Alexander Hamilton: The man who imagined America | LIVE EVENT

ladies and gentlemen can we come to order please my name is Chris DeMuth I'm president of the American Enterprise Institute and I'm delighted to welcome you all here this evening for the opening lecture in our 16th annual Bradley lecture series which runs monthly throughout the academic year September through June and which has been sponsored from the very beginning by the line and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee and we are very grateful to the foundation and its trustees for their constant support the schedule for the year is in brochures which many of you have seen for the rest of you they are available in the reception room we're following this evenings a lecture and a discussion period afterwards we will hold a reception in honor of our lecturer Ron chernow the opening lecture is titled Alexander Hamilton the man who imagined America it is of course based upon mr. Turner's book Alexander Hamilton which was published by the penguin press in the spring it is it is his fifth book his first book the the house of Morgan and American banking dynasty and the rise of modern finance published in 1991 the National Book Award and was selected by modern library as one of the hundred best non-fiction books published in the 20th century his fourth penultimate until this one book by biography of john d rockefeller Titan was published in 1998 it won the National Book Critics Circle Award it was a finalist excuse me for that award and was chosen by the New York Times and by time as one of the 10 best books of the year and given the great qualities of this book for those of you who have read it and the stupendous reception it has received no one can doubt that Alexander Hamilton will be similarly honored any institution would be honored to host a lecture by mr. chernau about this very great book about a very great man at a very great period in American and all of political history but there are three particular reasons why it is particularly suitable that AEI should sponsor a lecture on this subject in why those of us at AEI should have a special affinity for this book and this man the first is that Hamilton was an extraordinarily gifted practical political economist perhaps the greatest that America has produced he realized that individual freedom market enterprise and economic progress are not abstract goods or the fruits of philosophical dogma rather they can be realized only within the structure of specific institutions of law property and finance second Hamilton was par excellence the accomplished public man who was also a towering intellectual at a moment of great crisis high risk in public affairs or in his personal life his immediate instinct was to run to the study ransacked the literature and churn out an op-ed or a pamphlet or at his greatest moment the Federalist Papers this is the stuff of the fantasies of every AEI scholar America has produced too few of them Patrick Moynihan was the most recent and journals book shows that Hamilton was in his own way in time a statesman intellectual equal to Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill third he tells the story of the founding of American government and political institutions in the most vivid and realistic possible way through the story of the life of a man who for all of his extraordinary abilities was one who had the conventional ambitions and frailties and who produced what he did through all of the the syste tunes and fortunes and misfortunes of a life fully lived the book shows us that our Constitution and founding traditions were not products of musty Luke aberration even in the case of Madison but were born of tumult and hard and office often nasty contention that confusion and chaos can be so stimulating two men with feet of clay and can be the inspiration for clarity in thinking and enduring institutions is to me the great lesson of Ron's irnos book please give a warm welcome to our lecturer Ron Turner every now and then somebody introduces you so artfully and summarizes the book so beautifully that you're tempted to move straight on to the Q&A this is one of those those occasions it does seem fitting to be here at AEI to speak about Alexander Hamilton because to my mind he was the most enterprising of early Americans and more than anybody else he created an array of both public and private institutions to spur American enterprise you may be curious to learn how I got mixed up with mr. Hamilton when I was out on the road publicizing my biography of john d rockefeller Titan I realized the extent to which I had become typecast as the tycoon guy the Gilded Age mogul guy fact whenever I finished a speech people in the audience would start shouting out to Carnegie next to Vanderbilt next even more disconcerting after giving what I thought was a rip-roaring rendition of Rockefellers life some timid soul in the back would raise his hand and ask mr. chernau should I roll over my three-month table finally that person had known my own dismal investment history I realized that I had to break out of this gilded cage and that Hamilton was the perfect way to do it because on the one hand he would transport me back to the origins of the American economic and financial system that I had already been writing about at the same time he was one of those Universal geniuses of the 18th century whose minds seemed to touch on every conceivable subject I think it's fair to say that even many well-educated Americans are largely ignorant about mr. Hamilton yes they know that he appears on the $10 bills but you may have noticed with something of a movie star makeover in recent years a few years back US News and World Report did a marvelous article they reviewed the updated images of the founders on the new bills and when the magazine came to the new rugged square-jawed Hamilton it gushed and this is a direct quote the first Treasury secretary now looks like a real hunk if we're the 200 years to have a founder who's a real hunk Chris the other thing that everyone knows released used to know about Hamilton is that he was gunned down by vice president Aaron Burr in a duel in Weehawken New Jersey two centuries before HBO and Tony Soprano discovered the nearby turf burr you may know interesting piece of historical trivia burr was the only American vice president I'm sure ever indicted for murder in two States and he managed to preside over a famous impeachment trial of a Supreme Court justice in the US Senate while he himself was simultaneously on the lam from the law in New York and New Jersey never a dull moment in the affairs of Aaron Burr now it won't surprise this particular audience I think when I say that Hamilton was the most underrated the most prophetic and most misunderstood of the founders to my mind he was the indispensable figure after George Washington revolutions always breed in abundance poets and dreamers and fire-breathing