laying our shoulders to the machine after measures are decided on, one pulls this way & another that, before the utility of the thing is fairly tried, it must, inevitably, be torn asunder—And, in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness & prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps forever!”

Jefferson, then Secretary of State, likely livid over Washington siding with his sworn enemy, had no intention of moderating his opposition and sent Washington an extraordinary response.

“When I embarked in the government, it was with a determination to intermeddle not at all with the legislature, & as little as possible with my co-departments. The first and only instance of variance from the former part of my resolution, I was duped into by the Secretary of the treasury and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life this has occasioned me the deepest regret.”

He went on again to accuse Hamilton of trying to control the legislature, turning it into a House of Lords, and using that body to seize power.  “That I have utterly, in my private conversations, disapproved of the system of the Secretary of the treasury, I acknolege & avow: and this was not merely a speculative difference. His system flowed from principles adverse to liberty, & was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic, by creating an influence of his department over the members of the legislature. I saw this influence actually produced, & it’s first fruits to be the establishment of the great outlines of his project by the votes of the very persons who, having swallowed his bait, were laying themselves out to profit by his plans.”

Washington was unmoved, but Jefferson had already laid preparations to counterattack.   In autumn 1791, with Madison, his new convert, in tow, Jefferson had journeyed north, touring Lake Champlain, Connecticut, and Long Island, supposedly to “observe the vegetation and wild life of the region.”  During this sojourn, the two Virginians met with anti-Federalists Robert Livingston and George Clinton, two men whose views Madison had attacked in the Federalist essays.  They later stopped in New York City to plot with Aaron Burr.

The result was the birth of the nation’s first organized political party, the Democratic-Republicans.  It took two more elections, but in 1800, Jefferson defeated Adams for the presidency—with Burr as vice-president—marking the ascendancy of political parties and the death of the optimism in Federalist 10. 

All the evils of partisanship we now decry can be seen as emanating from that interchange.

One more aside.  Professor Rosen, as do many Supreme Court justices, evokes the Federalist essays to buttress his arguments, assuming, once again, that they are merely political theory as well as an accurate representation of the struggles of principle engaged in by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.  They are neither.  The eighty-five essays are op-eds, advocacy pieces, written to convince skeptical New Yorkers to ratify the new Constitution.  As such, they are filled with half-truths, distortions, and outright falsehoods.  (I have a chapter on the Federalist called “Unreliable Narrator.”)

The reason I’m so strong about these misrepresentations—and why I wrote the book—is that I do not think we can hope to solve the nation’s myriad problems without an honest look at who we really are.

And who we really were.