ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND
NINETEENTH -CENTURY AMERICAN
HISTORIANS: A STUDY OF SELECTED
INTERPRETATIDNS 0F HAMILTON

Thesis for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
MAX E. BRAMBLE
1968

   
   
    

  

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Alexander Hamilton and Nineteenth-Century American
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of Hamilton

presented by

Max E. Bramble

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ABSTRACT

ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY
AMERICAN HISTORIANS: A STUDY OF SELECTED
INTERPRETATIONS OF HAMILTON

by Max E. Bramble

Most American historians of the nineteenth-century
subscribed, either implicitly or explicitly, to a belief
that the United States was somehow an experiment in a bet-
ter political and economic life for men. They thought
democracy, or some variation on a democratic theme, was
America's special destiny, divine or otherwise. All his-
torical figures who had any part in the fulfillment of
that destiny have been made to stand before the judgement
of the historians--Alexander Hamilton probably more than
most men. Historians of the nineteenth-century, and the
twentieth as well, have not agreed in their judgements of
Hamilton.

Out of their efforts to account for the nation's
beginnings have emerged a large number of secondary materi-
als which, for all intents and purposes, have become part
of the historical record for this period. Now primary
sources must be joined with the secondary works for any

study of the Early National period and the Founding Fathers.

Max E. Bramble

However, the secondary works have added another dimension
to the interested student's task. He must know the histori-
ography as well as the sources, if he is to obtain valid
historical insight into this important period.

The intent of this essay is to deal with a small
aspect of the historiography of the Early National period:
nineteenth-century interpretations of Hamilton. Generally,
the effort has been made to portray the substance of the
various interpretations set forth by historians. Specifi-
cally, this essay will reveal the variety of views that
historians have offered for certain aspects of Hamilton's
career. For example, their judgements of his financial and
economic policies are considered. Their evaluations of his
reports, his policies for foreign and domestic affairs, and
his motives are examined. Consideration is given to their
estimations of Hamilton's contribution to the founding of
the nation. In fine, their assessments of Hamilton's states-
manship are a central topic throughout this essay.

A study of these historians and their work necessar-
ily involves some aspects of nineteenth-century American
intellectual history, primarily because they subtly re-
flected themselves in their interpretations. Hence, the
philosophies, prejudices, and other factors that influenced
them in their day are matters of major concern.

Not everyone who wrote something on Hamilton is

included in this paper. Some did not do enough on him to

Max E. Bramble

warrant calling their efforts major interpretations.
OtherS' interpretations were subsumed, for the most part,
in better known or more scholarly works. Those excluded
doubtlessly have a place in historical investigation, per-
haps in a study dealing with the nineteenth-century image
of Hamilton.

Those included--Richard Hildreth, Henry S. Randall,
Henry Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Graham Sumner--
were chosen because contemporary or subsequent scholars
judged their work to be significant or influential Hamiltoni-
EH] scholarship. Their work represented the major interpre-
tations of Hamilton to emerge in the nineteenth-century.

Though there was general agreement among them that
Hamilton was a conservative nationalist, possessed of con-
siderable ability, each of them was attracted by a particu-
lar Hamilton. Hildreth portrayed a "utilitarian" Hamilton
and Randall, a monarchical one. Adams described a practical
statesman who was limited by an inordinate ambition and a
deficiency of morals. Lodge saw him as the truly great na-
tionalist leader. Sumner admired him as a necessary counter-
force and check to undisciplined democracy, and yet at the
same time found much to criticize in his statecraft.

The weight of the nineteenth-century interpreta-
tions preponderated on the critical side. At the end of
the century, Hamilton remained in the shadows of the great

man, still largely an unfathomed and unknown quantity.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY
AMERICAN HISTORIANS: A STUDY OF
SELECTED INTERPRETATIONS

OF HAMILTON
By

Max E. Bramble

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of History

1968

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P.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the writing of this dissertation, I have been
helped immeasurably by the suggestions and criticisms of
my thesis committee: Dean Paul Varg, Dr. Madison Kuhn,
and Dr. Norman Rich. Whatever merits this study may have
are largely the results of their guidance.

For reading the manuscript in its early forms
'and offering many suggestions for improving its style,

I wish to thank Mr. Dennis E. Wiant.

At the completion of my graduate work, it is the
proper time for me to express my gratitude to many mem-
bers of the Department of History for their guidance
through my graduate studies. It is also the time for
the expression of my especial thanks to Dean Paul Varg
for his continued encouragement, counsel, and most of

all, his friendship. For these, I shall remain grateful.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEGMNTS O O O O O O O O O O O O O C O O O O O i i

Chapter
I O HAMILTON IN REVIEW 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O 1

II. RICHARD HILDRETH--A UTILITARIAN
INTERPRETATION o o o o o o o o o o o o o o 27

III. HENRY STEPHENS RANDALL--THE
JEFFERSONIAN INTERPRETATION. . . . . . . . 57

IV. THE ADAMSES--A MORALISTIC INTERPRETATION . . 78

V. HENRY CABOT LODGE--A FEDERALIST
INTERPRETATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11h

VI. WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER-~A MATERIALISTIC
INTERPRETATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ISO

VII. HAMILTON AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY. C O O O O O C O O O O O O O O O O 183

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY 0 O O C O O O C O O O O O O O O O 192

iii

CHAPTER I

HAMILTON IN REVIEW

The literature of American history is replete with
studies and interpretations of Alexander Hamilton; and with-
in that historical literature is a diversity of views which
indicates that placing Hamilton in a proper political per—
spective and assessing his impact on American history are
complex problems which historians still attend. Much of this
diversity comes from Hamilton's having been an active policy-
making and precedent-shaping statesman who wrote and said a
good deal about government and political philosophy. Hamil-
ton's historical record is filled with much for historians
to ponder and argue. When this abundant record is added to
those of Jefferson, Washington, Madison, John Adams, and
others, the search for historical truth becomes confounded.
Unfortunately, this abundance of material reveals no unity,»
either about the beginnings of the American nation or about
the contributions of each of these great men to those begin-
nings. That historians should disagree about the meanings of
those records is natural and healthy, and explains the ample

body of literature which exists.

 

 

 

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The secondary works on Hamilton abound with much that
is now accepted as commonplace, even though they are diverse
in interpretation. Regardless of the point of View of the
writer, Hamilton is counted as one of the Founding Fathers.
His part in bringing the call for the Constitutional Conven-
tion of 1787, his efforts to create a true union of the states,
and his part in giving form to the new federal government are
recognized in textbooks and monographs. He was a statesman,
for better or for worse, whose role in the Early National
period is, simply stated, part and parcel of that period's
history.

Hamilton served the nation as the first Secretary of
the Treasury in Washington's administration. In this depart-
ment he successfully plotted the course of federal financial
stability and shaped the fiscal policies of the nation during
the crucial years after 1789. Probably few students would
disagree with Leonard D. White's remark that the Treasury,
under Hamilton, was at that time the "dominating organization"
of the federal government.1 This department, more than the

other three cabinet divisions, affected the lives of Ameri-

cans, rich and poor, urban and rural, East and West.2 Friends

 

lLeonard D. White, The Federalists (New York: The
MacMillan Company, 1956), p. 117 and passim.

 

2Ibid., p. 117.

and critics alike judge Hamilton to have possessed extraordi-
nary talent and ability in that post.3
Hamilton once remarked that nearly every important
measure with which government is concerned involves money.LL
It was an observation that has proved particularly consistent
with the way in which present historians write the history of
the Early National period. The fiscal programs of Hamilton
are regarded as among the central issues of the 1790's, thus
placing him at the very center of the political vortex. His
efforts to put through his programs made him the logical
spokesman and leader of a group of like-minded men in Congress
and the states. It was a corollary of this common sentiment
that when political parties began to form in the mid-1790's,
Hamilton emerged as a party leader among the Federalists, and
remained so until his death in a duel with Aaron Burr in lBOu.
His prestige and influence among influential circles
of the country's powerful people depended upon more than his
official position in the government. He was in many respects
an extraordinary man. Amiable, charming, gracious, he moved

with ease among American social circles. Intellectually he

 

3Samuel Eliot Morrison, The Growth of the American

Re ublic (5th ed. rev.; New York: Oxford University Press,

, 01. I, p. 32h; White, The Federalists, p. 126;
Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton, The National Adventure,
lj88-1804 (New York: The MacMillan Company, 19627, p. 26,
hereafter cited as MitchelL,Hamilton; representative of the
critics: Vernon Parrington, Main Currents of American Thought
("Harvest Book"; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, l9§h),
Vol. I, p. 308; Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton, The
Struggle for Democracy in America (Reprint; Boston and New
York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 19h6), pp. 2h and 33.

 

”In White, The Federalists, p. 117.

H

was superior to most Americans of his time, particularly in
matters of government and economics. His ability to write
persuasively was demonstrated at the crucial meetings of the
New York ratifying assembly in June of 1788. During this
time, Hamilton wrote the majority of papers, along with Madi-
son and Jay, which became The Federalist Papers, often con-
sidered to be the best commentary on the nature of the Con-
stitution as conceived by the Founding Fathers.

There were few men on the national scene in the 1790's
who possessed the same ambition to succeed, the same energy
to achieve, the same boldness of action, and the same capacity
for sustained work or study. Whether as an aide-de-camp to
Washington, a concerned citizen, a practicing lawyer in New
York City, a Secretary of the Treasury, or a political party
leader, Hamilton never failed to impress-positively or
negatively--those who were associated with him. It was in
his nature to leave a profound impress upon the history of

the new nation.
II

The real merit, or demerit, as one may choose, of
Hamilton's statesmanship evinces itself in his famous reports,
prepared and presented during his incumbency as Secretary:
They served as a blueprint for domestic policy for the next
several years after 1790 and as a reference point of politi

cal "standing" for the next century and more.

Hamilton believed in the destiny of the United
States. It was blessed more so than any country in history
with abundant natural resources, waiting for development.
Fertile land was plentiful to supply the demands of an ex-
panding population. Minerals and other resources were
plentiful enough to provide the base for the country's in-
dustrial development. Hamilton had written:

...this country will, erelong, assume an attitude cor-
respondent with its great destinies--majestic, effi-
cient, and opergtive of great things. A noble career
lies before 1t.

He expounded more than an optimistic View of the
nation's economic destiny. He desired to help establish a
government that was honorable and respectable, both at home
and abroad. It was important to him that the new govern-
ment be active and strong so that it could maintain respect
and authority, and fashion the national development. In
1783, after peace with England had been obtained, Hamilton
viewed the task ahead as "to make solid establishments
within, to perpetuate our union, to prevent our being a
ball in the hands of European powers, bandied against each
other fihe state% at their pleasure; in fine to make our

independence truly a blessing."6

 

5Ibid., p. 516.

6Quoted in Louis M. Hacker, Alexander Hamilton in
the American Tradition (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Com-

pany, Inc., 1957), p. 76.

 

 

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After Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury, he
inaugurated a program that would fulfill the nation's require-
ments, as he perceived them. Central to his program, and '
basic to his very liberal view of the destinies of the United
States, was financial stability and independence at the federal
level. Hamilton wanted the national government to radiate the
integrity and resolve of the American people, in order that
peace would prevail at home. Social and economic stability,
in turn, would encourage foreign and American capital to under-
write the development of the nation. These ends he proposed
in his First Report on the Public Credit in January, 1790,
and these ends he obtained when Congress passed the Funding
and Assumption Acts of the same year.

Specifically, Hamilton asked the nation to honor its
war debts. They were, he said, the price of liberty. By
funding the debt, he was merely looking to the most expedient
way by which the debt could be properly administered and paid.
Assumption of the state debts was simply an amplification of
the war debt problem. Why should state governments and the
federal government compete for the funds to pay what the
American people in general owed their creditors, domestic and
foreign, who had supported them. It was much better, Hamilton
reasoned, that the war debts be massed, and one agency, the
federal government, see to the fulfillment of the terms of
the contracts of the newly funded debt. National honor re-

quired this much; but more than honor was at stake. Hamilton

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was not concerned with ethical formalities in his report.
As he understood public affairs, a good national credit was
a rung in the ladder reaching toward prosperity.

The order that Hamilton brought to the nation's finan-
ces enabled the federal government to borrow money on its
credit. However, no machinery yet existed to facilitate the
financial transactions of the government, especially the day-
by-day business. In December, 1790, Hamilton presented to
Congress a second report, The Report on the National Bank.

As an aspect of his larger program, Hamilton con-
ceived of the bank as merely an agency to help maintain and
to expedite the use of the benefits accruing from a sound pub-
lic credit. It was to be a privately owned, profit making,
but publicly supervised banking institution. Providing monies
on short term loans to the government, it was also expected
to expedite foreign-exchange operations; to serve as a deposi-
tory of public funds; to facilitate private payment of cus-
toms duties; to simplify the transfer of public monies from
place to place; and to issue currency.

On the surface of things, the Report seemingly dealt
with a mundane administrative matter. As events unfolded,
the Report unleashed a most significant debate in Congress
over the nature of the Constitution. It was immediately chal-
lenged by a group, who later became identified as Jeffersonian
Republicans, as inimical to the letter of the Constitution.

They argued that since the power to incorporate a bank was

pa

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not specifically enumerated as a power granted to the federal
government, any such measure creating a bank was unconstitu-
tional. Hamilton countered that the power to incorporate a
bank was not specifically excluded, and therefore the federal
government had the authority to create such an institution.
"Does the proposed measure," he wrote, "abridge a pre-existing
right of any State or any individual? If it does not, there
is a strong presumption in favor of its constitutionality."7
Hamilton's arguments in behalf of the legality of the bank
were based, not only on his reading of the Constitution, but
also upon his conviction that the federal government must have
latitude in its authority to act. To have this, the document
had to be interpreted loosely if it was to cope with the
exigencies of the future. Hamilton's arguments were suffi-
cient to muster a majority in Congress and persuade the Presi-
dent, and the bill creating the First National Bank of the
United States was enacted.

While the debate over the Bank was agitating Congress,
Hamilton presented what was the least controversial of his
proposals, the Report on the Establishment of a Mint. Suf-
fice it to say that Hamilton proposed a bimetallic standard
for the country's money system. His motive was to insure an

adequate circulation of money in the economy; his concern, to

 

7Quoted in Nathan Schachner, Alexander Hamilton
(Special contents edition; New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957),
Po 273-

keep the economy active and expanding. Hamilton's proposal
came in January, 1791, and was enacted into law in April, 1792.
By far the most statesmanlike report that Hamilton
prepared came in December, 1791, and was titled the Report
on Manufactures. It is well summarized by Broadus Mitchell:
The Report he said, "is fiscal only incidentally, but strives
to fashion prosperity and security for the new nation."8 The
other reports were as preludes to this major work; Hamilton
was not here solving an administrative problem of collecting
revenues, but was proposing that the federal government /~
actively intervene in the development of the economy. Mit-
chell, whose insight is penetrating, said that Hamilton was
exerting himself "as the earliest American economic planner."9
In this report, Hamilton expressed his belief that
the United States must look to the establishment of industry
within its boundaries. Though agriculture was a natural spe-
cialization of the American people, considering the abundance
of cheap land and the paucity of factory-hands, agriculture
would not secure peace or prosperity for the nation. As long
as the country depended upon the European demand for its food-
stuffs, prosperity would fluctuate according to that demand.

Diversifying the economy, however, establishing manufactures

and encouraging commerce as well as agriculture, the nation

 

8Hamilton, p. 139.
91bid., 1A2.

10

could expect to prosper more or less irrespective of foreign
conditions.10
National security was likewise closely related to the

diversification of the economy. Concisely, Hamilton expressed
his point of view:

Not only the wealth but the independence and security of

a country appear to be materially connected with the

prosperity of manufactures. Every nation, with a View

to these great objects, ought to endeavor to possess

within itself all the essentials of national supply.

These comprise the means of subsistence, habitation,

clothing and defense.
Moreover, the inadequate American navy could not guarantee
that the major ports of the world would be accessible to
supply the country's needs in case of war.12

Hamilton realized that difficulties faced any prospec-

tive manufacturer. The country was short of capital, labor,
and experience, besides being prejudiced toward agricultural
enterprise.l3 He attempted to meet these problems generally
by urging in his report that Congress enact legislation which
would permit federal intervention in the nation's economic
development. The federal government had taken a constructive

step forward already by establishing a basis for a sound pub-

lic credit. But this was not enough. Government should

 

loHenry Cabot Lodge, ed., The Works of Alexander
Hamilton (Federal Edition; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
l90h), Vol. IV, p. 13h; hereafter cited as Lodge, Works.

llIbid., p. 135.

12Ibid., p. 136.

13Mitchel, Hamilton, p. 139.

 

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11

provide funds and legislation to encourage the development of
certain new industries, Which investors would not undertake
unassisted.lLL A positive federal program should promote the
development of those industries necessary to the well-being
of the country.

The program that Hamilton meant for Congress to enact
included the payment of bounties and premiums and the enact-
ment of protective tariffs. None, however, were inviolate
gifts to industry. They were expedients, to serve their pur-
poses until American industry was established and in position
to compete favorably with the more advanced European manu-
facturers. His report also mentioned other measures, such as
the construction of roads and canals, the exemption of cer-
tain essential imports from duties, and government inspection
of manufactured goods.15

Exponents of an agricultural economy, particularly
those from the South, protested that Hamilton's proposals
were class and sectional in benefit. Having no industry in
their foreseeable future, they would obtain no advantage from

supporting such measures. Hamilton tried to persuade them to

see that industrial development would bring a vast increase in

the demand for agricultural produce.16 His presentations in

 

1HLedge, Works, Vol. IV, p. 105.
lsSchachner, Alexander Hamilton, p. 277.
161bid., pp. 276-277.

l2

behalf of his report were not sufficient to convince the major-
ity in Congress to enact this bold program. For the moment,
Hamilton's greatest report effected no novel course in Ameri-
can domestic policy.

Hamilton's last report, The Second Report on Public
Credit, January, 1795, is probably best characterized by
Madison's remark about it. "Hamilton," he wrote to Jefferson,
"has made a long Valedictory Rept[sic]."17 Hamilton, about
to leave public office, assumed the role of a prophet to
preach about good and bad fiscal policy. He exhorted Congress
to maintain the integrity of the public credit and to seek
means to retire the existing national debt as quickly as pos-
sible. He warned that bad policy resulted from increasing
that debt without providing immediately the means for retire-
ment of any newly acquired debt. He then urged specific mea-
sures for congressional consideration, such as converting the
foreign to a domestic debt, making provisions for the unsub-
scribed national debt, and enlarging the amount of money allo-
cated to the sinking fund and making it inviolate. Thus
Hamilton's last report ended with the same note as his first
report had begun--the sanctity of the public credit.

Hamilton's several reports were written with specific
domestic needs and problems in mind. The very character of
his objectives necessarily involved him in an effort to shape

the nation's foreign policy. The war in Europe, beginning in

 

17Quoted in Mitchell, Hamilton, p. 361.

 

13

1793, and the hostile policies of the belligerents, Britain
and France, threatened to embroil the United States in a war.
The strains of war would have interfered with the successful
implementation of his program. For this reason, he was active
during the decade of the 'nineties, both in and out of office,
working for what was essentially a pro-British foreign policy.
Foremost in his policy was peace. War would destroy
prosperity and undermine the nation's strength and develop-
ment. "If while Europe is exhausting herself in a destruc-
tive war," he wrote, "this country can maintain its peace, the
issue will open to us a wide field of advantages...."18 If
war must come, wise policy dictated that it be postponed for
ten or twelve years until the country was stronger.19
Hamilton wanted war least of all with Great Britain.

His revenue system prospered in significant amounts from the
commercial duties paid the country by British merchants and
shipppers. The loss of that revenue would require the imposi-
tion of heavy taxes on the people. Altogether a war would
cost too much:

To support public credit and carry on the war would suppose

exactions really grievous. To abandon public credit would

be to renounce an important means of carrying on the war;

besides the sacrifice of the pubgac creditors and the
disgrace of national bankruptcy.

 

18Lodge, Works, Vol. V, p. 86.

19Ibid., p. 177.

201bid., p. 87.

11L

Other factors influenced Hamilton to favor a pro-
British policy. For one thing, he thought British capital
was essential to the economic development of the country.

For another, he feared that the powerful British navy could
easily destroy the trade, navigation, and mercantile capital
of the United States. Spain and Britain allied could incite
a general Indian war that would "desolate the whole extent of
the frontier."21 An indiscretion in foreign affairs might
well destroy the gains of the United States since 1783.

Given his assessment of foreign relations, Hamilton
was predisposed to advocate and later to support a treaty
with Great Britain to avoid hostilities. The vehicle by
which he sought to secure his domestic policy from the strains
of war was the unpopular Jay's treaty of 179h. He tried to
encourage popular support of the treaty, even suffering a
rock on the forehead tossed by irate New Yorkers who were
opposed to the treaty. But the insult was evidentally toler-
able; for after the treaty was ratified by the Senate, he
wrote with relief that the country had escaped implication
in "the dreadful war" and had preserved its peace for a while
22

to come.

III

Hamilton's public biography to this point would indi-

cate that he was an extraordinary man indeed. The story must

 

211bid., p. 202. 22Ibid., p. 176.

15

also reveal that he had feet of clay. Notwithstanding his
other talents, Hamilton was deficient as a politician--mean-
ing that he lacked savoir-faire in human relations. He was

a leader of leaders, a general of an army, but he was not a
man of the people, nor did he care to be. He fancied himself
a statesman who should lead the nation to strength and pros-
perity. The people could not expect him, a man of honor and
perception to be their lackey in government. He would con-
struct the political and economic framework within which they
could enjoy their liberty and find their happiness.

He was a man of bold action who, after conceiving his
broad plan, moved imperiously to carry it out. Amalgamated
with his audacity was an ego involvement that inclined him
toward a rigidity in thought and action, once his mind was
settled. He was quick to understand, but not shallow in his
perception of state affairs. Once his conceptions took the
shape of plans of state policy, he tended to assume that they
were synonomous to the well-being of the nation. An attack
on one was an attack on the other, and he would suffer nei-
ther with patience or conciliation. Other politicians were
caught in the unpleasant predicament of being either with
him or against him.

In the Treasury and vested with power, his personal

predilections prompted him to act the role of a prime

l6

minister.23 In that assumed role, he proceeded to influence,
or as Jefferson would prefer to say, meddle in, the affairs
of all departments and Congress. Jefferson once wrote to
Madison, "Without numbers, he [Hamilton] is an host within
himself."2u Though the remark did not pertain to Hamilton's
ministerial pretensions, it does illuminate his tendency to
be exasperatingly overwhelming in office and out. But as
Jefferson knew too well, Hamilton had numbers also.

In Congress were a group of able men who might be
described generally as Hamiltonians. In the Senate were men
such as Strong, Ellsworth, Johnson, King, Schuyler, Read,
Robert Morris, and Charles Carroll. In the House, Ames,
Sedgwick, Wadsworth, Laurance, Benson, Boudinot, Clymer,
Fitzsimmons, and William L. Smith. Counting on their assist-
ance and receiving it, Hamilton was able to oversee the
legislative procedure. As part of the executive branch he
nevertheless crossed over the sacred separation of powers to
frame bills and secure their passage, to influence the appoint-
ment of friendly committees in Congress, to muster support for
particular bills, and to plan the strategy for pending legis-

lative battles. There were few areas of federal concern,

 

23Richard Morris, ed., Alexander Hamilton and the
Founding of the Nation (New York: The Dial Press, 19577, viii,
hereafter cited as Morris, Hamilton; John Miller, The Feder-
alist Era 1789-1801 (New York: Harper and Brothers), p. 8h.

2“'Quoted in Allan Nevins, "Alexander Hamilton,"
Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. VIII, p. 177.

17

delegated or implied, in which Hamilton did not try to show
Congress what was necessary and proper.25

Other executive officials found that Hamilton was
eager to shape policy in their respective areas. Hamilton
and Jefferson were engaged in a running competition after
war broke out in Europe in 1793 to shape American foreign
policy. Henry Knox, the Secretary of War under Washington,
was on many occasions merely the engine by which Hamilton's
plans for that department were fulfilled. Attorney General
Randolph found Hamilton more than once influencing the execu-
tive's position on Constitutional questions.26

After resigning from office in 1795, he continued to
exert influence in the cabinet. His successor in the Treas-
ury runs his good and loyal friend, Oliver Wolcott. He fre-
quently wrote to Hamilton asking for advice, thereby giving
the ex-Secretary an opportunity to keep a hand on federal
finances. After 1796, in the administration of John Adams,
Hamilton was able to exert influence upon the cabinet through
his close association and correspondence with Timothy Picker-
ing, Secretary of State, and James McHenry, Secretary of War,

as well as Wolcott, who Adams retained in his cabinet.27

__._

25John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton Portrait in
Paradox (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959;, p. 323;
hereafter cited as Miller, Hamilton.

26White, The Federalists, p. 127.

27Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John Adams, The
Egggapse of Federalisle795-1800 ("Perpetua Books"; New Yerk:
A- S. Barnes and Company, Inc., 1961), pp. 27h-279.

 

l8

Hamilton's conduct engenders suspicions as to his motives
and ethics. One critic was convinced that Hamilton sought
power and influence for himself.28
Other instances of Hamilton's excessive energy in

dealing with affairs of state and politics can be cited. He
was continually writing for the newspapers in an effort to
encourage favorable public opinion for Federalist policies

and to expose the opposition. He interfered in three national
elections from 1789 to 1800, concocting schemes to make them
come out as he believed right for the country. During the
campaign before the election of 1800, Hamilton wrote a vicious
pamphlet assailing the character and ability of John Adams.

It was an instance of very poor judgement by Hamilton and had
the immediate effect of splitting the Federalist party further
apart. In the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion in l79h,
Hamilton displayed a desire to impose an unnecessarily severe
vengence upon the culprits who promoted this frontier protest.

This description of Hamilton is preparation for the

observation that in a nation generally fearful of concentrat—
ing power in the federal government, and even more so in the
hands of an individual, Hamilton's conduct in office and out
appears excessively aggressive, and in some instances, sinis-
ter. It seems overbearing, overly ambitious, and power—mon-

gering especially when it is compared to the conduct of

 

28Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party
System (Williamsburg: The Institute of Early American His-
tory and Culture, 1956), p. 36.

S

r w
"I

no

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*QA

no

we:

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19

Washington, Jefferson, or Adams. In fairness to Hamilton, it
should be said that there appear to be extenuating factors
which explain his behavior. At any rate, different construc-
tions can be devised to account for his conduct. Most of the
pro-Jefferson historians, Claude Bowers, Vernon Parrington,
Joseph Charles, for example, have taken his conduct, in con-
junction with his political philosophy, as evidence that Hamil-

ton intended to subvert the American experiment in democracy.
IV

It seems ironical that Hamilton's conduct can be com-
pared, at least generally, to that of the popular folk-hero,
Andrew Jackson. Yet Hamilton has never had the stature of
Jackson, or Washington, or Jefferson. Probably one thing
that helps explain this irony is that Hamilton did not give
expression to a political philosophy which was entirely con-
genial to the dogmas of American democratic faith.29

Hamilton was a skeptic and a realist, to a degree, in
his views about men's ability to achieve happiness and materi-
al well-being. Whereas Jefferson had faith that men could
work everything out all right, Hamilton feared that they would
just as likely bungle it. His experience and understanding of
history showed him that man was inclined toward waywardness.30

He was no fatalist, but he did believe that men would have to

 

29Morris, Hamilton, p. 136.

3OMi11er, Hamilton, pp. 197-200.

20

employ every resource and faculty to achieve their well-
being.31 Unlike Jefferson, he would not trust some intangi-
ble quality to give Americans a good government and a pros-
perous nation. He believed that he, along with others of the
right persuasion, would have to see to the success of the
American effort toward these objectives. A young Hamilton
wrote in 1782:
Happy America, if those to who thou hast intrusted the
guardianship of thy infancy know how to provide for thy
future repose, but miserable and undone, if their negli-
gence or ignorance permits the spirit of discord t32
erect her banner on the ruins of thy tranquillity.

The guardianship, Hamilton believed, ought to be in
the hands of America's elite, most likely men of wealth.33
Hamilton did not advocate that an aristocracy of wealth
should govern the country by hereditary right.3H Leaders
should be chosen by their fellow citizens who were qualified
to vote.35 Hamilton's paramount concern was with having
capable men serve in government, and he had little faith in

the ability of the mass of men to provide stable and durable

leadership.36 Good government required good leaders to work

 

311219,. p- 199.

32Morris, Hamilton, p. 73.
33I2199. pp. 136-137.
3";2;g,, pp. 131-13h and 1h0.
35I2123. pp- 131-132.

36Miller, Hamilton, pp. 196-198.

21

for the desirable ends of "public strength" and "private
security and happiness."37

Capable leaders were one element essential to the
attainment of these,ends, power in the federal government
was the other.38 Though the majority of Americans were con-
cerned with limiting power in government, Hamilton was con-
cerned with the possible absence of it. He believed that
power was related to energy in government, and both were
necessary to effect the well-being of the people and preserve
the federal union. His five reports demonstrate the ways in
which he anticipated that federal power could be used effec-
tively.

The chief threat to federal energy, and the union
itself, was the states.39 As a Revolutionary War officer,
he had observed first-hand the obstructionism, niggardliness,
and apathy of the states when called on to assist the Conti-
nental Army. In the 1780's, the so-called "Critical Period",
he saw the states' uncooperative attitude toward one another
while faced with mutual problems and their unwillingness to
support the Confederation government. After 1788, he believed
that the states were the centers of anti-federal sentiment.
Aware of the sensibility in many quarters of the country

about the sanctity of the states, Hamilton spoke of achieving

 

37Lodge, Works, Vol. IX, p. 534.

38Morris, Hamilton, pp. 123 and 140.

 

39.1219, p. 283; Lodge, Wings, Vol. Ix, p. 533.

22

balance between state and federal powers. Each would pre-
sumably balance the other and thus preserve the liberties of
the people.LLO Potentially, if not in reality, the states,
Hamilton thought, held the preponderant weight. Steps ought
to be taken by interested parties to maintain the energy of

the federal government against the encroachments of the

states.L"l

This sketch of his views suggests two cardinal points
of Hamilton's political philosophy. He was a nationalist,
when the states were as powerful as they have ever been. And
he was an advocate of centralization of power when States'
rights and the evils of power were popular dogmas.