radicals but seldom visionaries with financial skills legal know-how business acumen and the administrative talents of a Hamilton he was a remarkable personality charming witty handsome and of course super-bright but he was also brash headstrong and perhaps in the end dangerously sure of himself this last defect of course being a trait completely unknown to all future Treasury secretaries now let me project on your imaginations a series of Hamilton vignettes that will summon up the many facets of this extraordinary man first let me conjure up a brilliant but frustrated adolescent toiling away at a trading house on st. Croix in the Caribbean in the late 1760s Hamilton later claimed that that humbled business experience was the most important part of his economic education he was an illegitimate boy born on the British island of Nevis and he suffered through a series of childhood traumas that I think would have shattered a lesser person his biological father abandoned the family when he was only 11 his mother died of tropical fever when he 13 he was then farmed out to a first cousin who committed suicide a year later so calamities of Jove like proportions descend on this struggling young man but so often the case with great figures in history adversity only seemed to strengthen this stubborn streak of self-reliance and to heighten his burning ambition to establish his rightful place and what must have seemed like a very unfriendly universe now in 1770 1772 in other words right before the Boston Tea Party a monster hurricane lashed st. Croix you see the beauty of my timing here monster hurricane lashes st. Croix and the self-taught prodigy publishes a description of it of such precocious force that the local merchants band together and they establish a special fund to educate him in North America this vendor Kent studied at King's College in lower Manhattan it was later renamed Columbia Kings being a trifle awkward as a name after the Revolution and as an undergraduate Hamilton is already publishing stirring pamphlets against the British he is drilling with his fellow students in the nearby church are it actually directly across the street from Ground Zero trendy and he also delivered spellbinding speeches to large crowds on what is today City Hall part but this young man for all his art he was always an ambivalent revolutionary when a rampaging mob of Patriots swoops down on the college hoping to tar and feather the Tory President Hamilton who was only about 5 foot 6 he was rather slight of build stood courageously in the doorway and blocked their paths this young man craved liberty yes but he also dreaded disorder and this would be a fine balancing act that would distinguish his entire career we're so lucky that we had founders like Hamilton that is nervous reluctant anguish trebles who always wanted to tamp down the revolutionary fires with an offsetting respect for private property rule of law and sanctity of contracts needless to say throughout human history these elements have been missing from most Reve Ellucian airy agendas before he even graduated this student extraordinaire was appointed an artillery captain in the continental cause he then slips across the fog band East River with Washington during the famous nocturnal retreat after the Battle of Brooklyn he rises from his sickbed to cross the Delaware to surprise the drowsing Hessians at Trenton then a few months later when Hamilton is only 22 this young man who had been a penniless orphan at this Counting house in the Caribbean only five years before is appointed aide-de-camp to George Washington this is miraculous it gives new meaning to the word meteoric and Hamilton proved so adept at handling Washington's immense correspondence Washington was able to give him the gist of a message in outward poped is beautifully worded delicately nuanced a diplomatic letter that it almost seemed like an inspired act of ventriloquism between these two men before long the Boy Wonder is effectively Washington's chief of staff throughout Hamilton's life men of tremendous experience and sagacity would instantly recognize his extraordinary gifts with Alma's Ella glide consistency Hamilton also had a knack of being present whenever history was being made he was there for instance at Benedict Arnold's house the morning that the treason plot was discovered an Arnold hot-footed at down the Hudson Jack Hamilton found himself consoling the voluptuous but destroy Peggy Arnold who lay weeping in an upstairs bedroom she was decked out in this gauzy lingerie and she was faking a mad scene to disguise the fact that she was in cahoots with her husband now Hamilton to my mind was the brainiest of the founders but I must admit that around beautiful women he had approximately 50 points on his IQ and he was taken in by Peggy Arnold's masterful performance oddly enough you think that Hamilton given his up ring would be thrilled to be Washington's chief of staff but he chafes at his desk and he dreams of battlefield glory unlike so many intellectuals both van and now Hamilton was a daredevil he enjoyed courting danger he had his supreme moment of heroism at Yorktown when he led the first infantry battalion to storm be out of ramparts picture the scene nighttime glare of exploding shells Hamilton Rises out of his trench he Sprint's across this rutted wasteland and he's leading his men with frenzied war whoops once at the parapet Hamilton who was rather short had one of his subordinates kneel in front of him sprang on the men shoulders sprang up on the wall and then exhorted his men to follow as if he were in some early Hollywood action flick now despite the crushing staff duties Hamilton somehow managed to give himself a wartime crash course in history finance and politics he was a self-invented immigrant the quintessentially American type and he didn't always turn to fancy intellectual sources in 1777 for instance he was not reading as he might have been the recently published Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith he didn't read that for another 1314 years now from Camp to camp this young autodidact is lugging these two ponderous folio sized volumes of maliki postlethwaite stationery of trade and commerce this was not light bedtime reading how he did this after day of doing correspondence for Washington Huna he also taught was toting along six volumes of Plutarch's lives a lifetime favored in the empty pages of a military pay book he was jotting down notes on geography foreign exchange population growth even European rivers that he would never live to see he studied with special care the experiences of England France and Holland in setting up central banks stock exchanges in trading corporations in some respects one can say that he hatched his vision of America's future by studying the recent European past he grasped the central insight that political power was predicated on financial power and that battles could be won no less