Episode 870: Founding Fathers – Alexander Hamilton

The lives of these men are essential to understanding the American form of government and our ideals of liberty. The Founding Fathers all played key roles in the securing of American independence from Great Britain and in the creation of the government of the United States of America.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
On this episode of This World. The lives of these
men are essential to understand the American form of government
and our ideals of liberty. The Founding Fathers all played
key roles in securing American independence from Great Britain and
in the creation of the government of the United States
of America. And now the life of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton

(00:34):
and as since has had a new burst of fame.
But he's somebody who really never should have disappeared. First
of all, he was extraordinarily bright. Hamilton may have been,
in sheer iq, the smartest of all the Founding Fathers.
He was just deeply admired by Washington. He was invaluable

(00:58):
to Washington as a staff off. He was endlessly competent.
And I think that's a key part of this is
that Hamilton was the person who was very ambitious, but
he was also a person who worked very hard and
who applied his considerable intelligence to whatever job he had. Now,
he actually had not gotten to the US very much

(01:21):
before the Revolution began. He was born, we think, either
in seventeen fifty five or seventeen fifty seven on Nevas.
His father was a Scottish trader named James Hamilton his mother,
Rachel Faussett Levi, and they were not married at the time. Rachel,
in fact, was married to another man at the time
of Hamilton's birth, but had left her husband after he

(01:44):
spent much of her family fortune and he had had
her in prison for adultery. Now you may be curious
why James Hamilton settled in Neavis. The British gained control
of the island in seventeen thirteen, and Nevis and Saint
KITT's soon were the leading areas of sugar production in
the Caribbean. The colonists and others wanted sugar to sweeten

(02:04):
their tea in cough. It's hard for us to remember,
but these islands were considered so amazingly valuable that at
one point in negotiations, the British kept some islands in
the Caribbean as being of greater value than all of Canada. Unfortunately,
the islands also had malaria, so a number of people
died over the two hundred years in which they were

(02:25):
producing sugar there. Hamilton's father abandoned his family in seventeen
sixty six. His mother died of yellow fever two years
later in February seventeen sixty eight, so he was orphaned,
probably at either eleven or thirteen, depending on which year
of birth was accurate. Hamilton and his older brother, James Junior,
moved in with a cousin who eventually died, and then

(02:46):
an uncle who also died. As I said, this is
an area that suffered huge casualties, largely from various tropical diseases.
After the death of his uncle, Hamilton was taken in
by Thomas Stevens, a merchant, and he was apprenticed with him.
Hamilton viewed this as the most formative part of his education,
learning how to track freight, chart courses for ships, and

(03:09):
calculate prices by different currencies. In his youth, Hamilton sent
poems and letters to the local newspaper. It was remarkable
because Hamilton did not have a formal education. It's says
that he was really smart and he kept learning. He
never attended school in the island, but when his mother
was alive, she taught him French and bought books for
him and his older brother to read. In seventeen seventy two,

(03:32):
impressed by Hamilton's quick learning abilities and intelligence, Hamilton's boss
sponsored the young clerk's trip to the United States to
attend school there. Hamilton began his preparation for college at
a grammar school in New Jersey and enrolled in what
was then called King's College in seventeen seventy four. It
becomes eventually Columbia University. Hamilton's enrollment of King's College speaks

(03:56):
to his astounding skills and intelligence to be admitted to
a university on his own terms, to be allowed to
enroll in any class for which he was qualified, and
to graduate as soon as he'd completed the minimum requirements.
After being denied admission at Princeton because of his unorthodox request,
Hamilton was admitted to King's College under the proposed arrangement

(04:19):
and subsequently assigned a special tutor. No, imagine, here's this
guy who shows up from the Caribbean and immediately begin
setting his own terms of life and gets away with it.
People are so impressed with how smart he is and
how hard he works that they keep bending over trying
to help him accommodate on his terms. During his time
at King's College, Hamilton's eloquence and genius took a political

