Also... Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were slavers. They bought and sold women and children into slavery. Every decision they made at the time of the founding was made to protect their profiteering from the buying and owning of human beings. Their lofy words were meaningless when they held a whip in one hand and used violence against people, denying them rights and freedoms. Hamilton was the only founding father at the time who recognized this monstrosity of a contradiction and fought to change it. He also predicted the inevitability of the civil war happening.
p4 - In contriving the smoothly running machinery of a modern nation-state--including a budget system, a funded debt, a tax system, a central bank, a customs service, and a coast guard--and justifying them in some of America’s most influential state papers, he set a high-water mark for administrative competence that has never been equaled.
p16 - Their liaison was the sort of match that could easily produce a son hypersensitive about class and status and painfully conscious that social hierarchies ruled the world.
p26 - Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalog of disasters that had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide, and the aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died. James, sixteen, and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone, largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless, topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant human being--that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a founding father of a country he had not yet even seen--seems little short of miraculous.
p39 - What a world of scarred emotion and secret grief Alexander Hamilton bore with him on the boat to Boston. He took his unhappy boyhood, tucked it away in a mental closet, and never opened the door again. Besides the horrid memories, this young dynamo simply was not cut out for the drowsy, slow-paced life of slave owners on a tropical island, and he never evinced the least nostalgia for his West Indian boyhood or voiced any desire to return. He wrote two years later, “Men are generally too much attached to their native countries to leave it and dissolve all their connexions, unless they are driven to it by necessity.” He chose a psychological strategy adopted by many orphans and immigrants: he decided to cut himself off from his past and forge a new identity. He would find a home where he would be accepted for what he did, not for who he was, and where he would no longer labor in the shadow of illegitimacy.
p108 - Unable to enforce its requests for money and troops, an impotent Congress was reduced to begging from the states, which selfishly hoarded soldiers for their own home guards. The only way the Continental Army could lure soldiers was through expensive cash bounties and promises of future land. The republican partiality for state militias in lieu of a strong central army threatened to undermine the entire Revolution. The disillusioned Hamilton also struggled to fathom why a Congress that had once boasted such distinguished figures was now glutted with mediocrities. Where had the competent members gone? Hamilton concluded that the talent had been drained off by state governments.
p139 - Then, in the most startling, visionary leap of all, Hamilton recommended that a convention be summoned to revise the Articles of Confederation. Seven years before the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton became the first person to propose such a plenary gathering. Where other minds groped in the fog of war, the twenty-five-year-old Hamilton seemed to perceive everything in a sudden flash.
p157 - Hamilton thought this loose framework a prescription for rigor mortis. There was no federal judiciary, no guiding executive, no national taxing power, and no direct power over people as individuals, only citizens of the states. In Congress, each state had one vote, and nine of the thirteen states had to concur to take significant actions. The Articles of Confederation promised little more than a fragile alliance of thirteen miniature republics.
p192 - It is puzzling that Aaron Burr is sometimes classified among the founding fathers. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton all left behind papers that run to dozens of thick volumes, packed with profound ruminations. They fought for high ideals. By contrast, Burr’s editors have been able to eke out just two volumes of his letters, many full of gossip, tittle-tattle, hilarious anecdotes, and racy asides about his sexual escapades. He produced no major papers on policy matters, constitutional issues, or government institutions. Where Hamilton was often more interested in policy than politics, Burr seemed interested only in politics. At a time of tremendous ideological cleavages, Burr was an agile opportunist who maneuvered for advantage among colleagues of fixed political views.