decisively in the bond market than on the battlefield this he saw from studying the experience of the British Empire now it was a proud aspiring young man without money Hamilton knew that he needed right to make respectable match as they said in the 18th century or in Jane Austen novels he lacked birth breeding and fortune and soon after Elizabeth Schuyler the daughter of powerful Hudson River dynasty visited the Continental Army in 1780 one of Hamilton's colleagues reported quote Hamilton is a gun man he was always brimming with pent-up libido a point made I think rather eloquently by Martha Washington when she nicknamed her lascivious Tomcat Hamilton I always think there must have been some very funny moments at Valley Forge where Washington was calling Hamilton and then Martha was calling Hamilton so they know the wedding at the Schuyler mansion in Albany the mansion is still there was a bittersweet affair here was Eliza had this huge rich family teeming with Van Cortlandt and Men Rensselaer cousins Hamilton had just one friend in attendance from Washington's staff and of course not a single family member was there think of the emotional imbalance even at the summit of power Hamilton would always remain on some level I think the eternal outsider it may have been this that endowed him with a fresh and original perspective that allowed him to perceive possibilities beyond the Ken of native-born Patriots spin was both a traditionalist and my Connick classed he was both a conservative and a progressive he tried to adapt the best and ancient custom and practice to the new Republican cause now as he launched his post-war a legal career again Hamilton's exploits him to verge on the superhuman at the time to qualify for the law in New York usually had to do a three year apprenticeship period he's Hamilton he qualifies after six months of self-study in fact he cobbles together a digest of New York legal procedures and practices and he does it so expertly that that book would function as a crib sheet for a generation of New York lawyers he then did something quite fearless for a young lawyer he defended the Tory merchants who had cooperated with the British during their long wartime occupied of New York City and who were now being persecuted by the returning Patriots Hamilton always feared a frenzy of revolutionary retribution quote the passions of a revolution or apt to hurry even good men into excesses he warned but he also feared that the loss of that flight capital would undermine urgent efforts needed to rebuild devastated New York it's worth remembering in the post 9/11 world that a quarter of all the buildings in Manhattan were destroyed during the American Revolution also worth remembering because sometimes we imagine that we had lived in a bubble before Hamilton was there the tip of lower Manhattan in 1776 when the British fleet appeared several hundred boats 32,000 men on them the largest expeditionary force of the 18th century was thrown against the colonists now Hamilton has often been portrayed as a fierce snob the stooge of the plutocrats of his day even a would-be despot with Napoleonic ambitions and of course in this morality play of early American history Jefferson is always cast as the pure and virtuous Tribune of the common people like wall stereotypes there's some truth but I try to argue in the book that history was much more complicated than the historical cartoons enshrined in many textbooks during the Revolutionary War was Hamilton who championed an audacious plan to emancipate any slaves who agreed to fight for the Continental Army in the mid 1780s it was Hamilton who co-founded the first abolitionist Society in New York in fact Hamilton the supposed pseudo aristocrat among the founders was the most consistent abolitionist among them he also had enlightened views about Native Americans you may know there's a college in upstate New York called Hamilton College that was originally designed to educate Native Americans and Hamilton lent both his name and his prestige to that endeavor you also held enlightened and admiring views about the Jews he wrote in one paper that he believed that their success could only be explained by special Providence this was not a cold condescending snob this was someone who was amazingly devoid prejudice for his time and I'm sure this had something to do with growing up in the very kind of polyglot multiracial world of the Caribbean with the indisputable exception of George Washington nobody did more than Hamilton - well the squabbling states into the powerful nation we know today Hamilton personally drafts the appeal for the Constitutional Convention he attends it he is the sole New York delegate to sign it he dreams up and supervises the most influential defense of the document ever written the Federalist Papers of those 85 luminous essays this young world when published 51 of them and there were times where he pumped out as many as five or six per week and mind you this was a full-time legal practice in fact we have anecdotal evidence of the printer sitting in the outer office waiting for the hairy busy Hamilton to scratch out the final lines of his latest essay no single treatise on the Constitution has been cited more frequently by the Supreme Court has now been cited nearly three hundred times over the past two centuries and the frequency of citation has actually risen with time Hamilton then almost single-handedly got the Constitution approved in New York he spoke 26 times over six weeks at the state ratifying convention all of these heroic achievements that he accomplished then of course when he's 34 years old 1789 Washington appoints him the first Treasury secretary this instantly makes him the most influential and the most controversial man in America Washington's cabinet though they didn't use the term then it was at that point called the General Counsel but Washington's cabinet consisted of just three people Thomas Jefferson at state Henry Knox at War and Alexander Hamilton at Treasury pound for pound the best cabinet ever I think we can all agree on that but the Treasury Department was many times larger than the rest of the government combined in those halcyon early days Jefferson had six employees at the State Department Henry Knox had a mere dozen at war while Hamilton's staff of course with its customs inspectors its tax collectors quickly ballooned to several hundred people a frightening Lee large bureaucracy for its day and historians have tended to like in Hamilton state as to that of the prime minister of Washington's administration rather than a mere department head I had the privilege of meeting with secretary Treasuries no earlier in the day he made what I thought was a wonderful point one that I wish I had made in my book that when we think of the State Department we don't think of Thomas Jefferson when we think of the War Department or now the Pentagon we don't think of Henry Knox but when we think