August 3, 2022 • 21 mins
They say the personal is political. But the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton may be the most political of any relationship in history.
Hamilton is experiencing a well-deserved revival in recent years. His vision of America as an economic powerhouse with an aggressive government as its engine has found many followers. He helped get the Constitution ratified, found the Federalist Party, and served as the first Secretary of the Treasury. But Jefferson fought bitterly with Hamilton throughout their careers and articulated a very different vision for the new nation, promoting an agrarian democracy built upon geographic expansion—an "empire of liberty," he called it. These tensions remain embedded in the Constitution and in the debates that roil politics in America to this day.
Louis Masur is a Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. He received outstanding teaching awards from Rutgers, Trinity College, and the City College of New York, and won the Clive Prize for Excellence in Teaching from Harvard University. He is the author of many books including "Lincoln's Last Speech," which was inspired by a talk he presented at One Day University.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
My hope is that by the end of this evening
you will have a deeper understanding of what it means
to say that one is a Hamiltonian or a Jeffersonian
in terms of their political ideology and their worldviews. The
science of happiness, Appreciating modern painting, dilemmas of modern medicine.
Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War, history of the artistic
(00:22):
genius of nicel Angeli, When intuition fame, turning points that
changed American psychology of religion. One Day University. The most
acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures,
(00:43):
fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn you understand
and appreciate that. There's really only one way that I
can possibly begin this lecture. This is the story of
two founding brothers, not really brothers. They had different fathers
(01:05):
and mothers. Filled with hate. They called each other names.
George Washington thought they were both insane. Hamilton's was the best,
that Jefferson was gentry. If t J had his way,
he would have borrowed Hamilton's entry. But immigrant Alex had
something to prove. He wanted to move America in a
particular groove. Jefferson had his doubts. The two of them fought.
(01:25):
Here comes the story of the warfare they wrought. My
name is new Major. I'm a distinguished professor of American
Studies in history at Rucker's University. It's great. I tried
it out on my wife. She said, I don't remember
that from the play. The pilo was Hamilton's versus Jefferson,
the rivalry that shaped America. I love the way your
(01:48):
lecture begins with this wonderful reference to the musical Hamilton's.
Why is that important in our current context as a
history orion. I welcome anything that gets people interested in
American history and what has been fabulous about Hamilton's Besides
how great the play is and how creative and how
(02:10):
inventive is it suddenly has people asking questions, who were
these guys? What do they believe in? What's the real story?
And it's important to note that it's a play, it's
not a documentary. I don't think today you can give
a lecture on Hamilton's and Jefferson without acknowledging the significance
of the play and the interest in Hamilton's and so
(02:32):
I use that in a way at the beginning of
the lecture to sort of draw the audience in, but
also to invite them to understand that what I'm about
to explain is in some ways part of, but different
from the experience of seeing the player listening to the soundtrack.
The rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton's was about two very
different visions of government exactly. They fundamentally disagreed over the
(02:56):
role of government, the power of the federal government, the
extent to which government should be centralized or should be
left to the states and to the individuals, And a
lot of the policy issues over which they fought really
came down to differing opinions about the role of government. Well,
let's take Hamilton's first. He wanted a strong federal government
(03:18):
and also powers for the federal government that we're not
enumerated in the Constitution. Well, let's start first with the constitution,
because he's one of the pivotal figures for the creation
of the Constitution in the summer of seventeen seven. So
Hamilton's is among the first to recognize that the Articles
of Confederation were not working Articles of Confederation that was
(03:41):
the document agreed to win the Federation of the first
system of government under which the United States operated, indeed
even during the Revolutionary War, and carried over beyond the
Revolutionary War into the early seventeen eighties. But in post
Revolutionary America, with inflation, with needs to raise money, with
(04:02):
various other questions that were coming up, they realized that
this form of government was so loose, so weak. It
was a confederation, it was a general agreement among the
thirteen states, but they couldn't get anything done this financial
economic crisis that afflicts of the states in the immediate
years after the revolution seventy two seventeen eighty four. Hamilton's
(04:26):
is among a group of people who begin to realize
that perhaps something needs to be done. Is Jefferson the
big ideas guy and Hamilton's more the pragmatist. I think
that's a nice distinction how I think of it. As
I think of Jefferson as an idealist, Hamilton's is a realist.
