Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and the Character of the American Republic
The feud between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, two giants of the early American republic, led to the two-party system that now dominates the United States. These men, opposites in their origins, temperaments, and politics, embodied differing visions for the character of their young nation. Jefferson’s vision of a republican utopia, populated by virtuous citizen-farmers, living simple, agrarian lives, stood in opposition to Hamilton’s expectation of an increasingly urbanised and industrialised society, whose geometric growth in wealth would be assured by banking and finance. Though Jefferson attained greater political heights, ascending to the presidency in 1800, it is ultimately Hamilton’s vision of for the modern state, with its central banks, stock exchanges, and urban populations, which lives on.
Origins
Born out of wedlock in the British West Indies in 1755, Hamilton’s early life was marked by shame, deprivation, and grief. His mother, the half-British, half-French Rachel Fawcett, fled Saint Croix to the island of Saint Kitts in the Caribbean in the early 1750s to escape her sadistic husband, who had her locked in a dark, damp jail for eight months owing to her alleged infidelity. On Saint Kitts, she met James Hamilton, the third son of a Scottish laird who was to father two children. James Hamilton showed little aptitude for business or fatherhood, eventually abandoning 11-year-old Alexander and his brother James in 1766. Less than a year later, Rachel Fawcett was dead, having succumbed to a fever. Hamilton’s next guardian, his mother’s cousin, committed suicide within a year – before the end of 1769, his aunt, uncle, and grandmother were all dead. Hamilton’s view of the world and human nature was forever darkened by this unspeakable childhood. Lacking a family pedigree, Hamilton later guarded his reputation fiercely and was unusually sensitive to slights on his honour. His early encounters with slavery in the West Indies, where he witnessed slave auctions and the brutality of servitude on sugar plantations in the tropical heat, made him a lifelong opponent of the peculiar institution.
Thomas Jefferson, by contrast, was born in 1743, the third of 10 children of wealthy Virginia planters. His father, Peter Jefferson, who owned more than 60 slaves, died when Jefferson was 14 in 1957, leaving his son 5000 acres of land and 20 slaves. Unlike Hamilton, the young Jefferson enjoyed a formal education, attending various local schools and indulging his many interests, which included practicing the violin and studying the natural world. Though their origins are scarcely comparable, Hamilton and Jefferson were similar in one respect – both were endowed with extraordinary intelligence. Both men were widely read autodidacts with insatiable appetites for books. Jefferson embodied the aristocratic ideal of a self-taught renaissance man, who, in his spare time, designed his hilltop plantation house at Monticello, authored works on the life of Jesus, cultivated plants, and read from his expansive library. Hamilton, an absurdly fast learner and prolific writer, would go on to author the bulk of the Federalists Papers, a collection of 85 essays explicating the newly formed Constitution of the United States. To the chagrin of Jefferson, Hamilton was to become the principal architect of the financial system that would come to dominate the country, and by extension, the world.
Rise
Hamilton attracted early renown for writing a letter describing a hurricane that ravaged Christiansted in 1772, which was to be published in a local newspaper. This prompted the Presbyterian revered Hugh Knox to solicit donations from locals to fund this talented young man’s voyage to the then British colony of New York. Attending what is now Columbia College, Hamilton soon involved himself in revolutionary activism, penning merciless political assaults against one Samuel Seabury, a clergyman who authored pamphlets promoting loyalty to the British. At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War between the American colonists and Great Britain, Hamilton captained a militia artillery regiment, distinguishing himself as a courageous, efficient officer. He attracted the attention of George Washington, General of the Continental Army, and served essentially as his chief of staff for the bulk of the war. In 1781, Hamilton, then a Colonel, lead a bayonet charge at the Battle of Yorktown, bringing him long-sought martial glory.