Hamilton's beliefs led to charges from his critics
that he was a monarchist. Most evidence suggests that the
charge was unfounded--most likely a "red herring". The evi-
dence is conclusive, however, that Hamilton was no democrat.
Iiis lack of faith in the ability of the masses has already
Iaeen mentioned. His rejection of democracy was mainly theo-
IPetical. Unlike most commentators on democracy, Hamilton
Ineant something rather specific when he spoke of it. Democ-
Iwacy was a classical form of government, first given shape
1D‘ythe ancient Greeks. Their experiences with it were a les-
5Son to all men about the deficiencies of such a form of govern-

rnent. Foreign relations had been characterized by war among

\

LLOMorris, Hamilton, p. 137.

LLlIbid., pp. 282-283.

23

the city-states; domestic relations by unmanageable mobs
which ended up supporting one tyrant or another.“2 The
Americans would have to find something more stable, more
durable than democracy if independence were to be a blessing.
In a letter to a Federalist friend, Edward Carring-

ton of Virginia, Hamilton declared himself politically:

As to my own political creed, I give it to you with

the upmost sincerity. I Em affectionately attached

to the repub11can theory.
He qualified his attachment by saying that he would support
republicanism so long as it was "consistent with the order
and happiness of society."HH Whether it would really work
in the United States was yet to be proved.”5 Hamilton had
the same doubts as Montesquieu about republicanism working
in a vast area such as the United States. But he wished it
success and worked to provide the "expedients" necessary to
its success.“3 In 1801, he expressed his political creed
somewhat more concretely; he wanted:

...the mild reign of rational liberty, which rests on

the basis of an efficient and well-balanced government '

and through the medium of stable laws shelters and proéf‘

tects the life, the reputation, the civi& and religious
rights of every member of the community. 7

 

u2l§id., p. 136.

H3Lodge, Works, Vol. 1x, p. 533.
Hum.

"Slhléy. p- 53h.

HéMorris, Hamilton, p. 128.

H7Ibid., p. 129.

21+

Using the phrase, "government of the people, by the
people and for the people" as a kind of yardstick, Hamilton
measures well on two of the three. He believed that govern-
ment "must be fitted to a nation, as much as a coat to the
individual."LLB His reports demonstrate that he sought fed—
eral policies which would serve the well-being of the people.
Whether they were the right policies is another question,
but Hamilton believed they were. Government by the people
was a concession he would not make, not in the sense that
they should participate directly and immediately in the con-
struction and administration of federal policy. Perhaps this
is pardonable; but surely his unpardonable aberration was

speaking out against democracy in this land.
V

Most American historians of the nineteenth-century
subscribed, either implicitly or explicitly, to a belief
that the United States was somehow an experiment in a better
;political and economic life for men. They thought democracy,
or some variation on a democratic theme, was America's special
destiny, divine or otherwise. All historical figures who had
a part in fulfilling that destiny have been made to stand
before the judgement of the historians--Hami1ton probably

more than most men. Historians of the nineteenth-century,

F

LLBIbid., pp. lh3-lhh.

25

and the twentieth as well, have not agreed in their judge—
ments of Hamilton.

Out of their efforts to account for the nation's
beginnings have emerged a large number of secondary materi-
als which, fkm'all intents and purposes, have become part
of the historical record for this period. Now primary sources
must be joined with the secondary works for any study of the
Early National period and the Founding Fathers. However, the
secondary works have added another dimension to the inter-
ested student's tasko He must know the historiography as
well as the sources, if he is to obtain valid historical in-
sight into this important period.

The intent of this essay is to deal with a small
aspect of the history of the Early National period: Nine-
teenth-century interpretations of Alexander Hamilton. Gener-
ally, the effort has been made to portray the substance of
the various interpretations set forth by historians of Hamil-
ton. From them have come the themes which have or have not
influenced subsequent investigation of Hamilton's career.
That knowledge may provide the basis by which some future
study can assess what current scholarship has assimilated
from the nineteenth-century historians and what it has con-
tributed new and valid to fixing Hamilton's historical place.

Specifically, this essay will reveal the variety of
interpretations that historians have offered of certain as-

pects of Hamilton's public and private careers. For example,

26

their judgements of his financial and economic policies are
considered. Their judgements of his reports, his policies
for foreign and domestic affairs, and his motives are exam-
ined. Consideration is given to their estimations of Hamil-
ton's contribution to the founding of the nation. In fine,
their judgements of Hamilton's statesmanship are a central
topic throughout this essay.

A study of these historians and their work necessarily
involves some aspects of nineteenth-century American intel-
lectual history, primarily because they subtly reflected
themselves in their interpretations of Hamilton. Hence, the
philosophies, prejudices, and other factors that influenced
them in their day are matters of major interest.

Not everyone who wrote something on Hamilton is includ-
ed 111 this paper. Some did not do enough on Hamilton to war-
rant calling their efforts major interpretations. Others'
interpretations were subsumed, for the most part, in better
known or more scholarly works. Those excluded have a place
in historical investigation, perhaps in a study dealing with
the nineteenth-century image of Hamilton.

Those included were chosen because contemporary or
subsequent scholars judged their work to be significant or
influential Hamiltonian scholarship, to either their genera-
tion or later generations. Their work represented the major
interpretations of Hamilton to emerge in the nineteenth-

century.

CHAPTER II
RICHARD HILDRETH -- A

UTILITARIAN INTERPRETATION

Richard Hildreth wrote one of the first scholarly
histories of the United States to be published in the nine-
teenth-century. His work also proved to be an interesting
paradox for subsequent historians to unravel. He was a
humanitarian, concerned about the moral and material improve—
ment of society. He was liberal in thought, being intellec-
tually allied with the tenets of Utilitarianism. By some
definitions, he could be judged a democrat. Yet he wrote
a history which has been labeled Federalist in point of view.
The contradiction becomes more intriguing when it is put in
the form of the question, Why would an intellectual liberal
praise Hamilton and disparage the traditionally accepted

symbol of democracy, Thomas Jefferson?

I
Hildreth was born in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in
1807, the son of Hosea and Sarah Hildreth. His ancestors
were counted among the earliest settlers of Massachusetts,
but not among the most illustrious. Hosea broke with the
family yeoman tradition when he went to Harvard. After

graduation he decided to prepare for the ministry. His plans

27

28

were changed when he married and found it necessary to teach
to support his family. While the Hildreths were at the Deer-
field Academy, Richard was born. Four years later, Hosea
accepted an appointment at Philips Exeter in New Hampshire.

The home environment was excellent preparation for
Hildreth's subsequent career as a writer, philosopher, and
scholar. He "bumped about among books" from an early age.

He was also bumped around Federalist political principles
from an early age.2 In 1822, Hildreth entered Harvard, where
he demonstrated interests in politics, government, and his-
tory among other things. He graduated high in his class in
1826, and soon after began legal studies.

Law, however, did not interest him as a career, and
in 1832 he accepted a position with the Whig Boston Qgily
Atlas. Ill-health in l83h forced him to sojourn in Florida.
What he saw of slavery in the South prompted him to begin work

on a novel, Archie Moore, which his biographer says was "the

 

first anti-slavery novel in the United States."3 During this
same interval, he wrote another book, Despotism in America,
which was intended to redress the misconceptions Tocqueville
had created in his Democracy in America. Not long afterwards,

Hildreth identified himself with the cause of abolition.

 

1Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted in Donald E. Emerson,
"Richard Hildreth," The Johns Hopkins University Studies in
Historical and Political Science, Vol. LXIV, (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins Press, 19h6), p.,15; hereafter cited as
Emerson, "Hildreth". ‘

2Ibid., p. 19. 3Ibid., p. 73.

29

His writing during the mid-1830's was prodigious.
Besides the books already mentioned, he translated into Eng-
lish Dumont's French version of Bentham's Theory of Legisla-
tign and wrote a book on banks and currency.

In 1837 Hildreth resumed his position with the news-
paper, and within the year was writing and campaigning as a
Whig candidate on a temperance platform. He even founded a
temperance newspaper, the Boston SELLL In the meantime he
put together a campaign biography for William Henry Harrison.

His health failed him again in 18h0, and this time he
chose British Guiana for his retreat. He supported himself
by newspaper writing. The significance of this retreat, how-
ever, was the fruition of his long standing desire to "analyze
in scientific terms, the moral, political, economic, and

5 He planned

intellectual factors which rule men's lives...."
to work up eight major treatises, but actually was able to
get only four of them on paper. The works which were penned
manifested a rationalistic, utilitarian, reforming character.
And though they were progressive in thought, they were not
well received at home.

Apparently discouraged by the poor reception of his
philosophical works, Hildreth turned his efforts toward the

writing of a factual history of the United States. He

 

LL1bid., p. 66.

5Martha M. Pingel, An American Utilitarian; Richard
Hildreth as a Philosopher (New York: Columbia University
Press, l9h8), p. 5; hereafter cited as Pingel, Hildreth.

3O

believed a history of this nature was necessary, and long
overdue, to counter the exaggerated and patriotic history

of George Bancroft.6 The History was not well-received
either. Critics claimed that it was devoid of philosophical
theme and was too severe in its judgements and descriptions
of the colonial fathers.

The l8h0' and 1850's were unpleasant years for Hil-
dreth. The nation's critics seemed determined to deny him
acclaim. Despite his literary misfortune, he retained his
sardonic wit. Perhaps it was sharpened by his critics.
Since so little of this side of Hildreth appears in his
major works, this comment might well serve as a sample of
the man's acumen:

[He had given up]...the idea of being entitled to
express any opin1on which might conflict with any-
body's religious notions except at the peril of being
spit upon or knocked down in the name of the Prince
of Peace.7
Another delightful example of his wit appeared in an essay
entitled, "Native Americanism, Detected and Exposed by a
Native American." It was liberal and pungent.

Numerous articles, revisions of previous works, and

a travel book on Japan absorbed his time after completing the

History. In 1854, Hildreth became associated with the New

York Tribune and, two years later, moved to New York City to

 

6Emerson, "Hildreth," p. 163.

71bid., p. 121.

31

serve Horace Greeley as an editor for that paper. Much of
his newspaper work now concerned abolition.

A month before the Civil War erupted, Hildreth's
health forced him to retire to relatives' homes in Massa-
chusetts to recuperate. Through the efforts of his wife, and
the influence of Governor Andrew and Senator Sumner, both of
Massachusetts, Hildreth was appointed American consul in
Trieste. Abroad, he showed some signs of recovering his
health, but only momentarily. Illness forced him to resign
his consular position and to live off the charity of friends.
In 1865, at the age of fifty-eight, Hildreth died in Flor-
ence.

II

The plethora of details that Hildreth made into his
History of the United States wears down the hardiest of
readers. By his standards, his efforts represented histori-
cal writing as it should be: "plain facts in plain Eng-
lish."8 Nearly everything from the per-centage duty on hair-
powder to the events leading to the War of 1812 are recorded
in the many volumes. His facts, colorlessly catalogued, lack-
ing, but not devoid, of theme and interpretation, account for
Hildreth's want of appeal among students of history.

Overwhelmed, or exasperated, by both his lack of

style and theme in the History, the reader is left to his own

 

8Richard Hildreth, The History of the United States
(Rev. ed.; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), Vol. I,
p. xi; hereafter cited as Hildreth, History.

 

32

tenacity to find some kind of meaningful generalizations to
carry away from his reading. More than likely, the one im-
pression any reader surely obtains is the strong anti-Jeffer-
son animus of the History. From this observation, it is only
an intellectual reversal of the coin to conclude that Hildreth
was a Federalist, who wrote a biased account.

No doubt this apparent characteristic of the History
has led earlier historians to label Hildreth. Frederick
Jackson Turner mentioned him as the Federalist historian.9
Vernon Parrington, consistent with his own Jeffersonian bias,
described Hildreth as a Federalist who thought God and Feder-

10

alism were one. In the Dictionary of American Biography,

Kenneth B. Murdock remarked about the Federalist bias of the
11

History. Alfred H. Kelly spoke of him as "the complete
Federalist."12 It appears that little doubt exists as to the

proper stereotype for Hildreth, although recent historians,

 

9Frederick Jackson Turner, The United StatesL1830-
1830 (Norton Library; New York: W.W. Norton Company, Inc.,
19

I, p- 8&-

loParrington, Main Currents of American Thought, Vol.
II, p. E30.

llVol. IX, p. 19.

12Alfred H. Kelly, "Richard Hildreth," The Marcus
W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography, ed., William
T. Hgtchinson, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937),
p. 3 .

33

Merrill Peterson13 and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,lH have
questioned it.

Justification for the pro-Federalist label seems
sufficient indeed when Hildreth's early life is considered
in conjunction with the History. His father was an out-
spoken critic of the Jeffersonians and their tactics and
policies, especially in the years before 1812. His biogra-
pher says that Hildreth "was the product of a Federalist
upbringing."15

That Hildreth was aware of Puritan and Federalist
formulas is somewhat evident in these remarks he made at the
Harvard commencement exercise in 1826:

...change [he said; does not always imply improvement;
...innovat1on is o tener the resource of folly than of
wisdom.... It is the height of absurdity to sacrifice
present good to problematical improvement,--...the
tendency of human affairs is to grow worse, and...all
effortslgill hardly avail to check their downward
course.
Gloomy and pessimistic, these remarks were spoken by an imma-
ture college graduate and not by the historian and philoso-

pher writing in the l8h0's and 1850's. They can be ignored,

for the most part, because the mature Hildreth became a man

 

l3Merrill D. Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image in the
American Mind ("Galaxy Book"; New York: Oxford University
Press, 1962), pp. 135-139; hereafter cited as Peterson,
Jeffersonian Image.

 

1“Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "The Problem of Richard
Hildreth," New England Quarterly, XIII (1940), pp. 223-2h5.

15Emerson, "Hildreth," p. 18.

16Quoted in Emerson, "Hildreth," p. 26.

3h

who actively sought material and moral progress for his fel-
low Americans, including the Negroes. Nevertheless, consider-
ing his biography and the bias of his History, the case for
Hildreth as "the complete Federalist" is easily understood.
And when combined with his Whig party affiliations of the

1830's and 'hO's, it seems well founded.

III

To label Hildreth as a Federalist historian is super-
ficially accurate; and Federalism is an element in his inter-
pretation of the figures of the Early National period which
cannot be ignored, although the degree to which it is pres-
ent if; difficult to determine. But the Federalist label
itself is an arbitrary choice of emphasis. It implies and
excludes too much. The evidence in the History shows that
Hildreth was anti—Jefferson, but not that he was opposed to
democratic institutions or that he was pro-Federalist in any
narrowly partisan sense. To say that he was a Hamiltonian
is acceptable only if qualified by adding that Hildreth
favored Hamilton's policies because he saw some utility in
them.

Moreover, the matter of labels should be reconsidered
in light of his political activities during the 1830's and
18h0's, and his writings other than the History. He labored
in behalf of reform, advocating temperance and abolition.

In his capacity as a reformer, he wrote in favor of democrat-

ic institutions and of what he thought was a realistic form

25555

35

of equality. He was a utilitarian, as nearly every work
about him testifies. His biographer wrote, "What especially
distinguished his thinking from that of his fellows in the
broad humanitarian movement MES his preoccupation with
Benthamist philosophy."l7 His translation of Jeremy Bentham's
Theory of Legislation was rated as a classic by one English
authority on Bentham's works, 0. K. Ogden. If labels are to
be used, fairness requires that Hildreth be called anti-
Jefferson, abolitionist, reformer, democrat, and utilitarian,
in addition to Federalist. These are a hodge-podge of 1a-
bels, not easily reconciled to one another. They do demon-
strate an essential point about Hildreth: He was a many-
faceted philosopher. And although the issue at hand is the
bias of the History, Hildreth's sagacity suggests that his
historical interpretations are based on more than a mere
partisan Federalism.

Hildreth's judgment of Alexander Hamilton is likewise
more restrained, from a historical point of View, than a
Federalist's interpretation of a Federalist hero. Hamilton
and his policies were generally approved by Hildreth because
he judged them to be serving the needs of the new nation.
Hildreth believed that he knew what the country needed for
stability and happiness in 1789 and after. The fulfillment
of those needs required the talents of a realistic, practi-

cal, intellectual man of character such as Hamilton.

 

17Ibido, p. 930

36

The keystone of Hildreth's social and political sys-
tem was the principle of utility. Influenced by the Bentha-
mite principles, he had come to accept the idea that the
ultimate purpose of collective and individual actions of men
was to provide the greatest good for the greatest number.
Utility was the scientific basis for good legislation and
government and would provide for the happiness and well-being
of the American people. From his study of history, Hildreth
had concluded that the well-being of men was best served by
democratic institutions because they "tend to produce a gen-

"18

eral spirit of humanity and philanthropy. From its incep-

tion, the United States represented a noble experiment in

behalf of man:

an attempt to establish perfect equality of political
rights; an essay towards the equal distribution among

all members of the community, of freedom, property,
knowledge, social advantages, and those othgr good things
which make up the mass of human happiness.

The success of that experiment depended upon the kind
of statesmen that would guide the nation through its forma-
tive years. Though Hamilton was not a utilitarian, his poli-
Cies encompassed the material well-being of the people.
IHamilton, not Jefferson, was the man who best served the

<30urse of democratic development of the United States.

¥

18Richard Hildreth, Theory of Politics (New York:
I‘Iarper and Brothers, 1853), p. 262.

19Richard Hildreth, Despotism in America (Boston:
John P. Jewett and Company, 1853), p. 7; hereafter cited
€38 Hildreth, Despotism.

37

Consistent with his own philosophic principles, Hildreth was
intellectually constrained to write favorably in his History
about the role of Hamilton and the other Federalists. This

does not mean, however, that he thought Hamilton a democrat.

IV
Jefferson was the democratic spokesman. Hildreth was
cognizant of Jefferson's advocacy of democratic principles
and wrote that no man "loved and trusted humanity" more than
Jefferson did. Jefferson was, according to Hildreth, a
"rarity, indeed, among professed democratical leaders--a sin-
cere and enthusiastic believer in the rights of humanity."20
But Hildreth also noted an irony in Jefferson's position:
Who could have anticipated that the apostle of
American democracy should himself have been an aristo-
crat and a despot. Yet so it was. Jefferson is
revered, and justly, as the earliest, ablest, and

boldest and most far-going of those who become ex-
pounders and advocates of the democratical system in

America.

Despite the mutual regard between Jefferson and Hildreth con-
cerning the necessity of democracy in America, Hildreth could
not accept Jefferson as the architect of it. Jefferson did

inot rank high as a practical statesman,22 for reasons which

Iiildreth made clear.

‘

20Hildreth, History, Vol. VI, p. 141.
21Hildreth, Despotism, p. 15.

22Hildreth, History, Vol. v1, p. lhl.

38

It may seem an unwarranted diversion to mention some
of the anti-Jefferson passages of the History when the con-
cern is Hildreth's interpretation of Hamilton. However, as
the nature of Hildreth's criticism of Jefferson becomes
evident, it should be born in mind what Jefferson lacked,
Hamilton possessed to some extent. Unhappily, Hildreth is
not explicit in his History, or other works, about his pro-
Hamilton sentiments. One must read between the lines and
contemplate the implications of what he wrote about Jeffer-
son as they might apply favorably to Hamilton.

To understand the paradox appearing in the History
requires a look at his interpretation of the character-
istics of Jefferson and his followers. Hildreth believed
that the Jeffersonians were aristocrats who sustained an
abominable system of slavery in the South. Even Jefferson
himself was a despot because he held black men in slavery.
The existence of slavery and the spirit of caste, which
slavery promoted in America, were both inimical to the
principles of democracy.

The irony of the Jeffersonians' warm espousal of
freedom, especially in the role of watchdogs of liberty in
Congress, was noted by Hildreth in the History. He found no
difficulty in explaining elsewhere how this irony could per-
sist; according to him, even kings and princes have been
freedom's advocates:

Each individual is always the ardent and zealous
champion of his own liberty, because the hatred of all

39

extraneous control, the desire to be solely governed by

the free impulses of his own mind, is a part of the con-

:EHETE;?B3Of human nature too essential ever to be
Thus, out of the narrowest and most selfish of motives, the
Jeffersonian aristocrats could easily expound the principles
of liberty, but for the wrong reasons. Hildreth goes on to
say in this passage that the love of freedom means more than
the individual acquisition of it. A true advocate of liberty
seeks liberty for all men; it involves "...a wide, expansive
feeling, the offspring of benevolence, the height of philan—
thropy, the extension to others of that which we find best
and most desirable for ourselves...."2H

To this passion for universal liberty, Jefferson,
Hildreth believed, dared not appeal because he lacked the
courage to take a position contrary to the prevailing atti-
tudes of his aristocratic followers. How then, Hildreth
implies, can the Jeffersonians be taken seriously as the
party working to establish a form of government conducive to
the greatest happiness of the people. How can their posi-
tion be reconciled with the expansion of democracy in the
nation, even though Jefferson uttered the right principles.
Another characteristic of the Jeffersonians which

Hildreth found exasperating and condemning was their irre-

sponsible and exaggerated criticism of the Washington admin-

istration. Certainly an opposition party had the right to

 

23Hildreth, Despotism, pp. 16-17. 2HIbid., p. 17.

 

hO

criticize an administration, but that criticism, Hildreth
believed, ought to contribute constructively to the well-
being of the people. Instead, the Jeffersonians stooped to
slander and vicious charges to debase the character of the
administration. Their disposition of their privy knowledge
of Hamilton's adulterous affair with Mrs. Reynolds revealed
their lack of scruples and the extent to which they would go
to agitate the people. Hildreth spent a disproportionate
amount of space in exposing the Jeffersonians' lack of
character in this affair.

When their opposition did rise above personal slander
to matters of state, their criticism was largely negative
and often based on self-interest or mere suspicion. Hil-
dreth believed that no small proportion of the Jeffersonian
opposition was'based on the Southerners' dissatisfaction at
not having dictated federal policies themselves.25 Even more
belittling to the Jeffersonians was their inability to govern
any differently than their predecessors; after coming to
power in 1800, they could do no better than to retain or
copy the Federalist models of government.26 Their actions
in power revealed how little substance existed in their
criticisms.

The intellectual fiber of Jefferson was also assailed

in the History. Hildreth had no objections to the

 

25Hildreth, History, Vol. IV, p. 352.
26Ibid., Vol. V, p. u18.

Ill

philosophical cast of mind, because he was so inclined him-
self. But for him, the philosopher had to be vigorously
logical and rational, one who induced from observed pheno-
mena.27 He disparaged what he described as the "mists of
metaphysical disquisition."28 Jefferson was, in Hildreth's
judgement, susceptible to this kind of thinking, especially
when the Virginian became involved in political issues or
matters of policy. Jefferson was "fond of hypothesis, in-
clined to dogmatize" and given "to theoretical ideals of
liberty and equality" such as he expressed in the declara—
tion of Independence.29 He was, despite a good intellect,
an extremist, who let his imagination dominate his reason to
an extent that he saw things "as he hoped, wished, suspected
that they might be."30

An'example of what might be called Jefferson's muddle-
headedness was his charge that a monarchical conspiracy, led
by Hamilton, was afoot in the national government with the
purpose of subverting the nation's republican institutions.
Hildreth doubted the substance of the charge, although he
recorded in his History that Hamilton had speculated on the

comparative advantages of monarchic and democratic forms of

 

27Pingel, Hildreth, p. 173.

28Quoted in Emerson, "Hildreth," p. 25.
29Hildreth, History, Vol. IV, p. 292.
30Ibid., pp. 3h0-3h1.

ha

government.31 Jefferson, who persisted in this charge, was
stimulated, according to Hildreth, by an "active imagina-
tion" and was given to "unnecessary alarm" at unfounded dan-
gers.32 That charges were never formally brought in Congress
by the Jeffersonians led Hildreth to conclude that the con—
spiracy existed mainly in Jefferson's mind. His chimerical
fear was understandable when one took into account his fanat-
ical character and his tendency to suspect "those who did not
share in and subscribe to all his dogmas."33

It is interesting to speculate that if Richard Hof-

stadter's book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics had
existed then, Hildreth might very well have described Jef-
ferson in those terms. Hofstadter defines the paranoid style
by three characteristics: a belief that the national govern-
ment is infiltrated by disloyal men; that a conspiracy exists;
and that a class exists throughout the country with the pur-
jpose of subverting American institutions. With little vari-
ation Hildreth has said as much of Jefferson:

Assuming to himself the office at once of spy and
censor on his colleagues, he adopted the practice of
setting down in a note-book every heretical opinion
dropped...anecdotes recorded, not as instances of the
speculative errors into which the wisest and the best
may fall, but carefully laid up as evidences against
political rivals of settled Eesigns hostile to the
liberties of their country.3

3lIbid., p. 297. 32Ibid., p. 33?-
33Ibid., p. 3H1- 3Lilbidu p. 298.

LLB

Continuing this same theme, Hildreth wrote in another in-

stance:

Under this strange hallucination of a monarchical
conspiracy for the destruction of the Constitution on
the part of those by whom its adoption had been secured,
from which the country was only saved by the republican
zeal and virtue of himself and his anti-Federal friendsS
and supporters, Jefferson labored to hlS dylng day....

Hildreth found certain aspects of Jefferson's politi-

cal creed objectionable, not because they were necessarily
wrong in principle, but because Jefferson drew faulty con-
clusions from them. Jefferson concerned himself exces-
sively with the abuses of power which could occur in govern-
ment. Nothing was wrong with recognizing the danger in giv-
ing men power; history testified to that. Unfortunately,
Jefferson dwelt upon that concern to an extent which made
his political policy negative rather than constructive.
Hence Jefferson strove to restrict the exercise of author-
ity in the new government, even to the extent "of depriving
government of its ability for good as well as for evil...."36
Such an attitude was untenable to Hildreth:

...it does by no means follow, as some have imagined

that governments are unfavorable to happigess in pro-
portion to the power which they exercise.

 

351bid., p. 3h0.
361bid., p. 292.

37Hildreth, Theorygof Politics, p. 232.

All

During the Early National period, the real problem
was not the usurpation of power by the federal authorities,
as claimed by Jefferson, but rather "the resistance of the
states to federal power," a problem which Hamilton "had the
sagacity to perceive."38 Undoubtedly Hildreth was here in-
fluenced by the controversy over slavery among the states in
the decades before 1861.

Jefferson's emphasis on natural law and rights and
equality were also found untenable by Hildreth.39 Men acted
irrationally and irresponsibly when they appealed to Nature
for justification of their principles and policies. Men
ought to rely upon their own faculties to provide the author-
ity for their actions; they should apply the principles of
utility to determine the desirability of laws for men.)-LO
Hildreth did not elaborate his reasons for finding natural
law and right indefensible, but he was undoubtedly influenced
by the views of Bentham. It is not unreasonable to assume
that Hildreth's views were those, or close to those, of
Bentham.

Bentham wrote that there are two senses of the word,

law.ul In one sense it means that "will or command of a

 

38Hildreth, History, Vol. IV, p. 297.

39Pingel, Hildreth, p. 36.
LLOlbid., pp. 153-176.
ulJeremy Bentham, The Theorytof Legislationpr. K.

Ogden, ed., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1950),
pp. 82-870

I45

legislature." The law of Nature, in the other sense, implies
the will of Nature, construed as a being. Those general
inclinations of men, found common, supposedly, to all men,
are thought to be the laws of Nature, or real codes of law,
indisputable and complete. In reality, the fiction that
men's inclinations are real laws of Nature is dangerous to
society, for it leads to interminable dispute and confusion.
Appeals to natural law imply the right of all men to annul

or overturn the legislative law. The latter is essential,
however, to society because it is necessary to restrain those
natural inclinations of men which so often impinge upon other
men. If natural law inclined all men to pursue the common
good, legislative law would be unnecessary.

Bentham had some strong words for the natural rights
advocates, and one can imagine Hildreth applying them to
Jefferson:

There is no reasoning with fanatics, armed with
natural rights, which each understands as he pleases,
and applies as he sees fit; of which nothing can be
yielded, nor retrenched; which are consecrated as
dogmas, from which it is a crime to vary. Instead
of examining laws by their effect, instead of judg-
ing them as good or bad, they consider them in rela-
tion to those pretended natural rights; that is to

say, they substitute for the reasoning RE experience
the chimeras of their own imaginations.

 

How much better for society if the partisans of Natural laws
and rights appealed to their own reason rather than Nature,

to judge good and bad laws.

 

LL2Ibid., p. 85.

h6

Concerning equality, Bentham wrote that for all men
to enjoy it, legislation would be rendered impossibleJ1L3
Laws establish necessary inequalities. They give rights to
some which restrict the freedom of others to act. Hildreth
perceived this much. In his Theory of Politics he implied
that the object of government was to establish equilibrium
among security, freedom, and equality. Both Hildreth and
Bentham said that government must have authority to act in
ways that might restrict the rights of individuals for the
common good of all.uu Jefferson, armed with his natural
rights philosophy, was unable to perceive these subtleties
or complexities of man's relation to man under a system of
legislative law.

The extent of Hildreth's anti-Jefferson bias in the
History is far more detailed than indicated by the preceding
discussion; but enough has been said to indicate the nature
of his criticism. What must be taken into account is that
nowhere does Hildreth denounce democratic principles or
institutions, although he does disparge the traditionally
accepted champion of democracy in America. Hildreth judges
Jefferson severely and finds him deficient in character, in
leadership, in realism and in pragmatism. Jefferson and his
followers were not the men to provide a viable foundation

for the new nation.

 

H3Ibid., p. 99.

LLLLIbid., passim and Hildreth, Theory of Politics,
p. 230.

 

LL?

V
The continual disparagement in the History of Jeffer-

son and his followers leads to the facile conclusion that
the Federalists were Hildreth's ideal. His lack of critical
appraisal of them as men and policy-makers gives credibility
to assuming that an element of emotional pro-Federalism
exists in the History. Clearly, Washington, Hamilton, Jay,
and other Federalists appealed to Hildreth's concept of good
statesmen. They were a "trio," he wrote, "not to be ap-
proached in our history, if, indeed, in any other."LLS
Washington and Hamilton were possessed of enviable qualities
of wisdom to judge, ability to act, devotion to country; both
were courageous, honest, and sincere. They were imposing
leaders. Their rhetoric may not have been the language of
the rights of men, but nonetheless they were able to create
a viable form of government and lay the foundations for the
stability and prosperity of the nation. Under their leader-
ship, the Federalist party pursued certain great objectives:

to consolidate the Union, to uphold the public

credit, to aid and encourage the national commerce,

navigation, and manufactures, to prevent paper

issues, and to enforce the obligation of contracts....H6

In the Utilitarian frame of reference, such policies were

in the best interests of the American people.