(04:47):
You have to understand in Jefferson we have the consummate
Enlightenment figure. Many of you have probably heard the story,
but it's always worth retelling. In nineteen sixty two, John F.
Kennedy had all of the Nobel prize winners in the
Western world to the White House for dinner. And he
stands up and he says, there is more genius and
(05:11):
talent assembled in this room tonight, except when Thomas Jefferson
dined alone. That was Jefferson. The man was remarkable. He
was a polly math. He was a scientist. He was
a naturalist, a philosopher, an inventor. You cannot come up
(05:32):
with a field that he didn't pursue. He learned Latin,
he learned Greek, he learned French. He had trouble with German.
By the way, it's the only language that in trouble
with music. He loved music. He played the violin, apparently terribly.
John Adam said he couldn't stand listening. Jeffers said, play
the violin. He is the embodiment of the Enlightenment. He
(05:54):
is the sort of philosophy. He spends his whole life
redesigning Monticello. There's not a single piece of the of
the universe that didn't interest this guy, and that he
didn't write about. Hamilton's not so much. Hamilton's is much
more the practical politician. Uh, he understands that not so
(06:15):
much ideas, but interests motivate people, and that if we
can harness those interests, perhaps then we can create a
sort of productive society. What was Jefferson most worried about
over Hamilton's view of government and needing these additional powers.
(06:35):
Like anything, there's a spectrum, Jefferson Madison, the party that
will become the Democratic Republicans are worried about centralized authority
of any kind. They worry about their liberties being taken away.
For them, localism is what should govern. As long as
(06:55):
you can keep government close, as long as you could
keep an eye on it, as long as there's tendencies
towards tyranny, we're okay. The problem with Hamilton's is he
not only favored a strong central government. On the spectrum
of people who favored a strong central government, he tended
toward the more extreme side, and over time some people
(07:18):
saw him as becoming a little bit crazed with power,
wanting to be more and more authoritarian, thinking that perhaps
the United States needed a king like structure, perhaps believing
in hereditary government. Even the federalists on his side, including
John Adams. John Adams and Hamilton's also dislike each other.
They disagree fundamentally over this question of power. So we
(07:40):
have Jefferson in part to thank for the Bill of Rights.
In this debate over the Constitution. One of the reasons
why we get a Bill of Rights is because Jefferson
and Madison basically say, Okay, fine, if we're going to
give the government more power, what are we going to
do to assure the fact that the government will not
rob us of our rights at root? That's what the
(08:02):
debate is about. You talk about how the founding fathers
were actually suspicious of democracy. That's right. That's right in
the same way that too much power in the hands
of a single individual becomes tyrannical, too much power in
the hands of the people becomes anarchy. I think Hamilton's
(08:26):
is very early on someone who understands the importance of
the nation. The concept of the nation is going to
take a long time to development, but Hamilton's he had
a vision of a nation. Jefferson, it's the individual right,
it's individualism. Uh, it's it's freedom, it's it's the word
democracy is still an epithet in the eighteenth century. This
(08:49):
comes as a news to a lot of people. None
of them like the word democracy. And the problem with
democracies that put too much power in the hands of
the people who ultimately can't be trusted. Listen to this.