of the Treasury we still think of Alexander Hamilton that says something about the extent to which he left his stamp permanently on that department Hamilton had to invent much of the government from scratch remember most revenues came from import duties he had to create a custom service this meant that he had to create a string of beacons and boys and lighthouses up and down the eastern seaboard I dare say the Treasury secretary Hamilton and President Washington exchanged notes on the subject of lighthouse contracts than any other there's always a kind of banality when you get into the everyday stuff of politics Hamilton had to construct a fleet of ships to intercept smugglers hence the birth of the coastguard again again we see Hamilton forging the basic building blocks of the government he devises the first tax system first budget system first central bank first monetary system first accounting systems he takes a country that was literally bankrupted by Revolutionary War debt he funds that dead and he restores American credit remember in 1789 we were the third world deadbeat in global capital markets we were in arrears on both principal and interest payment by the time Hamilton leaves office in 1795 after a little more than five years as Treasury secretary the United States commands interest rates as low as any other sovereign borrower the world we had gone from outcast to the best possible credit risk in the capital markets at the time in London Amsterdam and Paris at the same time Hamilton was making the enduring legal arguments that justified all of these activities in terms of the new Constitution think about Washington's first question always was is this permissible in terms of the new charter imagine therefore the inestimable value if you are President Washington of having a Hamilton in your cabinet here's someone is Chris Wayne who not only had the technical proficiency to create the first central bank but who could at the same time articulate the cogent constitutional arguments that legitimated these activities in this respect Hamilton to my mind was simply irreplaceable it's not as often in history you could say if he hadn't lived someone else would have done it maybe not as well but someone else would have done it's very hard to think of another figure who had this combination of talents in a country at the time of four million people maybe Hamilton's most ingenious moobus Treasury secretary was to have the federal government assume the debt of the war debt of the states this sounds counterintuitive perhaps slightly crazy what government in history has ever voluntarily taken on additional debt but it was the most cunning step that Hamilton perhaps took to solidify the Union why because he knew that if the federal government assumed the state debt that all of the creditors would transfer their allegiance to the state to the new federal government it also gave the federal government forever after was a kind of moral authority and not a legal lock on import duties and other revenues and for better voice Hamilton permanently embedded this feature into our system all the while and for classic state papers he personally researched and wrote them there was no big staff here he did this he was a mud man man in these four state papers Hamilton shaped a vision of a flourishing future economy that would have cities manufacturing stock exchanges banks and corporations at the time has all seemed like very scary futuristic stuff not only to most Americans but to most of the other founders in an agrarian society Hamilton was the founder who fused the democratic revolution sweeping parts of the Western world in the 18th century with the capitalist revolution he forged that critical link between capitalism and democracy that has really come to define the very essence of our system he also laid the groundwork for Wall Street when I was researching the book I called the archivist at the New York Stock Exchange and said tell me when Hamilton was Treasury secretary what securities were being traded on Wall Street on the curb really he said there were five three issues of Treasury securities created by Alexander Hamilton the stock of the Bank of the United States created by Alexander Hamilton the stock of the Bank of New York co-founded by Alexander Hamilton so that when we say that he was the patron saint of Wall Street we're not just slinging around loose metaphorical language so why was Hamilton villainized as this dangerous reactionary when in retrospect he seems very far ahead of his time partly this goes back to the deadly rivalry between Hamilton and Jefferson in Washington's cabinet Jefferson was a rather shy soft-spoken man but he kept a very elaborate secret diary full of damaging and to my mind sometimes dubious anecdotes about Hamilton but that aside the epic animosity between these two truly Olympian figures was partly a matter of clashing visions Jefferson foresaw America is a rural Eden of yeoman farmers with a weak central government he stressed states rights and strict construction of the constitution Hamilton wanted a robust and very diversified economy with an energetic central government strong president relatively weak states and a very expansive interpretation of the Constitution you know you feel for Jefferson when you see him having to deal just with Hamilton's verbal flow Hamilton was one of those frightening Lee opinionated and articulated people whom you've all met at Georgetown or Manhattan dinner parties they can speak in perfectly from paragraphs for hours on end then they do and you can you can see in his diary Jefferson moans Hamilton made a speech of 3/4 of an hour in the cabinet today as if he was speaking to a jury the next day Jefferson we really recorded Hamilton spoke again for three-quarters of an hour Hamilton was an unstoppable word machine I should know he wrote enough in 49 years to fill 22,000 pages of collected papers and yes your speaker tonight was masochistic enough to read through all of them for your benefit Harold Seerat who edited the papers for Columbia University Press evidently used to joke that he planned to dedicate the 27 volumes to Aaron Berger quote without whose cooperation this project would never have been completed I'm sure if Hamilton lived in normal lifespan it would have been 100 volumes Eve's easy even his Treasury Secretary Hamilton was dabbling an anonymous journalism he published essays under a bewildering variety of Roman pseudonyms for instance he wrote one series under the guise of Camillus and then he launched a simultaneous series called Philo cumulus that heaped extravagant praise on the brilliance of Camillus it's a shameless century the cabinet feud between hamilton jefferson finally become so vicious that poor washington finally has to intervene and plead with them to stop these vicious attacks on each other means thank God Washington was the one person who's rid of rose above what really became