The exception, as American history showed, was American
democracy. The loose and barren rule of the Confederation
seemed to conservative minds such as Hamilton’s to presage,
in its strengthening of individualism, a fatal looseness of social
restraints, and led him on to a dread of democracy that he never
overcame. Liberty, he reminded his fellows, in the New York
Convention of 1788, seemed to be alone considered in government,
but there was another thing equally important: “a
principle of strength and stability in the organization . . . and
of vigour in its operation.” But Hamilton’s governmental
system was in fact repressive.[1] He wanted a system strong
enough, he would have said, to overcome the anarchic tendencies
loosed by war, and represented by those notions of natural
rights which he had himself once championed; strong enough
to overbear all local, state and sectional prejudices, powers or
influence, and to control—not, as Jefferson would have it, to
be controlled by—the people. Confidence in the integrity, the
self-control, and the good judgment of the people, which was
the content of Jefferson’s political faith, had almost no place
in Hamilton’s theories. “Men,” said he, “are reasoning rather
than reasonable animals.” The charge that he laboured to
introduce monarchy by intrigue is an under-estimate of his good
sense.[2] Hamilton’s thinking, however, did carry him foul of
current democratic philosophy; as he said, he presented his
plan in 1787 “not as attainable, but as a model to which we
ought to approach as far as possible”; moreover, he held through
life his belief in its principles, and in its superiority over the
government actually created; and though its inconsistency
with American tendencies was yearly more apparent, he never
ceased to avow on all occasions his aristocratic-monarchical
partialities. Moreover, his preferences for at least an aristocratic
republic were shared by many other men of talent. When it is
added that Jefferson’s assertions, alike as regards Hamilton’s
talk[3] and the intent and tendency of his political measures,
were, to the extent of the underlying basic fact—but discounting
Jefferson’s somewhat intemperate interpretations—unquestionably
true,[4] it cannot be accounted strange that Hamilton’s
Democratic opponents mistook his theoretic predilections for
positive designs. Nor would it be a strained inference from
much that be said, to believe that he hoped and expected that
in the “crisis” he foresaw, when democracy should have caused
the ruin of the country, a new government might be formed
that should approximate to his own ideals.[5] From the beginning
of the excesses of the French Revolution he was possessed by
the persuasion that American democracy, likewise, might at
any moment crush the restraints of the Constitution to enter
on a career of licence and anarchy. To this obsession he sacrificed
his life.[6] After the Democratic victory of 1800, his letters,
full of retrospective judgments and interesting outlooks, are
but rarely relieved in their sombre pessimism by flashes of hope
and courage. His last letter on politics, written two days
before his death, illustrates the two sides of his thinking already
emphasized: in this letter he warns his New England friends
against dismemberment of the union as “a clear sacrifice of
great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good;
administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy,
the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be more concentrated
in each part, and consequently the more virulent.”
To the end he never lost his fear of the states, nor gained faith
in the future of the country. He laboured still, in mingled hope
and apprehension, “to prop the frail and worthless fabric,”[7]
but for its spiritual content of democracy he had no understanding,
and even in its nationalism he had little hope. Yet
probably to no one man, except perhaps to Washington, does
American nationalism owe so much as to Hamilton.
In the development of the United States the influence of Hamiltonian nationalism and Jeffersonian democracy has been a reactive union; but changed conditions since Hamilton’s time, and particularly since the Civil War, are likely to create misconceptions as to Hamilton’s position in his own day. Great constructive statesman as he was, he was also, from the American point of view, essentially a reactionary. He was the leader of reactionary forces—constructive forces, as it happened—in the critical period after the War of American Independence, and in the period of Federalist supremacy. He was in sympathy with the dominant forces of public life only while they took, during the war, the predominant impress of an imperfect nationalism.[8] Jeffersonian democracy came into power in 1800 in direct line with colonial development; Hamiltonian Federalism was a break in that development; and this alone can explain how Jefferson could organize the Democratic Party in face of the brilliant success of the Federalists in constructing the government. Hamilton stigmatized his great opponent as a political fanatic; but actualist as he claimed to be,[9] Hamilton could not see, or would not concede, the predominating forces in American life, and would uncompromisingly have minimized the two great political conquests of the colonial period—local self-government and democracy.