I walk around with random federalist papers, and I'm not
making any comment whatsoever about current events. I'm disclaiming right
(09:14):
now that this has anything to do with that. I
just want you to understand the anxiety that the founding
fathers had about the people. He said, we know from
experience that the people sometimes are and it is a
wonder that they so seldom are as they do, beset
as they continually are, by the wilds of parasites and sycophants,
(09:36):
by the stands of the ambitious, the avaricious, and the desperate,
by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more
than they deserve it, and of those who seek to
possess rather than to deserve it. That's Hamilton's Federalist number
seventy one. But so that's the other side of it, right,
(09:57):
you know, at the end of his life, Hamilton's is
gonna say democracy is our real disease, all right, I mean,
that's fine, But for Jefferson. Jefferson's famous saying is that
government is best which governs least Now we've talked about
Hamilton's being ahead of his time in terms of understanding
(10:20):
the important role of finance and economics, but it sounds
like Jefferson was also ahead of his time in appreciating
the importance of the role of the individual and the
wisdom of the collected populace, the people. I make this
argument that I think is right, that that Jefferson is
(10:42):
sort of optimistic, but he's backward looking. He wants to
preserve things the way they are in a certain fundamental sense.
Hamilton's the Realist, is much more pessimistic, but he's forward looking.
He really sees the direction in which American society is going,
and he helps to lead it. There the pessimism of
Hamilton's this this this sense that people are motivated by
(11:06):
self interest. They're not going to deny their self interests
for the good of the whole. And so therefore, once
we recognize that we can harness that we can harness
the power of people's self interests. Now, this is all
classical liberalism, and Hamilton's not alone and thinking of this.
Adam Smith at this time publishes The Wealth of Nations.
This is all lazy, fair economics. Let people basically do
(11:30):
their thing and in the end it will down to
the benefit of the society and the economy. Jefferson doesn't
want to unleash necessarily that kind of individual self interest.
He still believes in this older, what small our republican sense,
that people have to be moral, they have to be virtuous,
(11:50):
they have to be temperate and industrious, they have to
deny their self interest for the good of the community,
and only if the people move forward together there as
a whole in society prosper. There's a fundamental tension there
between the two of them on that question. Yeah, Um,
it is a rivalry that's personal, isn't it deeply personal?
(12:11):
And that's the thing that a lot of people don't
fully understand or appreciate, is that we venerate the founding fathers.
But they were deeply opposed on a number of issues,
and those opposition became not only political, but at times violent.
How do we know that the profound differences were not
(12:32):
just over matters of theory government. It's a great question.
And the reason why we know is we're fortunate enough
that the two of them could not help but write
lengthy letters to anyone who would listen. In which they
complained bitterly and denounced one another. And and they wrote
(12:54):
some of those letters to their boss. They wrote to
George Washington. People may not they served in the cab
of it together, right, Hamilton's secretary of the Treasury. Jefferson
is Secretary of State. So imagine these meetings with the
President and Washington. While he's sort of a federalist, he
stands above and beyond politics. So here's Jefferson's letter to
(13:15):
George Washington. He said, letter George ord top Serf, September nine,
everything right for us, Gary fit us. He's just warming up.
This entire letter is complaining about Alexander Hamilton's look at us.
There are no paragraphs. He is just blistering blue europe historian,
(13:40):
but also in this context a performer. Poor George Washington.
I mean, all the guy wants to do is like
retire and go back, you know, to mal Vernon. Well,
very few people expect a distinguished professor in suit and
tie to come out and begin by rapping. But I
think entertainment should be part of and is part of
(14:05):
of education. I think that's part of why I enjoy
lecturing for one day university. It's an opportunity not only
to present information, but to prevent it with passion, with engagement, uh,
to present it in a way so that people really
come to understand more than just the material that's being delivered.
The One Day University crowd they're amazing. Yeah, what do
(14:28):
you get from doing these lectures? I love doing it.
First of all, there's a tremendous energy. And while it's
wonderful to teach undergraduates, we all know that undergraduates have
a lot of other things going on and they're not
necessary at the point where they fully appreciate what it
is that you might be giving to them. The people
(14:48):
who come to One Day University are there to learn.
