HAMILTON.
Next to the august name of the President should be mentioned that great
man who, as a statesman, towered above all his compeers, even in that
assembly of great men,--Alexander Hamilton.
This eminent person is probably less well known to the nation at the
present day, than most of the leading statesmen of the Revolution. There
are causes for this in his history. He never attained to that high
office which has conferred celebrity on inferior men. The political
party of which he was one of the founders and one of the chief leaders
became unpopular with the great body of his countrymen before it was
extinct. His death, too, at the early age of forty-seven, while it did
not leave an unfinished character, left an unfinished career, for the
contemplation of posterity. In this respect, his fate was unlike that of
nearly all his most distinguished contemporaries. Washington, Adams,
Jefferson, Madison, Jay, and in fact almost all the prominent statesmen
of the Revolution, died in old age or in advanced life, and after the
circle of their public honors and usefulness had been completed.
Hamilton was cut off at a period of life when he may be said to have had
above a third of its best activity yet before him: and this is doubtless
one cause why so little is popularly known, by the present generation,
of him who was by far the greatest statesman of the Revolutionary age.
It is known, indeed, traditionally, what a thrill of horror--what a
sharp, terrible pang--ran through the nation, proving the comprehension
by the entire people of what was lost, when Aaron Burr took from his
country and the world that important life. In the most distant
extremities of the Union, men felt that one of the first intellects of
the age had been extinguished. From the utmost activity and public
consideration, in the fulness of his strength and usefulness, the bullet
of a duellist had taken the first statesman in America;--a man who,
while he had not been without errors, and while his life had not been
without mistakes, had served his country, from his boyhood to that hour
of her bitter bereavement, with an elevation of purpose and a force of
intellect never exceeded in her history, and which had caused Washington
to lean upon him and to trust him, as he trusted and leaned upon no
other man, from first to last. The death of such a man, under such
circumstances, cast a deep gloom over the face of society; and Hamilton
was mourned by his contemporaries with a sorrow founded on a just
appreciation of his greatness, and of what they owed to his intellect
and character. But by the generations that have succeeded he has been
less intimately known than many of his compatriots, who lived longer,
and reached stations which he never occupied.
He was born in the island of St. Christopher's, in the year 1757; his
mother being a native of that island, and his father being a Scotchman.
At the age of fifteen, after having been for three years in the
counting-house of a merchant at Santa Cruz, he was sent to New York to
complete his education, and was entered as a private student in King's
(now Columbia) College. At the age of seventeen, his political life was
already begun; for at that age, and while still at college, he wrote and
published a series of essays on the Rights of the Colonies, which
attracted the attention of the whole country. These essays appeared in
1774, in answer to certain pamphlets on the Tory side of the
controversy; and in them Hamilton reviewed and vindicated the whole of
the proceedings of the first Continental Congress. There are displayed
in these papers a power of reasoning and sarcasm, a knowledge of the
principles of government and of the English Constitution, and a grasp of
the merits of the whole controversy, that would have done honor to any
man at any age, and in a youth of seventeen are wonderful. To say that
they evince precocity of intellect, gives no idea of their main
characteristics. They show great maturity;--a more remarkable maturity
than has ever been exhibited by any other person, at so early an age, in
the same department of thought. They produced, too, a great effect.
Their influence in bringing the public mind to the point of resistance
to the mother country, was important and extensive.
Before he was nineteen years old, Hamilton entered the army as a captain
of artillery; and when only twenty, in 1777, he was selected by
Washington to be one of his aides-de-camp, with the rank of
lieutenant-colonel. In this capacity he served until 1782, when he was
elected a member of Congress from the State of New York, and took his
seat. In 1786, he was chosen a member of the legislature of New York. In
1787, he was appointed as a delegate to the Convention which framed the
Constitution. In the following year, when only thirty years old, he
published, with Madison and Jay, the celebrated essays called "The
Federalist," in favor of the form of government proposed by the
Convention. In 1788, he became a member of the State Convention of New
York, called to ratify the Constitution, and it was chiefly through his
influence that it was adopted in that State. In 1789, he took office in
Washington's administration, as Secretary of the Treasury. In 1795, he
retired to the practice of the law in the city of New York. In 1798, at
Washington's absolute demand, he was appointed second in command of the
provisional army, raised under the elder Adams's administration, to
repel an apprehended invasion of the French. On the death of Washington,
in 1799, he succeeded to the chief command. When the army was disbanded,
he again returned to the bar, and practised with great reputation until
the year 1804, when his life was terminated in a duel with Colonel
Burr, concerning which the sole blame that has ever been imputed to
Hamilton is, that he felt constrained to accept the challenge.