 

HSHildreth, History, Vol. v, p. 527.
H61bid., Vol. IV, p. 119.

h8

Yet, despite these plaudits, Hildreth was not blind
to certain deficiencies in the political philosophy of Hamil-
ton. For one thing, Hamilton tended to overemphasize materi-
alism an; the basis of human motivation.“7 Hildreth was
too astute an observer of human nature to accept this sim-
plistic explanation of man's conduct. Materialism was but
a part of the pleasure-pain psychology of the Utilitarians.
Moreover, Hamilton showed too little confidence in the
ability of the people to conduct their political and econom-
ic affairs,: especially when he recommended the appoint-
ments of a president and senators for life.LLB

In his Theory of Politics, Hildreth had a good deal
to say about the implications of Hamilton's position, al-
though the remarks were not expressly directed at Hamilton.
According to Hildreth, a democratic form of government
offered special advantages to society. Though all forms
of government required men to "submit to the pain of obey-
ing," the democratic form also offered all men the oppor-
tunity to participate in "the pleasure of commanding."u9
Who better than the people knew what their pleasure com-
manded.SO Through the ballot box, they could effect peace-

ful change of rulers and policies, as their interestes might

 

H7Ibid., pp. 296-297.
HBIbid., p. 297.
H9Hildreth, Theory of Politics, p. 253.

50Ibid., p. 260.

D9

require.51 And though some theorists expressed concern
about a tyranny of the majority, Hildreth believed that it
was better for a majority to oppress the few, than for the
few to tyrannize the many.52 (It is a Benthamite canon
that any government is a choice among evils.)

In addition, a democratic form of government offered
the opportunity to all men of talent and merit to rise to
positions of influence in their community.53 Most important
of all, it provided a standard, through frequent elections,
by which the people could indicate to the contestants for
power which of them possessed superiority and therefore the
right to rule.SLL Hamilton added nothing to the strength of
the federal government by suggesting that it perhaps should
be given a more "monarchical and aristocratic cast." Hil-
dreth overlooked Hamilton's political aberration on the
grounds that it was a speculative error into which the "wis-
est and best may fall."55

. The historian provided little explanation of the rea-
sons for his suppoSt of Federalist policies. His philosophy,
which makes his pro-Federalist interpretation comprehensible

to the student, manifested itself in his Theory of Politics.

 

Slibid., p. 255.
52%.

5312193, pp- EBA-255.
sulpld., p. 259.

SSHildreth, History, Vol. IV, p. 298.

50

Here he wrote that since the Middle Ages, history had divided
itself into epochs of some two hundred years each. There had
been an age of the clergy, of the nobles, of the kings, and
of the burghers; "Is there," he asked, "never to be an Agg.

of the People-~of the working classes.?"56 Answering his own

 

question, he said that their age was a potential, already in
the process of becoming. But that coming would be arduous.
"The first great necessity," he wrote, "of the human race is
the increase of the productiveness of human labor."S7 Poverty
and its effects must be overcome. Only then could the people
possess a sufficient proportion of, what Hildreth called, the
elements of power. When that time came, the people could
participate in shaping their own social destinies.58 Afflu-
ence, generally distributed among men, promoted political
freedom and equality. Hildreth observed and wrote, "Those
who possess the property of a country, have always succeeded
in obtaining political power. Revolutions of property have
always produced political revolutions."59 This was no call
to violent revolution such as occurred in the French Revolu-
tion; it was a call, rather, to men to rationally exploit
their ability to produce and distribute wealth, and in this

way bring about the desired political evolution.

 

56Hi1dreth, Theory of Politics, p. 257.
57Ibid., p. 271.
58Ibid., pp. 269-272.

59Hildreth, Despotism, p. 96.

 

51

The progress of civilization depended likewise upon
a more generous distribution of the wealth to be produced.
Men who must struggle for subsistence are not given to altru-
istic sentiments toward their fellow-men. Men who enjoy
abundance are disposed, or more easily persuaded, toward
the sentiment of benevolence, which to Hildreth meant the
desire to serve humanity.60 A student of Hildreth's Utiliu
tarian philosophy has aptly observed: "Hildreth...realized
that a good environment, one in which a person's needs could
be fulfilled, would do more toward elevating the standard
of morality than all the preaching about it ever could."61
Hildreth judged Federalist policies, materialistic as they
may seem, to be serving this ultimate objective of a moral
society in America.

Hildreth believed, contrary to certain aspects of
the Jeffersonian creed, that "no merely agricultural nation
ever attained a high degree of prosperity, or civilization.
To attain that result it is necessary that manufacturing
and commercial industry should combine with agriculture."62
Hamiltonian fiscal policies promoted, not only the finan-
cial stability of the government, but the larger social

objective of expansion in all sectors of the economy. The

Funding Act, Hildreth wrote,

 

60Hildreth, Theory of Politics, p. 156.
61Pingel, Hildreth, p. 19.

62Hildreth, Despotism, p. 132.

 

52

...promoted, to a great, and, indeed, unexpected
degree, the public prosperity. By furnishing a capi-
tal almost or quite as available as cash, of which
enterprise knew how to take advantage, and by the new
and powerful influence thus given to industry, it went
far toward relieving that private pecuniary embarrass-
ment which hag constituted one of the greatest evils
of the times. 3

The act re-established confidence in the nation and the
economy and stimulated development of commerce and indus-
try.6u It added value to the land, labor, and capital of
the American people in excess of the burden laid upon them
in the form of a national debt.

This same standard applied, at least generally, to
Hildreth's evaluation of Hamilton's other fiscal policies
or proposals, such as the National Bank or the Report on
Manufactures. No partisan bias is at work here; Hildreth
is interpreting history consistently with his observation
that human productivity must be increased.

Hamilton advocated an energetic and positive national
power, a principle which Hildreth found compatible with his
own philosophical system. In this vein, he wrote,

...a very high degree of power is essential; and a
government not possessed of the power is almost worse
than no government at all, sigge it excites hopes

which it fails to fulfill....

Indeed, power was necessary to perform the three

objectives which Hildreth assigned to government. It had

 

63Hildreth, History, Vol. IV, p. 275.
6H1bid., p. 276.

65Hildreth, Theory of Politics, p. 233.

53

to secure the people from foreign attack; to undertake mea-
sures for the common good of the nation, which were too
general or large in scope for private individuals to accom-
plish; and to secure and maintain law and order in the
country.66

The emphasis Hildreth made was on peace and social
order, not because he feared for the preservation of the
status quo, but because they were requisites for the "de-
velopment of productive industry." Although violence in
behalf of liberty was sometimes necessary, it rarely pro-
duced positive social benefits. Real progress could be
had only when men learned the complexities of social rela-
tions and created the material abundance essential to moral
advancement.67 These remarks are general in nature, apply-
ing to the whole of civilization. But to the specific mat-
ter at hand, Hamilton and Federalist policies, they are
relevant.

The Whiskey Insurrection was an instance of civil
disobedience which threatened federal authority, and there-
by its ability to act positively in guiding the nation's
development. The administration, however, moved with

alacrity and quelled this challenge to its power. The

success of the administration in this case actually worked

 

66Ibid., p. 232.
671bid., p. 272.

SA

to strengthen the government.68 Federal power had been
vindicated by Washington and Hamilton. By Hildreth's
standards, to have done otherwise would have involved them
in a violation of their public responsibilities.

This same theme of peace is relevant to Hildreth's
interpretation of Federalist foreign policy during the
troubled 1790's. Though England and France threatened
American security and violated American rights, the admin-
istration wisely adopted a policy which avoided any con-
frontation with the belligerents. The Federalists had

acted in the best interests of the United States.69

VI

Hildreth wrote a history which lacks the warm faith
in men that is prevalent in the Jeffersonian legacy. Only
in his other writings does he show his concern for the cause
of humanity. But it is dry and analytical, written in the
language of a man who spoke and felt through his mind.
Regardless of that defect, which it is when winning popu-
lar acclaim is at stake, his ideas show him to be an advo-
cate of the cause of human happiness.

His History displays the paradox of a democratic
philosopher applauding the High Federalists. Perhaps the

paradox is not so extraordinary when it is recalled that

 

68Hildreth, History, Vol. IV, p. 516.
69Ibid., p. h15.

55

one wing of the progressive-reform movement of the early
twentieth-century, the New Nationalists, were impressed

by the statesmanship of Alexander Hamilton. The recent
historian, Merrill Peterson, has described these reformers
as New Hamiltonians. He wrote that Herbert Croly, the
philosopher of the movement, saw Hamilton as "the true...
idol of Progressive Democracy."7O Hildreth did not go so
far in his description of Hamilton, because he did have
reservations about Hamilton's political philosophy. The
point here, however, is that the similarity in views between
Hildreth and the New Nationalists suggests that he was part
of an American reforming and intellectual tradition and not
an isolated, irrelevant scholar.

Hildreth's History shows that Hamilton did serve the
advancement of democracy through his policies, although un-
wittingly. Jefferson and his followers had no monopoly on
that service. The material and social well-being, the
basis of morality and thus of happiness, of the American
people required a more realistic and effective national
policy than Jefferson could provide. Hamilton proved to
be the more rational, realistic statesman, though perhaps
not the archtype social philosopher, who perceived on the
large scale the needs of the American nation in its forma-
tive years. In his praise of Hamilton, Hildreth permitted

himself one measure of flamboyance:

 

7OPeterson, Jeffersonian Image, p. hO.

 

56

Hamilton possessed the same rare and lofty quali-
ties, the same just balance of soul, with less, indeed,
of Washington's severe simplicity and awe-inspiring
presence, but with more of warmth, variety, ornament,
and grace. If the Doric in architecture be taken as
the symbol of Washington's character, Hamilton's be-
longed to the same grand style as developed inlthe
Corinthian--if less impressive, more winning.

 

71Hildreth, History, Vol. V, p. 527.

CHAPTER III

HENRY STEPHENS RANDALL --

THE JEFFERSONIAN INTERPRETATION

Hildreth treated the Hamilton-Jefferson conflict as
a germinal issue in the history of the Early National
period. Even though the main interest of study may have
been either of the two statesmen, the nature of the con-
flict imposed the necessity of coming to terms with both.
A recent critic of the Hamilton-Jefferson literature has
written: "Hamilton's policies were affected by the reac-
tions of his opponents....What Jefferson did and thought
is just as pertinent as what Hamilton did--when clashing

l The reverse is just as true.

head on."
Henry Stephens Randall, the nineteenth-century biog-

rapher of Jefferson, came to his own understanding of the

relationship between the protagonists, which he explained in

his The Life of Thomas Jefferson. Telling the life of St.

Thomas2 required some two-thousand pages, of which Randall

 

lStanley D. Rose, "Alexander Hamilton and the His-
torians," Vanderbilt Law Review, II (1958), p. 85h.

2Frank J. and Frank W. Klingberg, eds., "The Corre-
spondence Between Henry Stephens Randall and Hugh Blair
Grigsby, 1856-1862." Publications in History (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1952), Vol. XLIII, p. 65;
hereafter cited as Klingberg, Correspondence.

57

58

devoted more than one-third to the period when Hamilton and
Jefferson were the partisan antagonists seeking to control
federal policy. The historian Merrill Peterson has judged
that in Randall's Llfg, "what led up to 1790 was prologue,
what followed 1800 was epilogue."3 The Hamilton-Jefferson

conflict was the core of Randall's biography.

I

By the time Randall published the Life in 1858,
Jefferson's reputation had undergone considerable depreca-
tion in the hands of the Federalist historians and biogra-
phers.u Randall was a dedicated Jeffersonian, a fact in
itself sufficient to explain his desire to write the ngg.
But he was also sensitive to and motivated by the anti-
Jefferson bias of many of the then current histories and
biographies. That vindication of Jefferson was in his mind
is evidenced when he wrote, "The leering, sneering, dodging
way of making charges by implication, and by insulting innu-
endo—-which has been so extensively practised by early and
late caluminators of Mr. Jefferson--is not to our [his]

taste."5

 

3Peterson, Jeffersonian Image, p. 155.
HIbid., p. lh9.

5Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson
(New York: Derby & Jackson, 1858), Vol. I, ix. Hereafter
cited as Randall, Life.

59

The community of interest between Jefferson and Ran-
dall existed on several planes. After achieving a distin-
guished record at Union College, Randall began the study of
law, during which time he demonstrated a liking for legal,
constitutional, and political theory.6 By 1835 he was active
both in national affairs of the Democracy and in seeking
public office in New York, his home state. He became a
friend of Martin Van Buren and was associated with the Barn-
burners and Free Soilers of New York. His political record
would label him a democrat, if not a radical by the standards
of his day. His main political concerns were the advance-
ment of public education and a union which recognized States'
rights.7 In the years immediately preceding the Civil War,
he became decidedly pro-South, though not pro-slavery, in
his views.8 By this time Randall had come to see the North-
east as a section ambitious to make the South its "colonial
dependency."9 Such characteristics as these made Randall a
good Jeffersonian.

Other facets of Randall's life revealed an affinity
with Jefferson's agrarianism. In addition to being a poli-

tician, newspaper editor, lawyer, and school visitor, he

 

6Klingberg, Correspondence, p. h.
71bid., p. h and footnote, p. 171.
8Merrill Peterson, The Jeffersonian Imgge, p. 151.

9Klingberg, Correspondence, p. 7.

60

was also a farmer and a serious student of agricultural sub-
jects. He served as a corresponding secretary of the New
York State Agricultural Society, presented papers before the
Society, and wrote a number of reports and books on agricul-
tural subjects; in 1863 he published a well-received book,
The Practical Shepard.:LO His experience as a farmer enabled
him to appreciate Jefferson's faith in the values of an
agricultural life. Jefferson, he wrote, "never ceased to
believe that simple rural 1ife--moderation in living,
daily toil, and no greater aggregation of human beings than
is to be found in the family on each farm--is more condu-
cive to virtue than any other social state; and probably no
one will dispute him in this."11
Randall was a suitable man to do the biography of
Jefferson, and the success of the Ligg testified to his
ability. His sympathetic study was abetted by the friendly
cooperation of Jefferson's family and by the fact that he
saw Jefferson's papers before they were scattered about the
country. His biography was considered an "authorized"
biography and was based upon a nearly complete collection
of Jeffersonian manuscripts.12 Two recent historians sur-

mise that the Life was "well received and immediately had

 

lOHarry James Brown, ed., Letters From a Texas
Sheep Ranch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959),
pp. 20-23.

llRandall, Life, Vol. I, p. A29.

 

 

12Klingberg, Correspondence, p. 15.

 

61

a wide circulation."l3 For more than eighty years after
its publication in 1858, the Li£§_was the single most im-
portant and influential work on Jefferson.lLL

The success of Randall's biography meant that his
interpretation of Hamilton and the early party struggles
was bound to be influential. The thoroughness and care
with which the book had been researched added to the credi-
bility of his views. His use of documents, compared to the
way in which many of his contemporaries had used them, was
commendable; he neither edited nor suppressed them.15 He
attested to a desire to get below the "middle" of his sub-
ject and to know the feelings of Jefferson.16 The biography
he wrote thus became "biography in the truest sense," the
first "to add sweet and mellow touches to the Jefferson
image."l7 Hamilton had had no Boswell; and what Randall
did to him in the biography diminished his reputation and
confounded his historical image.

Hamilton's advocates had exaggerated their praise of

him. To say that his was the founding spirit of the nation,

 

l31bid., p. 11.

1LIIbid” pp. lh-15; Merrill Peterson, The Jefferson-
ian Image, p. 112; James Ingersoll Wyer, "Henry Randall,"
DlEtionary of American Biography, Vol. XV, p. 3H8.

 

15Klingberg, Correspondence, p. 3.
16Randall to Grigsby, Dec. h, 1856, Ibid., p. 71.

l7Merrill Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image, p. 153.

62

the genius of Washington's administrations, the constructor
of American constitutional government obviously claimed too
much. Randall rightly perceived that much of their praise
was intended to disparage Jefferson and his principles.
Randall's partisanship was barely concealed. To his friend,
Hugh Blair Grigsby of Virginia, he wrote, "The north wind
which sweeps without is not at this moment more fearless
and reckless than I) so far as Mr. J.'s political and per-
sonal enemies are concerned.--"18 The purpose and course
of Randall's interpretation of Hamilton is easily antici-
pated from this remark.

Hamilton did deserve recognition, in Randall's judg-
ment, but only as a man of action. He was a good adminis-
trator, and thus possessed of a facility for "practical
greatness." By his presence, the administration of Wash-
ington was invested with energy and "promptness" in execu-
tion.19 These qualities were manifestations of Hamilton's
character, for by temperament he was quick to decide, firm
in purpose, and energetic in implementing his views. His
self-confidence encouraged policy-making and execution
within his party and the government. But in his party,

he was like a dictator. And in government, "the most

 

18Randall to Grigsby, Dec. h, 1856, Klingberg,
Correspondence, p. 72.

19Randall, Life, Vol. I, p. 6H3.

63

efficient political executive is a despot."20 Randall
would not extend praise to Hamilton without qualification.
Randall's agrarianism manifested itself in a social
bias in his interpretation of Hamilton. He said that Ham-
ilton belonged to an "ambitious, energetic talented class

"21 The remark

who push their way upward to high office....
might be thought innocent of prejudice except that previ-
ously Randall had spoken disdainfully of the "treasury
parvenus."22 They were money makers, "ostentatious up-
starts," who rolled about in their carriages, denouncing
the agrarian doctrines of the state governments and the
common people.23 They spoke about national honor and such,
but they had been noticeably absent from the hardships and
privations of the Revolutionary War. It was such men as
these, of whom Hamilton was one, that the Secretary of Treas-
ury Inul given prominence and power by his fiscal policies
during the 1790's.

Little that Randall did in the Life_got below the
"middle" of Hamilton. His generally recognized accomplish-

ments were passed over. The Federal'st Pa e 3, though men-

tioned, were written off briefly as arguments to "tone up

 

201bid., pp. 635 and 6hh.
21Ibid., p. 6h5.
22Ibid., p. 607.

23Ibid.

6H-

the public mind to procure adoption..." of the Constitu-
tion.24 The several reports prepared by Hamilton were
neither mentioned as such nor put in the context of Hamil-
ton's overall policy; Jefferson and Madison's criticism of
them was, however, amply stated.25

A generous critic would allow that a biographer did
all that could be reasonably asked of him when he presented
his subject thoroughly, as Randall did Jefferson. But if
the biographer intended to include a history of the politi-
26

cal parties, as Randall did, he should know his own bias,

the subjects, and their era. "Biography," Randall wrote,
"should aim at the truth, or it should be silent."27
Randall appears to have not known his own political

philosophy too well, at least not consistently. In 1852,
28

he wrote:

...history is full of instances where the pros-
perity of individuals, and...nations, has been crippled,
in futile efforts to upbuild this or that branch of
industry.... Among the foolish, selfish, and even
iniquitous legislation of past ages, there has been
none perhaps productive of more real mischief to human
industry than the intermeddling enactments of govern-
ment.

This quotation reads like good Jeffersonian dogma. Its

laissez-faire sentiments are particularly opposed to the

 

Zulu—d” p- 577.
25l§id., pp. 60h-611 and 630.
26;Qid., p. 581.
27M” p. 160.

28Henry S. Randall, Sheep Husbandry (New York: Bangs,
Brother and Co., 1852), p. 10.

65

recommendations that Hamilton made in his Report on Manu-
factures. Yet, surprisingly, Randall worked in the 1860's
for the passage of the Wool and Woolens Act of 1867, which
made the industry "the very citadel of protection."29
In a similar vein, Randall, as a public school offi-
cial concerned with school libraries, addressing himself to
the problem, expressed a good Jeffersonian principle. "With
that strong reliance on popular virtue and popular under-
standing," he wrote, "which accords so well with the theory
and genius of our institutions, the choice of books has, in
the first instance, been left to the immediate agents of the
people."30 He then proceeded to describe the kinds of ma-
terials that should be withheld from the libraries, includ-
ing the works of Shakespeare.31 No doubt, by the standards
of his day, it was thought wise to shelter children from
immoral or polemical literature. The curious aspect of his
report was the remark that although no coercion would be
employed by the state superintendent to enforce the pro-
scribed materials, "all discreet and right-minded men would

regard with proper respect the deliberately expressed opinion

of the superintendent."32

 

29Harry James Brown, Letters From a Texas Sheep Ranch,
p. 2h.

30Henry S. Randall, "Common School Libraries," in
8.8. Randall, Mental and Moral Culture and Popular Educa-
tion (New York: C.S. Francis and Co., 18hfl), p. 185.

 

318ee Ibid., pp. 187-201.
32Ibid., p. 23h.

66

Perhaps these aberrations were the consequence of an
unresolved conflict between Randall's upbringing as a Feder—
alist33 and his conversion to the Democratic party. At any
rate, in the l8h0's Randall had a more balanced View of the
Founding Fathers. He wrote, at this time, that it was un-
necessary to enhance one man's reputation by destroying
another's.3H Even more astounding, in light of his inter-
pretation of Hamilton in the Life; was the remark:35

Hamilton divided; in patriotism and integrity,
between hem there was no division.... [TJhat man is
un-American, who, because he coincides with one,

would disentomb and expose to rude scorn the ashes
of the other.

In pilitical measures were they [JefferSon and

Evidently, the Jeffersoniana jaundiced his eye, for
in the Li£g_he showed a most un-American attitude toward
Hamilton. Using Hamilton's correspondence with "politi-
cians, bankers, stock-jobbers, speculators of various spe-
cies, etc.,"36 Randall found the evidence to support Jef-
ferson's and his own views of Hamilton. The Secretary of
the Treasury assumed himself to be "the maker and the dis-
penser."37 Yet, to an impartial observer, Randall believed

that it was obvious that the Treasury was secondary in

 

33Merrill Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image, p. 150.

3HHenry S. Randall, "Common School Libraries," loc.
cit., p. 213.

35Ibid., pp. 213-21h.
36Randall, Life, Vol. I, p. 638.

371bid.

67

importance to the State Department, especially during the
formative years of the new government.38

Hamilton, certainly possessed of a good mind, was
nonetheless incapable of originating new policies or theo—
ries of government or political economy; indeed, he had
"never...proposed an original thought or plan."39 Every-
thing he proposed was an adaptation of English policy and
experience to American circumstances. Unlike Jefferson,
Hamilton did not look forward to mark the paths of new po-
litical development for America, but backward to copy the
old. Hamilton could do no better than attempt to establish

a monarchy in the United States.

III

The belief that a monarchical conspiracy existed for
the purpose of overthrowing republicanism in America col-
ored Randall's interpretation of Hamilton and was the crux
of his history of the early political parties. Though in
some instances there is confusion whether Randall meant
monarchical sentiments rather than conspiracy, in the final
analysis it is clear that he meant that after 1789, Hamil-
ton and others conspired to place a king upon an American

throne. In his mind there was no distinction between the

 

38Ibid., p. 600.
39lbid., p. 6h1.

68

spirit of British government and its form, a distinction
which Hamilton would have made.

Randall's account of the formation of the political
parties was imprecise. He suggested that the process began
with the division of the colonials into Tories and Whigs at
the outbreak of the American Revolution. At that time, the
issue was British imperial policy, not the form of British
government.br0 It was evident at the time that the Tory was
inclined toward "strong government" and the Whig toward
"popular government."LLl However, not all Whigs were repub-
licans.H2 In the 1780's the American political scene was
a mixture of Tory monarchists, Whig monarchists, Whig re-
publicans, and Thomas Jefferson, the only avowed democrat.“-3
Whether they existed as parties, factions, or points of View,
Randall was equivocal.

The post-war problems of the 1780's affected the
political sentiments of the American republicans. Many of
- them "relapsed into monarchists"; Shay's Rebellion, in 1786,
produced an "anti-republican and anti-democratic influence
[that] was profound and almost universal throughout the

United States."LLLL Some continuity of sentiment emerged

 

Atom” p. 562.

MM.

”213331., pp. 562-563.

“31m” pp. Leo-E61 and 573-57u.
MM” p. 5611.

69

during the contests over ratification of the Constitution,
when the Federalists and Anti-Federalists made their appear-
ance.LLB Washington, upon assuming office in 1789, stated
to Madison that he was aware of the existence of a monar-
chical party.H6 Somehow-~Randall was not precise in speci-
fying how--the vague processes which began in 1776 con-
gealed in 1789 to bring forth a monarchical party with
Hamilton at its head.u7

Having thus postulated the existence of the monar-
chical party, Randall presented evidence to show that Ham-
ilton did indeed harbor monarchical, or anti-republican (the
terms are synonomous with Randall) views. The proofs are
well-known statements of Hamilton, for example his speech
of June 18, 1788, when he spoke approvingly of the British
government as a model; his remark to Governeur Morris in
1802 that the Constitution was "a frail and worthless fab-
ric"; and his belief that "all communities divide them-
selves into the few and the many. The first are the rich
and well-born, the other the mass of the people....The peo-
ple are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or deter-
mine right....[T]o the first class [give] a distinct, per-

manent share of government." Other quotations from

 

"EIde-. pp. 536-u37.
Hélbid., p. 567.
H7Ibid., p. 57u.

7O

Federalists, Fisher Ames, Governeur Morris, John Adams,
were used as corroborative evidence that monarchical sen-
timents did exist as Jefferson said.LLB When Randall con-
cluded this section, it was apparent that Hamilton held
views which differed from those of Jefferson, to say the
least!

The nature of the monarchical party is difficult to
describe on the basis of Randall's account. He said, on
one occasion, that it was doubtful that all of Hamilton's
"leading associates and apparent confidants" really intend-
ed in) set up a monarchy.LI9 On another occasion, he
doubted that it could be determined how many of the "les-
ser" Federalists preferred the monarchical plans of Hamil-
ton to the aristocratic views of Governeur Morris.SO Far-
ther on he said that after 1788, the majority of leaders
and people were conservative republicans; the monarchists
and democrats were mere "handfulls" of men.51 These remarks
should seemingly have caused Randall to suffer second
thoughts about the conspiracy. Yet, in a paradoxical

fashion, he asserted its existence:52

 

LLBThe subject of monarchical views within the Fed-
eralist part is "documented" in Ibid., pp. 578-593.

49mg” p. 588.
5O;p;g,, p. 583.
51M” p. 6h2.
5212131” p- 57h-

71

As Jefferson placed Hamilton at the head of the
alleged monarchical party--as all the world placed
him there, provided there was such a party--it is
incumbent on us to first and most particularly in-
vestigate his conduct.

His remark would lead one to expect that Hamilton's
conduct would be scrutinized and shown to be conspiratorial.
Rather less than this was accomplished. After the opening
broadsides, volume two was surprisingly less polemical in
tone.

Jay's Treaty affords an example of Randall's modera-
tion in volume two. When first describing the monarchists,
he said that they showed "their partialities by a constant
and ultra-colonial adulation of England."53 Knowing the
opposition of the Jeffersonians to the treaty, one would
anticipate that Randall would cite it as evidence of the
Federalists' pro-British predilections. Instead, he be-
lieved that the Republicans displayed poor party tactics by
pre-judging the character of the treaty and the intentions
of President Washington. They put themselves in the pre-
dicament of appearing as the war party and thus allowed the
Federalist to appeal to the people as advocates of an honor-
able peace.5)-‘r Even though the treaty was of questionable

merit, Britain having conceded little to the interests of

the United States, Randall believed that the ensuing peace

 

53Ibid., p. 583.
5H1bid., Vol. II, p. 2h9.

72

permitted the United States time to strengthen itself for
the showdown in 1812.55

Later on, in the first months of John Adams' admin-
istration, Hamilton showed himself to good advantage. As
relations with France worsened, he counselled moderation

to his partisans and endeavored to avoid a break with

6

France.5

As tensions between France and the United States
intensified, Hamilton's attitude toward France changed.
He became the exponent of the "most extensive war prepara-
tions," because he believed that war with France was immi-
nent.S7 Civil liberties of the Republicans were threatened,
as 1M3 approved of the passage of the Alien and Sedition
Acts and "bitterly complain [ed] that they were not more
vigorously executed."S8 By the summer of 1798, Hamilton
had become a war monger.59

The explanation for Hamilton's change of attitude
about policy Randall found in his desire for the United
States to seize Spanish possessions in the New World. Ham-
ilton had corresponded with Francisco Miranda and others

and had indicated his willingness for the country to

 

55;p;g,, p. 300.

56;p;g., p. 3H2.

571112.. pp. 391-396.
58;p;g,, pp. 397 and h80.

59Ibid., p. h38.

73

participate in a war of liberation in Latin America. He
envisaged a grand alliance composed of Great Britain, the
United States, and Latin American states. American troops
led by General Hamilton, aided and supported by the other
states, would drive Spain from the New World and perhaps
force the French out of the West Indies.60 (Of all Hamil-
ton's activities or proposals, this one smacks most of
conspiracy, though the connection with a monarchical plot
is hardly apparent.)

If Hamilton's military policy was suggestive of
ulterior motives, Randall found his legislative recommen-
dations for 1799 incriminating.61 His program contained
a number of alarming proposals, all of which aimed at the
extension of federal power. Internal improvements-~canals
and turnpikes--were called for. Increases for the army and
navy were insisted upon. Hamilton urged that the states be
reduced in size to render them powerless; that a new tax
ought to be imposed; and that the Alien and Sedition Laws
be more stringently enforced. And lastly, he proposed a
large scale increase in the Federal judiciary for the pur-

pose of increasing federal patronage. After thus summarizing

 

60Ibid., pp. h32-hh2. The details are only sketched
here. I find Randall's account of this episode so similar
to that of C. F. Adams' that further detail is unwarranted.
Infra., pp. 91-92.

61Randall, Life, Vol. II, pp. h58-h65.

7h

Hamilton's program, Randall judged "...these provisions,
carried out, would have constituted a purely consolidated
government, and one nearly as absolute in spirit and more
tyrannous in practice, in some particulars, than the admin-
istrations of Edward IV. or Henry VIII."62
Randall never established the Hamiltonian conspiracy
in point of fact. Instead, his efforts reveal and intensify
the differences between the policies of Hamilton and those
of Jefferson. These were partisan and passionate differences
to be sure. But that they involved a monarchical plot is
more alleged than proved. Randall does show that after 1798,
the Hamiltonian Federalists had exaggerated, if not chimeri-
cal, fears about the threat of France and Jacobinism to the
safety of the United States. And after 1800, they had exag-
gerated fears and concern for the stability of the govern-
ment then in the hands of the Jeffersonians. The Federal-

ists were gflacemen out of office who believed that no one

could govern as well as they had.