They understand what education means. They have a passion for
deepening their knowledge of various events. And it's delightful to
hear people say to me, oh, I wish I had
you when I was a junior or Saphram College. And
I remind them that they're romanticizing their college years. But
(15:08):
it's delightful to hear it because the fact is, at
different times in our lives, we're ready for something else
to learn, to take in to study, to move us along.
And in that sense, we're all lifelong learners. We venerate
both of these men, But what about their dark sides? Sure? Absolutely,
(15:30):
I mean we can't talk about Jefferson of course without
talking about Jefferson and slavery. Uh. It's the great enigma
of the great paradox. Uh. It troubles generation after generation,
and then well it should you know, how can the
man who wrote the line all men have created equal
not emancipate his own slaves? Uh? He understood that slavery
(15:50):
was wrong intellectually, and this goes back to the whole
idea of Jefferson as ideologue, but he can't ever really
get himself to the point of freeing him slaves, though
he lives long enough to predict that slavery's the institution
that's going through in some fundamental way under America. And Hamilton's,
for his side, is governed by personal passions. He has
(16:14):
an extra mental affair that he ends up talking about
publicly in all kinds of ways. His opponents cannot believe.
They're good luck that Hamilton would actually acknowledge this in
the seventeen nineties, and his ambition is so great that
some people see him as tending towards becoming the next Napoleon.
(16:34):
So there are these darker sides, deeper passions behind both men.
I'm not sure you could have the one necessarily without
the other, but it's important to see them, I think,
in their whole, in their totality. Is Hamilton's overrated today
because he's become something of a historical rock star as
(16:56):
a result of the extraordinary success of this music. Hamilton's
musical is not overrated. Hamilton's the man is He's He's
having his moment, and I think that that's great. I
think every so often we recover really important figures from
the past and reassess them. It's not surprising that in
this moment of Wall Street and capital and development and progress,
(17:22):
that suddenly, instead of Jefferson and Adams in Washington, Hamilton's
has been recovered. The other really important point that the
play makes that really helps us to understand what is
it about historical memories? Why do we venerate and remember
some figures and not others. Of course, part of the
answer for Hamilton's is very easy. He's killed by Aaron
(17:42):
Burr very early on. One of the things that happens
about history is the survivors get to write it, and
Adams and Jefferson live until eight They've got twenty two
years held the story of the revolution, and they begin
(18:03):
this amazing correspondence with one another. Again, I know I've
given you a few things to read tonight. Another thing
to look at is the Adams Jefferson correspondence in retirement.
Because these two hated each other, not the way, not
the way Hamilton's and Jefferson hated each other, I mean,
but they had violent political disagreements. Jefferson said of Adams
(18:23):
that his presidency was a reign of witches. So uh,
there was some nastiness there. But they heal those wounds,
and between eighteen thirteen and eighteen twenty six they have
this amazing correspondence in which they reflect upon all subjects,
including Hamilton's, and it gives them an opportunity to write
(18:45):
Hamilton's out of the story, and they do. And I
think that's part of what happened. It's part of why
the play has been so successful. It's kind of like
suddenly everybody woke up and said, we'll wait a minute,
there's this other Titanic figure there. What did he do?
And so um, And that's great because he is a
Titanic figure in in all kinds of important ways, but
(19:07):
like all of them, a complicated figure filled with paradox
is filled with tensions, a figure who changes over time.
So I don't think Hamilton's is overrated. I do think
because of the play, there's a certain romanticization, a certain
idealization that goes on. And that's what's so nice about
(19:29):
setting him intension with Jefferson, because you get to see
them not as single individuals to venerate, but as as
real life and humans who are battling one another. How
does this rivalry influence today's politics. I think we have
a tendency to idealize or romanticize the politics of the
(19:54):
Founding Fathers, and I would caution against that. Politics is
all ways filled with conflict, it's filled with difference, it's
filled with contest. There's a line that one can trace.