His great characteristic was his profound insight into the principles of
government. The sagacity with which he comprehended all systems, and the
thorough knowledge he possessed of the working of all the freer
institutions of ancient and modern times, united with a singular
capacity to make the experience of the past bear on the actual state of
society, rendered him one of the most useful statesmen that America has
known. Whatever in the science of government had already been
ascertained; whatever the civil condition of mankind in any age had made
practicable or proved abortive; whatever experience had demonstrated;
whatever the passions, the interests, or the wants of men had made
inevitable,--he seemed to know intuitively. But he was no theorist. His
powers were all eminently practical. He detected the vice of a theory
instantly, and shattered it with a single blow.
His knowledge, too, of the existing state of his own and of other
countries was not less remarkable than his knowledge of the past. He
understood America as thoroughly as the wisest of his contemporaries,
and he comprehended Europe more completely than any other man of that
age upon this continent.[401]
To these characteristics he added a clear logical power in statement, a
vigorous reasoning, a perfect frankness and moral courage, and a lofty
disdain of all the arts of a demagogue. His eloquence was distinguished
for correctness of language and distinctness of utterance, as well as
for grace and dignity.
In theory, he leaned decidedly to the constitution of England, as the
best form of civil polity for the attainment of the great objects of
government. But he was not, on that account, less a lover of liberty
than those who favored more popular and democratic institutions. His
writings will be searched in vain for any disregard of the natural
rights of mankind, or any insensibility to the blessings of freedom. It
was because he believed that those blessings can be best secured by
governments in which a change of rulers is not of frequent occurrence,
that he had so high an estimate of the English Constitution. At the
period of the Convention, he held that the chief want of this country
was a government into which the element of a permanent tenure of office
could be largely infused; and he read in the Convention--as an
illustration of his views, but without pressing it--a plan by which the
Executive and the Senate could hold their offices during good behavior.
But the idea, which has sometimes been promulgated, that he desired the
establishment of a monarchical government in this country, is without
foundation. At no period of his life did he regard that experiment as
either practicable or desirable.
Hamilton's relation to the Constitution is peculiar. He had less direct
agency in framing its chief provisions than many of the other principal
persons who sat in the Convention; and some of its provisions were not
wholly acceptable to him when framed. But the history, which has been
detailed in the previous chapters of this work, of the progress of
federal ideas, and of the efforts to introduce and establish principles
tending to consolidate the Union, has been largely occupied with the
recital of his opinions, exertions, and prevalent influence. Beginning
with the year 1780, when he was only three-and-twenty years of age, and
when he sketched the outline of a national government strongly
resembling the one which the Constitution long afterwards established;
passing through the term of his service in Congress, when his admirable
expositions of the revenue system, the commercial power, and the ratio
of contribution, may justly be said to have saved the Union from
dissolution; and coming down to the time when he did so much to bring
about, first, the meeting at Annapolis, and then the general and final
Convention of all the States;--the whole period is marked by his wisdom
and filled with his power. He did more than any other public man of the
time to lessen the force of State attachments, to create a national
feeling, and to lead the public mind to a comprehension of the necessity
for an efficient national sovereignty.
Indeed, he was the first to perceive and to develop the idea of a real
union of the people of the United States. To him, more than to any one
else, is to be attributed the conviction that the people of the
different States were competent to establish a general government by
their own direct action; and that this mode of proceeding ought to be
considered within the contemplation of the State legislatures, when they
appointed delegates to a convention for the revision and amendment of
the existing system.[402]
The age in which he lived, and the very extraordinary early maturity of
his character, naturally remind us of that remarkable person who was two
years his junior, and who became prime-minister of England at the age of
twenty-four. The younger Pitt entered public life with almost every
possible advantage. Inheriting "a great and celebrated name,"[403]
educated expressly for the career of a statesman, and introduced into
the House of Commons at a moment when power was just ready to drop into
the hands of any man capable of wielding it, he had only to prove
himself a brilliant and powerful debater, in order to become the ruler
of an empire, whose constitution had been settled for ages, and was
necessarily administered by the successful leaders of regular parties in
its legislative body. That he was a most eminent parliamentary orator, a
consummate tactician and leader of party, a minister of singular energy,
and a statesman of a very high order of mind and character, at an age
when most men are scarcely beginning to give proofs of what they may
become,--all this History has deliberately and finally recorded. What
place it may assign to him among the statesmen by whose lives and
actions England and the world have been materially and permanently
benefited is not yet settled, and it is not to the present purpose to
consider.