p198 - As he strode about James Duane’s chamber, Hamilton articulated fundamental concepts that he later expanded upon in The Federalist Papers, concepts central to the future of American jurisprudence. In renting the property to Waddington, he declared, the British had abided by the law of nations, which allowed for the wartime use of property in occupied territory. New York’s Trespass Act violated both the law of nations and the 1783 peace treaty with England, which had been ratified by Congress. In urging the court to invalidate the Trespass Act, Hamilton expounded the all-important doctrine of judicial review--the notion that high courts had a right to scrutinize laws and if necessary declare them void. To appreciate the originality of this argument, we much recall that the country still lacked a federal judiciary. The state legislatures had been deemed the most perfect expression of the popular will and were supposed to possess supreme power. Mrs. Rutger’s lawyers asserted state supremacy and said congressional action could not bind the New York legislature. At bottom, Rutgers v. Waddington addressed fundamental questions of political power in the new country. Would a treaty ratified by Congress trump state law? Could the judiciary override the legislature? And would America function as a true country or a loose federation of states? Hamilton left no doubt that states should bow to the central government: “It must be conceded that the legislature of one state cannot repeal the law of the United States.”
p199 - For the radicals of the day, revolutionary purity meant a strong legislature that would overshadow a weak executive and judiciary. For Hamilton, this could only invite legislative tyranny. Rutgers v. Waddington represented his first major chance to expound the principle that the judiciary should enjoy coequal status with the other two branches of government.
p226 - During his Assembly tenure that spring, Hamilton voted on two measures that suggested ambivalent feelings about his childhood. Oddly enough, he supported a bill making it impossible for people divorced due to adultery to remarry. Such a draconian statute in the Danish West Indies had prevented Hamilton’s parents from legitimizing his birth. If this vote suggests some latent hostility toward his mother, another vote betokens tenderness for her. The Assembly was debating a bill that aimed to deter mothers of illegitimate children from killing them at birth. One controversial clause stipulated that if the child died, the unwed mother had to produce a witness who could corroborate that the child had been stillborn or died from natural causes. It bothered Hamilton that the mother would have to admit openly that she had given birth to an illegitimate child.
p232 - Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.
p235 - When Franklin suggested on June 28 that each session start with a prayer for heavenly help, Hamilton countered that this might foster a public impression that “embarrassments and dissensions within the convention had suggested this measure.” According to legend, Hamilton also rebutted Franklin with the jest that the convention didn’t need “foreign aid.” The Lord did not seem much in evidence at this point in the convention. One story, perhaps apocryphal, claims that when Hamilton was asked why the framers omitted the word God from the Constitution, he replied, “We forgot.” One is tempted to reply that Alexander Hamilton never forgot anything important.
p243 - The two sides projected competing nightmares of what could happen if the other side prevailed. The federalists evoked disunion, civil war, and foreign intrigue, along with flagrant repudiation of debt and assaults on property. The antifederalists talked darkly of despotism and a monarchy, the ascendancy of the rich, and the outright abolition of the states.
p252 - It was Madison who wrote in Federalist number 44, “No axiom is more clearly established in law or in reason that that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized.”
p254 - The United States had become a pariah country, sneered at by foreign states: “We have neither troops nor treasury nor government.” Land and property values had plummeted, money had grown scarce, public credit had been destroyed--all because the central government lacked power. And it lacked power because it had to rely for revenue upon the states, who competed to provide the least money to it.
p255 - He also decried the confederation’s lack of a federal judiciary: “laws are a dead letter without courts to expound and define their true meaning and operation.”
p259 - Throughout his career, he showed special solicitude for an independent judiciary, which he thought the most important guardian of minority rights but also the weakest of the three branches of government: “It commands neither the press nor the sword. It has scarcely any patronage.” He was especially intent that the federal judiciary check any legislative abuses. In number 78, Hamilton introduced an essential concept, never made explicit in the Constitution: that the Supreme Court should be able to review and overturn legislation as unconstitutional… Here, Hamilton bluntly affirmed that “no legislative act… contrary to the constitution can be valid,” laying the intellectual groundwork for the doctrine of judicial review later promulgated by Supreme Court justice John Marshall.
