Jefferson and Hamilton (37 page)

Hamilton had little experience in such things. He had sat in Congress for a few months, but at a time when it was hardly more than an idle debating society. Most of his experience had been in the army, where orders were given and followed, not disputed and haggled over. Relatively unaccustomed to the ways of legislators, he was convinced after a few weeks that “we shall let slip the golden opportunity.” His “anxiety” that “the Convention … will not go far enough” was made all the greater by his belief that “there has been an astonishing revolution for the better in the minds of the people,” and that they were now “ripe” for “a strong well mounted government.”
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During the first twenty or so sessions, he said nothing. But on June 18, his frustration and apprehension peaking, Hamilton delivered a remarkable six-hour speech in which he laid bare his most deeply held convictions, hoping to persuade the delegates to commit to a radical plan of constitutional revision.

At the time of his remarks, the convention had been presented with two working proposals. The Virginia Plan called for a new constitution that vested the national government with much greater powers, including the
authority not only to enact laws “in all cases to which the separated states are incompetent,” but also to “negative” state laws “contravening … the articles of union.” The New Jersey Plan, on the other hand, proposed that the Articles of Confederation be amended to augment the powers of the federal government, though state sovereignty would for the most part be preserved.

When Hamilton rose to speak, the East Room was warm and stuffy, as it nearly always was on summer days. Following the procedure adopted by the Continental Congress, the delegates kept the room’s tall windows shut, both to suppress outdoor noise and to preserve the secrecy of their discussions and transactions. Hamilton faced colleagues seated in hard Windsor chairs at round tables covered with green fabric. The tables and chairs were positioned in arcs, and the delegates sat facing the dais, where the presiding officer, General Washington, sat in the tallest chair of all. Looking out over the rather small, square room, with its gray paneled walls, Hamilton began by saying that he was “unfriendly to both plans,” as under both the states would continue to “counteract” the national interest. Neither plan would solve the problems of raising adequate amounts of revenue or of raising armies before war was declared, and neither would satisfactorily check democracy. These deficiencies would mean that neither “public strength” nor “individual security” could be achieved.

What then was the solution? Hamilton said that he would like to see the “formal Extinction of State Governments,” but admitted that such a step would “shock public Opinion too much.” He also declared that he remained committed to republicanism, though he “despair[ed] that a republican government can remove the difficulties.” In fact, the plan that he recommended was republican in only a narrow sense. Hamilton urged a national government drawn on the likeness of the British example, “the best model the world ever produced.” The British government excelled because it provided for national strength, but also as it inhibited change.

Hamilton told his colleagues that every society divided into “the few and the many.” The few—the “rich and well born”—having already reached society’s pinnacle, had no incentive to pursue radical change. In contrast, the many were not only “turbulent and changing,” but they also would “seldom judge or determine right.” Therefore, it was crucial that the Constitution be designed in such a fashion to assure that the few would be the predominant force in the nation’s government. This was the only safe way to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

Hamilton recommended the creation of a bicameral congress, consisting of a lower house elected for three-year terms by the qualified voters, and an upper house chosen for life by an electoral college whose members had been
elected by the qualified voters. He additionally urged an executive chosen by the electoral college for life. Calling the executive an “elective monarch,” Hamilton said that a life term would place him “above temptation” and enable him to act solely in the national interest. He urged that the executive be vested with extraordinary powers, including unalloyed control of the military, enormous authority in the realms of foreign policy and finance, and an ironclad veto. In this layered structure of choosing the key officials, it went without saying that America’s principal rulers would inevitably be drawn from society’s elite. Most of those “trifling Characters” that tended to “obtrude” in republics would be screened out, he said.
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It was the most radical plan introduced at the Constitutional Convention, and while a great many delegates liked what they heard, all knew that the sort of constitution Hamilton favored was too impolitic to win ratification. A Connecticut delegate summed up the reaction of the Convention: Hamilton “has been praised by every body” but “supported by none.”
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Nevertheless, speaking in what was supposed to be a secrecy-shrouded chamber, Hamilton had pulled back the curtain that concealed the true thoughts of the most conservative Americans. For them, the American Revolution had been about breaking free of the mother country and creating their own powerful nation state, one in which the entrepreneurs, speculators, exporters and importers, and men of finance would be free from London’s confining shackles and oppressive hand. They had not dreamed of sweeping political or social change. But change had been unleashed, including the elevation to power of those who had been powerless in colonial days. This change aroused fear among the most conservative Americans. They yearned to stop the American Revolution, to make change more difficult, to preserve the contours of the society with which they had been familiar prior to 1776. Hamilton accepted that there would always be natural inequalities in society, and that they would increase over time. As this was the natural way of things, he was not inclined to seek any remedy for the disparities. Hamilton’s way of thinking was not one of compassion. It was an expression of the elite’s overarching desire to preserve their exalted status, and its class-biased, antidemocratic spirit not only would characterize Hamilton’s thought for the remainder of his life, but also would remain the driving force behind much of conservative philosophy for generations to come.