(04:42):
application as the debates became more poised about the role
of the British Empire and whether or not we should
become independent. While he was a sophomore in the college,
Hamilton delivered an impromptu speech that passionately outlined the case
of the colonies against parliamentary injustices. Remember this is a
time time when Americans are arguing with themselves. Are they

(05:02):
really English and merely petitioning the crown to do whatever
the crown wants? Or are they really this new creature
called an American? Hamilton cited as somebody w himself had
no great roots anywhere that he was an American. He
also became well known for his publishing a series of
scathing but reasoned responses to the Continental Congress that were

(05:25):
published when Hamilton was eighteen years old. Well Hamilton was
in college, the Revolutionary War began, and in seventeen seventy
five he quit school to join the army. Now Hamilton
was an impressive leader. He was well organized, He knew
how to get supplies to that troops. He could get an
amazing number of things done, and George Washington, who is

(05:47):
in desperate need of competent help, asked Hamilton to become
his assistant, helping him plan battles write letters and manage
Washington's staff. Hamilton served in this position for four years. Now,
Remember they're in field the entire time. They're together every
single day, they truly get to know each other. Washington
gets in the habit of relying heavily on Hamilton and

(06:09):
realizing that this is one of the brightest people, if
not the brightest person, he's ever met. Hamilton often used
his writing skills to write to the Continental Congress asking
for food and supplies for General Washington's troops, and he
watched as the Continental Congress wrote the Decoration of Independence
and debated how to run the country. Now, Hamilton was

(06:30):
so smart and so widely read that with six months
of studying he passed the Bar exam without formal training.
It was just amazing. He had decided in January seventeen
eighty two he wanted to become a lawyer. He petitioned
the New York Supreme Court to let him take the
bar exam without the required three year internship. And after all,

(06:50):
he had served four years as an aid to Washington,
so they sort of fudged and said, well, that kind
of counts as an internship. Hamilton taught him self law.
Now to aid In his studies, Hamilton studied old New
York court cases and wrote his analysis in a book
he later published called Practical Proceedings in the Supreme Court
of New York. He wrote it at the age of

(07:12):
twenty five. This puts him in the same league as
Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote his famous history of the Naval
War of eighteen twelve and was published when he was
twenty five. Hamilton saw his book become the standard text
in New York legal studies for the rest of his life.
In October seventeen eighty two, Hamilton passed the bar and

(07:32):
was legally allowed to practice law in New York. Now,
by this stage, the war is winding down and which
would begin to be a national country, And this is
part of what makes Hamilton so important. Hamilton had a
vision of America as a country, not a collection of
thirteen colonies, or later on, not as a collection of
thirteen states, but rather as a truly national system. In

(07:56):
seventeen eighty one, Hamilton proposed to Robert Morris, who was
Congress's Superintendent of Finance, that we needed a national bank.
He also suggested the Congress of the power to raise
taxes at the time, the Continental Congress couldn't actually levy
any taxes. They had to ask the colonies and then
later when they became states, to voluntarily give them money.

(08:16):
But they didn't have any power to actually raise money.
So Morris liked Hamilton's ideas and fought for them in Congress.
Morris then appointed Hamilton to the possession of receiver of
Continental taxes in New York in May of seventeen eighty two.
Remember this is a few months before even passes the bar.
So he's inventing the national Bank, developing a tax system,

(08:39):
becoming the receiver of taxes in New York while he's
also studying to pass the bar. He accepted the position,
he didn't have much time to get collected taxes, and frankly,
at the point, there was no real power in that job.
He couldn't go in and subpoena people or send them
to jail, or do anything. That was all basically naggy.