Now at sometimes is it more intense, more rancorous than
at other times? Sure? Absolutely, But we have to be
(20:14):
careful not to believe that the Founding Fathers were just
brilliant men engaged in the politics of trying to create
this new nation. They were, but they were human, They
had passions, they had personal opinions, power was always at stake,
and they weren't afraid to use it against one another.
(20:40):
I'm Richard Davies. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our
website one day you dot com to become a member
and access over six hundred full length video lectures from
the world's finance professors.
My hope is that by the end of this evening
you will have a deeper understanding of what it means
to say that one is a Hamiltonian or a Jeffersonian
in terms of their political ideology and their worldviews. The
science of happiness, Appreciating modern painting, dilemmas of modern medicine.
Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War, history of the artistic
(00:22):
genius of nicel Angeli, When intuition fame, turning points that
changed American psychology of religion. One Day University. The most
acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures,
(00:43):
fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn you understand
and appreciate that. There's really only one way that I
can possibly begin this lecture. This is the story of
two founding brothers, not really brothers. They had different fathers
(01:05):
and mothers. Filled with hate. They called each other names.
George Washington thought they were both insane. Hamilton's was the best,
that Jefferson was gentry. If t J had his way,
he would have borrowed Hamilton's entry. But immigrant Alex had
something to prove. He wanted to move America in a
particular groove. Jefferson had his doubts. The two of them fought.
(01:25):
Here comes the story of the warfare they wrought. My
name is new Major. I'm a distinguished professor of American
Studies in history at Rucker's University. It's great. I tried
it out on my wife. She said, I don't remember
that from the play. The pilo was Hamilton's versus Jefferson,
the rivalry that shaped America. I love the way your
(01:48):
lecture begins with this wonderful reference to the musical Hamilton's.
Why is that important in our current context as a
history orion. I welcome anything that gets people interested in
American history and what has been fabulous about Hamilton's Besides
how great the play is and how creative and how
(02:10):
inventive is it suddenly has people asking questions, who were
these guys? What do they believe in? What's the real story?
And it's important to note that it's a play, it's
not a documentary. I don't think today you can give
a lecture on Hamilton's and Jefferson without acknowledging the significance
of the play and the interest in Hamilton's and so
(02:32):
I use that in a way at the beginning of
the lecture to sort of draw the audience in, but
also to invite them to understand that what I'm about
to explain is in some ways part of, but different
from the experience of seeing the player listening to the soundtrack.
The rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton's was about two very
different visions of government exactly. They fundamentally disagreed over the
(02:56):
role of government, the power of the federal government, the
extent to which government should be centralized or should be
left to the states and to the individuals, And a
lot of the policy issues over which they fought really
came down to differing opinions about the role of government. Well,
let's take Hamilton's first. He wanted a strong federal government
(03:18):
and also powers for the federal government that we're not
enumerated in the Constitution. Well, let's start first with the constitution,
because he's one of the pivotal figures for the creation
of the Constitution in the summer of seventeen seven. So
Hamilton's is among the first to recognize that the Articles
of Confederation were not working Articles of Confederation that was
(03:41):
the document agreed to win the Federation of the first
system of government under which the United States operated, indeed
even during the Revolutionary War, and carried over beyond the
Revolutionary War into the early seventeen eighties. But in post
Revolutionary America, with inflation, with needs to raise money, with
(04:02):
various other questions that were coming up, they realized that
this form of government was so loose, so weak. It
was a confederation, it was a general agreement among the
thirteen states, but they couldn't get anything done this financial
economic crisis that afflicts of the states in the immediate
years after the revolution seventy two seventeen eighty four. Hamilton's
(04:26):
is among a group of people who begin to realize
that perhaps something needs to be done. Is Jefferson the
big ideas guy and Hamilton's more the pragmatist. I think
that's a nice distinction how I think of it. As
I think of Jefferson as an idealist, Hamilton's is a realist.