IV
A student of the literature about Hamilton and Jef-
ferson has complained that the interpretations of Hamilton
made by the Jeffersonian historians are difficult to recon-

cile with those of the Hamitonian historians. He said that

 

62Ibid., p. h63.

7S .

"this is not an unusual result in political controversy.
But it is not supposed to happen in historical writing."63
In Randall's Li£g_there was no distinction between tract

and history; to write the history of Jefferson was at the
same time to be the advocate of a political party. Ran-
dall's political partisanship was evident in his Li£g_and
letters. "I am a thorough going 'Jackson man,'" he wrote

in 1858, "believing that he was the great restorer of Jef-
ferson's doctrines."6u Thus partisanship did influence his
historical work.

Bias does not, however, adequately account for his
interpretation of Hamilton. As noted before, Randall had
at one time thought it unnecessary to enhance Jefferson's
reputation by derogating Hamilton's.65 His emersion in
Jeffersoniana imposed an imperative upon him, or at least
he chose to accept it as an imperative.

Jefferson's Aggs are relevant to understanding the
imperative which Randall encountered as Jefferson's biogra-
pher. These notes were made by Jefferson during the period,
1791-1809, while he was intimately involved in national

affairs. They contained many of Jefferson's views and

 

63Stanley D. Rose, Vanderbilt Law Review, II (1958),
p. 855.

éuRandall to Grigsby, July 7, 1858, ed. George
Green Schackleford, "New Letters Between Hugh Blair Grigs-
by and Henry Stephens Randall, 1858-1861," Virginia Maga—
zine of Historygand Biography, LXIV (1956), p. 338.

65Supra, p. 66.

76

"documentations" concerning the persons and principles
involved in the partisan controversies of the time. The
Jefferson scholar, Merrill Peterson, describes them as a
"collection of anecdote, gossip, and miscellaneous reflec-
tions on the men and the politics of the Federalist period."66
The charges that a monarchical conspiracy existed were
recorded in the £23§°

Randall was compelled to justify the Aggg, not in
all details, but in general.67 By accepting them as legiti-
mate testimony, Randall was obliged to believe that a mo-
narchical.conspiracy3 with Hamilton at its head, had in fact
existed. The imperative forced Randall into verbalizing an

68

unnecessary predicament:

of a monarchical conspiracy . Either Mr. Jefferson
u tered the truth; or he was a monomaniacal fanatic;
or he was...a cold-blooded demagogue attempting to
excite popular prejudices against adversaries by
deliberate falsehood.

[¥ There can be but three tTeories on the subject

The last two possibilities were in Randall's judgment unten-
able. And then by a process of pseudo-syllogistic reason-
ing in which two false propositions leave the first propo-
sition true, Randall concluded in substance that the con-
spiracy had existed. He said it for Jefferson: "It became,

indeed, one of the settled dogmas of his creed that there

 

66Merrill Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image, p. 33.

 

67Randall, Life, Vol. 11, pp. 31-Au-

68Ibid., Vol. I, p. 565.

77

was such a party in the United States, and that it was con—
stantly at work, openly or secretly, to overthrow republi-
canism."69 It came down to the question--a "naked one"--of
Jefferson's veracity.7O The imperative imposed upon Randall
the task of proving that Jefferson's estimation of the na-
ture of the early party struggles was founded in fact.

For Hamilton's historical image, the imperative was
unfortunate, indeed. It would seem reasonable to argue
that none of the elements of Randall's triology above need
be accepted. Jefferson may well have exaggerated his doubts
and feelings toward Hamilton. Randall did choose to believe
Jefferson's allegations, however; and thus his account of
Hamilton with all the trappings of documentation, cast the
burden of a monarchical conspiracy upon Hamilton's reputa-
tion. Hamilton's record in subsequent histories and biog-

raphies has not escaped this burden, or its implications.

 

6C’Iloid.
701bid.

CHAPTER IV

THE ADAMSES -- A

MORALISTIC INTERPRETATION

Through four generations, the Adams family of Quincy,
IMassachusetts, endeavored to follow an independent course
:in American politics. During their lifetimes, success in
jpolitics would seemingly have required that they place
'themselves either in the camp of idyllic, agrarian democ-
racy with its sentimental offshoots of egalitarianism and
llomespun'virtue, or in the camp of aristocratic Federalist
politics with its offshoots of materialism and protection-
ism. Instead the Adamses chose to serve the nation and not
the parties. They wanted to be statesmen who should serve
their country by remaining faithful to the principles of
truth, duty, and honor.1

Amazingly, John Adams and John Quincy Adams became

Presidents of the United States. Both had proved inept at

‘

1Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (The
IModern Library; New York: Random House, 1931), pp. th-105;
hereafter cited as Henry Adams, Education; George Hochfield,
Henry Adams, An Introduction and Interpretation (New York:

Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1962), p. 2; hereafter cited as
Hochfield, Henry Adams.

 

78

79

using the political powers of public office for personal
advantage. In fact, one might say that they obtained
office in recognition of their statesmanship and service
to the country, rather than their political acumen. John
Adams had loyally and doggedly served the cause of inde-
pendence during the war years, 1775-1783, and after the
war he served on the peace commission in Europe. Later
he was United States Ambassador to England. John Quincy
Adams held several diplomatic posts, including the ambas-
sadorship to Great Britain. He served with the commission
that wrote the Peace of Ghent, concluding the War of 1812.
He returned to the United States to become Monroe's Secre-
tary of State. Largely through his efforts, the adminis-
tration negotiated a treaty with Spain which ceded Florida
to the United States. Afterwards, he, along with Monroe,
formulated the famous guideline of nineteenth-century
American diplomacy, the Monroe Doctrine.

The third generation, represented by Charles Francis
Adams, likewise achieved distinction in service to the na-
tion as a statesman. During the difficult years of the
Civil War, he was the United States Ambassador to the Court
of St. James. Almost singlehandedly, he prevailed upon
Great Britain to adopt a policy of neutrality toward the
belligerents in America and to cease rendering material aid
to the Confederate cause. Historians believe that had Bri-

tain recognized and aided the Confederacy, the Civil War

80

would have ended with a Rebel victory. Besides this signal
service, Charles Francis Adams served in Congress as had
his father, John Quincy. In 1872 he was a contender for
the presidential nomination on the Liberal Republican tick-
et. Throughout his life, like his grandfather and father,
he wrote history.

Indeed the Adamses had served their country with dis-
tinction. But at no time were they popular figures among
the majority of American people. Neither John nor John
Quincy Adams ever willingly played the game of partisan
politics or political popularity; in fact neither would
admit to the necessity or honor of such a game. And both
left office, after serving one term each, with rancor in the
nation and bitterness in their hearts. Charles Francis
Adams never achieved the Presidency, because he chose to
work with third parties in behalf of reform.

Each of the Adamses was, as Martin Duberman has writ-
ten of Charles Francis, "a man who achieved political emi-
nence while remaining true to himself."2 Their individual
lives are the story of a family which subordinated personal
advantage and advancement to an effort to serve their

country.

 

2Martin Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), xvi.

 

3Hochfield, Henry Adams, p. 2; Henry Adams, Educa-
tion, p. 7.

 

81

By the latter half of the nineteenth-century, Ameri-
can politics had changed considerably, at least for the
Adamses. Dedication to duty and high-minded, disinterested
service to the nation were no longer sufficient claims upon
the people's attention. National office and recognition
were not forthcoming to the Adamses. If political power
and money were the measures of a society's values, reward
was reserved for men such as Grant, Conkling, Blaine, Jay
Gould, and Jim Fiske. Corruption, rather than honor, seemed
the key to success.

This Age of the Great Barbecue, as Vernon Parrington
called it, was also the age of the fourth generation of
Adamses, represented most brilliantly by Henry Adams. As
the fourth in the family line, the son of Charles Francis
Adams, he had inherited a tradition "of Truth; of Duty and
of Freedom."u It was an eighteenth-century tradition, as
he often called it, which did not prepare him for success
in the nineteenth-century.

Nevertheless, Henry Adams wanted to emulate the family
tradition. Before 1868, when he decided to act, Adams had
already concluded that seeking political office was out of
the question.5 He thought he might "join the press," believ-

ing that his ability to write and his political perspective

 

HHenry Adams, Education, p. 22.

5Ibid., p. 2H3 and passim Chaps. xvi & xvii.

82

would enable him to exert influence on the nation's politi-
cal morality. His autobiography suggests that he envisioned
himself in the role of a political prophet revealing politi-
cal truths to the people. Finding no outlet for his in—
tended profound political journalism and disillusioned by
the corruption of American politics, he soon gave up his
plan and set off for Europe.

In 1870 Adams received an appointment to the Harvard
faculty as a Medieval historian, a subject about which he
protested he knew nothing.6 But, since America seemed to
have no place for him in his preferred occupations, and
given his family's insistent advice, Adams felt obliged to
try his hand at teaching history. Although his tenure at Har-
vard is treatedillhis autobiography in a chapter entitled
"Failure," it was a time, nonetheless, which enabled him to
devote considerable attention to history, including that of
the United States. Moreover, the appointment carried the
additional responsibility of serving as the editor of the

North American Review, a New England intellectual journal

 

of sectional and limited distribution. During the 'seven-
ties, Adams wrote a number of articles for the Review and
other journals; some of his work dealt with historical sub-
jects. He also compiled a number of documents related to

Federalism in New England in a book that was published.

 

6Ibid., p. 2h3.

83

Adams gave up on teaching and resigned from Harvard

in 1877. He adopted the life of a gentleman scholar, living

off the income of his and his wife's investments, and started

tariting. In 1879 he published his first major historical
'book, The Life of Albert Gallatin. By this time he had al-
:ready started working on his history of the United States
during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison.
The 1880's were a remarkably productive period for
Trim. He dashed off a biography of John Randolph, an old
gpolitical enemy of his grantfather, John Quincy, and pub-
Ilished two novels, Democracy and Esther, which portended
Iris disillusionment with the democratic political system in
lhnerica. Meanwhile he continued working on his History; by
1891, it was completed and published in nine volumes!

The next twenty-odd years provided Adams with time
“to write a variety of books, including his well-known M232-
iigint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams.

Ihuubered among his publications were several essays in
WIlichhe vainly tried to formulate an acceptable philosophy

0f llistory.

With the exceptions of considerable political involve-

“mfllt and actual office holding, the career of Henry Adams
emlllated the family tradition. Particularly is the parallel
Clfiflar in that all of them wrote history. His grandfathers
made history in a sense and wrote it in their correspondence

arui official papers. Charles Francis Adams did likewise,

8H-

and more by compiling the Adamses' papers--John's, Abi-
gail's, and John Quincy's--into multi-volumed editions and
[publishing them during the mid—nineteenth-century.

Any student of Henry Adams' work must wonder why,

VJlth his ancestry, he published no histories of his famous

predecessors. The answer surely must be that his father had
already written them. Henry Adams' choice of Gallatin, Ran-
dolph, Jefferson, and Madison, however, did not remove him
so far from the issues raised by the administrations of his
ggrandfathers, not so far as one might assume.

Altogether, the Adamses wrote a number of books in-

xnolving the Early National period of American history and

:its prominent figures.

I

In various parts of their histories, Alexander Hamil-
ton is a major subject. Through four generations of Adamses,
kfirs presence and what he stood for seem to intrude upon them
as isome dark force, frustrating the family in its efforts to
assexrt its place and rectitude in American politics. They
reSiponded to him in their histories and judged him severely.

The Adamses generally admitted that Hamilton was a

Inarl of ability, and one should presume that they meant

85

ability in government organization and finance.7 Henry

.Adams was the more perceptive, and the most generous, of

the family in judging Hamilton's ability. He wrote that

IHamilton was one of two Americans--Albert Gallatin was the

other--who had demonstrated the quality of "practical states-

manship."8 Hamilton was remarkable for his "breadth of mind"

which enabled him to deal with "the machine of government as

a whole."9 He possessed a "practical knowledge of affairs

.and.of politics that enabled him to forsee every movement."10

Iflhe energy which he infused into Washington's first adminis-
‘bration produced legislative and administrative results that
'Hdere stupendous and can never be repeated"; the successors

(nan only alter and improve the form, but not the substance,

(If what Hamilton and his party created.11

The important theme in Adams' interpretation is the

one of practical statesmanship. He believed that the

‘

7John Adams to Dr. Ogden, Dec. 3, 1800, The Works of
éflflyn Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Little,

Brown and Company, 1856), IX, p. 576; hereafter cited as

C. IV. Adams, Works. Page Smith, John Adams (Garden City:
DOtfialeday and Company, Inc., 1962), Vol. II, p. 760. Charles
Fteuacis Adams, The Life of John Adams (Philadelphia: J. B.
LlFupincott and Co., 187h), Vol. II, p. 1hh; hereafter cited
as (3. F. Adams, Life.

 

8Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (Phila-
delddhia' J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1880), p. 267; hereafter

Cited as Henry Adams, Gallatin.
9;p;g., p. 268.
lOIbid.

llIbid.

 

I

86

practical statesman must necessarily be a financier, for
"no organization or reform is likely to succeed that does

"12 What

not begin with and is not guided by the Treasury.
Adams meant, but did not elaborate, was that Hamilton's
fiscal program was integral to the formation of the federal
government under Washington. Adams believed that the Con-
stitution had initiated a trend toward centralization in
American political development.13 As Adams had written,
"...at the moment [of Washington's first administration] it
was not unreasonable to suppose that what the country wanted
was centralization."1H Hamilton had the perspicacity to
recognize this compelling force and respond to it. His
entire fiscal program--the national debt, the national bank,
the loose constructionism, the federal aid to the economy,
the military arm--tended toward the centralization of politi-
cal power and energy in the federal government. Adams thus
saw that Hamilton, the financier in the Treasury, had effect-

ed tflua organization and character of the newly formed fed-

eral government. Since his policy was predicated upon a

 

12Ibid., p. 267.

l3Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams, The Middle Years
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 267.
Edwin C. Rozwenc, "Henry Adams and the Federalists," ed.,
H. Stuart Hughes, Teachers of History (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 195h), p. 129; hereafter cited as Roz-
wenc, "Henry Adams."

lLiHenry Adams, Gallatin, pp. 167-168.

87

cognizance of the compelling force of centralization, Ham-
ilton's ability manifested the highest order of practical
statesmanship. Few Secretaries since the time of Hamilton
and Gallatin perceived the importance of the Treasury, and
none of them have left great reputations behind.ls

Though Henry Adams saw Hamilton as an extraordinar-
ily able Secretary, he believed that certain details of
Hamilton's policy were impolitic. The national debt, for
one thing, was larger than it need have been. Assumption
increased the debt by twice the amount which was actually
necessary.16 Despite that, the nation may well have managed
Hamilton's debt program, had conditions not changed. They
did change, however, in the late 1790's, and the nation was
faced with the necessity of building up its military forces.
The Treasury was incapable of withstanding the double burden
of debt payment and military preparedness.l7 Government
(expenses threatened to exceed income; and thus make the cost
<of maintaining Hamilton's sinking fund too expensive. But
'the goVernment was committed to the sanctity of the fund and

(sould not honorably suspend its operation.18 Had Hamilton

_

l51bid., p. 167.
16Ibid., p. 168.
17Ibid., p. 169.

18Ibid., p. 173.

88

forseen the course of events, he might have been more con-
servative in assuming a large national debt.19

Hamilton was imprudent in other ways. The Whiskey
EXcise was an unpopular measure which came out of the admin-
istration's efforts to carry out Hamilton's fiscal policy.20
This impolitic measure was made worse by Hamilton when he
showed excessive zeal in hunting down and punishing the
Whiskey Rebels in western Pennsylvania. Hamilton displayed
a "marked desire to find evidence incriminating Gallatin"
in the insurrection.21 His authority for such an investi-
gation was uncertain, and it would have been better, con-

sidering the bitterness surrounding the excise and the rebel-

lion, had he left it in the hahds of the proper judicial

authorities.22

Jay's Treaty, for which Hamilton, along with other
Federalists, was an outspoken advocate, was "bad." Little
‘was gained by the country for all the trouble it caused.

”It compromised our neutrality and threw us into the hands
<of England."23 It exacerbated political sentiments at home.
CEhe people divided into two uncompromising and uncompromis-
Eible camps, led by Hamilton and Jefferson. Adams wrote:

Mr. Jefferson meant that the American system would
be a democracy, and he would rather have let the

19Ibid., p. 168. 22Ibid.
20Ibid., p. 87. 231bid., p. 159.
21

Ibid., p. 139.

89

world perish than that his principle...should fail.
”£35: 3223.332 Sifiiii§§e§.§$§§§?‘fl.Wat“ ...a.
In a letter to George Bancroft, the American historian,
Adams said, "As for the Jay affair, I fear we must concede--
Mr. Jay and I--that our ancestors gave some unnecessary
trouble."25 He surely would have included the other Fed-
eralists as well.
Though all Adamses deplored the spirit of party,
Henry Adams observed that Hamilton and Jefferson, in their
party roles, had set forth the only two theories of govern-
ment which offered solutions to the "great problems of Amer-
ican politics."26 With the exception of Gallatin, no states-
men since their day have added to those original state-
ments.27
Even though the theories that came to be associated
‘with Hamilton's name were the Views of a small minority of
.Americans, he and his party, by their ability, energy, and
determination, had after all "created the Constitution" and
gguided the nation under it for ten years.28 And whatever

Eflnortcomings these Federalists may have had, which were

nmany, they were successful. When they surrendered power in

¥

2HIbid.

25Harold Dean Cater, ed. Henry Adams and His Friends
(EBOston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 19h7i, p. 129.

26Henry Adams, Gallatin, p. M92.
27Ibid. 28Ibid., p. 199.

l

90

1801 to Thomas Jefferson, they handed him a government in

"excellent condition."29
Like his party, Hamilton had many defects, at least

in the eyes of the Adamses; nevertheless, Henry Adams

found him to be a man of first-rate abilities. Adams

said that when he was dealing with the subtleties of Jef-

ferson's character, he drew upon Hamilton:

of all the politicians and writers of that day, none
could draw pgstraits with a sharper outline than
Hamilton....

Washington probably represented what was best in the na-
tional character and aspirations, Adams thought, but he
pointedly said that "Washington depended mainly upon Ham-
ilton."31 No expression of Henry Adams' reveals better his

assessment of Hamilton than these words:

history only two examples Hamilton and Gallatin

of practical statesmanship hich can serve as pe -
fect models, not perhaps in all respects for imita-
tion, but for study, to persons who wish to under-
stand what practical Etatesmanship has been under
the American system.3

...there are, to the preset: time, in all Americjn

29Ibid., p. 273.

3OHenry Adams, History of the United States during
_§31e First Administration of Thomas Jefferson (New York:
llrrtiquarian Press, Ltd., Reprint, 1962), Vol. I, p. 277;
1lezreafter cited as Henry Adams, History.

31Henry Adams, Gallatin, p. 267.

32Ibid.

91

III

Assessing Hamilton's statesmanship and ability was
a matter for the historian, and Adams tried to do it ob-
jectively. Despite his approving interpretation of these
aspects of Hamilton, Henry Adams disliked him. To Samuel
Tilden, Adams wrote that in his eyes Albert Gallatin was
the only "fully and perfectly equipped" American statesman;
he possessed "ability, integrity, knowledge, unselfishness,
social fitness" more than other public men.33 Others showed
themselves to be "soft" and ”rough"; they gave way in Adams'
hand. But not Gallatin. He made errors, "but even in his
blunders he was respectable."3u The inference is clear
that Hamilton was one of those, soft and rough in spots.
Up to this point,in Adams' mind, Hamilton and Gallatin had
stood together as outstanding statesmen. But, Hamilton in
Ihis blunders was not respectable and here the comparison
between the two Secretaries ended.

More about Hamilton appeared in a letter Adams wrote
'to his friend and former student, Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge
llad written a book review expressing Views of Hamilton that
Ikdams could not fully appreciate, and Adams responded to it

thy saying that he had his "own kind of aversion" to the man.

¥

33Cater, Henry Adams and His Friends, p. 125.

3HIbid.

92

Hamilton displayed the character of an adventurer.35 Every-
thing that Hamilton wrote evinced a "Napoleonic kind of
adventurdom."36 Parenthetically it should be added here
that Adams' great-grandmother, Abigail, undoubtedly reflect-
ing her husband's animosity toward Hamilton, had written
that Hamilton "would become a second Buonaparty" if given
the chance.37
The analogy had some relevance in Henry Adams' mind,

because he made the comparison between Hamilton and Buona-
parte on two occasions in his History.38 He also gave a
description of Napoleon, which, with little imagination,
could easily be applied to Hamilton. He wrote:

CNapoleon possessed] Ambition that ground its heel

into every obstacle; restlessness that often defied

commonsense; selfishness that eat [siél like a cancer

into his reasoning faculties; energy such as had

never before been combined with equal genius and

resources; ignorance that would have amused a school-

boy; and a moral sense which regarded truth and

falsehood as equally useful modes of expression,--

an unprovoked war or secret aggassination as equally
natural forms of activity....

If not exactly in these words, certainly with the same inten-

sity would the Adamses have described Hamilton. One writer

 

35Worthington Chauncy Ford, ed., Letters of Hengy
Adams (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1932), I, pp. 28h-285; hereafter cited as Ford, Letters.

Samuels, op. cit., p. 56.
36

 

Ford, Letters, Vol. I, p. 28h.

37Quoted in Page Smith, John Adams, Vol. 11, p. 972.

 

38Henry Adams, History, Vol. II, pp. 168 and 190.
391bid., Vol. I, p. 33h.

93

has said that Napoleon "was the real Villain in the Hig-
gggy."uo Perhaps Hamilton should be seen as the bete noire
of the Adamses' histories. Whether this speculation is
right or wrong, the quotation above should serve for the
moment to elaborate Henry Adams' remark that he read a
"Napoleonic adventurdom" in Hamilton's writings.

Portions of two other letters written by Henry Adams
complete this description of his attitude toward Hamilton.
To his friend, John Hay, he wrote that "the man is noxious.
...He combined all the elements of a Scotch prig in a nasty
form."LIl In his History, on which he was working at the
time, he planned, he said, "not to touch him" and to cut
all that he could and emasculate the rest.42 To his broth-
er, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., he wrote asking after the
authority for crediting John Adams with the "splendidly
vigorous description of Hamilton as 'the bastard brat of
a Scotch pedlar'...."H3

None of these opinions about Hamilton appeared in the
published works of Henry Adams, certainly not in the form
or severity that they are quoted above. They were portions

0f letters that Adams wrote to friends and did not become

 

HOWilliam H. Jordy, Henry Adams; Scientific Historian
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 6h.

ulFord, Letters, Vol. I, p. 335.
LL2Ibid.

H3Ibid., Vol. 11, pp. 565-566.

9h

generally available to historians until they were published
in various collections in the twentieth-century. Neverthe-
less, they are of interest because they reveal clearly what
Henry Adams thought of Hamilton's character, and they pro-
vide insight to the few remarks about Hamilton which are
found in his Gallatin and History. They also show that
there is a continuity of judgment about Hamilton from John
to Henry Adams.

The dislike of Hamilton was a family passion. Hamil-
ton and the High Federalists, represented by State Street in
Boston and the Essex Junto, had caused the Adamses endless
difficulty and embarrassment. They had opposed John Adams'
election to high office on several occasions; they had in-
volved John Quincy Adams in vehement dispute about the seces-
sionist movement in New England prior to 1812 and after;
and theyluuldenounced Charles Francis Adams for his aboli-
tionist politics before 1860. Henry Adams undoubtedly per-
ceived something like an historical conspiracy against the
family, and it could be traced back to Hamilton, at least
in part. As a boy he had read the proofsheets of his
father's texts of John Adams' papers,HH and as a young
jprofessor he had edited some of John Quincy Adams' papers

“when gathering them for his book, Documents Relating to

 

HHHenry Adams, Education, p. 31.

95

New England Federalism. He knew his grandfathers' story
and was willing to settle accounts with Hamilton.)+5

The family conflict with Hamilton and his forces
began first in the stormy politics of the 1790's and con-
tinued through the threats of secession in New England prior
to the War of 1812. After the death of John Quincy Adams
in l8h8, the feuds, as Henry Adams said, "were no longer
acutely personal," but they never ceased.1+6 By this time,
the quarrels left the political arena to take place in the
pages of the history books. In the early 1850's, Hamilton‘s
son, John 0., published the Hamilton papers and later wrote
a history of the country based on those papers. Charles
Francis Adams took note of Hamilton's papers by remarking
"that no leading public man of the country, in any way of
rival powers, receives aid to his reputation from the pub-
lication that has been made of Mr. Hamilton's writings.u7
Henry Adams noted in his autobiography that "Mr. Hildreth,
in his standard history, went so far as to echo with appro-
val the charge that treachery was hereditary in the fami-

1y.")‘i8 There is more to this particular matter about the

 

HSConcerning Henry Adams' sense of family loyalty,
see Samuels, HenryAAdams, The Middle Years, pp. M9, 89,
160 and 388; Henry Adams, Education, pp. 7, 22, and 2h;
and Rozwenc, "Henry Adams," pp. 12h-l25.

Ll'(DHenry Adams, Education, p. 2h.

 

470. F. Adams, Works, Vol. IX, footnote, p. 288.

LIPBHenry Adams, Education, pp. 10h~105.

 

96

feud in the books than a paper on Hamilton need detail;
enough has been said to indicate that four generations of

Adamses were highly motivated to write history.

IV

There are three episodes which focus the family
anger. One is Hamilton's interference in the elections in
which John Adams was a candidate. Another is Hamilton's
and the Hamiltonians' efforts to dictate foreign policy to
John Adams and the nation in the period, 1797-1800. The
third is Hamilton's duel with Aaron Burr in l80h. As the
Adamses' account of these episodes unfolds, their deroga-
tory judgment of Hamilton becomes quite evident.

Political relations between John Adams and Hamilton
were never really good. The first indication of distrust
went back to the days of the Revolutionary War, when Hamil-
ton became suspicious that the Adamses and others in New
England were intriguing to undermine the authority of
General Washington.)+9 The same suspicion motivated Hamil-
ton to interfere in the election of 1788 to make sure that
Adams was not a 'popularly' elected Vice-President. Ham-
ilton wanted "to keep a check over the political influence
of the second officer" should Adams ever attempt "to embar-

rass the chief by his opposition."50 Adams protested the

 

LL90. F. Adams, Life, Vol. II, p. 137.

SOIbid., pp. 137-138.

97

indignity, but the Hamiltonians turned the protest against
him as evidence of his ambition and of the need for a check.
Knowledge of this campaign against his character came back
to Adams and created an element of distrust in the rela-
tions between the two men.51

This inauspicious beginning shifted to the background
in the first years of the new government. Both Adams and
Hamilton had in common a strong sense of nationalism, and
both saw the need to establish an energetic federal govern-
ment. Hamilton soon found that he could count on general
support from Adams for his fiscal program and other poli-
cies.52 For the moment, Adams and Hamilton enjoyed a mutual
confidence in pursuit of common goals, a confidence nurtured
by the moderating influences of President Washington.

When Washington retired in 1796, "the last check
upon the fury of the parties" was removed.53 The question
cmfsuccession was opened and soon became one of power.
There was no man who had the stature that Washington had
among the people at large. Though it was clear that the
opposition wanted Jefferson, it was not so clear who would
lead the Federalists. Adams, John Jay, and Hamilton were

contenders. Hamilton was the strongest in the party hier-

archy, but weakest in the public eye. Jay was popular

 

511bid., p. 139.
52Ibid., p. lho.
53Ibid., p. 201.

98

among the Federalist leaders, but his Treaty had aroused
considerable rancor in the public. Adams was not the most
popular candidate among the Federalist leaders; but he was
thought to be the least unpopular of the three to the pub-
lic, and the nomination devolved upon him.

Hamilton, though forced by circumstances to acqui-
esce in Adams' nomination, was unwilling to support him.
He set in motion a scheme to get electoral votes withheld
from Adams in hopes of electing his own dark-horse candi-
date, Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina and the Federalist
Vice-Presidential nominee, to the Presidency. The scheme
failed completely, and resulted in placing the opposition
candidate, Jefferson, in office as Adams' Vice-President.
Altogether, the scheme showed Hamilton's willingness to per-
vert the spirit of the Constitution.5u

In 1800 John Adams was up for re-election as the
Federalist candidate for the Presidency. Once again Hamil-
ton displayed his "bad faith" by covertly working for the
defeat of Adams and the election of Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney of South Carolina. By this time, Hamilton and
Adams were political enemies, and Hamilton was willing to
adopt extreme measures to carry off his scheme. He hoped
to divert electoral votes from Adams by convincing the elec-

tors that Adams was unfit for office. He wrote a vicious

 

SLLIbid., p. 20h.

99

pamphlet defaming the character of Adams and tried to cir-
culate it secretly among Federalist circles. The opposi-

tion got hold of the pamphlet, printed it, and made it

general knowledge to the public. This circumstance forced

a split in the Federalist party and guaranteed the election

of Jefferson. It was a betrayal in the eyes of the Adamses.55

Hamilton's conduct in the election of 1800 was moti-
vated by his intense dissatisfaction with John Adams' for-
eign policy in the preceding years. The years 1797-1800
'were years of intense strain in the relations between the
two men, and the bitterness generated at the time was un-
cioubtedly one source of the family hostility towards Hamil-
‘ton.

John Adams had known of President Washington's diffi-
culty in finding first-rate men to fill the Cabinet posts as
'they were vacated by the original incumbents. Washington
tvas forced by circumstances to appoint expedients: Timothy
]?ickering in the State Department, Oliver Wolcott in the
Tflreasury, and James McHenry in the War Department. Adams,
zafter becoming President, felt compelled by his own circum-

6

sstances to retain these Secretaries.5 He had no popular

Inandate from the people; his plurality was a mere three
<Blectoral votes. He knew already how difficult it was to

Iflind.qualified men willing to serve. The existing Cabinet

A

55Ibid., p. 335.
56Ibid., p. 226.

100

had the advantage of some experience, and it had the aura of
Washington's eminence, for he had chosen it. What Adams did
not know was that each of these Secretaries looked to Hamil-
ton for advice and counsel and espoused his policies as
their own at Cabinet meetings. Moreover, they covertly in-
formed Hamilton of the proceedings of Cabinet meetings and
felt no obligation to appraise Adams of the situation. "In
this way, Alexander Hamilton...was become all-powerful in
guiding the movements of the government."57

Such was the situation in March, 1797, when diplo-
matic relations with the French collapsed as a result of
their rejection of the American minister, Charles Cotes-
worth Pinckney. Adams wanted to renew relations with France
at the first opportunity. In May, a commission of three
Americans sailed for France in hopes of settling differences.
The outcome of their efforts was a rebuff, infamous in the
United States as the XYZ Affair. When the Senate caused to
be published the papers exposing this rebuff, public opinion,
regardless of party, was aroused by the insult. In the late
spring of 1798, war with France was a distinct possibility.