(09:00):
But from October seventeen eighty two to August of seventeen
eighty three, basically from the time he passed the bar
to seventeen eighty three, he served in Congress as a
representative state of New York. While he was there, he
helped draft the peace treaty between the US and Great
Britain that ended the war. He proposed that naval activities

(09:20):
be banned from the Great Lakes between the US and
British controlled Canada. That suggestion was ignored him. By the way,
by eighteen twelve, naval power on the Great Lakes whod
become a real issue and one of the major points
of combat during the War of eighteen twelve. In August
of seventeen eighty three, after eight months as a congressman,
Hamilton returned to New York and finally used his law

(09:43):
degree to establish a legal practice. He represented several tories.
Remember there were about a third of the American people
actually were on the side of the British, a third
were for independence, and the third just wanted to hide.
The fact is as a lawyer, he felt people deserve representation,
so he represents I had a number of tories who
had various claims because their property had been stolen or

(10:04):
their bills hadn't been paid, and a lot of people
thought that Hamilton was betraying the New Country by this
kind of representation. But Hamilton really taking a position that
John Adams had taken after the Boston massacre when he
had defended the British soldiers in Boston. Hamilton thought that
the lawyer had applied the law that people deserved representation,

(10:26):
and that the war was over, that the time had
come to move forward, to look to the future, and
that going after the loyalists, as the Tories were called,
would simply weaken the country because it would drive people away,
which they did. A very substantial number of the wealthier
loyalist left America, went to Britain or to Canada. Hamilton,

(10:47):
in fact, had a very different view. In June of
seventeen eighty four, he defended a loyalist in the Rutgers
versus Waddington case, which rose from the Trespass Act of
seventeen eighty three. Hamilton argued that trestpac Act was inconsistent
with things in the Treaty of Peace that he had
helped write. Remember, he helps write the treaty, helps pass

(11:08):
the treaty, so he's now in court debating what the
treaty means, and he clearly has a great deal of expertise.
He was very worried that if the case was one
and the loyalist was punished. It would drive thousands of
loyalists away from New York, negatively impacting trade. He lost,
but Hamilton used the arguments he made in the case
as the basis for the Federalist Papers number twenty two

(11:31):
and seventy eight, where he argued, quote, the interpretation of
the law is the proper and peculiar province of the courts.
The case also set the state precedent for judicial review
established by the Supreme Court in eighteen oh three. Now,
Hamilton wanted a strong and powerful federal government. The truth is,
Hamilton felt more comfortable with an aristocratic government. If he

(11:54):
could have figured out a way to get there. He'd
love to have had George Washington as a new king,
but that's not where the country is going. His deeper
impact that really mattered was that he wanted to have
the nation come together, and he looked for things that
would bring together everybody into thinking themselves as Americans. Hamilton

(12:33):
maneuvered and worked very hard. He ended up playing a
major role in the Constitutional Convention, and he really understood
that it was very, very important that we become a
unified country. His role in the Convention was important, and
the Convention is an interesting example of two things we

(12:54):
tend not to remember. One it was a coup d eta.
The people who went to the Convention were sent to
the Convention to reform the Articles of Confederation. When they
got there, they looked around and said, this is crazy.
These things will never work. So without any kind of
basic approval from back home, they decided they'd write a
new constitution and completely replaced the Articles of Confederation. They

(13:18):
did a second thing which we often tend to forget.
They decided they'd meet in secret. So the most important
document defining America, the Constitution, is written in secret by
a group of people who have basically violated their rules
by giving themselves a much bigger assignment than they were
elected for. They have to work out an amazing number

(13:40):
of details, and it involves very deep political negotiation. They
finally come together with a program and they pass out
a constitution. Now, because they understood a little bit different
than some of our current leadership, that you couldn't sustain
something if it wasn't supported by the people, they said,

(14:04):
you know, all the states have to in fact endorse it.
I think nine of them had to endorse the Constitution
for it to go into effect. Well, that meant you
had to go back. Each state would have a different
way of doing it. Some would do it by vote,
some would do it by having the state legislature involved.
But each state had to find a way to ratify
the constitution. So here's this document which had been drafted

