Alexander Hamilton (49 page)

Since Hamilton’s abiding literary sin was prolixity, the time and length constraints imposed by
The Federalist
may have given a salutary concision to his writing.

For all his charisma, Alexander Hamilton was essentially an intellectual loner who took perverse pride in standing against the crowd. All the more remarkable that his greatest literary triumph came in close collaboration with Madison and Jay. After leaving the convention in Philadelphia, Madison had returned to his lodgings at 19 Maiden Lane in Manhattan, where he resided with other Virginia delegates to the now almost moribund Confederation Congress. Later anointed “the Father of the Constitution,” Madison had many reservations about the document, especially the equal representation of states in the Senate, and was content at first to let others take up the cudgels in its defense. He also thought it proper that others should assess the convention’s work. But by late October, he was so upset by the grotesque distortions of the Constitution and the furor whipped up by the New York press that he agreed to work with Hamilton on
The Federalist.
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Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.

At this crossroads, Hamilton and Madison must have seemed an odd pair in the New York streets: Hamilton, thirty-two, the peacock, wearing bright colors and chattering gaily, and Madison, thirty-six, the crow in habitual black with a quiet, more reflective manner. When French journalist J. P. Brissot de Warville met them that year, it was the older Madison who resembled a pallid young scholar while Hamilton seemed older and more worldly. “This republican seems to be no more than thirty-three years old,” the Frenchman wrote of Madison. “When I saw him, he looked tired, perhaps as a result of the immense labor to which he had devoted himself recently. His expression was that of a stern censor, his conversation disclosed a man of learning, and his countenance was that of a person conscious of his talents and of his duties.”
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Of Hamilton: “Mr. Hamilton is Mr. Madison’s worthy rival as well as his collaborator. He looks thirty-eight or forty years old, is not tall, and has a resolute, frank, soldierly appearance.... [H]e has distinguished himself by his eloquence and by the soundness of his reasoning.”
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Hamilton and Madison came to symbolize opposite ends of the political spectrum. At the time of the
Federalist
essays, however, they were so close in style and outlook that scholars find it hard to sort out their separate contributions. In general, Madison’s style was dense and professorial, Hamilton’s more graceful and flowing, yet they had a similar flair for startling epigrams and piercing insights. At this stage, Madison often sounded “Hamiltonian” and vice versa. Later identified as a “strict constructionist” of the Constitution, Madison set forth the doctrine of implied powers that Hamilton later used to expand the powers of the federal government. It was Madison who wrote in
Federalist
number 44, “No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized.”
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At this juncture, they could make common cause on the need to fortify the federal government and curb rampant state abuses.

Both Hamilton and Madison were rational men who assumed that people often acted irrationally because of ambition and avarice. Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
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The two shared a grim vision of the human condition, even if Hamilton’s had the blacker tinge. They both wanted to erect barriers against irrational popular impulses and tyrannical minorities and majorities. To this end, they thought that public opinion should be distilled by skeptical, sober-minded representatives. Despite Hamilton’s reputation as the elitist, the starting point of Madison’s most famous essay,
Federalist
number 10, is that people possess different natural endowments, leading to an unequal distribution of property and conflicts of classes and interests. In a big, heterogeneous country, Madison argued, these conflicting interests would neutralize one another, checking abuses of power. “Let ambition counteract ambition,” he wrote in
Federalist
number 51.
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If Madison displays a broader knowledge of theory and history in
The Federalist,
Hamilton betrays wider knowledge of the world. With his itinerant background, he brought commercial, military, and political expertise to bear. This was especially true in discussions of political economy, in which he outshone Madison. Madison showed more interest in constitutional curbs against tyrannical encroachments, whereas Hamilton lauded spurs to action. In sections of
The Federalist
dealing with the executive and judicial branches, Hamilton pressed his case for vigor and energy in government, a hobbyhorse he was to ride for the rest of his career. At the same time, he was always careful to reconcile the need for order with the thirst for liberty. Bernard Bailyn has written that “the Constitution, in creating a strong central government,
The Federalist
argued, did not betray the Revolution, with its radical hopes for greater political freedom than had been known before. Quite the contrary, it fulfilled those radical aspirations, by creating the power necessary to guarantee both the nation’s survival and the preservation of the people and the states’ rights.”
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Let us pause to survey
The Federalist,
with special attention to Hamilton’s contributions, for these essays testify to the extraordinary breadth of his thinking. As author of the opening salvo, Hamilton began with a flourish, addressing the series “
To the People of the State of New York.
After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting Federal Government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America.” The main question was whether good governments could be created “from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
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One can almost see Hamilton declaiming as he announced that the outcome of the ratifying conventions would determine “the fate of an empire” and that rejection would be a “general misfortune of mankind.”
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Hamilton questioned the motives of the Constitution’s opponents and censured the two types who had populated his political nightmares: state politicians (read: George Clinton) who feared an erosion of their power, and demagogues who fed off popular confusion while proclaiming popular rights (Jefferson later took this starring role). Hamilton warned that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.”
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Having set the stage, Hamilton outlined the general plan of the future essays but did not specify their number.