Hamilton’s political philosophy was strikingly unlike that of Jefferson’s. Their differences were rooted in their conflicting views of human nature. Jefferson was an optimist; Hamilton was a pessimist who, in the words of one scholar, held “mankind in pragmatic distrust.”
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He saw humankind as the pawn of passion, and in numerous writings Hamilton spoke of the
intractable “avarice, ambition, interest which govern most individuals.” Given man’s ever-present “love of power,” “desire of preeminence and dominion,” irresistible “low intrigue” for gaining power, and propensity for deception once in power—in order to achieve greater power and make pawns of the weak—Hamilton harbored doubts about man’s capability for self-government.
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Later, Hamilton viewed Jefferson as a “visionary” who embraced “pernicious dreams,” for the Virginian thought humankind was endowed with a moral sense that made possible affection and empathy. If man’s environment could be changed so that education was widespread, social distinctions eliminated, and wealth more equally distributed, the good in mankind would predominate. Jefferson championed governments that permitted change, advocated listening to the will of the people, and denounced the oppression of the many through what he had called the tyranny of the few. His draft constitutions for Virginia bore little resemblance to the plan that Hamilton had laid out. Emphasizing the goal of maintaining the authority of the “whole body of the people,” the officeholders in Jefferson’s plans were to serve for brief terms, the executive was to be a weak official, and a bill of rights was to be included in order to protect the people from their government. At bottom, Jefferson’s constitutional formulations sought to facilitate the desires of the governed. Hamilton emphasized the preservation of order and stability, the protection of those who had reached society’s summit, and the means of restraining those who had not.
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Hamilton had not been a major player in the convention prior to his speech, and he played an insignificant role from that point forward. He talked at length only one other time, on June 29, in the midst of what seemed to be a crisis of indissoluble differences among the delegates. The heart of his remarks concerned the “consequences of the dissolution of the Union,” though this time he emphasized the dangers from abroad claiming, “Foreigners are jealous of our encreasing greatness, and would rejoice in our” divisions. Moreover, the nation was in debt to European powers, which might drive them to gain what they were owed. If the nation is weak, he cautioned, “foreigners will invade your rights.” The United States would survive only if the states remained united “for our common defence.” Among his last words to the convention was an appeal to create a national government of “sufficient stability and strength” that it could provide for the national defense.
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Following his second speech, Hamilton went home to tend to his legal practice. Two weeks after his departure, Washington wrote to Hamilton that it seemed unlikely that the convention would produce the government that America required. “I wish you were back,” he added. The convention was the first occasion, as far as is known, when Hamilton and Washington were together
since Yorktown. Hamilton had not made the one-day ride from Annapolis to Mount Vernon to call on Washington the previous fall, perhaps because Betsey had given birth to the couple’s third child during his absence and he was anxious to get home. But Hamilton’s lingering rancor toward Washington likely played a role too, and in fact he does not appear to have associated with Washington in Philadelphia. Washington dined, drank tea, even went sightseeing with numerous others, but in his diary he never mentioned the least contact with Hamilton. After having been in the same city with Washington for six weeks, Hamilton remarked that he had not “compared ideas” with Washington. The general, of course, was aware of Hamilton’s thinking after his June speech, and he appeared not to have been put off by it. Furthermore, as Washington lodged with Robert Morris and spent considerable time with Gouverneur Morris—with whom he went fishing near Valley Forge during a weeklong recess—he was probably made aware, if he had not known previously, that Hamilton’s grasp of economics was exceptional.
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The history of the Constitutional Convention was one of repeated compromises between various interests. Moreover, recognizing the difficulties that they would face in securing ratification, the Nationalists did not go as far as most would have liked. Nevertheless, the consolidationists achieved what they had long sought. Preserving the broad outlines of the Virginia Plan, the Constitution provided for an omnipotent national government, including an executive who was vested with breathtaking powers. It did not vest Congress with the authority to overrule state laws, but it accomplished the same end by prohibiting the states from exercising many sovereign powers. Despite the convention’s supposed secrecy, Hamilton learned in August in New York that the proposed new government was being given “a higher tone,” and he asked Rufus King to let him know when the end was near, as he wished to sign the final document. Hamilton was in his seat on the convention’s last day, and he told his colleagues that while the Constitution could hardly be “more remote” from that which he had wished, he would sign it. It offered a “chance of good” and the best hope for preventing “anarchy and Convulsion,” he said.
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Drafting the Constitution was the easy part. Ratification was far more difficult. Two impost amendments had already failed, and they were less inflammatory to many than the Constitution. Though to make ratification easier, the Philadelphia Convention stipulated that only nine states, acting through “Conventions,” not state legislatures, need consent.