(14:27):
in secret, it's suddenly sprung in the country. It is
outlining a very complicated system which frankly, even today and
government class people have a hard time mastering all the
details of the Constitution. And Hamilton, along with two other people,
John Jay of New York and James Madison of Virginia,

(14:48):
decide to write what is in fact the most elegant
and most powerful campaign brochure ever written. And it's important
to think about that way. The Federloist papers nowadays seem
like this very sophisticated academic document that people study, but
that's not what it was. It was a collection of

(15:10):
eighty five articles essays written by Hamilton, Madison and Jay.
They appeared anonymously in New York newspapers in seventeen eighty
seven and seventeen eighty eight under the pen name Publius.
And I have to say, having spent large parts of
my life dealing with the Federalist papers. They're unbelievably brilliant. Now,

(15:33):
the vast majority of them were written by Hamilton. Fifty
two out of the eighty five are written by Hamilton.
They address every major question about the nature of the
new government. They walk people through the reasoning that led
the government to be designed the way it was. They
are far and away the best primary source for understanding

(15:55):
what the founding fathers intended. And they weren't. I remember
this country were probably only about a third of the
people could read. And here you have this document. When
I say campaign brochure, you just pick it up a
look at it. This wasn't some two page, fancy colored
document with seven pictures. This is pure print. And what

(16:16):
happened was, of course, relatively smart people read it and
then would sit around the tavern and explain it. So
the people who couldn't read were listening and asking questions
from the people who could read, and the net result
was one of the greatest educational moments in history. The
American people came together. They concluded both that it was

(16:37):
the right thing to do and that it was creating
a government which was legitimate. Now the Federalist Papers originally
were published primarily in two New York state newspapers, the
New York Packet and the Independent Journal. They were then
reprinted in other newspapers in New York and in cities
around the country. Then a bound edition was produced with

(16:58):
revisions and corrections by Hamton, and that was published in
seventeen eighty eight. Another edition would be published some thirty
years later by Jacob Gideon in eighteen eighteen with revisions
and corrections by Madison, which was the first one that
actually identified each essay by its author's name. So think
about that. You get this series of articles and newspapers
and then a book by Publius, and you end up

(17:22):
reading what the arguments are and you go, well, you
know they've really thought this through. And in fact, if
you take the time to read it, you'll realize that
Hamilton was a genius. He and Madison are the two
primary writers, and their grasp of the most important fundamentals
of freedom is just astonishing. I think as long as

(17:44):
humans want to understand how to be free, the Federalist
Papers will have a role to play and will be
a primary source document on the nature of freedom. Now,
while he's in the middle of creating a new country.
He also becomes a member of the board of trustees
of what used to Being's College when he went to it,
but now was Columbia College, which of course has evolved

(18:04):
into Columbia University. He helped develop a detailed outline of
the new academic departments and faculty appointments. He assisted in
analyzing their finances and budget allocations, and he would work
on the board at Columbia and serve Columbia for the
next twenty years until he died. While people always identify
Jefferson with founding the University of Virginia, the fact is

(18:27):
Hamilton was on the board of Columbia College long before
Jefferson got around to creating the University of Virginia. Hamilton's
most famous role is first Secretary of the Treasury. Washington
brought him in immediately. There were two great important jobs.
I think the most important was Secretary of Treasury. The
second most important was the Secretary of State. Jefferson has

(18:49):
made Secretary of State, Hamilton has made Secretary of the Treasury,
and they are amazingly different in their approach to things.
Jefferson as an intellectual, he spent a great deal of
time representing the United States in France. He watched the
early stages of the French Revolution. He was actually sympathetic

(19:10):
in the early days against the monarchy, even though the
monarchy had supported the United States and its War of Independence.
And then I think Jefferson, like everybody else, was horrified
as the French Revolution went crazy and began guillotining people,
imposing a dictatorship of the left. But he came home
he was very concerned about a strong central government. This