In the next four essays, John Jay showed how weak and vulnerable the confederation had been in foreign affairs. Then Hamilton devoted four essays to the pernicious domestic consequences that would ensue if the Articles of Confederation endured and states continued to bicker with one another. With his penchant for disaster scenarios, Hamilton cited dire precedents from ancient Greece to Shays’s Rebellion. In
Federalist
number 6, he mocked as wishful thinking the notion that democratic republics would necessarily be peaceful: “Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities?” This prophet of global trade also dismissed the pipe dream that commerce invariably unites nations: “Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory?”
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Hamilton disputed that America would be an Eden governed by a special providence: “Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?”

Starting with
Federalist
number 7, Hamilton reviewed the numberless things that states could squabble about without a strong union. The lack of fortifications and standing armies would only exacerbate wars among the states, tempting bigger states to behave in predatory fashion toward smaller ones. The resulting chaos would lead to the very despotic militarism that antifederalists feared, for in such a situation “the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors.”
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While conceding that republics had produced disorders in the past, Hamilton noted that progress in the “science of politics” had fostered principles that would prevent most abuses: the division of powers among departments, legislative checks and balances, an independent judiciary, and representation by elected legislators.
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When Jay fell ill, Madison brilliantly leaped into the void with his celebrated
Federalist
number 10, the most influential of all the essays, in which he took issue with Montesquieu’s theory that democracy could survive only in small states. Standing this argument on its head, Madison showed that in a more extensive republic, interest groups would counterbalance one another and avert tyrannical majorities.

In
Federalist
numbers 11–13, Hamilton displayed his practical, administrative bent as he explained the advantages of the new union for commerce as well as government revenues and expenses. He revealed America’s commercial destiny as he prophesied that envious European states would try to clip the wings “by which we might soar to a dangerous greatness.”
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With a powerful union, America would strike better commercial bargains and create a respectable navy. He offered an expansive view of prosperous American merchants, farmers, artisans, and manufacturers, all working together. In a sudden flash of economic foresight, he anticipated twentieth-century monetary theory: “The ability of a country to pay taxes must always be proportioned, in a great degree, to the quantity of money in circulation and to the celerity [what economists now call velocity] with which it circulates.”
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Blessed with a potent union, the government would collect customs duties with greater efficiency, since it would not have to stop contraband among the states and need only patrol the Atlantic seaboard. Americans would likewise save money by having a single country rather than the separate confederacies that might stem from disunion. All this was a further rebuttal to Montesquieu’s view that large republics could never survive.

In
Federalist
numbers 15–22, Hamilton and then Madison skewered the anarchic state of the confederation. Pride and honor always loomed large in Hamilton’s value system, both personal and political, and he mourned the national degradation and loss of dignity after the Revolution. The United States had become a pariah country, sneered at by foreign states: “We have neither troops nor treasury nor government.”
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Land and property values had plummeted, money had grown scarce, public credit had been destroyed—all because the central government lacked power. And it lacked that power because it had to rely for revenue upon the states, who competed to provide the least money to it.

Only if the federal government could deal directly with its citizens and not fear obstruction from the states could it be a true government. In number 17, Hamilton disagreed that national officials would be able to impose their wills on the states. State governments would always have superior claims on people’s affections, and abuses of power would therefore more likely occur on the local level. Here Hamilton had planned a
tour d’horizon
of ancient and modern confederacies, showing how they tended to fall apart. When he learned that Madison had already undertaken this work, Hamilton handed him his notes for
Federalist
numbers 18–20. The resulting somewhat pedantic essays by Madison ended on a defensive note: “I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents. Experience is the oracle of truth and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred.”
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To round out his searching critique of the Articles of Confederation, Hamilton devoted two more essays to the central government’s impotence in enforcing the law. Recalling Shays’s Rebellion, he inquired, “Who can determine what might have been the issue of [Massachusetts’s] late convulsions if the malcontents had been headed by a Caesar or a Cromwell?” (This and numerous other pejorative references to Caesar belie Jefferson’s canard that Hamilton revered the Roman dictator.) He endorsed the need for federal regulation of commerce and allayed fears that the central government would levy oppressive customs fees: “If duties are too high, they lessen the consumption—the collection is eluded and the product to the treasury is not so great as when they are confined within proper and moderate bounds.”
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He also decried the confederation’s lack of a federal judiciary: “Laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.”
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In typically categorical fashion, Hamilton ended by dismissing the Articles of Confederation as an abomination, “one of the most execrable forms of government that human infatuation ever contrived.”
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In the next fourteen numbers (23–36), Hamilton undertook a point-by-point defense of the Constitution, making the case that an energetic government would require peacetime armies and taxation—both associated with British rule and hence anathema to radical populists. The new country would be so large, he contended, that only a mighty central government could govern it. To gain the requisite strength, that government would need the option of raising armies instead of relying on the much romanticized state militias: “War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perseverance, by time, and by practice.”
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While others maintained that a wide ocean insulated America from European threats, Hamilton saw a country enmeshed in a shrinking world: “The improvements in the art of navigation have ...rendered distant nations in a great measure neighbours.”
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Economic and military strength went hand in hand: “If we mean to be a commercial people...we must endeavour as soon as possible to have a navy.”
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As to fears that the federal government would amass excessive power, Hamilton again reassured readers that “the general government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments and these will have the same disposition towards the general government.”
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Similarly, state militias would check potential abuses of any national army, safeguarding the balance of power between the federal and state governments.