Jefferson, Hamilton’s elder by 12 years, had been admitted to the bar and had already served as a member of the Virginia legislature for six years prior to the outbreak of hostilities at Lexington and Concord. Despite depending heavily on slave labour, Jefferson, in his tenure in the House of Burgesses, wrote and sponsored legislation that would give masters the authority to free their slaves, to no avail. Guided by the enlightenment philosophy of Locke and Montesquieu, the ethical precepts of Jesus, and classical authors including Cicero, Jefferson believed that all men were endowed with natural rights, and that governments that were founded on principles other than the consent of the people were tyrannical. As the British attempted to reassert their authority over the largely self-governing American colonies in 1774, Jefferson wrote a resolution calling for the boycott of British goods, later to become A Summary View of the Rights of British America, which laid out a list of American grievances against George III for delegates in the First Continental Congress. As a delegate for the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. The author of this immortal document, extolling “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as self-evident and inalienable rights, did not, like Hamilton, take up arms against the British, considering himself more philosopher than warrior. In January 1781, Jefferson fled with his family from Richmond, Virginia, as a British detachment lead by the traitor Benedict Arnold approached from Hood’s Point, an act that would later attract charges of cowardice. As hostilities between the British and the American colonists wound down, the Congress of the Confederation appointed Jefferson as diplomat to France. Jefferson, with household slaves in tow, sailed across the Atlantic to Europe in 1784, where he was to remain until September 1789.
Hamilton, meanwhile, resigned his military commission in 1782 to complete accelerated studies in law, starting his own profitable practice and serving as a member of the New York Congress shortly thereafter. While Jefferson negotiated treaties of amity and commerce from Paris, Hamilton attended the Constitutional Convention as a delegate beginning in May 1787, the nominal purpose of which was to revise the defunct Articles of Confederation, which did not, among other defects, provide the federal legislature of the United States the power to levy taxes. At the Convention, held behind closed doors and subject to oaths of confidence to promote candid debate, Hamilton proposed a model for a federal government with a powerful executive who would be “appointed for life”, leading him to be dogged by accusations of closet monarchism for the remainder of his career. A product of compromise at the Convention between supporters of states’ rights and proponents of a strong federal government, the Constitution of the United States, while lacking a monarch, did allow for an active executive branch, a boon to Hamilton’s ambition and a lifelong gripe of Jefferson. Hamilton and Jefferson met for the first time in June of 1790. Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States in Washington’s presidential cabinet, had been busily producing a 40,000-word document detailing the state of the nation’s finances, which included recommendations that the federal government assume the states’ war debts, establish a national bank, and use a funded debt to promote domestic manufacturing. Jefferson, the newly appointed Secretary of State, immediately set about undermining Hamilton’s vision.
Conflict
The political disagreement between these two men rested on their differing responses to two propositions: how much power the federal government ought to wield relative to the states, and whether the country ought to assume an agricultural or industrial character. Hamilton believed that the union would be best preserved through a powerful central government which could levy taxes, found corporations, and protect nascent industry. His abiding fears were those of disunion, anarchy, and mob rule, perhaps owing to his dark view of human nature, leading him to believe that a meritorious elite ought to steer the young republic. Taxes, especially customs duties, could establish a sufficient revenue stream so as to pay the debts incurred during the Revolutionary War to restore American credit abroad. This was necessary, Hamilton argued, to gain access to foreign capital, so that the new republic could use a funded debt to fuel its growth. With his liberal interpretation of the constitution, Hamilton believed that the federal government had the power to found corporations, leading to his efforts to establish the Bank of the United States in 1790. An American prophet, Hamilton foresaw the power of banking. He believed that circulating currency in the economy created infinitely more value than that hoarded in a merchant’s chest, in that loans generated interest for creditors and promoted social mobility and enterprise among debtors. Perhaps before anyone, Hamilton saw the potential of the American entrepreneurial spirit, himself an immigrant and beneficiary of the nation’s fluid social hierarchy. A central bank, in which the government would own a minority stake alongside private investors (the latter being rich Americans, who would thus have a financial stake in preserving the nation), would control the supply of currency – a crucial function, according to Hamilton, who had witnessed the rapid devaluation of ‘Continentals’, paper currency issued by Congress during the Revolutionary War. Hamilton, who introduced securities trading into the American consciousness, anticipated economic theory by some 80 years when he stabilised a market panic and subsequent bank run in 1792 by providing liquidity from the Treasury to overextended private banks in the northern states. A lifelong admirer of British governance and commerce, Hamilton envisioned the United States as a manufacturing behemoth in the making. Pre-war, the British enforced bans on certain kinds of industrial equipment in the colonies, discouraging manufacturing whilst buying up raw materials for British factories. As Treasury Secretary, Hamilton actively poached British subjects who had manufacturing knowledge, especially in the textiles industry, to spur American industrialisation. He believed that in the short term, the federal government should implement mercantilist policies (i.e., tariffs on foreign manufactures) to protect domestic industry – such suggestions inevitably impeded on Jefferson’s domain as Secretary of State. With his almost superhuman capacity for work and genius for administration, Hamilton’s influence on federal politics became ubiquitous through the early 1790s, and his vision for the nation, along with his power, seemed unassailable.