(04:47):
You have to understand in Jefferson we have the consummate
Enlightenment figure. Many of you have probably heard the story,
but it's always worth retelling. In nineteen sixty two, John F.
Kennedy had all of the Nobel prize winners in the
Western world to the White House for dinner. And he
stands up and he says, there is more genius and
(05:11):
talent assembled in this room tonight, except when Thomas Jefferson
dined alone. That was Jefferson. The man was remarkable. He
was a polly math. He was a scientist. He was
a naturalist, a philosopher, an inventor. You cannot come up
(05:32):
with a field that he didn't pursue. He learned Latin,
he learned Greek, he learned French. He had trouble with German.
By the way, it's the only language that in trouble
with music. He loved music. He played the violin, apparently terribly.
John Adam said he couldn't stand listening. Jeffers said, play
the violin. He is the embodiment of the Enlightenment. He
(05:54):
is the sort of philosophy. He spends his whole life
redesigning Monticello. There's not a single piece of the of
the universe that didn't interest this guy, and that he
didn't write about. Hamilton's not so much. Hamilton's is much
more the practical politician. Uh, he understands that not so
(06:15):
much ideas, but interests motivate people, and that if we
can harness those interests, perhaps then we can create a
sort of productive society. What was Jefferson most worried about
over Hamilton's view of government and needing these additional powers.
(06:35):
Like anything, there's a spectrum, Jefferson Madison, the party that
will become the Democratic Republicans are worried about centralized authority
of any kind. They worry about their liberties being taken away.
For them, localism is what should govern. As long as
(06:55):
you can keep government close, as long as you could
keep an eye on it, as long as there's tendencies
towards tyranny, we're okay. The problem with Hamilton's is he
not only favored a strong central government. On the spectrum
of people who favored a strong central government, he tended
toward the more extreme side, and over time some people
(07:18):
saw him as becoming a little bit crazed with power,
wanting to be more and more authoritarian, thinking that perhaps
the United States needed a king like structure, perhaps believing
in hereditary government. Even the federalists on his side, including
John Adams. John Adams and Hamilton's also dislike each other.
They disagree fundamentally over this question of power. So we
(07:40):
have Jefferson in part to thank for the Bill of Rights.
In this debate over the Constitution. One of the reasons
why we get a Bill of Rights is because Jefferson
and Madison basically say, Okay, fine, if we're going to
give the government more power, what are we going to
do to assure the fact that the government will not
rob us of our rights at root? That's what the
(08:02):
debate is about. You talk about how the founding fathers
were actually suspicious of democracy. That's right. That's right in
the same way that too much power in the hands
of a single individual becomes tyrannical, too much power in
the hands of the people becomes anarchy. I think Hamilton's
(08:26):
is very early on someone who understands the importance of
the nation. The concept of the nation is going to
take a long time to development, but Hamilton's he had
a vision of a nation. Jefferson, it's the individual right,
it's individualism. Uh, it's it's freedom, it's it's the word
democracy is still an epithet in the eighteenth century. This
(08:49):
comes as a news to a lot of people. None
of them like the word democracy. And the problem with
democracies that put too much power in the hands of
the people who ultimately can't be trusted. Listen to this.
I walk around with random federalist papers, and I'm not
making any comment whatsoever about current events. I'm disclaiming right
(09:14):
now that this has anything to do with that. I
just want you to understand the anxiety that the founding
fathers had about the people. He said, we know from
experience that the people sometimes are and it is a
wonder that they so seldom are as they do, beset
as they continually are, by the wilds of parasites and sycophants,
(09:36):
by the stands of the ambitious, the avaricious, and the desperate,
by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more
than they deserve it, and of those who seek to
possess rather than to deserve it. That's Hamilton's Federalist number
seventy one. But so that's the other side of it, right,
(09:57):
you know, at the end of his life, Hamilton's is
gonna say democracy is our real disease, all right, I mean,
that's fine, But for Jefferson. Jefferson's famous saying is that
government is best which governs least Now we've talked about
Hamilton's being ahead of his time in terms of understanding
(10:20):
the important role of finance and economics, but it sounds
like Jefferson was also ahead of his time in appreciating
the importance of the role of the individual and the
wisdom of the collected populace, the people. I make this
argument that I think is right, that that Jefferson is
(10:42):
sort of optimistic, but he's backward looking. He wants to
preserve things the way they are in a certain fundamental sense.