(19:31):
is one of the first places where he and Hamilton
have a profound disagreement. Jefferson agrees to support the new
Constitution only if Madison will carry a series of amendments,
which became known as the Bill of Rights. And it's
important to recognize it. Where Hamilton is trying to strengthen
the government, Jefferson is really worried that a strong government

(19:55):
will infringe on our liberties. By contrast, Hamilton had a
more idealized vision that humans could have power without being
corrupted by it. I would say that Jefferson was almost
certainly more correct about humans than Hamilton, but Hamilton was
almost certainly more correct about the economy and about how
money worked, and that makes it one of the most

(20:17):
amazing things in American history that you end up at
this magic moment. First of all with Washington, who is
the moral giant, the man of honor, the person everybody
relies on, the person on whose shoulders all of us stand,
the genuine father of his country. But Washington recognizes he
doesn't know all these details. That's not his strength. He'd

(20:40):
led a war for eight years. He was a great planner.
He's actually a very innovative planner who bread an entire
new species of more powerful mule. For example, he worked
very assiduously at understanding the business of running the largest
plantation in America. But Washington was a very good, very
shrewd selector of peace. He knew that Jefferson loved foreign affairs,

(21:03):
and Jefferson understood Europe, and he knew that Hamilton could
master finance. At a time when we'd had enormous inflation,
the money issued by the Continental Congress had collapsed in value.
There was a huge amount of debt held by the public,
there was a huge amount of debt held by the
Dutch and others. And the question was were we going

(21:25):
to dissolve into being incapable of paying our debts, having
our currency collapse and not being acceptable as a financial
risk around the world. Or were we going to in
fact fund the debt, pay it off, and pay off
the debt that we recrued overseas? And along comes Hamilton.

(21:47):
Hamilton is a student of Adam Smith, who published The
Wealth of Nations in seventeen seventy six as one of
the Great Magic Moments. The book, which most explains the
importance of freedom and markets, was published the same year
as The Declaration of Independence, which explains the importance of
political freedom, and the two go hand in hand, they
reinforce each other, and Hamilton understands what Smith is doing.

(22:10):
Smith's not a theoretician. He's not writing about theory. Smith
is an observer of a world that is emerging, the
world of manufacturing, the world of commerce, and he's describing
how it's working. When Smith has a section on the
needle factory and how efficient it is and how productive
it is, it's because he's actually been in a needle
factory and washed at work. And so Hamilton comes along.

(22:32):
I remember, now, he's been a lawyer, he's been an artilleryman,
he's been a personal aid, to General Washington. He's become
a lawyer. Now he pivots and he becomes a financier,
and he's brilliant enough that he gets right to the
heart of the matter. And there were twelve volumes of
Hamilton's personal papers. They were introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge,

(22:54):
who wrote this extraordinary explanation of Hamilton about eighteen and
Lodge says, Hamilton's genius was understanding facts, and he allowed
facts to then develop theories. He didn't start with theories
and try to twist the facts. And so Hamilton looked

(23:16):
at if you want a healthy country, and you want
to be able to have a sound credit, and in
a crisis, you want to be able to borrow money
from the Dutch and others, what do you have to
do And he said, well, first of all, you have
to acknowledge all of the debts coming out of the
Continental Congress during the war. Second, you have to acknowledge
all the debts that you signed your name for in

(23:37):
terms of the Dutch and others. And then you have
to build an ability to gradually pay him off. And
you did that by always running a small surplus and
taking that small surplus and what was called a sinking
fund and paying down the debt. Now, Hamilton also had
the advantage of studying what William Pitt the Younger had
done in Great Britain in the seventeen eighties, so he

(23:59):
knew this could work work. His problem was how do
you get it through a Congress, which isn't all that
excited about, first of all, the domestic debt, because what
had happened was a lot of the veterans who'd earned
these IOUs had sold them out of despair. So you
had speculators, many of them in New York and Massachusetts,