Up to this time, Hamilton had been content to act as
a power behind-the-scenes, exercising his influence over
the Secretaries in Adams' Cabinet and over the councils of

the Federalist party. Evidently, the likelihood of war with

 

57Ibid., p. 226.

101

France aroused in him some desires to step forward and

openly devise national policy and see to its implementa-
tion. "He began to see a crisis worthy to call forth all

"58

his latent powers. (Italics mine.)
Hamilton's position was strong. He influenced the
Cabinet and the Party. He enjoyed the support of the
"younger and more active members of the federal party of
the north and the east."59 Much of this "chain of influ-
ence" had been linked while he was in the Treasury, at

O

which time he exerted "considerable influence" over the
mind of Washington.60
The Federalists in Congress, influenced by the in-
tent of Hamilton's policy, enacted.a program abrogating
American treaties with France and authorizing warlike meas-
ures. The navy was strengthened by an increase in person-
nel and ships and the Department of Navy was established.
The army was increased and a list of officers, suitable to
a much larger force, was drawn. The Alien and Sedition
Acts were passed, though without the hearty endorsement
of President Adams. The program was short of what Hamil-

ton wanted. President Adams was concerned with proper de-

fensive measures and thought to make the navy the first line

 

581bid., p. 2h3.
59Ibid., p. 2A2.

60Ibid., p. 2A3.

102

of defense, while the army should serve as a deterrent to
any plans of invasion by the French. Hamilton wanted a
large army because he envisioned an offensive war.61

Hamilton, in the previous years, had become privy to
a "grand project of revolution in South America."62 A
large army, which he dreamed of leading, was necessary for
the offensive war inherent in this project.

The project was the brainchild of a Venezuelan ad-
venturer, Francisco de Miranda, who was in 1798 already in
London trying to persuade the British to supply ships,
money, and men to the project.63 The Americans were sup-
posed to supply an army to fight the Spanish. In reward
for the service, the United States was to obtain all of
the Spanish territory east of the Mississippi River, inclu-
ding New Orleans. Besides the glory which Hamilton antici-
pated coming to him from the venture, he also saw it as a
means to ally the United States with Britain against the
French.6u His plan meant the abandonment of Washington's
principle of neutrality.65

Hamilton had other reasons for wanting a warlike

policy towards France and the army which had come out of

it. He had never been sympathetic to the "popular ideas"

 

61Ibid., p. 2H5. 62

Ibid.
631bid. 6H1bid., p. 250.

65Ibid.

103

that prevailed in the country. "Theoretical democracy"
was a political anathemalx>him. His efforts in behalf of
the Constitution and the new federal government were pre-
dicated on the fear that something worse would evolve in
its stead.66 By the end of the 1790's he feared that
despite his efforts, America was threatened with a civil
commotion; "a grave crisis was portending."67 (Italics
mine.) Federalist control of an army would allow them to
strike a blow for good government and order.

While the nation girded itself for the possible war
with France, Hamilton schemed with his friends to obtain
for himself the position of second in command of the pro-
visional army. "His great ambition was for military
lead."68 Through subtle pressures he prevailed upon
Washington--already designated commander--to name his
staff officers. Hamilton, Knox, and Pinckney were duly
named. President Adams, however, had wanted to appoint
some militarynmnifrom the opposition to positions of com-
mand. Adams also knew that Generals Knox and Pinckney had

dates of rank which game them precedence over Hamilton.

 

66Ibid. 0. F. Adams emphasized this aspect of
Hamilton's outlook. It is stressed in other places; see
C. F. Adams, Works, Vol. I, pp. hhS and 526. Henry Adams
distrusted Hamilton because "he was equally ready to sup-
port a system he utterly disbelieved in as one that he
liked." See Ford, Letters, Vol. I, p. 28H.

670. F. Adams, Life, Vol. II, p. 25.

68Ibid., p. 252.

10h

Hamilton, aware of the President's reticence to accede to
his desires, urged the Secretaries to pressure Washington
to act. Their efforts aroused the old General to write to
Adams, demanding the prerogative of naming his staff. Adams
deferred to Washington's demand, and Washington named Hamil-
ton Inspector-General, second in command. Knox resigned his
commission and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney acquiesced. For
all intents and purposes, Hamilton had his army command,
for General Washington would assume command only in the
event of actual war.69 It was a Pyrrhic Victory though,
because "from this time may be dated the beginnings of
[Adamsfl distrust of his ministers and of his determina-
tion to resist their control."70

In the fall of 1798, John Adams learned through reli-
able sources that France was willing to re-establish rela-
tions with the United States. The President posed the prob-
lems cd‘ resuming relations for his Cabinet to consider.
It was a subject which "burst like a clap of thunder" upon
them. Peace was intolerable; "to their system, war was an
essential part."7l They and Hamilton did everything they

could to deter Adams from effecting a reconciliation with

 

69Ibid., pp. 252-255.
701bid., p. 256.

71Ibid., p. 261.

105

France. But the President remained firm in his determina-
tion to avoid war if it were honorable and possible to do
so. In February, 1799, President Adams announced his desire
to nominate William Van Murray as minister to France.72

The Hamiltonians turned to Congress in an effort to
check the President's plans for resumption of relations with
France. A caucus of Federalists was called and the question
of a declaration of war was put. The moderate Federalists--
the Adams' supporters--combined to vote it down.73 At this
moment, the influence of Hamilton and his forces began to
diminish rapidly. Their frustration soon vented itself in
vilification of the President.7hr

War, it was clear, was the settled policy of the Fed-

eralists who supported Hamilton, some of them even willing

to support a policy of aggressive war.75 There were two

 

72Henry Adams wrote: "The nomination [of Van Murray]
fell like a thunder-bolt between the conflicting forces.
At first its full consequences were not understood; only
by slow degrees did it become clear that it meant the ex-
pulsion from power of the Hamiltonian Wing of the party and
the end of their whole system of politics. Their war with
France, their army, their navy, their repressive legislation
[the Alien and Sedition Acts], all fell together. The im-
mediate dangers, which has threatened civil war, disappeared."
Gallatin, p. 22.

 

73Henry Adams viewed this whole episode much like his
father did. He wrote: "The Hamiltonian Federalists were
ardent for war, for an army, and for coercive measures
against domestic opposition; the moderate Federalists, prob-
ably 21 large majority of the party with the President at
their head, would have been glad to recede." Gallatin, p. 215.

7H0. F. Adams, Life, Vol. II, pp. 268-269.
751bid., p. 270.

106

reasons which account for their policy. First, they wanted
to capitalize on the anti-French sentiment for party advan-
tage; and second, they wanted control of a large military
force.76 Military power would enable the Hamiltonians to
make "modifications in the laws, and even in the Constitu-
tion itself."77 No other construction can be placed on
Hamilton's actions.78 He had written that the Constitution
needed more "ramparts" and "buttresses"; it was a "fabric
which can hardly be stationary, and which will retrograde,
if it cannot be made to advance."79

John Adams' conciliatory policy prevailed, and in the
fall of 1800, a Convention between the two nations was
signed. To Adams, it was his greatest contribution to the

80

nation.

 

761bid.
77Ibid.

78Henry Adams interpreted Hamilton's actions some-
‘what like this. He wrote: "They [the Republicans] believed,
not without ground, that the Federalists aimed at a war
with France and an alliance with England for the purpose
of creating an army and navy to be used to check the spread
of democracy in America." (Italics mine.) Gallatin, p. 211.

79Quoted in 0. F. Adams, Life, Vo1. 11, pp. 270-271.

80Ibid., p. 297.

107

To Hamilton, peace meant the end of his policy and
his schemes of conquest and glory. He determined to pre-
vent the re-election of John Adams in 1800.81

The foregoing account is a summary of Charles Francis
Adams' history of the relations between the two men. It
contains no information which is startling or new; the story
is a standard account, except for the emphasis that Adams'
placed on Hamilton's character and his motivations. Adams
tried to be just and temperate in his account; but the de-
fects in Hamilton's character were explicit in his conduct
and his policy and could not be ignored. Adams interpreted
Hamilton, "faithful" to the facts.

The major outline of Charles Francis Adams' account
was quite similar to that of his father's, found in the
"Reply to the Appeal of the Massachusetts Federalists."82
Missing from the more detailed account of Charles Francis
Adams was an effort to explain Hamilton's motivation for

meeting Aaron Burr in the duel in l80h. John Quincy Adams

dealt with it as a key to Hamilton's character and purposes.

 

81Henry Adams spoke of the matter sarcastically:
"The struggle for control between Hamilton and the conspira-
tors, lasted to the eve of the election,--secret, stifled,
mysterious; the intrigue of men afraid to avow their aims,
and seeming rather driven by their own passions than guided
by the lofty and unselfish motives which ought to inspire
those whom George Cabot emphatically called the best!"

History, Vol. II, p. 18h.

82In Henry Adams, ed., Documents Relating to New
England Federalism, 1800-1815 (Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1877), pp. 107-329; hereafter cited as Henry Adams,
Documents. The reference above refers specifically to

pp- 1E7-15u-

 

108

Hamilton had many honorable reasons for refusing to
accept Burr's challenge; he had set them forth in a final
"testament," published by his executors after his death.

He had written that conscience, survival, family, and jus-
tice to his creditors militated against his meeting Burr.
John Quincy Adams agreed, and wondered what more powerful
impulses than these could "operate upon the human heart."
His answer, "Ambition, the marshal's truncheon, the 'All
hail hereafterl'"83

Adams reasoned that after the debacle of 1797-1800
and the inauguration of Jefferson's administration, the
political future of the Hamiltonian Federalists was bleak
indeed. The administration of Jefferson had earned the
respect of the nation by bringing peace, prosperity, and
general tranquillity. The covert talk of secessionism among
New England Federalists was the only portent of the revival
of Hamilton's influence and prestige. But in 180h, Hamilton
counselled against secession; nevertheless, he was aware
that such dissatisfaction might lead to crises in the future
that would require his assumption of military command.BLL

Adams saw the connection between anticipated crises
and Hamilton's last words. In the final paragraph of Hamil-
ton's paper explaining his reasons for meeting Burr appeared

these words:

 

83Ibid., p. 166. 8"Ibid., p. 169.

109

The ability to be in future useful, whether in
resisting mischief or effecting good, in those cri-
ses of our public affairs which seem likely to hap-
pen, would probably be inseparable from a cogformity
with public prejudice in this particular.... 5
The phrases "resisting mischief or effecting good" and "cri-
ses in public affairs" were not references to war, but to

86

civil commotions. If he failed to meet Burr, military
men would think him a coward and refuse to offer him a com-
mand in the future. "He must meet his foe, or surrender
forever the prospect of commanding armies."87 Hamilton's
acceptance of the challenge was grounded in his ambition.88
Henry Adams thought that Hamilton accepted Burr's
challenge for more concrete reasons than a compelling ambi-

tion. He saw it as the culmination of a struggle between a

political power and an aspirant to power: "the leadership

 

85Quoted in Ibid., p. 168. Henry Adams commented to
Lodge upon the significance of these lines: "From the very
first to the last words he wrote, I read always the same
kind of Napoleonic adventurdom, nor do I know any more
curious and startling illustration of this than the con-
clusion of that strange paper explaining his motives for
accepting Burr's challenge." He then quoted the lines
given above and went on to say, "What should you or I say
if our great-grandfathers had left us those words as a
deathbed legacy? I think we should not have so high a
moral standard as I thank those gentlemen for leaving us.
And I confess I think those words alone justify all John
Adams' distrust of Hamilton." Ford, Letters, Vol. I,

pp. 28h-285.
86Henry Adams, Documents, p. 169.
87l§l§°
BBEElQ-

110

of Hamilton would not tolerate rivalry from Burr."89 Hamil-
ton had to fight to maintain his political influence, other-
wise Burr, and others, would have usurped it.

John Adams did not leave any histories as such of the
stormy relations he had had with Hamilton, a deficiency
which his son and grandsons supplied. His published papers,
however, provide ample evidence of his dislike of Hamilton.
On one occasion he said that Hamilton was "the most rest-
less, impatient, artful, indefatigable and unprincipled
intriguer in the United States, if not the world...."90 On
another occasion he wrote that Hamilton's "principle rule
of right and wrong, of wisdom and error, was his own ambi-
tion and indelicate pleasures...."91 These themes were am-
ply developed by his family.

John Adams made one comment about Hamilton which had
a profound effect upon the later generations of Adamses. He
said that "Mr. Hamilton's imagination was always haunted by
that hideous monster or phantom, so often called a crisis,
and which so often produces imprudent measures."92 John
Quincy Adams dealt with the theme of crisis in his analysis

of the motives of the duel, saying in effect that Hamilton

 

89Henry Adams, History, Vol. II, pp. 176 and 187.
900. F. Adams, M, Vol. x, p. 121..

9lgpyg” Vol. IX, p. 300.

92;p;g,, pp. 289-290.

111

anticipated a civil crisis at some time in the future.93
Charles Francis Adams mentioned the theme several times.9h
He also wrote, nearly in the words of his grandfather:

"The expectation of a great crisis haunted his mind during
several of his last years."95 With Henry Adams the theme
took the form of an exclamation: "Always the crisis!"96

To his friend, Henry Cabot Lodge, he wrote the words that
gave meaning to the phrase: "Future political crises all
through Hamilton's life was always in his mind about to make
him commander-in-chief, and his first and last written words
show the same innate theory of life."97 Nothing shows the
similarity in the Adamses' interpretations of Hamilton more
than does their handling of this theme of crisis. To them,
Hamilton was something like a Napoleon, ambitious and un-
principled; a military adventurer who sought to exploit

crises for his own glory and power.

V
It was convenient indeed for the Adamses that Hamil-
ton should have so sinister a character as their reading of

the facts suggested. His lack of political virtue at once

 

93Henry Adams, Documents, p. 169.
91+Supra, pp. 101 and 103.

950. F. Adams, Works, Vol. I, p. 526.
96Henry Adams, History, Vol. II, p. 187.

97Ford, Letters, Vol. I, p. 285.

112

highlighted their own political virtue and explained their
political failure. Against such an adversary, virtuous men
have only truth and honor with which to do battle, and they
do not always carry the field. Hamilton, and his symbolic
successors, had effectively hindered four generations of
Adamses in their efforts to exercise political power and
influence. As moral men, they had to trust to Providence
to make final retribution upon Hamilton.

In the meantime, the Adamses presented their histor-
ies for their contemporaries to judge. And though all the
Adamses effectively deprecated Hamilton's character and pur-
poses, none of them had more influence upon the general pub-
lic than Henry Adams. He was instrumental in fixing a sin-

98

ister, perhaps immoral, reputation upon Hamilton. One
can hardly read Adams without suspecting Hamilton of ulter-
ior purposes, destructive to American democracy.

One page in Adams' History should serve to substan-
tiate the point. He was in the habit of collecting anec-
dotes about eminent nmnl as keys to their private charac-
ter.99 One especially destructive anecdote about Hamilton

appeared in the History and became part of the historical

record. In 1803 Hamilton was reported to have been speaking

 

98Henry Commager, "Henry Adams," Essays in American
Historiography, p. 195; Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamil-
ton and the Constitution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, Inc., l96h), p. 228.

99Samuels, Henry Adams, The Middle Years, p. h02.

 

113

at a dinner in New York. Someone expressed a democratic
sentiment which aroused Hamilton to reply sharply. He sup-
posedly struck his hand on the table and said, "Your people,

,100

sir--your people is a great beast.’ Whether Adams inclu-

ded the anecdote in his History as fact or symbol, it soon

became associated in the popular mind with Hamilton.lOl

His reputation has fared ill with such burdens.102
The Adamses' interpretation of Hamilton has something
of the character of a literary vendetta. Nonetheless, they
have raised some of the most difficult questions with which
the students of Hamilton and the Early National period have
had to cope. Everyone, including the Adamses, could admit
that Hamilton was a very able financier, administrator,
general, statesman, etc.; but was he a moral man? Until
his character, and his motivations and actions stemming from
that character, are conclusively understood, Hamilton's

place among the Founding Fathers must remain a controver-

sial issue among historians.

 

100Henry Adams, Histor , Vol. I, p. 85-

101Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the
Constitution, p. 162.

 

102Ibid., pp. 4, 162, and 226-236.

CHAPTER V

HENRY CABOT LODGE--A

FEDERALIST INTERPRETATION

Hamilton needed a masterful biographer who could
explain to democratic America his aristocratic concepts of
government and society and his concept of the relationship
between an energetic federal government and the founding of
the nation. He had nearly the right biographer in the per-
son of Henry Cabot Lodge, whose Alexander Hamilton was both
sympathetic to the subject and well-received by the reading
public. Paradoxically, Lodge's ability to present the Ham-
iltonian point of View was at once the strength and defect
of the biography.

It is implied that Lodge was too partial in his pre-
sentation of Hamilton, that his biography was thereby dis-
torted and, thus, poor history. There is truth in that
statement, but it can be qualified to a certain extent by
saying that the value of Lodge's Hamilton lies in its thor-
oughly Hamiltonian character. Lodge was candid in expres-
sing his admiration of Federalist and Hamiltonian principles
and policies. His point of view was unencumbered by any

sentimental attachments to democracy, a loyalty which makes

11h

115

one's appreciation of Hamilton a rather difficult, if not
impossible, task. More than the majority of historians who
have dealt with this period, Lodge was attuned to the Feder-
alist side of the political and intellectual milieu of the
latter eighteenth-century. For Lodge, there was no need
to explain Hamilton's deviations from democratic theory or
practice.
I

Lodge's understanding of Federalism was, figuratively
speaking, bred into him by ancestry and environment. His
paternal relatives were successful Boston merchants and
shippers, who moved among Massachusetts' wealthy circles.
On the maternal side, he was linked to the former Federalist
Senator from Massachusetts and the friend and confident of
Washington and Hamilton, George Cabot. Throughout his life,
Lodge lived and moved among the wealthy and intellectual
society of Beacon Hill and Back Bay. His recent biographer
succinctly described the influential and intelligent class
from which Lodge sprang: "From their ranks," he wrote, "in
numbers far out of proportion to their relatively small popu-
lation, had come leaders in every branch of American life."1
In the sense that Lodge emerged from a circle of affluent,
intellectual, and able people, it is proper to label his

background aristocratic.

 

1John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge, A Biography
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953): pp. lh-l5; hereafter
cited as Garraty, Lodge.

116

To say that his background was Federalist through
and through is doubtlessly an exaggeration. But surely
there is an element of truth in the statement of another
of Lodge's biographers that the sons and grandsons of Massa-
chusetts' Federalists would never let the Federalist creed
die.2 In Lodge's case, his historical works are proof of
his efforts to keep the memory of Federalism alive.

Indeed his background and social environment were
influences which should account in part for his partiality
to Federalism. But he also had considerable respect for his
ancestors which, according to one historian, is an "excel-
lent barometer of conservatism."3 Lodge readily acknowl-
edged lflue influence of his family and the past in shaping
his views; "...my own family," he said, "were friends and
followers in successive generations of Hamilton and Webster
and Sumner. I was brought up in the doctrines and beliefs
of the great Federalist, the great Whig, and the Great Repub-

lican."LL Men such as these formed an aristocracy of leaders,

 

2Karl Schriftgiesser, The Gentleman from Massachu-
setts: Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston: Little, Brown and Com—
pany, l9hh), p. 11; hereafter cited as Schriftgiesser, Lodge.

 

3Garraty, Lod e, p. 59; see also Schriftgiesser,
Lod e, p. h; and 1chard E. Welch, Jr., "Opponents and Col-
Ieagues: George Frisbie Hoar and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1898-
l90h," New England Quarterly, XXXIX (1966), p. 183.

 

“Henry Cabot Lodge, The Democracy of the Constitu-
tion and Other Addresses and Essays (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1915): p. 160; hereafter cited as Lodge,
Democracy of the Constitution.

 

117

for whom Lodge's historical works manifested considerable

respect.S

Lodge's concern with political power and statesman-
ship was reflected in both his life as a powerful Senator
from Massachusetts and his historical works. The major his-
tories that he wrote in the nineteenth-century were politi-
cal biographies of the Early National leaders, George Cabot,
Hamilton, Washington, and Webster. (His effort in the 1870's
to revive the reputation of George Cabot aroused his schol-
arly' interest in Hamilton.)6 His approach to Hamilton in
the biography revealed a rather unqualified tendency to
treat events and achievements as the consequence of the
actions of a few great men; for example, he could write that
Washington and Hamilton created the American nation. But

more explicit are his remarks that:

...it is safe to say that it is to Washington aided
first by Hamilton and then by Madison, that we owe

the development of public opinion and the foundation

of the party which devised and carried the Constitu-
tion. Events of course worked with them, but they

used events, and did not suffer the golden opportunigies,
which without them would have been lost, to slip by.

5See Henry Cabot Lodge, A Short History of the English
,Qplonies in America (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1881),
Pp.’EE2-hh3, hereafter cited as Lodge, A Short History; and
Lodge, Life and Letters of George Cabot (Boston: Little,
.Brown and Company, 1878), p. 577, hereafter cited as Lodge,
.Eporge Cabot. '

6Garraty, Lodge, p. 58.

7Henry Cabot Lodge, George Washington (Boston and
lNew York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1898), Vol. II,
SP. 29; hereafter cited as Lodge, Washington.

118

Whether Lodge was projecting his self-image as a
potential statesman into the historical record, or his study
of the Federalist imbued him with a concept of elitest lead-
ership is a moot question. Probably Lodge was affected by
the interactions of his own ambitions, his background, and
his study of the past. In any case, Lodge had lofty notions
about the destiny of the United States and gave the impres-
sion that he envisioned himself in the role of a great na-
tional leader, perhaps on the order of a Hamilton.8

There are other examples of interesting parallels
between Lodge's career and his historical writings. Lodge
claimed that his favorable attitudes toward protectionism
and bimetallism were the result of his study of Hamilton.9
According to his biographer, Lodge "set an exacting standard
of intelligence and responsibility in his public utterances.
Nearly all his speeches were logical arguments sticking
closely to the points at issue, and free of oratorical bom-
bast, appeals to prejudice, and personalities."10 Lodge's

'biography of Hamilton is fulsome with praise of Hamilton for

just these qualities of mind and presentation.11 This

 

8Lodge, A Short History, p. 519; Garraty, Lodge, p.
IU16; Schriftgiesser, Lod e, p. 122; Welch, New England
Quarterly, XXXIX (196 ,‘p. 192.

 

9Garraty, Lodge, pp. 111-113.
10Ibid., p. 125.

11Henry Cabot Lodge, Alexander Hamilton (13th ed.;
Ikpston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1886), pp. 6, 7,
axni 2h-25; hereafter cited as Lodge, Hamilton.

119

suggests that Lodge did perhaps identify with Hamilton,
the independent, resourceful, and masterful leader.
Other parallels can be pointed out. Lodge was via

12 as both his career in

tallyiinterested in foreign affairs,
Congress and his histories would indicate. His interest in
the Navy can be traced through his biography of George Cabot,
his marriage to a Navy "Brat," his friendship with Captain
Mahan and the "Big Navy" advocates.l3 His nationalism is
evident throughout his writings, and shows itself to have
been a fundamental point in his concept of American foreign
policy. The similarities between what Lodge wrote about
Hamilton and the Federalists and his own career as a states-
man are remarkable. His histories are like a preview, or
portent, of his own future policies.

To describe Lodge as a Federalist is also to say that
he was a conservative. His recent biographer has described
his attitude as that of "intelligent conservatism," a phrase
which describes Hamilton as well.lLL Much evidence can be
adduced to reveal Lodge's political conservatism, as for
example his opposition to certain progressive reforms and

his close association with Republican party regulars through-

out most of his Congressional career. Some might argue that

 

12Schriftgiesser, Lodge, p. 15h.
13Ibid., pp. 110-llh.

l“Garraty, Lodge, p. 225.

120

his opposition to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations
was not only conservatism, but reaction.

For purposes of understanding his interpretation of
Hamilton, however, nothing is so useful to know as his atti-
tude about the nature of progress. It reveals the influence
upon him of the once popular race and "germ" theories; but
more importantly it reveals the essentially conservative
character of his thought. Lodge was not only respectful of
his ancestors, but also of their achievements. "We, like
our contemporaries everywhere," he wrote, "are heirs of the
ages, and we must study the past, and learn from it, and
advance from what has been already tried and found good."15
Though the remark has the tone of universality about it,
Lodge had in mind the particular accomplishments of the
English race as constituting the meaningful past. He spoke
of their "marvelous political and material success," of
their unique display of extraordinary political talent,
and attributed it all to their "slow mind and ingrained

conservatism."16 Conservatism was their one signal virtue,

 

lSHenry Cabot Lodge, Studies in History (Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 188M), p. 36h.

16Ibid., p. 333; Lodge, "Limited Sovereignty in the
United States," Atlantic Monthly, XLIII (1879), p. 187.
In Lodge, George Cabot, p.7hlfi, the theme is repeated:
"We of the English race--whose creed is that governments
and great political systems grow and develop slowly, are
the results of climate, soil, race, tradition, and the
exigencies of time and place, who wholly disavow the theory
that perfect governments spring in a night from the heated
brains of Spaniards and Frenchmen--can best appreciate the
task with which our ancestors grappled."

121

and it explained their distaste for speculative, theoreti-
cal political systems which had no foundation in the experi-
ence or history of their people.17

Lodge's generalizations about the English race were
not as carefully qualified by him as they should have been.
The majority of Americans in 1787, being of English and
Scotch descent, were, he wrote, "deeply imbued with all
those principles of law which were the bulwarks of English
liberty."18 When their chosen delegates met at Philadel-
phia to draw up the Constitution, they devised a Constitu-
tion, according to Lodge, especially designed to protect
the rights of minorities and individuals.19 The Anglo-
Saxons had always sought to protect the individual by limit-
ing the sovereign power, whether that power resided in a
monarch, an aristocracy, or the people.20 Yet in Lodge's
account of the events of the post-Revolutionary years, it
was a majority of these descendants of Englishmen who rushed
headlong toward a democratic system. At this point it be-
comes clear that the admirable traits of the English race

were the particular possession of those men who became the

 

17Lodge, A Short History, p. 519.

18Lodge, Democracy of the Constitution, p. 51.

 

19Ibid., p. 57; Lodge, Atlantic Monthly, XLIII
(1879): P- 192-

20Lodge, Atlantic Monthly, XLIII (1879), p. 187.

 

122

Federalists.21 In the 1780's and 1790's the compelling
necessity before the country--if it was to be a nation--
was to impose restraints upon democracy, and the Federal-
ists nun; that challenge. Their great leader was Alexan-
der Hamilton.22

Writing a biography of Hamilton was probably a less
arduous task for Lodge than for many other writers, consid-
ering his disposition toward Federalism and his attitude
about research. When asked by a reporter about his method
of writing history, he replied that his method was to "go
to the original sources of information...get thoroughly
saturated with the subject, and then sit down and write."23
His remarks seem especially acceptable if the emphasis is
placed on saturation rather than information. Lodge under-
stood Federalism, its leaders and purposes, quite well, but
he bothered little with the historical record to corrobo-
ratelfljsinterpretation of Hamilton. From an historian's
point of view, his failure to ground his interpretation in
carefully marshalled facts constitutes a serious defect of
the Hamilton biography.

The want of serious scholarship did not detract from

the biography's popularity. By 1907, twenty-five years

 

21Lodge, Studies in History, pp. lhh-th.

22Lodge, George Cabot, p. 303.

 

23Quoted in Garraty, Lodge, p. 58.

123

after it was first published, Lodge boasted that it had sold
more than 35,000 copies and "was still in demand."2H Its
success would have been proof enough to Lodge that the book's
deficiencies were unimportant. He was hardly attracted by
the scientific historians quest for facts, because, as he
said, "men will...fall asleep over the reasoned catalogue."2S
By his standards, the biography of Hamilton should have been
written as good literature, and not as a scholarly mono-
graph.26 To his friend, Theodore Roosevelt, he remarked

that style "is after all the salt that keeps alive the savor

of the thoughts we would not willingly have die."27

11

Considering that Lodge not only wrote a biography of
Hamilton, but also edited Hamilton's papers in their first
major collection, it is evident that he did not intend the
memory of Federalism to languish. In many respects for him,
the papers of the Federalists constituted a secular bible,
of which the book of Hamilton was a major part. The Fed-
eralists, he said, "When they dealt with elemental ques-
tions and fundamental principles, the same yesterday, to-

day, and forever in human history, I follow them because

 

2H1bid., p. 56.

25Henry Cabot Lodge, A Frontier Town and Other Essays
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906), p. 92.

 

26See Ibid., pp. 87-91, for Lodge's ideas of good
history.

27Quoted in Garraty, LEQEE: p. 57’

12h

they proved their wisdom by their success."28 Hamilton was
the incarnation of Federalism.29

Though Lodge's fulsome praise of the Federalists
tends to lessen one's appreciation of him as an historian,
he nonetheless had a very clear idea of what the Federalists
were about. If one can read Lodge with a degree of toler-
ance, that is to say without a Jeffersonian animus, his
argument that the Federalists were "the National and Ameri-
can party, from 1789 to 1801,"30 has many elements of
plausibility to it.

In his eyes the Revolutionary War had disturbed
established political and social patterns, which would have
to be replaced with patterns congenial to American needs
and tastes. Moreover, the attainment of independence cont]
fronted the American people with the momentous question of
what direction the future. Would they remain a confedera-
tion of "thirteen jarring states," or would they create a

nation? In View of the dismal record under the Confedera-

tion government,31 the choice for nationhood was inevitable,

 

28Lodge, Democracy of the Constitution, p. 86.
29Lodge, Hamilton, p. 19h.

3OLodge, Washington, Vol. II, p. 273; Lodge, Histori-
cal and Political Essays (Boston and New York: Houghton,
Mifflin and Company, 1892), pp. 62-63.

 

31In George Cabot, p. h15, Lodge described the Con-
federation period as a time when "Independence became tur-
bulence; liberty, license; and freedom, anarchy." In
Hamilton, p. 39, Lodge wrote that finance was the rock
upon which the Confederation floundered.