Hamilton's the Realist, is much more pessimistic, but he's forward looking.
He really sees the direction in which American society is going,
and he helps to lead it. There the pessimism of
Hamilton's this this this sense that people are motivated by
(11:06):
self interest. They're not going to deny their self interests
for the good of the whole. And so therefore, once
we recognize that we can harness that we can harness
the power of people's self interests. Now, this is all
classical liberalism, and Hamilton's not alone and thinking of this.
Adam Smith at this time publishes The Wealth of Nations.
This is all lazy, fair economics. Let people basically do
(11:30):
their thing and in the end it will down to
the benefit of the society and the economy. Jefferson doesn't
want to unleash necessarily that kind of individual self interest.
He still believes in this older, what small our republican sense,
that people have to be moral, they have to be virtuous,
(11:50):
they have to be temperate and industrious, they have to
deny their self interest for the good of the community,
and only if the people move forward together there as
a whole in society prosper. There's a fundamental tension there
between the two of them on that question. Yeah, Um,
it is a rivalry that's personal, isn't it deeply personal?
(12:11):
And that's the thing that a lot of people don't
fully understand or appreciate, is that we venerate the founding fathers.
But they were deeply opposed on a number of issues,
and those opposition became not only political, but at times violent.
How do we know that the profound differences were not
(12:32):
just over matters of theory government. It's a great question.
And the reason why we know is we're fortunate enough
that the two of them could not help but write
lengthy letters to anyone who would listen. In which they
complained bitterly and denounced one another. And and they wrote
(12:54):
some of those letters to their boss. They wrote to
George Washington. People may not they served in the cab
of it together, right, Hamilton's secretary of the Treasury. Jefferson
is Secretary of State. So imagine these meetings with the
President and Washington. While he's sort of a federalist, he
stands above and beyond politics. So here's Jefferson's letter to
(13:15):
George Washington. He said, letter George ord top Serf, September nine,
everything right for us, Gary fit us. He's just warming up.
This entire letter is complaining about Alexander Hamilton's look at us.
There are no paragraphs. He is just blistering blue europe historian,
(13:40):
but also in this context a performer. Poor George Washington.
I mean, all the guy wants to do is like
retire and go back, you know, to mal Vernon. Well,
very few people expect a distinguished professor in suit and
tie to come out and begin by rapping. But I
think entertainment should be part of and is part of
(14:05):
of education. I think that's part of why I enjoy
lecturing for one day university. It's an opportunity not only
to present information, but to prevent it with passion, with engagement, uh,
to present it in a way so that people really
come to understand more than just the material that's being delivered.
The One Day University crowd they're amazing. Yeah, what do
(14:28):
you get from doing these lectures? I love doing it.
First of all, there's a tremendous energy. And while it's
wonderful to teach undergraduates, we all know that undergraduates have
a lot of other things going on and they're not
necessary at the point where they fully appreciate what it
is that you might be giving to them. The people
(14:48):
who come to One Day University are there to learn.
They understand what education means. They have a passion for
deepening their knowledge of various events. And it's delightful to
hear people say to me, oh, I wish I had
you when I was a junior or Saphram College. And
I remind them that they're romanticizing their college years. But
(15:08):
it's delightful to hear it because the fact is, at
different times in our lives, we're ready for something else
to learn, to take in to study, to move us along.