Few Americans have received higher tributes from foreign authorities. Talleyrand, personally impressed when in America with Hamilton’s brilliant qualities, declared that he had the power of divining without reasoning, and compared him to Fox and Napoleon because he had “deviné l’Europe.” Of the judgments rendered by his countrymen, Washington’s confidence in his ability and integrity is perhaps the most significant. Chancellor James Kent, and others only less competent, paid remarkable testimony to his legal abilities. Chief-justice Marshall ranked him second to Washington alone. No judgment
- ↑ He warmly supported the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 (in their final form).
- ↑ The idea, he wrote to Washington, was “one of those visionary things none but madmen could undertake, and that no wise man will believe” (1792). And see his comments on Burr’s ambitions, Works, x. 417, 450 (8: 585, 610). We may accept as just, and applicable to his entire career, the statement made by himself in 1803 of his principles in 1787: “(1) That the political powers of the people of this continent would endure nothing but a representative form of government. (2) That, in the actual situation of the country, it was itself right and proper that the representative system should have a full and fair trial. (3) That to such a trial it was essential that the government should be so constructed as to give it all the energy and the stability reconcilable with the principles of that theory.”
- ↑ Cf. Gouverneur Morris, Diary and Letters, ii. 455, 526, 531.
- ↑ Cf. even Mr Lodge’s judgments, pp. 90-92, 115–116, 122, 130, 140. When he says (p. 140) that “In Hamilton’s successful policy there were certainly germs of an aristocratic republic, there were certainly limitations and possibly dangers to pure democracy,” this is practically Jefferson’s assertion (1792) that “His system flowed from principles adverse to liberty”; but Jefferson goes on to add: “and was calculated to undermine and demolish the republic.” As to the intent of Hamilton to secure through his financial measures the political support of property, his own words are honest and clear; and in fact he succeeded. Jefferson merely had exaggerated fears of a moneyed political engine, and seeing that Hamilton’s measures of funding and assumption did make the national debt politically useful to the Federalists in the beginning he concluded that they would seek to fasten the debt on the country for ever.
- ↑ Cf. Gouv. Morris, op. cit. ii. 474.
- ↑ He dreamed of saving the country with an army in this crisis of blood and iron, and wished to preserve unweakened the public confidence in his personal bravery.
- ↑ His own words in 1802. In justification of the above statements see the correspondence of 1800–1804 passim—Works, vol. ix.-x. (or 7-8); especially x. 363, 425, 434, 440, 445 (or 8: 543, 591, 596, 602, 605).
- ↑ Cf. Anson D. Morse, article cited below, pp. 4, 18-21.
- ↑ Chancellor Kent tells us (Memoirs and Letters, p. 32) that in 1804 Hamilton was planning a co-operative Federalist work on the history and science of government on an inductive basis. Kent always speaks of Hamilton’s legal thinking as deductive, however (ibid. p. 290, 329), and such seems to have been in fact all his political reasoning: i.e. underlying them were such maxims as that of Hume, that in erecting a stable government every citizen must be assumed a knave, and be bound by self-interest to co-operation for the public good. Hamilton always seems to be reasoning deductively from such principles. He went too far and fast for even such a Federalist disbeliever in democracy as Gouverneur Morris; who, to Hamilton’s assertion that democracy must be cast out to save the country, replied that “such necessity cannot be shown by a political ratiocination. Luckily, or, to speak with a reverence proper to the occasion, providentially, mankind are not disposed to embark the blessings they enjoy on a voyage of syllogistic adventure to obtain something more beautiful in exchange. They must feel before they will act” (op. cit. ii. 531).