 

125

that is, if the American people were to enjoy security,
peace, and prosperity. Speaking to this point, Lodge said,
"The very existence of the colonies as a respectable state
demanded union, and brought about the adoption of the Con-
stitution. With this beginning, a national sentiment had
to be created, and a nation built up."32

In face of bitter opposition,33 in a country domina-
ted by the feeling of separatism,3u a minority of Americans,
"led by the greatest men in American history,"35 set about
the task of contriving a constitution and devising a more
perfect union. These Federalists, who strived for the
noblest and best ends ever sought by a party or statesmen,
had a threefold object: 1) To build up a nation and national
sentiment; 2) to create a strong government; and 3) to devise
policies for that government.36 Together these ends did
promote the founding of the nation, and to a very large
extent they were the work of Hamilton's genius.37

Hamilton's greatness derived not only from his com-

manding position within the brilliant Federalist party, but

 

32Lodge, A Short Histopy, p. 520.
33Lodge, Georgp Cabot, p. 30.
3LLLodge, A Short History, p. 520.
35Lodge, George Cabot, p. 26h.
36_I_pi_d., p. hlh.

37Lodge, Hamilton, p. 199.

126

also from his policies which gave life and form to the paper
system created in the Constitution.38 Lodge was particularly
impressed with the First Report on Public Credit and the
Report on Manufactures, judging them both to be among the
most important State papers ever written in the United
States.39 They engendered policies which strengthened
America materiallyj-I’O and improved the nation's standing
among the other states of the world.”1 Lodge summarized
the results of the reports thusly:

From these reports came the funding system, the reve-

nue system, the sinking fund, national banking, the

currency, and the first enunciation of the protective

policy. They carried with them the great doctrine of

the implied powers of the constitution, and opened up

the important question of internal improvements. So

far as public policy could do it, they laid the foundfié

tion of the material prosperity of the United States.
These reports alone showed Hamilton's genius for finance and,
what was probably even more important to Lodge, Hamilton's
concern for the well-being of the nation.

When the details of these brilliant reports are set

aside, the great national objects of the Federalists are

seen in bold relief. Though the reports aimed at introduc-

ing specific measures, Hamilton's major interest was the

 

38_I_pi_d_., pp. 13h-135; Lodge, @3133, Vol. II, p. 289.
39Lodge, Works, Vol. II, p. 289 and Vol. III, p. 198.
HOLodge, Hamilton, p. 109.

“11121131,,” p- 155; Lodge, Mg, Vol. II, p. 289.

H2Lodge, Hamilton, p. 115.

 

127

general need to establish a successful, strong, and ener-
getic government which could maintain the union of the
states and give the American people a national life.“3 The
American people had’committed themselves to an experiment
in nation-building, and Hamilton intended that that experi-
ment should have every opportunity to succeed. Material
development and prosperity along with federal strength were
the "pole-stars" of Hamilton's domestic policies. They
were objectives which Lodge saw as bold, masterly strokes
of statesmanship, thoroughly American and national in pur-
pose.
III

Fortunately for the country, the same spirit of
nationality permeated Federalist foreign policy. In the
1790's the majority of Americans remained subject to what
Lodge called colonial modes of thought.HH The Federalist
leaders, however, discerned the nation's true interests
aside from and in spite of the din and confusion of events
in Europe.

The colonists' close ties to Europe were formally
abrogated by the Treaty of Paris in 1783, but the ties were

severed only in the sense that the colonies now had political

 

"3lpgg,, pp. 91, 106, 115, and 121-122; see also

HHLodge, Studies in History, p. 333.

128

and economic freedom. In thought, the Americans still
responded as colonials, by which Lodge meant that they
"still felt that our fortunes were inextricably interwoven
with those of Europe."LIS Most influenced by European affairs
were the Francophile Jeffersonians, who first involved Amer-
ican politics in foreign events; but after 1800, and their
fall from power, the Federalists became Anglophiles.u6 The
Americans required twenty-five years, until the end of the
War of 1812, to liberate their politics from foreign influ-
ences.u7 Until 1800, however, the Federalist party, and”)
particularly Hamilton, had been national in outlook.”8 Dur-
ing this nationalist period, they alone pursued policies
which sought to eliminate the foreign influence in domestic
and foreign affairs.

When war broke out in 1793 between Republican France
and the European monarchies, the United States was threat-

ened by an unwanted entanglement in the hostilites. Hamil-

ton, undistracted by other considerations, defined American

 

LLSIbid., p. 337.

HéLodge, George Cabot, p. 62; Lodge, Studies in His-
tory, p. 3H1.

 

H7Lodge, Studies in Histopy, p. 3H3; Lodge, Wash-
ington, Vol. II, p. 37.

HBLodge, Studies in History, pp. 339 and 3h1.

129

interests as "continental supremacy" and "complete inde-
pendence in business, politics, and industry.""*9

These national interests were advanced when Washing-
ton, with the support of the Federalists, promulgated the
Proclamation of Neutrality. In Lodge's judgment, neutrality
was the "true foreign policy" of the United States.50 It
was "the central point of the whole policy of Washington
and Hamilton, and was one of the great landmarks established
by the Federalists for the guidance of the republic."51 In
effect, Washington's administration had struck a blow at the
colonial mode of thinking in the United States and also told
Europe that the United States intended to look after its
own interests apart from the balance of power or monarchial
issues. The government was committed to attending the needs
of the people and to mastering a continent.52 These objec-
tives were the cornerstone of Federalist policy, but the
majority of American people were slow to perceive the valid-
ity of the Federalist position.

For more than a quarter-century, foreign policy vacil-

lated as the people groped their way toward true independence

 

H9Ibid., p. 339.

SOLodge, Hamilton, p. 153; Lodge, Studies in His-
tory, p. 338.

51Lodge, Hamilton, p. 163.

 

52Lodge, Washington, Vol. II, pp. 1h7-1h8. On page 7
of this work, Lodge wrote about Washington that "No man of
that time, with the exception of Hamilton, ever grasped and
realized as he did the imperial future Wthh stretched before

the United States."

130

from Europe.53 The Jeffersonians' stubborn "Colonial"
attachment to France blinded them to the national inter-
ests. When they came to power after 1800, they abandoned
neutrality for a policy favoring France. With "marvelous
inconsistency," Lodge said, Jefferson wanted no connections \
with foreign powers, yet at the same time he sought "to aid
France and injure England to the utmost extent."ELL The
Jeffersonians had failed to realize that the Federalists,
before 1800, were not Anglophiles, and that they would main-
tain neutrality, with force if necessary, against either
nation that might infringe upon it.55

Moreover, the Jeffersonians failed to comprehend 2\\
that a strong navy was essential to maintain American neu- .
trality.56 When Jefferson inaugurated his policy of fru-
gality, the navy, as the pillar supporting strong neutrality,
was disastrously reduced to ineffectiveness. In due course,
Jefferson's policies "led to the wretched and degraded con-

dition of our country and our politics during the first

years of the..." nineteenth-century.57

 

53Ibid., p. lh8.
SHLodge, George Cabot, p. h60.

55Lodge, Hamilton, p. 163. Lodge is too generous
to Hamilton here; see Supra, pp. l3-1h.

 

56Lodge, George Cabot, pp. hl, 316-317, and h28.

57Ibid., p. 65.

131

In time, the American people found their way to the
definition of true national policy, which they announced in
the famous Monroe Doctrine. Lodge claimed that "long before
the nominal author had thought of it, Hamilton had formu-
lated the Monroe Doctrine."58 This was Lodge's way of say-
ing that Hamilton had left his mark upon the future course

of American foreign policy.59

IV

Setting forth Lodge's interpretation of Hamilton's
nationalistic policies deals with but one aspect of the
biography. Lodge was fully aware that Hamilton and his
policies were controversial in the 1790's and after. In
his description of the major outlines of Hamilton's states-
manship, Lodge interspersed vindications of the policies
'which Hamilton pursued.

Whether or not one is willing to accept Lodge's
vindications depends upon one's own interpretation of the
Revolutionary and Confederation periods, and one's judgment
about the extent to which the United States was obliged to
aid and support France in her war with the monarchies. If
one takes a Jeffersonian tack, then Lodge's interpretation

will prove unacceptable.

 

58Lodge, Studies in History, p. 176.

59Lodge, Hamilton, p. 163.

 

132

To Lodge, the effect of the Revolutionary War was
quite clear. It had nearly destroyed one of the "balance-
wheels of society," the wealthy and conservative class. As
a consequence of the imbalance, "the new democracy was mov-
ing along its destined path, but it had no checks...."60
There existed an historic necessity during the Confedera-
tion period for a conservative class to advance and assume
file responsibility of preserving the gains of independence.61

The role of conservators was assumed, of course, by
the men who became the Federalists. Following Hamilton's
leadership, these able men sought to establish an effective
national government through a constitution. They wanted to
build a nation, strong and secure, which was dedicated to
preserving individual liberty and property.

Hamilton had little to do with the actual writing of
the Constitution, but his services in bringing the Conven-
tion together at Philadelphia were commendable. Commend-
able, too, were his efforts in behalf of the adoption of the
Constitution in the New York state ratifying convention.

The Federalist Papers, the product of Hamilton's national-

istic mind, were a masterpiece of American political

 

éoLodge, Studies in History, pp. lhh-1h5.

61Lodge described the Articles of Confederation as
being wrong in conception and principle and thus doomed to
failure. Frontier Town, p. 155.

133

literature.62 Referring to Hamilton's "great" speech of
June 18, 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, a speech
which had been criticized as a plea for monarchial forms
of government, Lodge remarked that Hamilton's proposals
differed in only two aspects from the plan which was fi-
nally adopted.63

Evidently Lodge stressed Hamilton's contributions
to the making of the Constitution because of Hamilton's
well-known remark to Governeur Morris that the Constitution
was a frail and worthless fabric. Addressing himself to
the known fact that Hamilton was not satisfied with the
Constitution, Lodge said that had Hamilton been anything
other than a patriotic man, he would have reviled the docu-
ment. But Hamilton was a patriot and a man of practical
mind, who realized that the Constitution was the best in-
strument obtainable and that it must be upheld.6H Else-
where Lodge pointed out that the Massachusetts Federalists,
King, Ames, Parsons, Cabot, and others, held views similar
to those of Hamilton about the deficiencies of the Constitu-

tion. Moreover, they believed that if it failed of adoption,

 

62Lodge, Studies in History, p. 3hh; Hamilton, p. 70;
and Democracy oflthe Constitution, pp. hl-h2.

 

63Lodge, Studies in History, p. lh2. Lodge wrote
here that Hamilton's proposals for "a Senate and President
during good behavior, and the appointment of state gover-
nors by the central government" were not incorporated into

the finished document.

éuLodge, Hamilton, p. 6h; see footnote 7, supra,
p. 117.

 

1M

the country would face disintegration and ruin.65 It was
an act of statesmanship by Hamilton to accept the document
as it was and to utilize the possibilities inherent in it.66
By exercising the powers granted in the Constitution,
as he did in his financial policy, Hamilton revealed the
hidden powers in its "dry clauses, and gave vitality to
the lifeless instrument. He drew out the resources of the
country, ...he gave courage to the people, he laid the
foundations of national government...."67
According to Jeffersonian standards, Hamilton's ./\
policies were too energetic, too centralizing, and there-
fore too dangerous to American freedom. Lodge could not

admit the validity of these charges.68

For he, like Hamil-
ton, believed that the problem confronting the nation in the
1780's and 1790's was too much democracy, a condition pro-
moting disunity, disorder, and national weakness. Like Ham-
ilton, he surely believed that the country needed a "more
conservative establishment" to check the democratic tenden-

cies of the people.69 When Lodge discussed Hamilton's polit-

ical beliefs he could do so with enthusiasm and accord.

 

65Lodge, George Cabot, p. 29.

 

66Lodge, Hamilton, pp. oh and 17h.
671bid., p. 135.
68Lodge, George Cabot, p. 59.

69Ibid., p. 25.

135

It was true, as many of Hamilton's critics alleged,
that he had spoken at the Constitutional Convention in
favor of the English form of government. Lodge asserted,
however, that all the plans of government brought forth at
Philadelphia were similarly based upon the English system,
including the plan that became the Constitution. To say in
1787 that the English system was the best model in existence,
as Hamilton did, was merely to express a truism.7O Hamil-
ton was not unique in his attachment to the English model.

Moreover, to say that Hamilton was the head of a
monarchical faction, as Jefferson claimed, was chimerical.71
To be sure, Hamilton was a monarchist in theory; but in
practice, he was a republican.72 He believed that a repub-
lic was the only form of government acceptable to the Ameri-
can people.73 Lodge admitted that Hamilton wanted a repub-
lic that was aristocratic, rather than democratic, in char-
acter.7LL But Hamilton was no lone wolf, "crying in the

wilderness," for many men wanted the same thing.75 Lodge

 

7OLodge, Hamilton, p. 60.

 

71Lodge, George Cabot, p. 59.
72Lodge, Studies in Histopy, p. 175.
73Ibid.

7HLodge, Hamilton, p. 61; on page 282, Lodge elabor-
ated the features of Hamilton's preferred form of republic;
"He believed in class influence and representation, in a
strong government, and in what, for a want of a better
phrase, may be called an aristocratic republic."

75Ibid., p. 130.

136

disarmed this admission of Hamilton's aristocratic pref—
erence tqr saying that the great Federalist's main concern,
however, was less with the form of government and more with
the necessity that it should be strong and provide order.76
"That he ever," Lodge wrote, "seriously believed it desir-
able or possible to establish a monarchy, and one 'bottomed
on corruption,‘ in the United States, it is preposterous to
suppose."77

V

The charge that Hamilton was a monarchist easily lent
itself to implicating him in a foreign policy which aimed to
ally the United States with England. It was not only the
Jeffersonians who accused him of Anglophilia, but the Adams
wing of the Federalist party as well. Lodge believed the
charges to be "absurd" and "baseless."

With heavy-handed irony, Lodge wrote that the very
men who called the great Federalist, "British Hamilton,"
were the men most anxious to ally the country with France.78
He was referring to the Jeffersonians, who he said were mis-

guided by "colonial ignorance which could not understand

the real purpose of neutrality."79 They could not understand

 

76Lodge, Hamilton, p. 90 and Studies in History,
P- 173-

77Lodge, Studies in History, p. 173.

 

781bid., p. 339.

79Ibid., p. 3&0-

137

that Hamilton meant to pursue a policy of neutrality toward
all nations.80 They inculpated Hamilton for "simply and
stupidly endeavoring to force us toward England as against
France."81
Actually Hamilton's purposes during the eventful
decade of the 1790's were strictly national. His effort
to rid the country of the French treaties was quite consist-
ent with those purposes. The French treaties were a relic
of "colonialism" (as Lodge used the word) which ought to be
abrogated. By freeing the country from those "entangling
bonds"with France, Hamilton sought to provide the country
with a position in foreign affairs that was "wholly free
and thoroughly national...."82 Hamilton's support of the
unpopular Jay's Treaty was based upon the practical consid-
eration that the choice was one between war with England
and subsequent destruction of the union or acceptance of a
treaty with obvious defects which might be negotiated
later.83
The labyrinth of events during the administration of
John Adams, when relations with France verged on war, proved

a test of Lodge as a pro-Hamilton historian. Probably no

 

801bid., p. 176.

alléiés: Po 3M0; see supra, pp. l3-lh and infra,
p0 139-lu00

82Lodge, Hamilton, p. 166.

83Ibid-, p. 180; Lodge, George Cabot, p. 71-

138

historian found his way through this maze to vindicate Ham-
ilton so well as did Lodge. This should not imply, however,
that Lodge was uncritical, even though his interpretation
was Federalist 2x Ragga.

Other indictments of Hamilton came from the Adamses,
who believed that Hamilton was motivated by ambition and a
desire for glory and power and that his ambition induced
him to favor a pro-British and hostile policy toward France.
Hamilton's opposition to John Adams, his efforts in his own
behalf to obtain a command in the provisional army, his
interest in Miranda and the Latin American adventure, and
his part in bringing ruin to the Federalist party were
offered by them as evidence of his self-seeking and ambi-
tious policies. The general substance of their charges was
parried by Lodge, and done so in a reasonable manner.

As to Hamilton's efforts to oppose John Adams' can-
didacy for the Presidency, Lodge contended that in 1796,
Hamilton was right to insist that all of the electoral votes
the Federalists could muster should be cast alike for Adams
and Pinckney. Had his demands been met, Jefferson would
not have been elected Vice-President. Hamilton erred, how-
ever, when he let it be known that he would be as pleased
with Pinckney's election to the Presidency as with Adams';
as an important party leader, Hamilton should have supported

Adams, the party choice.8u Hamilton erred again in 1800

 

8“Lodge, Hamilton, p. 197.

 

139

when he wrote his pamphlet defaming the character of Presi-

dent Adams, who was up for re-election. His act was "

a
piece of passionate folly" which unnecessarily created
divisions within the party on the eve of an election. "it:
was," Lodge wrote, "the work of a man crazed with passion,
and bent on revenge."85 Lodge, who placed a priority on
party loyalty 86 must have viewed Hamilton's behavior in
this instance with chagrin, although he did not blame Ham-
ilton solely for the disruption of the Federalist party.

In Hamilton's unique and influential relationship
with members of Adams' cabinet, Lodge saw no evidence of bad
faith to the President or disservice to the nation. Both
Adams and Hamilton were impolitic in their behavior with one
another because they avoided open and frank consultation.

On the other hand, that the secretaries sought Hamilton's
advice and acted upon it, was "their affair, not his."87

Of more interest than Hamilton's opposition to Adams
was his foreign policy after 1797. Here lay much of the
grist for the Jefferson and Adams mills.

Hamilton was frank about his dislike of the princi-

ples and the course of the French Revolution. By tempera-

ment a conservative, Hamilton could only respond to it in a

 

851bid., p. 233.
86Schriftgiesser, Lodge, p. 95.

87Lodge, Hamilton, p. 23H.

 

luO

way consistent with his nature. He believed that the French
were waging war on everything he held dear, which Lodge de-
scribed as "constitutional liberty, law, order, and society."88
Despite his personal opposition to French doctrines, he

believed that the United States should avoid war with France

if possible and that England and France should be treated

 

alike insofar as was possible.89 Lodge made the point clear- F1
ly that even though Hamilton felt strongly about France and

the Revolution, he was nonetheless guided by the interests .4
of the United States in formulating his policy. '

After Adams released the XYZ dispatches in 1798, and
the temper of the nation became hostile to France, the Fed-
eralist leaders advocated military preparations in the
expectation of war. One of their measures called for the
creation of a provisional army, which they anticipated would
be commanded by Washington assisted by Hamilton. The in-
trigue which appeared to surround Hamilton's appointment to
a command position and which included bringing Adams to
acquiesce in Hamilton's appointment, seemed invidious.
Hamilton, in the eyes of his critics, appeared in this in-
stance as something like a war lord.

Lodge contended that "whatever his talents for war

may have been,...[Hamilton's] ruling passion was that of a

‘

881bid., p. 202.

89Ibid.

1A1

statesman...."90 Believing this, Lodge could place a most
friendly interpretation on Hamilton's connection with Mi-
randa and the Latin American adventure.

Interest in control of adjacent Spanish Terrirory
and eviction of the Spanish from their New World posses-
sions was a matter of long-standing concern in Hamilton's
mind. It was, Lodge said, "part of that conception of na-
tionality and of national greatness which was the predomi-

"91 Hamilton

natingixfifluence in Hamilton's public career.
realized that should war come, actual contact with the French
forces was unlikely. Under these circumstances, he reasoned
that the United States could strike France only by striking
her ally, Spain. Hamilton, therefore, made plans to seize
Florida and the Louisiana territory from Spain, and thereby
secure control of the Mississippi Valley.92 That Hamilton's
interest in the Mississippi Valley was a valid national
objective was vindicated when Jefferson acquired the Lou-
isiana Territory in 1803.93

It was natural for a man of Hamilton's imperial views
to be interested in Miranda's scheme, if for no other reason

than to be abreast of matters which were of vital interest

to the United States.9u Hamilton had no plans for an

 

902L121... pp. 26 and 138-139.
gllhia-. p» 212. gelbid.

93lhiiy, p- 213. 9thid., p. 218.

lu2

alliance with England except in the event of war with France,
in which case an alliance would serve American interests
very well.95 Even though dreams of glory may have been
before his mind, his motivations were based on nothing but
what would redound to the advantage of the United States.
"The theory that his mind teemed with visions of empire and
of military power in the Napoleonic fashion...." Lodge wrote,
"is due to the heated and hostile mind of Mr. [John]
Adams."96
In view of Lodge's close friendship with the Adams

family, his description of John Adams' treatment of Hamil-
ton was independent and rather severe. Much of Hamilton's
censure of Adams in the famous pamphlet, Lodge thought, was
indeed justified, although untimely.97 More interesting
were Lodge's sensitivities to Adams' slights of the great
Federalist. Lodge's remarks read like a portent of his own
sensitivities to the slights of Woodrow Wilson in 1918-
1919. Lodge wrote:

Hamilton was the most powerful leader of the Federal-

ists; Ina was the most conspicuous and brilliant states-

man in the country, and yet the President, the head of

the Federalist party, first undertook to ignore him,

then slighted his advice and derided him.... Decency,

prudence, and self-interest t8 take no higher motives,
dictated an opposite course.9

 

95Ibid., p. 218.
96Ibid., pp. 213-2lh and Studies in History, p. 177-

 

97Lodge, Hamilton, p. 233.

 

98Ibid., p. 231.

1&3

Lodge believed that Hamilton was reasonable and manageable.
"All that was required," he wrote, "was tact, full and
frank consultation, and the deference to which [Hamilton's]
opinions were on every ground entitled."99

Lodge could speak against Adams' ability to lead the
party and retain harmony, but he could not speak against
Adams' policy of peace with France.100 That policy was in
keeping with the true national guidelines laid down during .
Washington's administrations. He could not condone in all
respects the actions of the Federalist party and of Hamilton
after 1798. He was forced to offer palliations in their
behalf.

Through nothing but ability, Lodge believed, the
Federalists as a minority had been able to carry their na-
tionalistic measures in Congress. Their electoral success
in 1798 was heady recognition. While a minority, they had
been prudent and disciplined.. Success now made them "more

"101 They jammed through Con-

masterful and overbearing.
gress a number of military bills in the summer of 1798, and
the Alien and Sedition Laws. These latter bills as first

drafted were so severe that Hamilton urged modification.102
When modified, as they had been by the time of their enact-

ment, Hamilton gave them his support. Lodge made it clear

 

gglpid., p. ZOO. lOOLodge, George Cabot, p. 196.

102

 

lolLodge, Hamilton, p. 222. Ibid., pp; 222-223-

lLLLL

that Hamilton's support of them was not unique or sinister.
Everyone connected with them--Federalist Congressmen and
Senators, the President, the state leaders, and most of the
Federalist party of the North--supported them also.103
The "one dark blot" in Hamilton's career occurred
during the desperate events of 1800. After the election
of 1800 in New York, when Burr obtained the votes for the
Democrats, Hamilton proposed in vain to Governor John Jay
that the presidential electors be chosen by the districts
instead of by the incoming Democratic legislature. Lodge
called it an attempt at fraud for which Hamilton was culpa-
ble. Lodge palliated Hamilton's conduct by saying that it
was the consequence of an exaggerated reaction to the French
Revolution: Hamilton believed that the party of Jefferson
existed for the purpose of destroying the federal govern-

ment of the United States.lOLL

This particular explanation, that Hamilton expected
a civil war, Lodge used to explain the great Federalist's
behavior until his death in lBOu. As the nation settled
down to the presidential administration of the democrats,
Hamilton became depressed and discouraged by public affairs.

By 1802, he had become an alarmist.105 He expected that at

 

lO3Ibid., p. 223.
lOuIbid., pp. 227—228.

lOSIbidO: pp. 26h-265 EDd 267.

1&5

any moment the French principles in the hands of their
American advocates would force a show-down with the princi-
ples of law and order, and constitutional liberty. The
impending "crisis" would perhaps impel the good citizens
of America to call him forth as a "saviour of society."106
After 1800, Hamilton's attitudes, actions, and even his
death, were the result of his exaggerated reaction to what
Lodge said was the impossible triumph of French principles.107
The collapse of the Federalist party paralleled the
downfall of Hamilton in one respect. If any one word de-
scribed the problem of Hamilton or the Federalists, it was
excess. The Federalists, after 1798, had too many leaders

who were too "unbending and dogmatic.n108

Their "strong
and uncurbed wills," their errors and passions brought their
premature downfall.109 Lodge succinctly described the inevi-
table course of events:

Ultimately Jeffersonianism must have prevailed, but

at the time of its actual triumph it came too soon,

and Jefferson's early victory was secured solely by

the errors of his opponents. 10

VI

Lodge made other observations about Hamilton which

fell outside the main themes as they were developed in the

 

106Ibid., p. 270. 107IQiQ-. pp. 270-271.
108Lodge, George Cabot, pp. 193-19u-
109Ibid., p. 26h.

110Lodge, Studies in History, p. 167.

1H6

preceding sections. Though they are fragments, they are
relevant and remarkable.

Throughout the biography, Lodge showed respect for
Hamilton's intellect and courage. He admitted that Hamil-
ton sometimes acted the part of an American prime minister;
but any consideration of the responsibilities of Congress
heaped upon him, as Secretary of the Treasury, would help

111 The tendency to act the prime

explain the tendency.
minister was also natural to Hamilton's temperament. He
was not a good manager of men and frequently became imperi-
ous and impatient with them. In respect to the ability to
manage and manipulate men successfully,Hamilton had to bow
to Jefferson as the superior party manager.112

Hamilton's strengths and defects sprang from his
passions.113 He was a passionate nationalist, but his in-
tense feeling obscured his understanding of the strong tra-
dition of state loyalty among the American people. His pas-
sion against democracy enhanced his leadership among the
Federalist party leaders, but made him an ineffective leader
of the people. His passions led him to write the untimely
pamphlet attacking Adams' character, to ask Governor Jay to

participate in an election fraud, and to form his alliance

 

111Lodge, Hamilton, p. 158.

 

112Ibid., pp. 82 and 278; see also Garraty, Lodge,
p- 59-

113Lodge, Hamilton, p. 275 and also p. l2u.

 

1h?

of passion with Mrs. Reynolds. Lodge said that Hamilton's
"moral strength was not always strong enough to rise over
and restrain the passions...."llu Yet, the strength of his
passions was the source of his courage, his convictions,
and his statesmanship, and his service to the country.

As one would expect of Lodge when comparing Hamilton
to Jefferson, Hamilton appeared much the better. "Hamil-
ton," Lodge wrote, "was consistent, strong, masculine, and
logical. Jefferson was inconsistent, supple, feminine, and
illogical to the last degree."115 Nevertheless, Lodge con-
ceded that eventually Jefferson and the principles of democ-
racy must triumph in the United States. Hamilton's work

was done by 1800, and he had done it well.116

VII
It was suggested before that the distinctive feature
of Lodge's Alexander Hamilton was its thorough-going Feder-
alism. For nearly three-hundred pages, Lodge fulsomely
praised Hamilton and the Federalists. No one but an author
thoroughly convinced of the rectitude of his subject could
do it without weakness or qualifications undermining his

line of interpretation.

 

ll"Lodge, Studies in History, p. 180; this is a
remark which perhaps reflects the influence of the Adamses.

 

115Ibid., p. 1H8.

116Lodge, Hamilton, p. 280.

 

1&8

This is not to say that Lodge was necessarily cor-
rect in his interpretation. He was obviously too Feder-
alist in his views to properly understand and appreciate
Jefferson's role during the Early National period. More-
over, Lodge showed little indication of having studied the
period independently of the views and roles of the Feder-
alist party. He could not present, what historians profess
to admire, a balanced-view of the period.

However, it is tempting to conclude that a balanced-
view of Hamilton's part in the history of the period would
be poor history, if not impossible history to write. Prob-
ably" consensus among historians about the conflict between
Hamilton and Jefferson is unobtainable. Probably no syn-
thesis of the period can be produced to lead to the balanced-
view. Probably each student of the period must be a parti-
san of one or the other protagonists. The so-called objec-
tive facts of the period possess little meaning of relevancy
until the student evaluates them, and puts them in a con-
text, as did Hamilton and Jefferson. What historian can
state with objectivity the meaning of those facts, whose
interpretation of them, Hamilton's or Jefferson's, is right
sand whose is wrong?

Still, for the historian who likes a show Of imparti-
ality in the author or who has a predilection for Jefferson's
point of view, Lodge's Hamilton would be unsatisfactory.

Assuming that the majority of American historians are

149

probably Jeffersonian in view, the conclusion follows that
Lodge's biography can not be thought a definitive work on
'Hamilton. In this sense, Lodge was not the masterful biog-
rapher which Hamilton's historical reputation so badly

needed.

CHAPTER VI

WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER--A

MATERIALISTIC INTERPRETATION

Strongly influenced by the work of Hildreth and
Lodge on Hamilton and the Early National period, William
Graham Sumner wrote a biography of Alexander Hamilton. At
the time he wrote, near the end of the nineteenth-century,
Darwinian-Spencerian evolutionism had become a popular and
compelling mode of thought in American intellectual and
business circles. The new doctrine, in combination with
his conservative temperament, caused him to write a biog-
raphy that praised and criticized Hamilton. Like Hildreth's
before him, Sumner's work presented a paradox for the inter-
ested student to resolve.

Like chemical elements, Sumner, Darwinism, and Spen-
cerism joined together to form a compound of social thought
that at once flowed out of American economic conditions and
was expressive of American aspirations and values. His-
torians -for example, Henry Steele Commager, Richard Hof-
stadter, Stow Persons, and Robert Green McCloskey--have
demonstrated that Social Darwinism, as advocated by Sumner,

was a grand attempt to provide intellectual and moral

150

151

justifications for the materialistic sacred cows of American
capitalism.

Sumner wrote a large number of political-economic
tracts that revealed clearly enough the themes and char-
acter of his social thought. Essays such as "The Absurd
Effort to Make the World Over," "The Challenge of Facts,"
and What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, as well as many
others, were not abstract explorations into the nature of
man's social existence, but were polemics in behalf of the
status quo. Historians searched neither far nor deep to
learn that Sumner was a cautious, conservative advocate of
profit, capital, and competition, and that he opposed reform
of the economy, especially by state intervention.

Since any two of his essays, or a dozen of them,
tended to reproduce the same fundamental themes, historians
generally have felt little compulsion to find how his prej-
udices were interwoven into the historical record. Fur-
thermore Sumner was more important to them as an historical
figure than as an historian.