(24:20):
who had gone across the South, buying up these IOUs
sometimes at ten or fifteen cents on the dollar. And
now if you're going to actually pay them off, that
means that the veterans not going to get very much,
but all these speculators are going to get rich. Similarly,
in a Great American tradition, Congress wasn't all that excited

(24:43):
about raising hard taxes from its own people in order
to ship the money to the Dutch who had loaned
us the money with which we fought the war. So
Hamilton had to put together a political movement that would
be in favor of a national economy be in favor
of what we would go all sound money, and he
started by writing a report on the public credit, which

(25:06):
is an amazing document. It's probably as good an introduction
to thinking about finance as anybody ever has. He followed
it up about a year later by writing a report
on Manufactures, which is the best document ever written on
how a country can go about creating a strong manufacturing base.
It's one which, by the way, modern liberal economists hate

(25:28):
because it argues for focusing on America first and using
tariffs and other things to protect American jobs. Because if
you had a purely free trade environment in the seventeen nineties,
the British were so much more advanced than we were,
they would have wiped out all of our industries. And
so Hamilton, in a very practical way, says that's not

(25:49):
going to work. The way you have to do is
find a way to grow American jobs with American manufacturing,
and then pay off the debt from this growing economy.
He also proposed that there'd be a national bank, something
he'd talked about a decade earlier, and that the bank
would be independent from the government, but the government would
own twenty percent of the bank stock. Now potentially he

(26:11):
could get it through the Congress. There were some people
who argued that the Constitution does not give them the
power to establish a national bank. This was Jefferson's position,
but Washington stepped in and said, well, the Constitution can
be loosely interpreted, and he approved Hamilton's plan. So, with
Hamilton and Washington both in favor of the national bank,

(26:34):
it got created. Hamilton then turned his attention to establishing
a national currency, because again, remember up to this point,
you have all these states producing money, much as the
Scottish banks had each been producing their own money, and
you had this extraordinarily weak and frankly useless money that
the Continental Congress had created. So he establishes a national

(26:56):
mint and begins to put together with the MIT Act
of seventeen ninety two, creating a national currency. That led
to a fundamental split. There was a Federalist Party which

(27:32):
was deeply committed to the Constitution, deeply committed to a
national economy, in many ways biased in favor of New
England and New York and to some extent Pennsylvania. And
then there was a Democratic Republican Party which was really
the anti Federalist and that was created by Jefferson and Madison.
It used to be said in John F. Kennedy used

(27:54):
to use this line that Jefferson and Madison went to
New York butterfly collecting and to run into Erin Burgh,
who ran the political machine in New York, and the
three of them happened to create the Democratic Republican Party
while they were butterfly collecting. The butterfly collecting, I think
never actually happened, but was the cover for their trip.
Well to show you how successful Jefferson was as a politician.

(28:18):
The Federalist Party basically disappears by around eighteen twelve, and
the Democratic Republican Party evolves into the Democratic Party, and
it is today the longest surviving political party in the world.
It has an amazing capacity for adapting and mutating and evolving,
an enormous tenacity of survival. But Hamilton was the leader

(28:40):
of the Federalist Party, and Hamilton has created an economic
system heavily favoring the cities, heavily favoring manufacturing. Remember, if
you're a farmer in the South, in particular, you are
not all that happy to have manufacturing protected because that

(29:02):
raises the price of what you pay for, So there's
a certain bias in favor of lower tariffs and agricultural
areas and higher tariffs and manufacturing areas. The Federalist Party
represented the manufacturing side. Now at the same time, in
order to get all of this done, they had to
find some ability to have a mutual agreement. And the

(29:24):
pact they created with a great deal of negotiating was
a dinner that Madison and Jefferson had with Hamilton. At
the time, the government had moved initially to New York,
then had moved to Philadelphia. The Southerners really wanted the
government to be between Virginia and Maryland. The Northerners didn't