Deep divisions were soon apparent. The Constitution gained its strongest support in the urban centers and eastern counties of most states; the
backcountry nearly everywhere opposed ratification. The supporters called themselves Federalists, the foes Anti-Federalists. Even the critics were divided. Some wanted to reject the Constitution and keep the Confederation, some wanted a second convention to try again to write a new constitution, some preferred to amend the Articles of Confederation, and some wished to amend the proposed Constitution. On the other hand, the Federalists were unanimous in wishing to ratify the Constitution “as it now stands.”
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The Federalists faced a tough battle, but they entered the fight with several advantages. They offered a concrete solution to an obvious problem. Washington, the most revered and trusted American, had signed the Constitution, as had numerous other leading citizens. The nation’s press, the mass medium of the day, overwhelmingly supported the Constitution. Furthermore, having waged a long fight to rid the country of the Articles, and having sat together for four months in the Constitutional Convention, the Federalists emerged from Philadelphia united, organized, and primed for the contest. They cleverly orchestrated the flow of ratifying conventions to establish a bandwagon effect. Within one hundred days of the Convention’s adjournment, five states had ratified the Constitution, and eight of the necessary nine had given their approval by early spring.

New York’s convention was one of the last to meet, but the battle in New York had commenced even before the Constitutional Convention ended. In July, Lansing and Yates left Philadelphia in disgust once the Constitution took shape. Once they filled Governor Clinton in on what the Constitution would almost certainly look like, he publicly predicted “a mischievous issue” from Philadelphia and was also probably behind a bevy of wild rumors in the press about what to expect. That was too much for Hamilton. He responded with an essay attacking the Articles and assailing the governor as one who had a “greater attachment to his own power than to the public good.”
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Clinton’s defenders countered with vitriol of their own. One essay, signed by “Inspector,” insinuated in a New York newspaper that Hamilton had “palm[ed]” himself off on Washington, whom he had served until the general realized that his aide was “a superficial, self-conceited coxcomb.”
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Another scribbler wrote of a fictitious immigrant from the Caribbean named “Tom Shit”—clearly meant to be Hamilton—who was the illegitimate offspring of a white father and a black mother. “Tom” peddled advice to a “Mrs. Columbia” about how to run her plantation, including the admonition that she appoint a superintendent for life rather than for a brief tenure.
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