p276 - On April 30, George Washington rose early, sprinkled powder on his hair, and prepared for his great day… Resplendent with a ceremonial sword at his side, he also wore a plain brown suit of American broadcloth woven at a mill in Hartford. A special message for Hamilton’s future was encoded in this outfit: that America should encourage manufactures, especially textiles, an industry dominated by Great Britain. Washington hoped it would soon “be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear” in any dress that was not of American origin.
p307 - Though a passionate slavery critic, Hamilton knew that this inflammatory issue could wreck the union. He couldn’t be both the supreme nationalist and the supreme abolitionist. He certainly couldn’t push through his controversial funding program if he stirred up the slavery question, which was probably a futile battle anyway. So this man of infinite opinions grew mute on that all-important matter, though he may have taken a secret swipe at slaveholders the following year. Historian Philip Marsh has argued that Hamilton, using the pen name “Civis” in a newspaper piece of February 23, 1791, penned the following telling sarcasm to Madison and Jefferson: “As to the negroes, you must be tender upon that subject… Who talk most about liberty and equality…? It is not those who hold the bill of rights in one hand and a whip for affrighted slaves in the other?”
p313 - Hamilton may have believed that Jefferson’s contributions to the nation paled beside his own and not just because of his own work on behalf of the Constitution. Besides handling Washington’s correspondence, Hamilton had spent five years in combat, exposing himself to enemy fire on many occasions. Jefferson had never set foot on a battlefield. Elected Virginia governor in 1779, he found the job irksome and wanted to resign, prompting Edmund Pendleton to complain to Madison, “It is a little cowardly to quit our posts in a bustling time!” When the turncoat Benedict Arnold burned and pillaged Richmond in January 1781, the capital stood defenseless despite warnings from Washington to Jefferson. Governor Jefferson fled in the early hours, giving up Richmond without a shot and allowing munitions and government records to fall into British hands. In June, in Jefferson’s waning hours as governor, the British pounced on Charlottesville and almost captured the Virginia Assembly gathered there. Then, when word came that a British cavalry was approaching Monticello, Jefferson scrambled off on horseback into the woods. He was accused of dereliction of duty and neglecting the transfer of power to his successor. Though the Virginia Assembly exonerated him of any wrongdoing, Hamilton wasn’t the only one who suspected Jefferson of cowardice.
p317 - “I will agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this country.” -- Jefferson talking about the French Revolution
p350 - Overshadowing this geographic split was the fundamental question of whether the Constitution allowed a central bank. While writing The Federalist, Madison had subscribed to an elastic interpretation of the charter. Now, speaking on the House floor, he made a dramatic turnabout, denying that the Constitution granted the federal government powers not specifically enumerated there: “Reviewing the Constitution… it was not possible to discover in it the power to incorporate a bank.” Hamilton turned to article 1, section 8, the catchall clause giving Congress the right to pass any legislation deemed “necessary and proper” to exercise its listed powers. Madison accused him of exploiting that power and “leveling all the barriers which limit the powers of the general government and protect those of the state governments.” Afraid that the agile Hamilton would dream up limitless activities and then rationalize them as “necessary and proper,” Madison re-created himself as a strict constructionist of the Constitution.
p353 - The essence of it was that government must possess the means to attain ends for which it was established or the bonds of society would dissolve.
p354 - The Bank of the United States would enable the government to make good on four powers cited explicitly in the Constitution: the rights to collect taxes, borrow money, regulate trade among states, and support fleets and armies.
p457 - The vindication was so resounding that Hamilton withdrew his long-standing resignation, and his cabinet position grew more impregnable than ever. Nevertheless, it frustrated him that after this exhaustive investigation his opponents still rehashed the stale charges of misconduct. He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that “no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.” If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end “that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.”
p627 - The intellectual spoilsport among the founding fathers, Hamilton never believed in the perfectibility of human nature and regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics: thou shalt always be optimistic when addressing the electorate. He shrank from the campaign rhetoric that flattered Americans as the most wonderful, enlightened people on earth and denied that they had anything to learn from European societies. He was incapable of the resolutely uplifting themes that were to become mandatory in American politics. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.
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