Though little attention has been given to him as an
historian, Sumner wrote a number of histories. They dealt
with finance, money, and banking in the United States and

1

three statesmen: Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, and

 

1For an extensive bibliography of Sumner's works,
see Albert Galloway Keller, ed., The Forgotten Man and Other
Essa s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 19187, pp.IH99-
518; hereafter cited as Sumner, The Forgotten Man.

152

Robert Morris. These did not represent his most famous
works.

Sumner's main interests were current politics, eco-
nomics, and sociology, as demonstrated by the majority of

his essays and his most famous book, Folkways. Sumner con-

 

ceived of his efforts as the spade work for an eventual
opus, the science of society. He was empirical by tempera-
ment, suspicious of a_priori and speculative approaches to
the study of man in society. His understanding of the
evolutionary nature of man's social institutions combined
with his empiricism led him to view history as a vast res-
ervoir of material essential to the sociologist.2 Looking
back upon his student days at Oxford, he remembered coming
to an understanding "that social science must be an induc-
tion from history."3 His essays show that his approach to
social issues of his day were frequently historical in
character or grounded on historical facts.

His interest in history, particularly in economic
and financial subjects, made his choice of Alexander Hamil-
ton for a biography a natural one. Though Sumner's biogra-

pher said that the Alexander Hamilton had many defects of

 

2Albert Galloway Keller, Ed., The Challenge of Facts
and Other Essayg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 191HI,
p.Hll; hereafter cited as Sumner, The Challenge of Facts.

 

3Albert Galloway Keller and Maurice R. Davie, eds.,
.Essays of William Graham Sumner (New Haven: Yale Univer-
'§ity Press, 19lu), Vol. II, p. 8; hereafter cited as Sum-

ner, Essays.

153

style, which suggest that perhaps Sumner was writing for
the market rather than the critics, the book was judged in
the early 1920's by one historian, Samuel E. Morison, to
be "the best life of Hamilton that has ever been published
...."u At least in certain academic circles, Sumner's

Hamilton was an important work.

II

Sumner was very much a man of his day; perhaps not
a typical man, but a man whose achievements and success
represented the fulfillment of the kind of dreams a major-
ity of Americans held in the latter nineteenth-century.
From an obscure beginning as the son of an English immi-
grant worker, Sumner rose by hard work, determination, and
some good fortune to become a nationally known professor at
Yale. His life had many of the elements of an Horatio Alger
success story.

His ancestors on both sides were Englishmen. The
Sumners were either farmers or textile workers, who lived
in a small village situated near the Darwin River in Lanca-
shire. In 1836, Thomas Sumner, an ambitious young man
eager to better his lot in life, immigrated to Patterson,
New Jersey, where in 18HO, his son, William Graham, was

born. It is an interesting coincidence that Sumner's life

 

"Harris Elwood Starr, William Graham Sumner (New
'York: Henry Holt and Company, 19257, p. 307; hereafter
cited as Starr, Sumner.

15h

should be entwined with two place names that were so rele-
vant to his intellectual convictions.

Thomas Sumner evidently exerted considerable influ-
ence in the molding of his son's life—long convictions and
attitudes.5 It appears that the boy absorbed from the fa-
ther a system of values that emphasized hard work, thrift,
and self-denial. The father's struggle to make a living
apparently impressed the boy with inchoate ideas that life
was severe and niggard. His simple, honest, uncomplaining,
unaided effort to provide for his family furnished the boy,
in later life, with a model of the kind of qualities neces-
sary to a man just to survive. From this source it appears
that Sumner obtained the rudiments of his practical, utili-
tarian, materialistic philosophy.

Other influences had acted upon the young man's
mind. He reminisced that Harriet Martineau's "Illustra-
tions of Political Economy" had done much to shape his
"conceptions of capital, labor, money, and trade."6 He
meant that Martineau's works were one source of his laissez-

faire, hard-money, anti-union, and free trade convictions.

 

5Starr, Sumner, pp. 16-18; Stow Persons, ed.,
Social Darwinism, Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner
’CEnglewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963f, p. 1; Robert
Green McCloskey, American Conservatism in The Age of Enter-
prise,l865-19lO ("Harper Torchbook"; New York: Harper and
Row, 196E7, pp. 32-33; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism
in American Thought ("Beacon Book"; Boston: The Beacon
Press, Inc., 1955?, p. 52.

6Sumner, The Challenge of Facts, p. 5; Persons, p. l.

155

But it is also evident that these ideas were part of Thomas
Sumner's economic lexicon,7 and it would seem that Sumner's
reading at this stage of his life merely reinforced what he
had already learned from his unschooled father.

The home-learned lessons served young Sumner well.
His determination to learn, combined with his father's
financial sacrifice and his pastor's encouragement, enabled
him to attend Yale College, in preparation for the ministry,
and to graduate in 1863 with high honors. At Yale, he dis-
played a single-minded determination to learn, at the exclu-
sion of amusement and sociability. His friendship with a
fellow Yale student, William C. Whitney, proved a piece of
good luck. When Sumner decided to study theology abroad,
Whitney persuaded his brother, Henry C. Whitney, to lend
Sumner money to pay his expenses while he studied first at
Geneva, then G3ttingen, and finally Oxford. The Whitneys
also provided the money to buy him a substitute when he was
drafted to serve in the Union armies.

In 1867, the Yale College faculty elected Sumner to
serve as a tutor. When he joined the staff, he began his
long association with Yale which lasted until 1909. His
tenure there was interrupted only by a ministry in Episco-
pal Churches in New York and New Jersey from 1869 to 1872.

When he returned to Yale as Professor of Political and

 

7Starr, Sumner, pp. 17 and 22; Hofstadter, pp. 52-
53-

156

Social Science, the change represented a reconciliation
of his profession with his life-long interests in the secu-
lar world.

That professorship provided him with the time, the
resources, and the environment to study and write. Increas-
ingly through the years, his major concern became one of
developing a science of society.8

It had to be a science, rather than a philosophy, of
society because he believed that only science widened "our
knowledge of the earth" and thereby increased "our power to
interpose in the play of forces of nature and modify it to
suit our purposes and preferences."9 A bit of his point of
view was manifested in his belief that all the sciences were
related because each investigated a particular aspect of the
struggle for existence. The purpose of scientific investi-
gation was to determine the laws which governed the world
and by which men were limited in their efforts to make a
better world.10

Influenced by his own background and by the gigantic

economic strides of the latter nineteenth-century, Sumner

emphasized economic laws, or forces, as the "more primitive,

 

8

Starr, Sumner, p. 287.
gsumner, Essays, Vol. I, p. 175.

lOMaurice R. Davie, William Graham Sumner (New York:
Thomas R. Crowell, 1963), p. 23.

157

original, and universal."11 His economic determinism was
well demonstrated by his conviction that the industrial
organization--the particular system which men developed to
extract their living from nature-~exerted a pervasive influ-
ence upon society. He wrote:
It controls us all, because we are all in it. It cre-
ates the conditions of our existence, sets the limits
of our social activity, regulates the bonds of our
social relations, determines our conceptions of good
and evil, suggests our life-philosophy, molds our
inherited political institution 2 and reforms the
oldest and toughest customs....

His study of economics led him to postulate a truth
or two about the way in which men could best harmonize with
the deterministic forces and aid themselves as well.13
Civilization was an advance of man's ability to wrest a
living from nature. The best index by which to measure
this advance was the capital accumulated by a particular
society. A view such as this made it easy for him to say
that the industrious, prudent, and temperate "savings bank
depositor is a hero of civilization."l" Capital accumula-
tion was also an engine of progress because it enabled man

to gain a step in the struggle with nature.15 Capital, to

be effective however, had to be in the hands of the few, who

 

llSumner, The Challenge of Facts, p. 30.
12Sumner, Essays, Vol. I, p. 93.
13McCloskey, p. H8; Davie, pp. 16-17.
114'Sumner, Essays, Vol. II, p. 22.

15Ibid., p. 18.

158

16

accumulated it through a process of natural selection.
Moreover, capital had to be protected as property, for
"if capital were not property it would not do its work in

"17 Continuing the theme, Sumner wrote, "If we

industry.
negative or destroy property we arrest the whole life of

civilized society and put men back on the level of beasts."18

 

Deterministic as his convictions were, they were i
qualified by his belief in the evolutionary character of (1
life and institutions. He believed that the system had
changed before and would change again.19 But men could do I

little themselves to alter the organization; they must adapt
themselves to the emerging conditions.

These notions about what men could and could not do
were the basis of his particular definition of laissez-
faire. The term usually connotes a "let alone" philosophy
which justifies men's competition and struggle with one
another and nature. It enjoins them to seek their fortunes
without tender regard for moral or social scruples. His
definition of the term gave it a unique turn, without alter-
ing its traditional meaning. He defined it to mean:

Do not meddle; wait and observe. Do not regulate;
study. Do not give orders; be teachable. Do not enter

upon any rash expgsiments; be patient until you see how
it will work out.

 

lélbid., pp. 28-29. l7Ibid., p. 129.
lBIbid. lglbid., p. 124.

201bid., p. A72.

159

The term as he would use it was a warning, not an injunc-
tion. The appeal to laissez-faire was his way of insisting
that "reforms must be historical, not speculative" and that

reforms "must be founded in the genius and history of the

country."21

In matters of social or political action requiring
judgment, he used a materialistic criterion. His biographer
caricatured this aspect of his thought by saying, "It was 3

characteristic of Sumner...always to see the relation of an

 

object or condition to the practical interests of the indi-
vidual, however remote and forgotten, and generally to the
pocketbook of the individual."22
The term, materialism, as it is applied here to Sum-

ner and his thought, is meant to imply more than a mere
concern with the pocketbook. It is meant to be an encompas-
sing term that includes 1) Sumner's preoccupation with eco-
nomic forces as the mainsprings of society, institutions,
thought, and values; 2) his preference for the facts of
science as opposed to the speculative or idealistic systems
of thought; 3) his preoccupation with the world and society
as it was, rather than as it ought to be; and h) his resig-

nation to the limits imposed on man by the hard realities of

nature and life itself. The world was a tough, old place

 

21Sumner, The Forgotten Man, p. 36H.

22Starr, Sumner, p. 525.

160

of bread and butter matters. It required that men learn to

discipline themselves in order to survive.

III
Sumner was too much the advocate of his own convic-

tions to treat history objectively. His moralizing approach
to it was revealed in his words that "one of the chief re-
sults of our historical studies is to show the repeated and
accumulated faults and errors of men in the past."23 His-
torians have noted that Sumner's materialism was the basis
of a secular ethics for him, and by this system men, ideas,
and institutions were judged, with an almost religious-like
intensity?"L

' This critical approach to history was characteristic
of his Alexander Hamilton. The opening remarks in the
biography disclose that his foremost concern was to "show
how and in what sense, Alexander Hamilton was one of the
makers of this American State."25 As Sumner's analysis
materializes, it becomes clear that Hamilton is being meas-
ured against 13KB principles of a materialistic conception
of society and that the judgments of his statecraft go for
or against him according to the degree to which he conformed

to those principles.

 

23Sumner, Essays, Vol. II, p. 358.
2"Hofstadter, pp. 52-5u; McCloskey, pp. 36-37.

25William Graham Sumner, Alexander Hamilton (New
York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1890), p. iii; hereafter
cited as Sumner, Hamilton.

161

IV

The first part of the Hamilton portrayed and dis-

 

cussed American society before 1789. It is necessary to
describe Sumner's account of this period, because it was
the stage on which Hamilton entered to play his role as a
statesman.

The American Revolution erupted out of the incon-
gruities inherent in the relationship between England and
the colonies. North America offered abundant lands for
development and exploitation; but the colonies did not have
the freedom to develop them because of the plunderous and
restrictive imperial policy of mercantilism.26 As soon as
independence was feasible for the colonists, it was neces-
sary that they should have it.27 The revolutionary ferment,
though right in ultimate purpose, brought about a social
condition bordering on anarchy. All the old ideas, re-
straints, and traditions were thrown aside for the moment;
society became confused and disorderly as mob rule and vio-
lence overwhelmed legal and political institutions. Prop-
erty yum; destroyed. Tories were senselessly harassed, and
their civil rights flagrantly ignored. Courts were sus-
pended, and "debtors found license." "It was a welcome
experience to a great many people," Sumner wrote, "that one

could refuse to pay debts, and thereby win popularity and a

 

6
Sumner, The Challenge of Facts, p. 324.
27lEiQ-3 Sumner, Hamilton, pp. 21-22 and 29.

162

"28 Events in these pre-war

reputation for patriotism.
years were conducive to a spirit of "lawlessness and reck-
lessness" within the population, and given American condi-
tions, this spirit needed no encouragement.29

The war itself expanded these "sordid" aspects of
social disorganization, and pointed up other shortcomings
in public administration. Government under the Continental
Congress was "unbusinesslike, wasteful, and inefficient."
As an example of its defiencies, he described the Continen-
tal Army's want of materials and necessities, while goods
bought and paid for by Continental agents in Europe lay un-
useable in foreign warehouses.30 At the same time, the
colonies had abundant resources useful to the war effort
which went untapped because the Congress would not impose
any war taxes.31 He described public affairs during the
war as being characterized by "indolence, negligence, lack
of administrative energy and capacity, dislike of any method-
ical business-like systems, and carelessness as to money
responsibility and credit."32

The same characteristics and the problems they created
continued into the post-war years to plague the Confedera-

tion government. In the course of the decade of the

 

28 29

Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 51.
30122.91... p. 91. 31mm, pp. 87-88.

32Ibid., p. 101.

163

'eighties, the anarchical inclinations of the people took
on the more concrete form of a party, composed of northern
and southern debtors, and others who were advocates of what
Sumner called anarchistic liberty. This party, which
appeared in 1788 as the anti-Federalists, was opposed to
any effective national government, especially to one that
should levy taxes, enforce discipline and responsibility
among the people, especially in regards to contracts and
debt payments, and that should balance rights with obliga-
tions.33
Facing these problems, Sumner used the words of a
prophet who has the advantage of hindsight to anticipate
the role of Hamilton:

Every great social movement inevitably presents a
mixture of noble and sordid elements. Its methods are
very often impure, and its watchwords are very sure to
be half-truths. When the crisis is over, however, and
the days of orderly growth come again, the sordid ele-
ment must be eliminated, the methods of agitation must
be laid aside, the rhetoric and declamation must b3
toned down, and the half-truths must be dissolved. h

The party of orderly growth became the Federalist party,

made up of men of "wider information and superior training."
The Federalists were conservatives in the sense that

tradition and experience guided their course in public af-

fairs. It followed that they should be the ones to take

the English political heritage of America, modify it and

 

——

33Sumner, The Forgotten Man, pp. 286-287.

3"Sumner, Hamilton, p. 11.

16h

adapt it to American needs. Their major concern was to
establish civil liberty in the country--1iberty under law--
in the place of the anarchistic liberty of the anti-
Federalists.3S Clearly he set forth the Federalists as a
counter-revolutionary force.36
The foregoing discussion provides the context for
the key elements in Sumner's analysis of Hamilton. First,
he believed that "the Union was from the start at war with
the turbulent, anarchist elements which the Revolution set
loose"; second, he said that "the contest with anarchy and
repudiation was the great work which went to the making of
this nation at the end of the last century, and Alexander
Hamilton was one of the leading heroes of it."37 According
to Sumner, the new nation needed specifically "energy in
the administration, discipline in the army, cohesion...[in]

the Union, [and] punctuality... [in] the finances."38

 

35Sumner, The Forgotten Man, p. 228; see page 26 of
this work for Sumner's definition of civil liberty.

36Justification for this statement is found in Sum-
ner, Essays, Vol. II, pp. 3H9-350, where he wrote: "The
Constitution-makers were under an especial dread of democ-
racy, which they identified with the anarchism of the
period 1783-1787. They therefore established by the Con-
stitution a set of institutions which are restrictions of
democracy....Now the whole genius of this country has been
democratic....Down through our history, therefore, the
democratic temper of the people has been at war with the
Constitutional institutions."

37Sumner, Hamilton, p. 13.

 

381bid., p. 102.

165

In the main, he credited Hamilton with meeting these
needs and checking the anarchistic tendencies of the people.
Public credit was established, and a fiscal system was de-
vised. Vigor was infused into the federal government's
administration of public affairs. The Union was sustained
and federal power was effectively maintained against the
states. And perhaps just as important in his estimation,
Hamilton was an effective agent for awhile in contesting
. the democratic fictions of majoritarianism and equalitari-
anism. Throughout his public career, Hamilton displayed
continually an "indefatigable energy" and accepted respon-

9

sibility for his actions and opinions.3

V

Sumner said that Hamilton was a good statesman, but
not so good as a financier.LLO At first reading, the remark
does not seem perplexing or paradoxical, but as the analy-
sis develops, one of the puzzling aspects becomes his criti-
cisms of the Secretary of Treasury's fiscal principles and
policies and the statesman's statecraft. If Hamilton's fis-
cal and economic reports were wrong in many respects, as
Sumner said they were, and if his political methods undid

all of his great measures, as Sumner said they did,

 

39This paragraph is a collation of Sumner's views
of Hamilton found mainly in Hamilton, pp. th, llu, 133,
213, 227, and 228.

"0.1223.” pp- iv and 150; Sumner, Essa 3, Vol. I,
p. xiii.

166

Hamilton's contributions to the founding of the nation were
of a peculiar order. Yet this is the dilemma that Sumner's
biography creates.

Most historians would not make any distinction between
Hamilton's statesmanship and his reports. In fact they be—
lieve that Hamilton's reputation, for better or for worse,
is based upon the policies which he expounded in the reports
and then implemented in public life. Sumner, however, did
make the distinction.

His treatment of Hamilton's scheme for the National
Bank is illustrative of this ambivalence in his analysis.
The Bank, he said, was a "paper-money machine," founded on
"financial fallacies" which Hamilton never overcame."l
Undoubtedly the country needed banking facilities, but the
people were taking care of their needs, Sumner thought.
Hamilton's Bank "was not essential to the work of the Fed-
eral government" and the justification for it was based
upon the conveniences anticipated from its services, which
was an unsound reason for legislation."2 Moreover, the way
in which the federal government subscribed for Bank stock
'by giving its note established a precedent in the public's
mind that private banks could be founded by private citizens

in the same manner. Hamilton's procedure in this instance

 

"lSumner, Hamilton, p. 11H.

 

"Zlbid., pp. 162-163.

167

"planted the seeds of wild-cat banking" which "cursed" the
nation for years and gave rise to the Bank War during Jack-
son's administration."3 In creating the Bank, Hamilton
deliberately intended to interweave "the interests of
wealthy men with those of government.""" Elsewhere Sum-
ner said that Hamilton outgrew this policy of marrying
wealth to the government."5 But in the plans for the Bank,
Hamilton's concern for the wealthy and their support came
near to creating a plutocracy,"6 which was to Sumner "the
most sordid and debasing form of political energy known to
us."u7 Despite these strictures, he said the statesmanship
of Hamilton's Bank was grand."8

Hamilton's policy for restoring public credit was
handled less severely by Sumner, although the same ambiva-
lence obtained. The federal government was obliged to re-
store the nation's credit; the public interest required it.’49
He thought Hamilton's provisions for the funding of the na-

tional and foreign debts were sufficient to the purpose.

 

"3Ibid., pp. 163-16h.
""Ibid., p. 163.
"SIbId., p. 110.

1+6Sumner, The Forgotten Man, p. 296.

 

"7Sumner, Essays, Vol. II, p. 225.

uBSumner, Hamilton, p. 11H.

 

"glbId., pp. 13 and ho.

168

Assumption of the state debts, however, was not a matter of
"financial rectitude," but of "political expediency" and a
doubtful one at that. Assumption kindled unnecessary polit-
ical turmoil and division. The state debts could just as
well have been left in the hands of the states.50

Scattered throughout the funding and assumption plans
were some of Hamilton's fallacious notions about capital.
Hamilton had offered as one justification for his fiscal
policy the idea that the new government bonds would serve
as capital, actually new capital, which was badly needed to
develop the American economy. Sumner argued knowledgeably
that the bonds were not capital,51 but instead represented
merely a transfer of money from the tax payers to the bond-
holders. Despite his approval of Hamilton's efforts to
restore national honor and credit, his criticisms raise
doubts about the Secretary of Treasury's financial wizardry.

Sumner reviewed the remaining reports and found them
based upon fallacious principles as were the others. The
Report on Manufactures set forth a series of general pro-
posals which met no needs or problems of the federal govern-
ment; in fact, Hamilton was proposing policy in an area

which was not government's proper concern.52 Sumner objected

 

5OIbid., p. 154, also p. 157.
51Ibid., pp. 153-15u.
52Ibid., p. 15h.

169

to the proposal that government intervention in the economy
was necessary to build-up American industry. Intervention
worked against the economic law that an economy should
develop freely and naturally. Elsewhere, Sumner said that
non-interference was the highest political wisdom.S3 He
would not approve the principles laid down in the Report

on Manufactures because they were mercantilistic, and they
disavowed free-trade and invoked protectionism.5"

Sumner likewise rejected the bimetallism proposed in

 

Hamilton's Report on the Mint.55 He thought the measure
would undermine the stability of the currency that only a
gold standard could bring about. Even the excise tax,
which led to the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania,
he thought a doubtful measure, although he approved of the
federal government's display of force to put down the up-
rising.56
Sumner's criticisms of the principles or measures
contained in Hamilton's reports undermined Hamilton's repu-
tation as an exceptional Secretary of the Treasury and a

financial genius. He avoided stating the conclusions to

which the logic of his criticisms seemingly lead. Probably

 

53William Graham Sumner, Andrew Jackson (Boston and
New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1910), p. 55.

S"Sumner, Hamilton, pp. 173-181.
55Ibid., p. 171.
56Ibid., pp. 198-199.

170

Hamilton escaped censure because he valued Hamilton less as
a financier, or even as a statesman, but more as a counter-
force to democracy.

Of course, one can accept the distinction as Sumner
made it and believe that Hamilton was a statesman, not a
financier. That would be a satisfactory solution to the
dilemma that he created. However, he also criticized Ham-
ilton's statecraft.

The context in which Sumner's criticisms have mean-
ing is provided in his concept of the evolution of American
culture. According to him, the abundance of land and the
few people there to exploit it--the man-land ratio--was a
deterministic factor making democracy inevitable.

In a new country [he wrote] ...with unlimited land,
the substantial equality of the people in property,
culture, and social position is inevitable. Polit-
ical equality follows naturally. Democrac is
given in the circumstances of the case....5¥
He also said that "we are not free and equal because Jef-
ferson put it into the Declaration of Independence...but...
because the economic relations existing in America made
the members of society to all intents and purposes free and
equal."58 Democracy was one of the mores which evolved
from the material conditions in America.

Though some features of democracy, notably majori-

tarianism and equalitarianism, were bad, democracy, Sumner

 

57Sumner, The Forgotten Man, pp. 291-292.

58Sumner, Essays, Vol. I, pp. H58-459.

171

said, "has sometimes been good."59 He had in mind that
democracy was beneficial because it gave rise to loose and
simple institutions, which in turn gave free-play to social
competition.60 Democracy in America, he said, showed:
...what the power of personal liberty is--what self-
reliance, energy, enterprise, hard sense men can
develop when they have room and liberty and when
they are emancipated from the burdens of traditions

and faiths which are nothing but the accumulated
follies oféand blunders of a hundred generations of

statesmen.
In a qualified way, he believed in certain features

of Jeffersonian democracy, as the quotation above suggests.62
He admired the Democracy most when it advocated a platform
of hard-money, free-trade, the non-interference theory of
government, and no special legislation.63

But if certain features of democracy were satisfac-
tory to Sumner, others were not. To most men, he argued,
equality, more often than not, meant equality of material
things, money and goods.6" Personal liberty meant the oppo-

site of equality, because it allowed men to develop their

qualities to the best of their abilities, and this meant

 

59Ibid., p. 351.
6OSumner, The Challenge of Facts, p. 274.

61Sumner», Essays, Vol. II, p. 141.

62Persons, p. 8, also observed this tendency in Sum-
,ner's thought; however, McCloskey, p. 169 argues against it.

63Sumner, Andrew Jackson, p. H38.

éuSumner, Essays, Vol. II, pp. h22-h23.

172

that inequalities in wealth would exist.65 By its very
nature, equalitarianism threatened personal liberty because
of its appeal to large numbers of men. Equality, through
the device of majoritarianism, could become the ruling prin-
ciple of the state: majoritarianism could create a govern-
ment as absolutistic as that of any king of old.66
The proper check to such dogmas as equality and
popular sovereignty was a republican form of government.67
It was founded on the principle that civil liberty, that is,
liberty under law, and not equality, was the first objective.
A republic permitted self-government through regular parti-
cipation in public life. Most important of all, it pro-
tected the individual because it prevented the state from
becoming the tool of numerical majorities. Sumner touted
a republic because, as he said, it gave "guarantees of law
that a man shall not be interfered with while using his own
powers for his own welfare."68
It is clear that he wanted a democratic-republic,
which is to say an amalgam of the two systems. He wanted
democracy because it afforded opportunities for certain of

his convictions to have free-play as operating principles.

At the same time pure democracy represented a threat to his

 

65Ibid., pp. l2h-125.
66

Starr, Sumner, p. 252.

67Sumner, The Challenge of Facts, pp. 22o-227.

68Ibid., p. 26.

173

particular definition of democracy, and therefore made a
republican form of government as a balance or check to
democracy, imperative. So much "democracy," as defined by
Sumner, was inevitable in American government, because it
was inherent in American conditions.69 Any statecraft
would fail which did not take this fact into account.

As shown in Section III above, Sumner believed that
democracy was raging through the country and threatening to
undermine civil liberty. Hamilton and the Federalists
endeavored to discipline democracy and to provide the
country with peace, order, and stability--the proper con-
text for civil liberty.

Unfortunately for Federalist policies, Hamilton
"provoked antagonism of every kind, sectional, personal,
and factional."7O He never understood that government in
the United States should assume a democratic-republican

71

form. He pushed his policies too hard, too fast, and too
much against the genius and temper of the people.72 He
should have acknowledged public opinion and maintained

"sympathy with the invincible forces which predominated in

 

69Ibid., pp. 244 and 273.

7OSumner, Hamilton, p. 184.

 

711bid., p. 244.

72Sumner made this point time and time again; see
Ibid., pp. 123, 178, 190, 229—230, 232-233, 239, 241, and
245.

174

it, so that he could cooperate with them."73 Because he did
not, the policies for whichlualabored suffered "shipwreck;"7"
Sumner described the nature of Hamilton's failure in these
dramatic words:

...the men, the parties, the t eories which oppose

themselves to this [democratic tendency are swept

down like seeds before the flood. It is idle to

ask whether it is a good tendency. It is a fact--

a fact whose causes arise from the deepest and broad-

est sgcial and economic circumstances of the coun-

try.
Hamilton's failure in statecraft was marked by the triumph
of Jefferson in 1800.

Jefferson's election also marked the triumph of the
democratic tendencies of the country, a triumph which went
unchecked throughout the nineteenth century.76 Sumner
explained the success of the Jeffersonian party as the re-
sult of their conforming "to the genius of the country and
...[bearing it] along the true destinies...."77 They came

to power and held it because they carried on their program

"in phrases," he said, "borrowed from the old pet doctrines

 

73Ibid., p. 241 and The Challenge of Facts, p. 392.

7"Sumner, Hamilton, p. 102 and The Challenge of
Facts, pp. 244, 256, and 396-397.

7SSumner, The Forgotten Man, pp. 364-365. That
Sumner thought Hamilton had failed is evidenced by his
remark that Hamilton had brought catastrophe upon his own
political theories and enterprises; see Hamilton, p. 178.

76

 

 

Sumner, The Forgotten Man, p. 300.

77Sumner, Essays, Vol. II, p. 142.

175

of relaxation and undiscipline."78 Even though he approved
of the Jeffersonians conforming to the democratic destiny
of the nation, he could not accept Jefferson or his succes-
sors as statemen or leaders.

Jefferson, he thought, was a theoretical philosopher,
and Jackson was undisciplined and unreflective.79 Both men
paid too much regard to the dogmas of popular sovereignty
and equality. For this reason, there was a need in the
early decades of the republic for a conservative party
flaich could uphold constitutional government against democ-
racy. The Whigs had an opportunity to prevent the careless
development of the country's political institutions, but
they failed for the same reasons that Hamilton and the Fed-
eralists failed. The Whigs also isolated themselves from
the democratic tendencies of the country.80

In 1880, in an address before the Kent Club of the
Yale Law School, Sumner asserted that "the path of reform
lies in the direction of stronger constitutional guarantees
and greater reverence for law as law." This statement sug-
gests that he would have democracy "disciplined." Moreover,
that a conservative party should exist for that purpose was

suggested by these remarks in the same address:

 

781bid., p. 344.
79Sumner, The Forgotten Man, p. 298 and Jackson,
pp. 324-325.

80Sumner, The Forgotten Man, p. 357.

176

Any conservative party which fulfills its function
in this country will have to take its stand on that
platform [as quoted above]. 8Its reforms must be
historical, not speculative.

Weighing the meaning of Sumner's criticism of Hamil-
ton's statecraft, and that of the Federalists as well, it
is evident that Hamilton failed to make the necessary
reforms prevail. And the work which the Federalists first
set out to do, remained to be done by some later conserva-
tive party. Again, if Hamilton's statesmanship amounted to

failure in imposing the needed reforms, his contributions

as a statesmen were of a peculiar order.

VI
The area in which the efforts of the Federalists
showed greater success was foreign policy. Sumner believed
that it "commands far more unqualified praise than their

"82 To Hamilton, he gave full credit for

domestic policy.
devising and advocating the policies of national independ-
ence euui neutrality; they were the "purest commonplaces of
national policies."83 His praise, however, was confined to
the years before 1798. From 1798 and after, the Federalists
lost sight of the country's best interests as they sought

their own party ends.

 

81Ibid., p. 364.
82

Sumner, Hamilton, p. 223.

83Ibid.

177

During the administrations of President Washington,
the relations of the United States with the European states
had been most difficult and troubled. Independence had not
solved America's problems and probably had intensified them;
it was unfortunate that foreign affairs predominated and
interfered with domestic affairs, particularly since they
gave rise to internal party divisions.8u Difficult as were
those times, the true course of the nation was patently
clear: It had "to maintain neutrality, defend its rights,
preserve peace, and grow in strength."85 In general these
Objectives were obtained by Jay's Treaty and Washington's
Proclamation of Neutrality.