a very very crippling partisan warfare in the end it was Jefferson not Hamilton who left the cabinet and defeated and Hamilton who reigned triumphant at least that is until Jefferson attained the presidency the golden glittering prize that always eluded Hamilton not enough at a I'm allowed to talk about sex but what the heck I'm just a writer down here from New York Hamilton to the best of my knowledge was the only occupant of the office who was ever referred to in the press as the amorous Treasury secretary during the summer of 1791 at the height of his powers as Treasury secretary young woman 23 year old mariah reynolds calls at his home in philadelphia asked to speak to hamilton privately and she spells out this woeful tale of how she has been cruelly abandoned by her husband Vulgarian named James Reynolds she appealed to Hamilton for financial aid several years later Hamilton narrated what happened next quote in the evening I put a bank bill in my pocket and went to her room has I inquired for mrs. Reynolds and was shown upstairs at the head of which she met me and conducted me into a bedroom I took the bill out of my pocket and gave it to her some conversation ensued from Richard was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable the beautiful circumlocution of those days thus long before bill and Monica we had Alexandria now for a full year even as he wrote his famous report on manufacturers how he managed do all this at once I don't know the smartest man American politics commits the most foolish blunder imaginable Hamilton admitted he never knew whether mrs. Reynolds attraction from was real or just a clever ploy he said the variety of shapes which this woman could assume was endless and he kept furtively slipping off in the night the government was in Philadelphia kept slipping off to these acid nations with a mrs. Reynolds even after mr. Reynolds suddenly reappeared did mr. Reynolds and the adultery know he decided to be much more fun and profitable to charge Hamilton for it so incredibly enough brilliant Hamilton begins to fork over blackmail money or hush money to James Reynolds despite the fatal damage that this could have done to his career not to mention to his long-suffering wife Eliza I will refrain here from any parallels to contemporary political figures now one day mariah Reynolds was entertaining a friend of hers named Jacob Clingman when Hamilton came to the door Hamilton did take certain basic precautions you can imagine he was petrified when he just saw an eyewitness standing there with mrs. Reynolds so what did Hamilton do on the spot he decided that he would pretend that he was simply dropping off a message for the lowlife James Reynolds stop and think about this imagine the doorbell rings Monday you opened it you know there's : pal where Donald Rumsfeld's or Alan Greenspan pretending to be the FedEx delivery man and expecting to get away with this Hamilton Bing Hamilton he ultimately published a 95 page pamphlet admitting to the affair when even some of his closest friends and warmest admirers thought that a couple of well chosen paragraphs should have nicely done the trick fairness to Hamilton he thought it's so essential to preserve his public reputation that he was willing to make the most painful sacrifice of his private reputation the Reynolds affair makes for very lively reading but should not detract from the fact Hamilton was an absolutely incorruptible public official his opponents floated wild myths that he was plotting to restore the British monarchy he was in the pay of the British crown that he had piles of money stashed away in this London bank account Oh balderdash when Hamilton resigned his treasury secretary in 1795 his finances were in such sorry state stated that he desperately needed to resume his law practice to support his family in fact Hamilton spent so much time tending to the finances of his adopted country that he tended to neglect his own finances and when he dieded the duel at age 49 he was effectively insolvent his widow and seven children were only sustained by a secret subscription fund raised by more than 100 of Hamilton's friends that fund interesting enough who was kept at the bank of New York and its existence was kept secret until the 1930s I found is the most interesting demonstration of the discretion of the old Wall Street bankers that that secret was kept for 140 years I just want to mention briefly Hamilton's of feats extended beyond his years at Treasury I would like to just single out one tonight which is his contribution to the the US military Hamilton had an encyclopedic knowledge of military lore he walked with this upright military carriage he gloried in the title of Colonel Hamilton at a time when Jefferson Madison thought that America could rely on ragtag state militia and gunboats Hamilton argued for permanent and professional Mattila military he actually sketched the first blueprints for what became was point in 1798 when John Adams was president there was a great war scare with friends the quasi-war Hamilton was made major-general and he single-handedly created a provisional army of 12,000 soldiers from scratch it's quite incredible Hamilton designed all the uniforms he designed the huts for old men and officers he created his own drill manual he even had experiments conducted with a pendulum to establish the perfect length and speed of the American marching step and contrary to the claims of those who said that he was a would-be Caesar when John Adams decided in Congress in 1800 to disband the army Hamilton went along with it turned out to be a grave mistake as Hamilton predicted and we learned a very hard lesson during the War of 1812 when the dismantling of that professional army led the British to march into Washington and torched the defenseless capital let me say in closing that I was thrilled by studying Hamilton not just for the man but for the colorful and very inspirational times in which he lived because if you just follow in Hamilton's footsteps the American Revolution the Constitutional Convention the creation of the first federal government all these formative moments in early American history flicker by like some fabulous newsreel I would say that from Lexington and Concord in 1775 to Jefferson's first term as president nobody stood more consistently at the center of American political life than Alexander Hamilton we were just damn lucky that in the flush of revolutionary passion at a moment when utopian dreams can overtake and corrupt most noble experiments we had this brilliant visionary with his imagination in the sky but who always kept two feet firmly planted on the ground this was a man who managed to be hard-headed in practical and dreamy all at once it is an inspiring story the saga of a young man who comes out of nowhere takes the world by storm and literally grows up along with his adopted country thank you thank you for that very warm response I'd be