(29:44):
particularly want it to go that far south, but the
Southerners didn't particularly want to follow Hamilton's financial plans, and
so they cut a deal. Again less than about the
complexities of history. They negotiated for several months. They finally
thought they had a deal, and they sat down, had
dinner and looked at each other. Now, remember by this

(30:05):
stage they're both still in Washington's cabinet. Jefferson is still
the Secretary of State, Hamilton's still the Secutor of the Treasury.
Madison is in the Congress, but he's Jefferson's closest ally
and also probably the leading figure in the Congress. They're
both financing newspapers. I mean, Jefferson's subsidizing a newspaper whose

(30:25):
job it is to attack Hamilton. Hamilton is subsidizing a
newspaper whose job it is to attack Jefferson. And they
all know this. It's a very small town, but they
have this bigger problem. They've got to find a way
to create a sound currency, to create a sound economic policy,
and they need a place to put the government. And

(30:46):
so finally they agree. Jefferson gets the capital Washington, d c.
Between Virginia and Maryland, and Hamilton gets his economic policies,
and with that you have the birth of the modern
American system. Now in the middle of all that, Washington leaves,
and his successor was his vice president. Partially, I think

(31:09):
as a function of geographic equity, because Washington was from
Virginia and John Adams is from Massachusetts. So again it's
a step towards binding the country together. However, the Federalist Party,
which had been largely created by Hamilton, who had in fact,
as a part of that process, created all sorts of

(31:29):
mechanisms of propaganda, had built a political machine, but he
and Adams had a big falling out, and as a result,
Hamilton was very bitter about Adams. Adams found himself being undermined,
and in seventeen ninety six he had replaced Washington because
he had been vice president. By eighteen hundred, he has

(31:52):
lost so much popularity that he loses to Thomas Jefferson
in what in some ways is the first modern example
of a genuine opposition party peacefully taking power. Jefferson becomes president.
Hamilton is now basically out of power. The Federalists are
in fact declining rapidly, and Hamilton goes back to New

(32:17):
York to make money and begins to make a lot
of money. He founds the New York Evening Post and
this becomes the New York Post, a New York Post
founded in eighteen oh one oldest continuous newspaper in the
United States still publishing, and it is the fourth largest
newspaper in America. Founded by Alexander Hamilton, who on the

(32:39):
very first day had a statement of principles which was
co authored by the editor William Coleman and Alexander Hamilton.
It says quote. The design of this paper is to
diffuse among the people correct information on all interesting subjects,
to inculcate just principles in religion, morals, and politics, and

(33:00):
to cultivate a taste for sound literature. Hamilton at this
stage is successful, has been a national figure, has helped
invent the modern American system, and probably could have lived
a very long life except for the tragedy that Hamilton

(33:20):
tended to inspire hatred. Jefferson had people who disliked him,
but generally they didn't hate him Hamilton, partly, I think,
because he was so smart, and he was so aggressive,
he was so arrogant, that people who couldn't compete with
him intellectually just burned with hatred. Tragically for him, his
son was killed in a duel in eighteen oh one

(33:42):
defending his father's honor, and then Hamilton gets crosswise of Aaron. Now,
Aaron Burr is a genuine scoundrel, a truly bad man.
He'd been the boss of New York. He'd helped Jefferson
and Madison create the Democratic Party. But it was typical
of how how bad he was that when he and
Jefferson both agreed to run, Jefferson for president Burr for

(34:04):
vice president. Nobody had thought through that. The original constitution
didn't provide for any way to tell who was running
for president who was not, and it was all done
based on the number of electoral votes you got. I
think the theory in the oly days being that whoever
came in first would be president, whoever came in second
would be vice president, which is what had happened in

(34:27):
seventeen ninety six when Adams became president and Jefferson became
vice president. But in eighteen hundred, in a truly weird moment,
Burr and Jefferson were tied. Now everybody knew Burr was
supposed to be the vice president, but Burr saw an opportunity,
so he tried to become president. He was out maneuvered.