Jefferson, circumspect and reserved, was, in terms of personality and politics, anathema to the rash and opinionated Hamilton. A republican purist, Jefferson’s abiding fear was that a strong central government, or a British-style, energetic executive branch, would lead to tyrannical aristocracy. Unlike Hamilton, who feared and detested mob rule, Jefferson praised the bloody French Revolution as it unfolded, admiring the republican fervour of the Jacobins. With his strict, literal reading of the Constitution, Jefferson viewed Hamilton’s programs as illegal expansions of federal power at the expense of the states, accusing the Treasury Secretary of working towards establishing an American monarchy. Constantly on guard against anything that smacked of elitism or corruption, Jefferson believed that only a virtuous citizenry and strong state governments could ward off tyrannical or monarchical tendencies. Banking, according to Jefferson and his counterpart in the federal legislature, James Madison, was a tool of corrupt, unproductive, city-dwellers, used to condemn virtuous Southern planters (debtors by nature) to servitude. He viewed speculation in bonds and securities as corrupting diversions from other, more productive pursuits, whereas Hamilton saw speculation as a necessary evil inherent to a healthy economy. A gentleman farmer, Jefferson derided large, dense cities as hotbeds of hedonism and decadence, and instead espoused the virtues of a simple, agricultural life – Jefferson, an aristocrat and notorious spendthrift who bought more than 60 oil paintings while in Paris, was devoid of a sense of irony. His vision was of a nation of citizen-farmers, with each family tilling their own 50 acres of productive soil, impervious to the vices of urban living which would no doubt germinate in an industrialised nation. At a time when nine out of every 10 Americans farmed (compared to today, where only one in 10 farm), Jefferson’s views were not as retrograde as they now appear. As his influence with Washington faltered, whilst Hamilton’s soared, Jefferson launched a vicious press campaign through intermediaries against the Treasury Secretary, which would escalate into open hostilities between the two men. Their personal antagonism embodied a deep split in the early republic along both geographic and ideological lines, between the agricultural south and increasingly industrialised north. Headed informally by Jefferson and Madison, opponents to Hamiltonian financial programs dubbed themselves "Republicans”, whereas those who supported Hamilton called themselves “Federalists”. At this time, political parties were considered uncouth, undemocratic, and corrupting, and politicians bristled at accusations of partisanship. This tradition died in short order as the newspaper wars between Republicans and Federalists became rife with personal sniping and unfounded accusations. Where Jefferson’s proxies accused Hamilton of being an aristocrat and monarchist, Hamilton, in a litany of essays penned under Roman pseudonyms, claimed that Jefferson was a demagogue and despot in disguise. Hamilton was to claim victory in the short term, with Jefferson leaving Washington’s cabinet in December 1793. Washington, firmly in the Federalist camp (though preferring to stay publicly aloof from partisan squabbles), served a second term before he was succeeded by John Adams, another Federalist.
The newspaper feud between Hamilton and Jefferson gave rise to America’s first political parties. The Jeffersonian Republican Party, who would later morph into today’s Democratic Party (today’s Republican Party having been founded in 1854), elevated their namesake to the presidency in 1800, defeating the incumbent Federalist John Adams. Jefferson, who bolstered his legacy with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, was the first of a generation of Democratic-Republic leaders. Hamilton, meanwhile, was on a personal and political downslide that would lead to his death in 1804 in a duel with Aaron Burr, a Republican and bitter rival who Hamilton was alleged to have insulted at a dinner party. No Federalist ever again reached the presidency. The Federalist Party fielded its last presidential candidate in 1816 before fading into oblivion. Though Jefferson outlived Hamilton, dying at age 83 in 1826, and attained greater political heights, he would be aghast to learn that Hamilton’s America, an industrial and financial superpower, was realised, while his vision of an agricultural Eden has been rendered obsolete by events. It is now considered that the natural progression from a backwards state to a modern one is marked by industrialisation, urbanisation, and the establishment of dynamic market economies and robust financial institutions. No man did more than Hamilton to shape the character of the world’s most powerful nation and economy – by building the Treasury from scratch, establishing the first central bank, creating mechanisms for a stable currency, and promoting industrialisation, this poor immigrant from the West Indies lives on in a way that Jefferson cannot.