And in that sense, we're all lifelong learners. We venerate
both of these men, But what about their dark sides? Sure? Absolutely,
(15:30):
I mean we can't talk about Jefferson of course without
talking about Jefferson and slavery. Uh. It's the great enigma
of the great paradox. Uh. It troubles generation after generation,
and then well it should you know, how can the
man who wrote the line all men have created equal
not emancipate his own slaves? Uh? He understood that slavery
(15:50):
was wrong intellectually, and this goes back to the whole
idea of Jefferson as ideologue, but he can't ever really
get himself to the point of freeing him slaves, though
he lives long enough to predict that slavery's the institution
that's going through in some fundamental way under America. And Hamilton's,
for his side, is governed by personal passions. He has
(16:14):
an extra mental affair that he ends up talking about
publicly in all kinds of ways. His opponents cannot believe.
They're good luck that Hamilton would actually acknowledge this in
the seventeen nineties, and his ambition is so great that
some people see him as tending towards becoming the next Napoleon.
(16:34):
So there are these darker sides, deeper passions behind both men.
I'm not sure you could have the one necessarily without
the other, but it's important to see them, I think,
in their whole, in their totality. Is Hamilton's overrated today
because he's become something of a historical rock star as
(16:56):
a result of the extraordinary success of this music. Hamilton's
musical is not overrated. Hamilton's the man is He's He's
having his moment, and I think that that's great. I
think every so often we recover really important figures from
the past and reassess them. It's not surprising that in
this moment of Wall Street and capital and development and progress,
(17:22):
that suddenly, instead of Jefferson and Adams in Washington, Hamilton's
has been recovered. The other really important point that the
play makes that really helps us to understand what is
it about historical memories? Why do we venerate and remember
some figures and not others. Of course, part of the
answer for Hamilton's is very easy. He's killed by Aaron
(17:42):
Burr very early on. One of the things that happens
about history is the survivors get to write it, and
Adams and Jefferson live until eight They've got twenty two
years held the story of the revolution, and they begin
(18:03):
this amazing correspondence with one another. Again, I know I've
given you a few things to read tonight. Another thing
to look at is the Adams Jefferson correspondence in retirement.
Because these two hated each other, not the way, not
the way Hamilton's and Jefferson hated each other, I mean,
but they had violent political disagreements. Jefferson said of Adams
(18:23):
that his presidency was a reign of witches. So uh,
there was some nastiness there. But they heal those wounds,
and between eighteen thirteen and eighteen twenty six they have
this amazing correspondence in which they reflect upon all subjects,
including Hamilton's, and it gives them an opportunity to write
(18:45):
Hamilton's out of the story, and they do. And I
think that's part of what happened. It's part of why
the play has been so successful. It's kind of like
suddenly everybody woke up and said, we'll wait a minute,
there's this other Titanic figure there. What did he do?
And so um, And that's great because he is a
Titanic figure in in all kinds of important ways, but
(19:07):
like all of them, a complicated figure filled with paradox
is filled with tensions, a figure who changes over time.
So I don't think Hamilton's is overrated. I do think
because of the play, there's a certain romanticization, a certain
idealization that goes on. And that's what's so nice about
(19:29):
setting him intension with Jefferson, because you get to see
them not as single individuals to venerate, but as as
real life and humans who are battling one another. How
does this rivalry influence today's politics. I think we have
a tendency to idealize or romanticize the politics of the
(19:54):
Founding Fathers, and I would caution against that. Politics is
all ways filled with conflict, it's filled with difference, it's
filled with contest. There's a line that one can trace.
Now at sometimes is it more intense, more rancorous than
at other times? Sure? Absolutely, But we have to be
(20:14):
careful not to believe that the Founding Fathers were just
brilliant men engaged in the politics of trying to create
this new nation. They were, but they were human, They
had passions, they had personal opinions, power was always at stake,
and they weren't afraid to use it against one another.
(20:40):
I'm Richard Davies. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our
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