happy to take some some questions oh I think the British by far in fact we know one of his four great state papers when he was creating Central Bank the Bank of the United States remember we've had three central bank's or at the bank of the United States for 20 years after Hamilton then we had the second Bank the United States you all remember the Eddie Jackson very didn't then we had the Fed in in 1913 we know that when Hamilton created that first bank of the United States that he literally had the bylaws of the Bank of England sitting on his desk so you can actually take that paper and the bylaws of the Bank of England and and match them up and I think that particularly his sense of the importance of public credit and the relationship that sort of financial power to military power was based on his very close reading of British history his attitude towards the French was always much more ambivalent the whole story in itself because Hamilton Hamilton's on his mother's side was from his French Huguenot family he was absolutely bilingual and as a result one of many duties he performed during the Revolution was that he was the liaison between Washington and all the French aristocrats Hamilton was very close with Lafayette and it's rather amusing Hamilton was so bright that even though he was self educated when you look at his correspondence in French with Lafayette Lafayette is making all of these spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes and here is Hamilton who was writing to Lafayette in faultless impeccable French but Hamilton always had an ambivalent feeling about the French they would finally come out in his feelings towards the French Revolution when he wrote an early impression letter to Lafayette in 1789 kind of letter that makes for interesting reading still and he says to Lafayette he said I wish you well with the Revolution he said I must have my doubts he said let me tell you why he says I fear the vehement character of your people and then he says I fear the philosophic reveries of your politicians no comment over there yeah fallout between Hamilton and Madison this isn't many ways Hamilton managed to feud with just about everyone I mean it's rather remarkable that he manages to enter into these Titanic feuds with John Adams Thomas Jefferson James Madison James Monroe even alienates Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson you know so everyone that Hamilton opposes goes on to become president but I find that I find that of the various relationships in a certain way the the saddest was with Madison because it starts out they go in 1786 to this conference in in Annapolis Maryland together that issues the call for the Constitutional Convention they were only four years apart in age and they find I can ship they both have this kind of strong national perspective and they seem to have this very kind of easy personal and political rapport and that persists through the Constitutional Convention and then Hamilton once he introduces his report on public credit is shocked absolutely shocked at his skin that the person who stands up on the floor of the house was Madison to lead the charge against it because Hamilton felt that he Hamilton was being true to this continental perspective that the two had happened and suddenly he feels that Madison has moved more into the states rights cam I think one of the things that happened because they both felt very kind of self-righteous each accused the other of unforgivable betrayal and mind you they were so much alike that historians still debate the some of the Federalist Papers in terms of whether this one was written by Hamilton or that one was written by Madison that their viewpoint and even their language was so alike that we still can't entirely disentangle it I think that one of the things that happened was that Hamilton becomes Treasury secretary so he has not only the luxury but the obligation of taking a national perspective Madison becomes congressman from Virginia before then later becomes Secretary of State President and so he represents his constituencies it's interesting to speculate you know things might have been different let's say if Hamilton had become a congressman or a senator and if James Madison had been in the in the first cabinet but it's it's an unusual relationship because even though Hamilton had legions of admirers and clearly legions of enemies as well the madison relationship stands out because it's the only one where that starts in a very intense friendship and then moves into a very intense feud so it's it's singular in that respect is it likely that Hamilton might have become president if he did along it no I think it's safe to say not I think that by Jefferson's first term there's really been a decisive triumph of the Jeffersonian party then called the Republicans although actually then Democratic Republicans than Democrats know so I think that the historical pendulum had swung the other way the Federalist Party even though there would be later incarnations in the 1830s and 1840s every party called the Whigs that in there's a certain lineage there but basically by the 1820s the Federalists have faded out as a party and they kind of remained kind of residual force in New England politics so Hamilton on the one hand his political base would have disappeared on the other hand even by the time he has the duel with burr it's a way in which she's lost not in a way he's lost his leadership of the Federalist Party because of mistakes in in judgment the Mariah Reynolds affair I mentioned he then enters into this very misguided feud with John Adams during the 1800 election when Hamilton and Adams were sort of nominally Co heads of the Federalist Party Hamilton with his usual prolific pen publishers a 45 page diatribe an open letter to John Adams and as I say in the book actually these were not some of the things that many of the things that Hamilton said about John Adams were not invented about extremely temperamental and bizarre behavior by Adams in office but the pamphlet backfired on Hamilton because it showed such poor judgment and one thing that noticed quite a number the reviewers have picked up in the book which I agree with is that Hamilton's political life changes when he no longer is under the influence of George Washington that you see both during the Revolution and during his time as Treasury secretary he's Hamilton with all those rights but it's as if on some level in terms of tact and proportion and moderation that he has internalized Washington's personality and some level he's always taking his lead from Washington there's the intelligence the fire and the passion but there's a sense of limitation that he knows well I can't go beyond that line because Washington wouldn't have gone beyond that line after he leaves in 1795 then particularly after Washington steps down after his second term Hamilton begins increasingly to rely on his own judgment and his own