The theatre in which Hamilton appeared, lived, and acted, was one of a
character so totally different, that the comparison necessarily ends
with the contrast which it immediately suggests. Like Pitt, indeed, he
seems to have been born a statesman, and to have had no such youth as
ordinarily precedes the manhood of the mind. But, in the American
colonies, no political system of things existed that was fitted to train
him for a career of usefulness and honor; and yet, when the years of his
boyhood were hardly ended, he sprang forth into the troubled affairs of
the time, with the full stature of a matured and well-furnished
statesman. He, in truth, showed himself to be already the man that was
wanted. Every thing was in an unsettled and anxious state;--a state of
change and transition. There was no regular, efficient government. It
was all but a state of civil war, and the more clear-sighted saw that
this great disaster was coming. He was compelled, therefore, to mark out
for himself, step by step, beginning in 1774, a system of political
principles which should serve, not to administer existing institutions
with wisdom and beneficence, but to create institutions able to unite a
people divided into thirteen independent sovereignties; to give them the
attitude and capacity of an independent nation; and then to carry them
on, with constantly increasing prosperity and power, to their just place
in the affairs of the world. It was a great work, but Mr. Hamilton was
equal to it. He was by nature, by careful study, and by still more
careful, anxious, and earnest thought, eminently fitted to detect and
develop those resources of power and progress, which, in the dark
condition of society that attends and follows an exhausting period of
revolution, lie hidden, like generous seeds, until some strong hand
disencumbers them of the soil with which they had been oppressed, and
gives them opportunity to germinate and bear golden fruit. At the age of
three-and-twenty he had already formed well-defined, profound, and
comprehensive opinions on the situation and wants of these States. He
had clearly discerned the practicability of forming a confederated
government, and adapting it to their peculiar condition, resources, and
exigencies. He had wrought out for himself a political system, far in
advance of the conceptions of his contemporaries, and one which, in the
hands of those who most opposed him in life, became, when he was laid
in a premature grave, the basis on which this government was
consolidated; on which, to the present day, it has been administered;
and on which alone it can safely rest in that future, which seems so to
stretch out its unending glories before us.
Mr. Hamilton, therefore, I conceive, proved himself early to be a
statesman of greater talent and power than the celebrated English
minister whose youthful success was in the eyes of the world so much
more brilliant, and whose early death was no less disheartening; for
none can doubt, that to build up a free and firm state out of a
condition of political chaos, and to give it a government capable of
developing the resources of its soil and people, and of insuring to it
prosperity, power, and permanence, is a greater work than to administer
with energy and success--even in periods of severe trial--the
constitution of an empire whose principles and modes of action have been
settled for centuries.
Hamilton was one of those statesmen who trust to the efficacy of the
press for the advancement and inculcation of correct principles of
public policy, and who desire to accomplish important results mainly
through the action of an enlightened public opinion. That he had faith
in the intelligence and honesty of his countrymen, is proved by the
numerous writings which he constantly addressed to their reason and good
sense, in the shape of essays or letters, from the beginning to the end
of his career, upon subjects on which it was important that they should
act with wisdom and principle.
His own opinions, although held with great firmness, were also held in
subordination to what was practicable. It was the rare felicity of his
temperament, to be able to accept a less good than his principles might
have led him to insist upon, and to labor for it, when nothing better
could be obtained, with as much patriotic energy and zeal as if it had
been the best result of his own views. The Constitution itself remains,
in this particular, a monument of the disinterestedness of his
character. He thought it had great defects. But he accepted it, as the
best government that the wisdom of the Convention could frame, and the
best that the nation would adopt. In this spirit, as soon as it was
promulgated for the acceptance of the country, he came forward and
placed himself in the foremost rank of its advocates, making himself,
for all future time, one of the chief of its authoritative expounders.