Hamilton's contributions to these achievements in
foreign policy were considerable, Sumner thought.86 Hamil-
ton argued and worked against the identification of Ameri-
can interests with the course of the French and their revo-
lution; and he did so at a time when the "anarchistic ele-
ments" of the country were gaining strength and renewed
enthusiasm for France.87 Moreover, he sought to educate
his countrymen to the fallacies of gratitude as the basis

88

for American policy toward France.

 

8";p;g,, p. 208.

85I_bi_d., p. 223.

86;p_i_d., pp. 211 and 223.
87;§;§,, p. 208.

88;bld., pp. 211-213.

178

When Hamilton pressed for "peace and trade with all
nations" as a justification for ratifying Jay's treaty,
Sumner agreed whole-heartedly; he thought so mainly because
commercial warfare, as advocated by the Jeffersonians,
would work to the nation's disadvantage.89 The Camillus
Letters, written by Hamilton to urge approval of the treaty,
were judged by Sumner to be "the best which...EHamilton] ever
wrote...."90

Throughout this troubled time, Hamilton proceeded
to meet each problem and to guide foreign policy. Sumner
was impressed:

[Hamilton, he wrotegl sought a device to meet the
exigency, and having seized upon the cardinal idea
of what he thought would meet the purpose,he filled
it out in its details, and proceeded to prepare the
auxiliary measures, which would presenglthemselves
1n carrylng It to a successful result.
Indeed, Hamilton's conduct exemplified energy and vigor in
government.

The treaty with Britain did not improve America's
relations with France. Before long the two countries were
near to undeclared war with one another. Ill-will in the
United States toward France brought extreme reactions on

the part of the Federalists; party spirit soon overwhelmed

them and the Jeffersonians. In consequence of these tense

 

891219;. pp- 4, 62-69, and 216.
90Ibid., p. 216.

91Ibid., p. 214.

179

circumstances, Hamilton's statecraft changed character. For
the Federalists, the chain of events beginning in 1798 ended
in catastrophe in 1800 with the election of Jefferson and
the disintegration of their party. Hamilton's part in the
Federalist debacle was rather vaguely dealt with by Sumner;
but he did make clear that the Federalists took advantage of
the turmoil to push "high spirited measures." They became
"stubborn" and "pertinacious," isolated from public opinion,
and removed from the "ruling forces of American life."92
Decline for the Federalists was inevitable under the cir-
cumstances.

Sumner's interpretation of Hamilton's conduct during
the years after 1798 was free from any suspicious or sinis-
ter implications. He believed the charge that Hamilton
intended to use the provisional army for domestic purposes
lacked proof.93 He thought that Hamilton's administration
of military affairs had produced many needed reforms; for
example, his plans of organization, recruitment, and finan-
ces, and his plan to prevent desertion. His energy in this
capacity was "indefatigable." As a kind of emphatic after-
thought, Sumner said that Hamilton's talents were desper-

ately needed during the War of 1812.9" The Miranda project,

 

921bid., p. 233.
93Ibid., p. 226.

9"Ibid., p. 229.

180

which seemed so sinister in the eyes of other historians,
was handled rather matter-of—factly by Sumner. When dis-
cussing Hamilton's interest in Spanish territory in the old
southwest, he said that he "had the interests of the United
States in that quarter distinctly before his mind."95

By 1800, Hamilton had become closely identified with
the program of the war Federalists led by Timothy Pickering,
Fisher Ames, and others. His opposition to John Adams and
his obstructionist efforts to delay the peace mission to

France were impolitic. Peace, was, Sumner believed, in the

 

best interests of the country.96 By his untimely attacks
on Adams in the election year, 1800, Hamilton precipitated
the crisis in the Federalist party which brought its ruin
and destroyed his base of leadership and influence in na-
tional affairs.97
VII
Sumner's biography of Hamilton is paradoxical in
Character because Hamilton proved difficult for Sumner to
handle. Sumner was an anti-Hamiltonian in terms of most of
his convictions. Since he had studied and written numerous
economic works, his views were rather well-defined. He was

opposed to protectionism and special legislation, distrust-

ful of central power, and favorable to hard money. Besides

 

951bid., pp. 225-22e. 961bid.. p. 237.
97Ibid., p. 238.

181

these convictions, he had formulated rather definite con-
cepts of the nature of social evolution. Lasting effect
upon social development, he believed, required statesmen

who could reconcile their aims and measures to the forces,
or laws, of life. Moreover, his concept of statecraft under
evolutionary conditions required a sensitivity to and know-
ledge of the compelling forces, both qualities which Hamil-
ton did not have.

In these two respects, Hamilton rated low by Sumner's
standards. Hamilton advocated economic policies which Sum—
ner could not countenance; and his statesmanship did not
respond to the deterministic forces operative in the social
development of America. In these two respects, Sumner's
biography ought to be considered anti-Hamiltonian.

In a third respect, however, Sumner was sympathetic
to Hamilton. Sumner was himself a conservative, socially
and politically. To him, Hamilton and the Federalists repre-
sented government by the best people. They represented a
counter-balance, a desirable check, to the undisciplined
democratic tendencies of the people, albeit an ultimately
ineffective check. They were symbols of discipline, re-
sponsibility, and realism in politics. In his eyes, the
Federalists had done battle with the anarchy of the post-
Revolutionary era and had endeavored to deal with the real

exigencies of the new nation.

182

It is fair to say that the biography is too critical
to be thought pro-Hamilton. Any Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian
can find considerable material by which to discredit Hamil-
ton's statesmanship, and thus his claim upon America's
gratitude. Yet, Sumner was temperamentally pro-Hamilton.
Insofar as he is concerned, the paradox can be resolved by
saving that Sumner wanted certain Jeffersonian ends by what
ought to have been Hamiltonian means.

0 Though Sumner's ambivalence may be resolved, the
solution does not improve Hamilton's historical reputation.
With friends like Sumner, Hamilton needed no enemies. For
in the final analysis, Sumner's biography must lead to the
conclusion that Hamilton's fiscal measures were ill-
predicated, and his statesmanship, a failure. Little is

left, except personal qualities, with which to found Hamil-

ton's reputation.

CHAPTER VII

HAMILTON AT THE END OF THE

NINETEENTH-CENTURY

The interpretations presented in this paper repre-
sent the major developments in Hamiltonian scholarship of
the last half of the nineteenth-century. It was not until
this period that historians began to apply serious efforts
to Hamilton as a subject for their books.1 When they did
make the effort, they began what has proved to be a contin-
uing diversity of views among historians about Hamilton,
his statecraft, and his place in the history of the Early
National period.

' Some students of history say that the great man

as a symbol often gets in the way of understanding the man
himself. In the case of the historians in this paper, it
is only at the level of symbols that any consensus among
them about Hamilton takes place. At the general level,
Hamilton emerges from their pages as a symbol of nation—
alism, of conservatism, of consolidation, and of energy

in government. These symbols represent the nineteenth-

century's legacy to the twentieth. They have become so

 

1For an interesting account of the factors which
kept Hamilton from his place in American historical liter-
ature until mid—century, see Lynn Hudson Parsons, "The
Hamiltonian Tradition in the United States, 1804-1912,"
(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of History, The
Johns HOpkins University, 1967), pp. 1-129.

183

184

much a part of the traditional View of Hamilton, that they
are treated as indisputable facts in the textbooks, although
some twenieth-century historians are trying to qualify
them.2

In many respects, these symbols reflected the lat-
ter half of the nineteenth-century, the era in which these
historians lived and wrote. The fact that the nation had
first been threatened, then saved from division by civil
war, encouraged a new emphasis in historical writing. If
the first half of the nineteenth-century had belonged to
the democratic Jefferson, the latter half belonged to the
nationalistic Hamilton. He had been vindicated by the
course of events, and the historians manifested their sense
of relief and gratitude by praising and portraying him as
the great nationalist. However, students of American his-
tory know that the nation celebrated not only the salvation
of the Union, but also the amazing, bewildering, and extra-
ordinary economic development which took place after the
Civil War. Hamilton's concern for industry and commerce,
for property and contracts, for bankers and investors, and
law and order appealed to the conservative and capitalistic-

minded Lodge and Sumner, and surely to vast numbers of

their fellow Americans.

 

21 have in mind the efforts of Clinton Rossiter,
Broadus Mitchell, and Louis Hacker, all pro-Hamilton his-
torians.

 

 

W}: ..

185

Closer scrutiny of the pages of the nineteenth—
century historians reveals that the general accord sug-
gested by the symbols is largely illusory. They wrote
about "many Hamiltons," to use Clinton Rossiter's appro-
priate phrase,3 instead of one that could be subsumed under
these few general symbols. There was a different Hamilton
which attracted each of them.

Richard Hildreth's interpretation should have been
a major step forward in Hamiltonian scholarship, because
his effort to interpret Hamilton by a Utilitarian standard,
rather than the Manicheanistic standard characteristic of
many views, introduced a new set of categories by which he
could be judged. Unfortunately, Hildreth's interpretation
was only a potential, for he did not incorporate his Util-
itarian philosophy in his History. Few students were
likely to go to his other works to find the Utilitarian
key which he had applied to Hamilton in his own mind. It
is evident to one who takes the time to read Hildreth's
philosophical and related works, that the Hamilton which
appealed to him was the one who devised policies to encourage
American eonomic development and prosperity. An affluent
environment was the basis of the moral advance Hildreth

dreamed of for America. Thus it was the practical and

 

3Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the Con-
stitution, pp. 3-33.

 

 

 

186

realistic-minded statesman who attended the first and real
needs of the American peOple. By stretching a term some-
what, it can be said that Hildreth admired a "utilitarian"
Hamilton

It is evident that Henry S. Randall did not appre-
ciate Hildreth's "utilitarian" statesman, or even know that
such a Hamilton existed. One can correctly assume that
Randall was familiar with Hildreth's History,Ll for he was
determined to redeem Jefferson's reputation from the detrac-
tors. Randall responded vigorously to Hamilton, as Hildreth

had to Jefferson. In his Life of Thomas Jefferson he por-

 

trayed Hamilton in the dark and somber tones of a monarchist,
a man far removed in spirit from the true democratic des-
tinies of America. With the publication of Randall's gig:
by the end of the 'fifties, two Hamilton's emerged from

the books, a "utilitarian" and a "monarchist".

In the pages of the Adamses there existed a Hamilton
which shared the attitudes of both Hildreth's and Randall's
Hamilton. The Adamses saw him as a remarkably capable man,
who brought energy and purpose to the administration of
public affairs, yet despite his considerable ability, was
inferior in morals. His motivations sprang from the
depths of an inordinate ambition. What he could do for the

country was always circumscribed by the evil and danger

 

"Klingberg, Correspondence, p. 90.

 

187

inherent in his ambition. The Adamses saw Hamilton as a

man of two careers. One, while he served in Washington's
administration, demonstrated extraordinary practical states-
manship. The second, out of office and unrestrained by the
moderating influences of President Washington, was a mili-
tarist, seeking glory and fame. By sheer bulk of their
literary outputs, but also by their own reputations as
participants ha America's political history and as his—
torians, they focused attention upon this Hamilton of les—
ser morals.

Friend of the Adamses, student of Henry Adams, an
instructor at Harvard who used Hildreth's History as his
text,5 Henry Cabot Lodge brought an unmitigated respect
and admiration of Federalism, Federalist leaders and their
achievements, the Constitution and the nation, to his inter-
pretation of Hamilton. The man Lodge found in the histor-
ical record was a truly American statesman who put country
and honor above all other considerations. Hamilton, as
the symbol of nationalism, conservatism, of centralization
and energy in government, emerged most clearly from his
pages. Staying within the confines of the Hamilton-
Jefferson conflict, Lodge interpreted Hamilton's career
as a consistent effort, from the beginning of the Revolution

to the end in 1804, to found a nation, and secure it in its

 

5Schriftgiesser, Lodge, p. 39.

188

freedom and prosperity. Lodge, unscholarly in several
respects and partial in View, did more than any of the
other historians to reveal Hamilton as a man, possessed

of passions, excesses, and shortcomings, but for all that,
a man of character and ability.

Sumner was the one author whose approach to Hamilton
showed a remarkable similarity to that of a predecessor, in
this case Lodge's Hamilton.6 Yet, despite the similarities
which manifest themselves in similar tone, approach, and
judgements, Sumner did not find the same Hamilton to admire
that Lodge had found. He praised Hamilton as a statesman,
but found much to criticize in Hamilton's fiscal policies
and statecraft. The Hamilton that appealed to Sumner was

7 It was Hamilton's

more like the one portrayed by Hildreth.
empirical, pragmatic approach to concrete problems of gov-
ernment that Sumner approved; but more than anything else,

he admired the Hamilton who stood firm for law and order

 

. 6Sumner's bibliography includes references to Lodge's
biography of Hamilton and life of George Cabot. It is evi-
dent in Sumner's footnote citations that he did his own
research. Lodge did not provide a bibliography or any
footnotes in his Hamilton.

7There is no bibliographic reference to Hildreth.
However, the conclusion of Sumner's biography of Hamilton
ended with the remark that of all previous historians,
Hildreth's interpretation resembled most closely his own.
Sumner, Hamilton, pp. 259-260.

189

and property rights at a time when democracy supposedly
threatened them all. Paradoxically, Sumner admired the
anti—democractic Hamilton, while it was the Hamilton who
improved the material base on which democracy could thrive
that Hildreth respected.

Henry Adams' and Henry S. Randall's works both
have had a long-standing reputation as a standard or clas-
sic among later historians. Both of them portrayed Hamilton
as a man with a seamy side. And it is apparent that most
historians since their time have been suspicious and
unfriendly toward Hamilton. The work of Hildreth, Lodge,
and certainly Sumner, can hardly be thought to have redeemed
the "whole" Hamilton from the disparagement he has received
in the hands of a majority of historians. Hildreth's
Hamilton, as he stands in the History unadorned by a Util-
itarian mantle, appears as merely a Federalist. Lodge's
Hamilton was done in such a way that most serious readers
would be suspicious of Lodge as an historian, and would
therefore be inclined to discount the Hamilton that he por-
trayed. Sumner's criticisms disallowed Hamilton as a
financier or a successful statesman. In effect the weight
of nineteenth-century interpretations of Hamilton pre-
ponderated on his seamy side.

The legacy to historians of today has been a Ham—
ilton that desired to turn America from its true democratic

course and fix instead an aristocratic form of government

 

190

in democracy's place. He was described as an ambitious

man, eager to have a controlling hand in the determination

of government policy and American development. His policies,
outlined in full mainly in his several reports, were judged
by these historians as good and bad. It is difficult to
generalize about their judgements because there was no
consensus among them about his statecraft. The only area, I
in which general accord obtained, concerned his policy

after 1797. After this time, they judged his conduct and

 

motivations critically, finding him extreme and misguided

\w m.

in his actions. Since his public career ended on a nega-
tive tone, it has been natural to read his career back-
wards and to suspect the honesty and good intentions of
his earlier actions.

The discord among the interpretations has been
emphazised as their major characteristic. Lest the small
areas of accord be obscured by this emphasis, notice should
be given to the common views they had of Hamilton. From
his most severe critic, Randall, to his most ardent advo-
cate, Lodge, Hamilton was thought to have been a man of
energy and action in government. He gave a drive and deter-
mination to Washington's first administration which it
might not have had otherwise. Hamilton was also an extra-
ordinary administrator, partly because of his energy and
partly because of his ability to attend the host of details

involved in the day-to-day affairs of the federal government.

191

Even Randall admitted that he had a facility for practical
greatness.

Such recognition would hardly suffice to give
Hamilton a place in the front ranks of America's great.
By the end of the nineteenth-century, Hamilton was in the

shadows of the great men, still largely an unfathomed and

unknown quantity.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Two books proved especially valuable not only as
introductions to the subject of Hamilton and nineteenth—
century historians, but also as useful references on many I

occasions: Merill D. Peterson, The Jeffersonian Image in

 

the American Mind ("Galaxy Book," New York, 1962), has

 

much information about the historians who in dealing with

 

Jefferson, had to come to terms with Hamilton. Clinton
Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution (New
York, 1964), especially chapters one and seven, deals
effectively with the way in which Hamilton has been treated
by historians up to the present. His observations on
Hamilton and the historians are useful and suggestive.
Another work that should be consulted is Lynn Hudson Par-
sons, "The Hamiltonian Tradition in the United States,
1804-1912," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Dept. of
History, The Johns Hopkins University, 1967), a work fash-
ioned after Peterson's approach. Parsons gives the best
idea of Hamilton's image in the work of nineteenth—century
historians.

Several works ought to be read for general infor-
mation and background to nineteenth-century historians and
historiography. They are: William T. Hutchinson, ed.,

The Marcus W. Jernegan Essays in American Historiography

192

 

 

 

3"... IRAQI}: 1.1.?!- RoIIH? j;
. I
..As

A.

L

1 414)!“ .\

 

193

(Chicago, 1937); Harvey Wish, The American Historian (New

 

York, 1960); David Van Tassel, Recording America's Past:

An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies

 

in America, 1607—188u (Chicago, 1960); Michael Kraus, The'

 

Writing of American History (Norman, 1953); and for bio-

graphical information on historians the Dictionary of

 

American Biography is useful.

 

Hamilton in Review

 

A very judicious survey of the Early National

period is available in John C. Miller, The Federalist Era,

 

1789-1801 (New York, 1960).

 

By far the most interesting, suggestive, and pro-
Hamilton is Rossiter's book cited before. He discusses
much more than the title indicates. Hamilton, he believes,
has been misjudged and mistreated by the historians. He
succeeds in presenting a most favorable construction of
Hamilton's statesmanship and suggesting the debt which
subsequent generations of Americans owe Hamilton.

The most intensive and carefully documented biog-
raphy of Hamilton has been done by Broadus Mitchell,

Alexander Hamilton (2 vols.; New York, 1957 & 1962); he

 

provides insight into Hamilton's economic policies and
political program which is indespensable. Another biography

is that of Nathan Schachner, Alexander Hamilton (Special

 

contents edition; New York, 1957). A more discriminating

 

194

account is found in John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton,

 

Portrait in Paradox (New York, 1959). Miller portrays a

 

Hamilton so intent upon having his national program adopted,
that he undoes much of what he strived to achieve. The
paradox, as a literary device and a framework of interpre-
tation, is appropriate to Hamilton, but many of the para-
doxes are left unresolved. A brief summary of Hamilton's
career is found in Allan Nevins, "Alexander Hamilton,"

Dictionary of American Biography, vol° VIII.

 

A study of the founding of a government and the
administration of it in the formative years is available

in Leonard D. White, The Federalists (New York, 1956).

 

White's field of specialization is public administration,
and therefore what he has to say of Hamilton's administra-
tion of the Treasury is of special interest.

Richard B. Morris, ed., Alexander Hamilton and the

 

Founding of the Nation (New York, 1957), is a convenient

 

and accessible collection of Hamilton's documents, or
excerpts from them, dealing with several pertinent topics
of interest to any student of Hamilton. The papers and
letters of Hamilton are available in the rather carelessly

edited collection by Henry Cabot Lodge, The Works of

 

Alexander Hamilton (12 vols.; Federal Edition; New York,

 

190“).
An entertaining, dramatic, but Jeffersonian account

of the Early National period is Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson

 

 

195

and Hamilton, the Struggle for Democracy in America (Boston

 

and New York, 1925). Bowers is not unfriendly to Hamilton,
but his presentation represents Hamilton as the aristo-
cractic, anti-republican protagonist of Jefferson. Vernon L.
Parrington, "Alexander Hamilton and the Leviathan State,"

Main Currents in American Thought (3 vols.; New York,

 

1927), vol. I, 297-312, portrays a Hamilton who tried to I
rout the forces of Jefferson's democratic-agrarian party.
The most severe, and exaggerated, depreciation of Hamilton

was done by Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American

 

 

Party System (Williamsburg, 1956). Charles described

 

Hamilton as a self-seeking, ambitious anti-democrat, who

used a simple-minded Washington to advance his policies.

Richard Hildreth

 

The biography of Hildreth is that by Donald E.

Emerson, "Richard Hildreth," vol. LXIV, The Johns ngkins

 

University Studies in Historical and Political Science

 

(Baltimore, 1996). Since Emerson provides little analysis
of Hildreth's thought, his biography should be supplemented

by Martha M. Pingel, An American Utilitarian, Richard

 

Hildreth as a Philosopher (New York, 1948), which includes

 

several essays and letters by Hildreth that are valuable
samples of the man's writing and thought. Additional
biographical information is found in Kenneth B. Murdock,

"Richard Hildreth," vol. IX, Dictionary of American Biog-

 

raphy. Both Hutchinson and Wish already cited, should also

be consulted.

196

The most suggestive article dealing with the para-
dox of Hildreth's democratic philosophy and his "Federal-
ist" History is provided in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,

"The Problem of Richard Hildreth," New England Quarterly,

 

IX (1940), 223-2A5. Schlesinger did not resolve the para—
dox, nor did he probe the problem intensively, though he
did observe that Hildreth approved of Federalist policy
without accepting Federalist social philosophy.

Invaluable for an understanding of Hildreth's

philosophy is his Theory of Politics (New York, 1853),

 

and to a lesser degree his Despotism in America (Boston,

 

1854). In these two books, his values and his application
of the Utilitarian tenets to political and economic affairs
are revealed. It is also wise to read these two works in

conjunction with Jeremy Bentham, The Theory of Legislation,

 

available in several English editions. Crane Brinton's

article on Utilitarianism in the Encyclopedia of Social

 

Science is helpful.
To find Hildreth's interpretation of Hamilton, his

History of the United States (6 vols.; rev. ed.; New York,

 

1856) must be read carefully. They are distractingly dull
volumes to read and become of interest only when one
applies the Utilitarian key, as the philosophical frame—

work of the History.

197

Henry Stephens Randall

 

Information about Randall is not abundant and must
be gathered in bits from a few available sources. James
Ingersoll Wyer, "Henry Stephens Randall," vol. XV, Dic-

tionary of American Biography provides a biographical

 

sketch.
Invaluable in comprehending Randall and his work

on Jefferson is Frank J. and Frank W. Klingberg, eds.,

 

The Correspondence Between Henry Stephens Randall and Hugh

Blair Grigsby, 1856-1861, vol. XLVIII, University of Cali-

 

 

fornia Publications in History (Berkeley and Los Angeles,

 

1952). Their introduction provides as much relevant infor-
mation as has been published. The letters pertain mainly
to Randall's work on the Ligg, but are worth reading, if
only for the few remarks about Jefferson's detractors.

Also consult George Green Schackelford, ed., "New Letters
Between Hugh Blair Grigsby and Henry Stephens Randall,

1858-1861," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,

 

LXIV (1956), 32A—357. Peterson's Jeffersonian Image is

 

useful for what he says not only about Randall but also
about Randall's interpretation of Jefferson and Hamilton.
For an interesting account of Randall's effort to secure
tariff protection for the sheep and wool industry, see
Harry James Brown, "The Fleece and the Loom; Wool Growers
and Wool Manufactures during the Civil War Decade," Bgsle

ness History Review, XXIX (1955), 1—27, and also his intro—

 

duction to Letters From a Texas Shegp Ranch (Urbana, 1959).

 

198

Randall's application of Jeffersonian principles
to practical matters is interestingly revealed in his chap-
ter, "Common School Libraries," in 8.8. Randall, Mental

and Moral Culture and Popular Education (New York, 1844),

 

and also in the introduction to his Sheep Husbandry (New

 

York, 1852).
Hamilton becomes the "monarchical" protagonist of

Jefferson in Randall's the Life of Thomas Jefferson (3

 

vols.‘ New York, 1858), especially volumes I and II.

The Adamses

 

The idea for treating four generations of Adamses
as "one" historian came from reading Housatonic, "A Case

of Hereditary Bias," New York Daily Tribune, Sept. 10 and

 

Dec. 15, 1890. Another historian has developed a similar
theme: Lynn Hudson Parsons, "Continuing Crusade: Four

Generations of the Adamses Family View Alexander Hamilton,"

 

New England Quarterly, XXXVII (1964).
For the Adams family generally, one can start with

James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (Boston, 1930). For

 

more detailed accounts, there are several books available:
John Adams' biography has been done by Charles Francis

Adams, Sr., The Life of John Adams (2 vols.; Philadelphia,

 

1874); and see the excellent work done in Page Smith, John
Adams (2 vols.; Garden City, 1962). John Quincy Adams'

views of Hamilton can be found in his "Reply to the Appeal

 

199

of the Massachusetts Federalists," in Henry Adams, ed.,

Documents Relating to New England Federalism, 1800—1815

 

(Boston, 1877), 170-329. The life of Charles Francis

Adams, Sr., has been done in Martin Duberman, Charles Francis

 

Adams, 1807-1886 (Boston, 1961).

 

Henry Adams is best understood by beginning with

the brief introductory study, George Hochfield, Henry Adams,

 

An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1962). From

 

here one can take his choice of turning to Henry Adams,

 

 

The Education of Henry Adams (Modern Library; New York, SJ
1931), which provides useful biographical information and
insight into the man and his mind; or one may prefer more

background and interpretation before reading the Education.

 

In that case, read Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams, The Middle

 

Years (Cambridge, 1965), an account of the years most rel-
evant to Adams as the historian. For analysis of Adams
as a historian and his histories, see William H. Jordy,

Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (New Haven, 1952).

 

The Adamses' views of Hamilton are found inter-
spersed through the following works: Charles Francis Adams,

ed., The Works of John Adams (10 vols.; Boston, 1850-1856);

 

Henry Adams, ed., Documents Relating to New England Feder—

 

alism and his History of the United States During the First

 

Administration of Thomas Jefferson (Reprint; New York,

 

1962), Vols. 1 and II; also see his The Life of Albert

 

Gallatin (Philadelphia, 1880). Though few references to

200

Hamilton exist in Henry Adams' letters, those available
are valuable; see Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Letters

of Henry Adams (2 vols.; Boston and New York, 1930) and

 

Harold Dean Cater, ed., Henry Adams and His Friends (Bos-

 

ton, 1947).

For an interesting presentation that Henry Adams
wrote his famous History as an Adams Federalist rather than
a Jeffersonian, see Edwin C. Rozwenc, "Henry Adams and the

Federalist," ed., H. Stuart Hughes, Teachers of History

 

(Ithaca, 1954).

Henry Cabot Lodge

 

The references to Henry Adams, cited above, have
scattered references to Henry Cabot Lodge. After seeing
them it is easy to conclude that Lodge was indeed an aris-
tocrat and a conservative. Of course, these points are
made clearly in two biographies: John A. Garraty, nggy

Cabot Lodge, A Biography (New York, 1953) and Karl Schrift-

 

giesser, The Gentleman from Massachusetts: Henry Cabot

 

Lodge (Boston, 1944). The first cited is the superior
biography. Schriftgiesser, if not grinding a left-handed
axe, is at least sharpening it on Lodge. Henry Cabot Lodge,

Early Memories (New York, 1913) provides a view of the

 

aristocratic and traditional influences that made up Lodge's

youthful experiences.

 

\". __,-_
‘ D l.

201

Much about Lodge, his political attitudes and
beliefs, his values, and his nationalism can be learned
from reading in the several collections of his essays and
speeches. Moreover, these essays reveal his preoccupation
with the early Federalists as fit subjects for historical

treatment and commemoration. See Lodge, The Democracy of

 

the Constitution and Other Addresses and Essays (New York,

1915); A Frontier Town and Other Essays (New York, 1906);

 

Historical and Political Essays (New York, 1892); and

 

especially valuable is his Studies in History (Boston,

 

1884). In this last work is one essay on "colonialism"

in American thought, and is a key to understanding his
favorable interpretation of Federalist foreign policy,

and another essay on Alexander Hamilton, which should be
compared to the biography of Hamilton to see the change

in Lodge's interpretation of the great Federalist. Some-
thing of Lodge's aristocratic and anti—democratic leanings
can be gleaned from reading his article, "Limited Sover-

eignty in the United States," Atlantic Monthly, XLIII

 

(1879), 184-192.

For Lodge's interpretation of the Federalists and
Hamilton, one should see first his summaries of colonial
politics in his A Short History of the English Colonies

(New York, 1881). The Life and Letters of George Cabot

 

(Boston, 1878) is especially good for his view of the Fed-

eralists and their party and it has some material on Hamilton.

 

" we y:

202

His George Washington (2 vols.; Boston and New York, 1898)

 

adds further insight and information about his appreciation
of the two great Federalist leaders. The collection of
Hamilton's papers which Lodge edited contains an introduc-
tion to Hamilton and throughout the twelve volumes a few
scattered footnotes which reveal, sometimes at length, his

views of Hamilton's measures. His Alexander Hamilton ' I

 

(Boston, 1882) represents the high point of his Hamiltonian

and Federalist interpretation of the Early National period.

 

\E-_

William Graham Sumner

 

Cursory introductions to Sumner and his thought
can be found in Harris Elwood Starr, "William Graham Sum-

ner," vol. XVIII, Dictionary of American Biography, and in

 

Maurice R. Davie, William Graham Sumner (New York, 1963).

 

Both accounts are superficial, more biographical than ana-
lytical, although the latter work has representative excerpts
from Sumner's writings that introduce his thought.

A full—length biography: Harris Elwood Starr,

William Graham Sumner (New York, 1925) is outdated and shows

 

little inclination to analyze, criticize, or probe Sumner's
thought. For such an analysis it is best to turn to Stow

Persons, ed., Social Darwinism (Englewood Cliffs, 1963);

 

Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought

 

(2nd ed. rev.; Boston, 1955), Chapter III. For the polit—
ical implications of his thought, see Robert Green McCloskey,

American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (Cambridge,

 

203

1951); also Harry Elmer Barnes, "Two Representative Con-
tributions of Sociology to Political Theory: The Doctrines
of William Gramham Sumner and Lester Frank Ward," American

Journal of Sociology, XIV (1919), 1—23.

 

Most rewarding for insight and understanding about
the man and his thought are the collections of essays:

Albert Galloway Keller and Maurice R. Davie, Essays of

 

William Gramham Sumner (2 vols.; New Haven, 1911); Sumner,

 

The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays (New Haven, 1914);

 

and Sumner, The Forgotten Man and Other Essays (New Haven,

 

1918). These contain much information about the Early
National period, American history in the nineteenth-century,
and they also reveal Sumner's biases which should be known

before reading his Alexander Hamilton (New York, 1890).

 

In conjunction with this biography, one should read his

Andrew Jackson (Boston and New York, 1910) in order to see

 

why a man with certain Jeffersonian tenets should not accept

Jefferson and Jackson, instead of Hamilton, as his hero.

 

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