impulses and his is very very erratic Hamilton's genius he was a policymaking genius he was far from a political genius I think he was the greatest policy maker we've ever had but God knows he was not the best politician we've ever had but they don't seem to that's an excellent point I'll repeat it if you didn't hear it you would think that Hamilton and John Marshall would have been very close after all Marshall on the Supreme Court takes a lot of the Hamiltonian concepts and applies them in different in a major Supreme Court decisions the doctrine of judicial review and implied powers etc etc etc and in fact and this picks up this gentleman's point would Hamilton had become president in many ways john marshall replaces hamilton as the leading intellectual force in the Federalist Party and once Hamilton dies in the duel and the thorn and Jefferson side is of course John John Marshall even though they were distantly related you know I think the fact that you pick up something very very interesting that there wasn't that relationship I tend to think in the absence of other information that it was simply happenstance that is Marshall was in Virginia I think that if Marshall had been in the vicinity Hamilton would have become close to him you know one thing to remember about Hamilton Hamilton had this very very very rootless life grows out the Caribbean goes from Eva's to st. Croix to New Jersey to New York one of the things that struck me for somebody who'd had this rather itinerant life and then of course he was in the Revolutionary War from 1776 to 1787 well of his movement seemed to be in the New York kind of bounded by this triangle of New York Philadelphia and Albany where his in-laws lived one of the people who works at Mount Vernon said to me said you know it's very strange there's no entry that Hamilton ever visited Mount Vernon I mean here's George Washington's closest political associate as president and I never found any reference that Hamilton visited Mount Vernon now as I point in the book the personal relationship became closer in later years but I'm sure George and Martha Washington were very close social friends as well as political allies with Alexander and Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton I'm sure the invitation to visit was extended many times I would think that probably Washington's built a little miffed that they never came down so it's it's it seems strange but I'm just trying to remember you know where John Marshall was at different times but just my sense is that there was not a lot of direct contact between them I have to think about that more but off the top my head that's my yeah Marshall was in Richard motors was Ivan and Hamilton after Yorktown he galloped off to Albany I don't think he ever set foot in Virginia again all the way in the back join the club okay this gentleman is a little bit confused or dubious whatever about what happened at the time of the duel I am too I mean this is this is one area where in spite of a lot of documentation we end up falling back on guesswork to answer the second question first did he fire into the air yes I think he did fire into the air because even if you accept burrs version of events which was at Hamilton fired first you know why was Hamilton shot I forget it was like 10 or 12 feet up and four feet to the to the side this I was just the other night the New York Historical Society has this wonderful new exhibition that just opened on Hamilton and one of the things that they did which is really very good they created life-sized bronze statues of Hamilton and burr squaring off in the duel and then place them exactly as apart as they would have been at the the duel so you really can can picture it and so they would have been to see this pillar in the center them that that was that wouldn't even have been further away so that from where I'm sitting the distance would have been down to maybe about the fourth or fifth rows they were very very close now these were unwieldy pistols they were smoothbore pistols they were very awkward so you can see when you see this reconstruction that they did you can see people particularly they would stand on the side you could see people missing but not missing by that much so I think that he did waste a shot and as I point out in the book when his own son died in a duel in 1801 we have Hamilton's statement that Hamilton had urged his son to waste his fire also which is son deadness and also was killed in the on the dual terms of why Hamilton fought the the duel one of the things that I tried to show in the book was to remember I'm this masochist I read chronologically through all of the the papers one thing that I felt very very strongly reading through them chronologically now you develop a sense of a person Hamilton had been involved in six or seven previous affairs of Honor a duel remember was simply the potential culminating stage within the fairy honor it was these ritualized confrontations somebody would insult your honor reputation you would send the person a letter demanding satisfaction satisfaction was code language that you would demand a duel if you didn't get some kind of apology or explanation okay Hamilton had been through six or seven of those as principal three or four times as the second or an advisor to someone else and Hamilton you could see on all the previous occasions was completely uncompromising there was something in Hamilton's nature that was completely uncompromising you know I can't offhand think of a single letter that Hamilton wrote I mean you want to get a sense of Mendes I can't think of a single out of that Hamilton Road where he said you know that meeting we had the other day I'm sorry I spoke in haste or I said something that was ill-advised or to started you never get that kind of second thinking or apology it was partly his strength it's not an attractive quality in many ways you know you kind of feel like you were always right so when you come to the the duel with Burr the only thing that's really unique about it well the two things one it goes all the way all of the other affairs of Honor with Hamilton were as it were settled out of court there was a negotiation before they were paired to the dueling ground the other thing that was unique was the first time that Hamilton was on the defense of that is Burr initiated it Burr was the one who said you offended me it was usually Hamilton saying you offended so he was thrown off balance but there was nothing there was no episode in his life of his apologizing in that that that way and he did admit he never denied that he had libeled burr so there was a sense of kind of honor in duty he never Hamilton didn't lie and so he couldn't come out and say you know I never liable but he knew that he had he said a number of different places he indicated that he had libel burg he also had this notion which again I find myself difficult I have difficulty thinking myself into his