(34:50):
Hamilton spoke out against him, further increasing how much Burr
disliked Hamilton. Jefferson gets elected, Burr becomes vice president. He
then goes back to New York, runs for governor and loses,
with Hamilton once again speaking out against it. Hamilton is
the person that Burr thinks has ruined his life, so

(35:10):
Burr challenges him to a duel, and dueling back then
was very common. It begins to disappear about forty years later,
and one of the people who helped end dueling was
Abraham Lincoln. When he was challenged to a duel, the
person being challenged always gets to choose the weapons. Lincoln
chose shotguns at three feet and the other guy said,

(35:31):
why that would be murder. Lincoln said, right, you challenge me,
you want to have a duel, so these shotguns at
three feet. The guy said, okay, I didn't actually mean it,
and the duel disappeared. But at seven am on July eleventh,
eighteen oh four, in Weehawk and New Jersey, a town
where Hamilton's son had already been killed in a duel
three years earlier, Hamilton and Burr stood ten paces apart,

(35:54):
announced they were ready, turned and fired. Hamilton missed, probably deliberately.
Burr shot Hamilton just above his right hip, and the
next day Hamilton died in agony at forty nine years
of age. Now that of course sets up the drama
which becomes the musical, and it's interesting in some ways,

(36:15):
a little bit like Lincoln being killed immediately after winning
the war and the second inaugural, which then permanently placed
Lincoln in the unique position of being a martyr to
the country. Hamilton's death blocked him from any future involvement,
so we have no idea since he was only forty nine,
we have no idea what the next twenty or thirty
years or forty years would have been liked. But it

(36:37):
also meant that for a while he sort of disappeared.
It's one of the comments that Henry Cabot Lodge makes
in his introduction to Hamilton's twelve Volumes. And that was unfortunate.
I mean, the dominance of the Jeffersonians led to and
remember that they win with Jefferson, then they come back
and they win with Madison, and then they come back

(36:58):
and win again with Monroe. So you have a very
long Virginia dynasty which had followed eight years of George
Washington with only four years by Adams from Massachusetts. And
in that process Hamilton sort of ceases to be the
brilliant financial revolutionary who had unified the country, the extraordinary

(37:20):
propagandist who'd written the Federalist papers, the efficient staffer who'd
helped George Washington win the Revolutionary War, and Hamilton just
kind of faded for a while. He then began to
come back after the Civil War, as we became a
much more unified national country and people thought in national terms.
I think Hamilton is an immortal. I think that what

(37:42):
he did in creating the core system, funding the debt,
creating the framework in which America could be accepted by
other nations, establishing a national economy, creating a Bank of
the United States, all of these things came together, combined
with the sheer genius of the Federalist papers, and I

(38:02):
think that it's easy to look back and forget that
there was this relatively small handful of people Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison,
Hamilton among the key who changed the history of the world.
They made it possible for us to forget the divine
right of kings. They made it possible for us to
come to believe that we are truly all endowed by

(38:24):
our creator with certain unalienable rights. They made it possible
for us to imagine that a continent wide country could
govern itself, that the people of that country could in
fact be in a position to have better lives, to
create a nation, to develop a patriotism that transcended any
of the normal things which had split us apart, and

(38:45):
I think as we go through our own travise and
we have our own difficulties of figuring out who we
are and how we're going to operate, it's useful to
go back and look at these folks and realize that
every generation has to find some people who have that
kind of capacity, and that Hamilton is certainly worthy of
study as somebody who had a remarkable impact, born out

(39:07):
of wedlock, an orphan, self educated, and in the end,
one of the greatest of Americans. Thank you for listening
to Founding Father's Week on Newtsworld. You learn more about
Alexander Hamilton on our show page at newtsworld dot com.

(39:30):
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