He was very ably assisted in the Federalist by Madison and Jay; but it
was from him that the Federalist derived the weight and the power which
commanded the careful attention of the country, and carried conviction
to the great body of intelligent men in all parts of the Union. The
extraordinary forecast with which its luminous discussions anticipated
the operation of the new institutions, and its profound elucidation of
their principles, gave birth to American constitutional law, which was
thus placed at once above the field of arbitrary constructions and in
the domain of legal truth. They made it a science; and so long as the
Constitution shall exist, they will continue to be resorted to as the
most important source of contemporaneous interpretation which the annals
of the country afford.[404]
In the two paramount characters of statesman and jurist, in the
comprehensive nature of his patriotism, in his freedom from sectional
prejudices, in his services to the Union, and in the kind and magnitude
of his intellect, posterity will recognize a resemblance to him whom
America still mourns with the freshness of a recent grief, and who has
been to the Constitution, in the age that has succeeded, what Hamilton
was in the age that witnessed its formation and establishment. Without
the one of these illustrious men, the Constitution probably would never
have existed; without the other, it might have become a mere record of
past institutions, whose history had been glorious until faction and
civil discord had turned it into a record of mournful recollections.
The following sentences, written by Hamilton soon after the adjournment
of the Convention, contain a clew to all his conduct in support of the
plan of government which that body recommended:--"It may be in me a
defect of political fortitude, but I acknowledge that I cannot feel an
equal tranquillity with those who affect to treat the dangers of a
longer continuance in our present situation as imaginary. A nation
without a national government is an awful spectacle. The establishment
of a constitution, in a time of profound peace, by the voluntary consent
of a whole people, is a prodigy, to the completion of which I look
forward with trembling anxiety."
FOOTNOTES:
[401] While these sheets are passing through the press, Mr. Ticknor
writes to me as follows: "One day in January, 1819, talking with Prince
Talleyrand, in Paris, about his visit to America, he expressed the
highest admiration of Mr. Hamilton, saying, among other things, that he
had known nearly all the marked men of his time, but that he had never
known one, on the whole, equal to him. I was much surprised and
gratified with the remark; but still, feeling that, as an American, I
was in some sort a party concerned by patriotism in the compliment, I
answered with a little reserve, that the great military commanders and
the great statesmen of Europe had dealt with larger masses and wider
interests than he had. 'Mais, Monsieur,' the Prince instantly replied,
'Hamilton avoit _deviné_ l'Europe.'"
[402] See his first speech in the Convention, as reported by Mr.
Madison.
[403] Burke, speaking of Lord Chatham.
[404] The current editions of the Federalist are taken from an edition
published at Washington in 1818, by Jacob Gideon, in which the numbers
written by Mr. Madison purport to have been corrected by himself. There
had been three editions previous to this. The first edition was
published in 1788, in two small volumes, by J. & A. McLean, 41 Hanover
Square, New York, under the following title: "The Federalist: a
Collection of Essays written in Favor of the New Constitution, as agreed
upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787." The first volume
was issued before the last of the essays were written, and the second
followed it, as soon as the series was completed. The authentic text of
the work is to be found in this edition; two of the authors were in the
city of New York at the time it was printed, and probably superintended
it. It was reissued from the same type, in 1789, by John Tiebout, 358
Pearl Street, New York. A second edition was published in 1802, at New
York, in two volumes, containing also "Pacificus on the Proclamation of
Neutrality, and the Constitution, with its Amendments." A third edition
was published in 1810, by Williams & Whiting, New York. I have seen
copies of the first and second editions only, in the library of Peter
Force, Esq., of Washington, editor of the "American Archives." There are
some discrepancies between the text of the first edition and that of
1818, from which the current editions are taken. By whom or on what
authority the alterations were made, I have not been able to ascertain,
nor have I learned when, or why, or how far Mr. Madison may have
corrected or altered the papers which he wrote. Such of the changes as I
have examined do not materially affect the sense; but it is very
desirable that the true text of the Federalist should be reproduced.
That text exists in the first edition, which was issued while the
Constitution was before the people of the United States for their
ratification; and as the Federalist was an argument addressed to the
people in favor of the adoption of the Constitution, the exact text of
that argument, as it was read and acted upon, ought to be restored,
without regard to the reasons which may have led any of the writers, or
any one else, to alter it. I know of no evidence that Colonel Hamilton
ever made or sanctioned the alteration of a word. After the text of the
Constitution itself, there is scarcely any thing the preservation of
which is more important than the text of the Federalist as it was first
published.