mind here but he felt that as a military man again as I was saying this was very big in his psyche he felt that as a military man that if he ducked the duel that his future usefulness as a military man and politician would be diminished that he would be accused of cowardice so he felt that he had to on the one hand show bravery by going to the dueling ground and on the other hand expressed what by that point was a principled opposition to dueling by wasting his shot so he comes up with this very strange compromise that made complete sense to him that I share your bafflement about it because we're dealing here not only with politics and not only with Hamilton's particular psychology we're dealing with the whole set of 18th century conventions that are not always easy to understand much less sympathize with yeah you know now you know I'm glad I'm glad that you bet you asked that because it's it's it's it's so entertaining to tell tales of the Reynolds scandal that you that you can miss the other side and the in the other side and I hope this doesn't sound too paradoxical he was an extraordinarily happily married man he wrote scores maybe hundreds of letters to his his wife and of the most tender and loving variety she lived for fifty years after he died and she absolutely worshipped worshipped his memory I start the book out she was an old woman she was living not too far from the White House she had his bust in the corner and she would gaze at the bust and she spent many years supervising an authorized biography of her husband that was written by her son she spent many many years personally collecting his papers where she would write to different friends and associates of her husband you know asking them to recall him so a lot there's a lot of wonderful material in the Library of Congress people almost answering Eliza Hamilton's questionnaires and so she made quite extraordinary allowances for his wayward nature but I have no doubt that it was a deep love magic and and of course it makes it the sadder that he abused it because she was just the soul of loyalty and and goodness he was a very good father it's it's interesting I came upon a lot of correspondence later correspondence of his children who talked about him always in the warmest terms I couldn't find literally a single line of criticism some of that may have been that he was the sainted father you know who had died in the in the duel and well so Eliza turned him into this sainted figure so they probably felt inhibited in terms of criticism but from everything we know he delighted in his children's company and vice versa and I think the fact that he really was not only legitimate but orphaned I think that he took great pleasure in his family well he was he was a great man he was an extraordinarily busy man I think that a lot of the child-rearing was left to his his wife as I said he seemed to be working around the clock one of the you know it was very curious just as a writer how did Hamilton manage to write so much but he would do he would he would pace in the garden until he had got something clear in his mind he would almost be mumbling to himself like he was sort of working it out in his mind pacing back and forth then he would lie down and he would sleep for several hours no matter what time of the day it was and then he would suddenly get up and write and write and write and he apparently would sit there and write for seven or eight straight hours well this is not your soft-shoe dad this is not dad who is always available you know when you need him but I think that the expectations at that you know in that era of a parent were quite different and it was a large family and I think that the Skyler's were also very much part of the children's lives last question it's a very good question you know did Hamilton manifest destiny did he see this and you know sea to shining sea of Erica I yes and no the when the Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase Hamilton was still alive because it was 1803 the Federalists were in a very strange position they felt that the Louisiana Purchase would the Federals based in the north particularly New England they felt the Louisiana Purchase would enhance the power in the south and so a lot of the Federalists opposed the Louisiana Purchase they you also felt that the southern states would extend slavery into the states that would be carved out of the Louisiana Purchase in fact that was prophetic for the next four decades I think virtually every state that came out of the Louisiana Purchase was a slave site so the Federalists kind of saw that angrily so Hamilton would have seen that and Hamilton was an abolitionist but Hamilton actually dissented from his Federalist colleagues he approved the Louisiana Purchase he was much too much of a you know practical politician not to see that this was the great real estate deal of human history it also it delighted him and it worked him it delighted him because he did talk about this Empire spreading across the American continent as did the the founders it hurt him because he had when he was treasury secretary and he expanded the doctrine of implied powers remember Jefferson was saying all these things that were precisely enumerated in the Constitution could be done and so hamilton creates a central bank in jefferson says there's nothing in the Constitution about a central bank that's unconstitutional and then Hamilton lives to see you know Jefferson make the Louisiana Purchase there's nothing in the Constitution about doubling the size of the country quick real estate deal with the French and even you know Jefferson to his credit Jefferson realizes there's nothing in the Constitution Jefferson consults with you know Madison and and the others Jefferson did think about going to Congress to get a constitutional amendment then realized speed was of the essence and like they couldn't do that so Jefferson just kind of lets the constitutional question ride but you can imagine for for Hamilton who had been criticized by Jefferson throughout his years as Treasury secretary for much more modest expansions of federal power he couldn't you know help but have a rueful laugh at the time of the Louisiana Purchase and again just you know one last point to go back to this gentleman's question could Hamilton have become president that really politically begins to change the whole shape of the country where there had been and would continue to be a number of years a rough political parity between north and south and that begins to enhance the power of the south which means from Hamilton's point of view to enhance the power of the opposition party so I don't think for better for worse that he would have been president anyway you bet the life crowd thank you

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

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Length: 65min 44sec (3944 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2016