The Way Back. F. H. Buckley

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       Up from Aristocracy

      PHILADELPHIA WAS NOT UNUSUALLY HOT IN THE SUMMER of 1787, as is often supposed. The weather was cooler than normal and it often rained, as it did on the morning of Monday, June 18 when Alexander Hamilton stepped out from Miss Daley’s boardinghouse. His walk would take him the three blocks to the Pennsylvania State House, where the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were meeting (the name Independence Hall came later), and where he served as a representative from New York.

      Hamilton strode into the Assembly Room, past the guards, and took his seat at the table on the left, at the back of the room. Was he a little nervous? He was young, only 32—or possibly only 30, for his birth to a single mother on the West Indian island of Nevis was so obscure that historians cannot agree when it happened. Before him, on the dais, stood George Washington, the Convention’s president, for whom Hamilton had served as aide-de-camp during the Revolution. The other delegates included Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, George Mason, John Dickinson, Gouverneur Morris, and James Wilson. When he learned their names, Jefferson described them as “demigods” in a letter to John Adams.¹ It was an audience that might intimidate a person with more age and experience than Hamilton, who was about to deliver one of the most remarkable speeches in American history.

Alexander Hamilton Stumbles

      The Convention was then at a standstill. On May 29, Edmund Randolph, Virginia’s Governor, had presented what came to be called the Virginia Plan, which would have replaced the decentralized government of the Articles of Confederation with a strongly national constitution. The plan, drafted principally by James Madison, was supported by the large states of Virginia and Pennsylvania. On June 15 the small-states delegates responded with the rival New Jersey plan, which was much more decentralized. Until that point Hamilton had been silent. Now, on June 18, he would rise to speak.

      Neither the Virginia nor the New Jersey plan would do, he said. He was particularly opposed to the New Jersey plan, but even the Virginia plan left too much power to the states. It was, “pork still, with a little change of the sauce.”² In principle, said Hamilton, we might as well abolish the states, and in any event the national government should be given the power to veto their laws. By this point, the small state delegates were likely apoplectic, but Hamilton hadn’t finished (he went on for five or six hours in all). In what followed he gave the most ringing endorsement for aristocratic government by any major American politician, then or now.

      He began by praising the British constitution. Many of the delegates had good things to say about it, but Hamilton went further and doubted whether anything short of a constitutional monarchy would do for America. A republic could serve up nothing suitable for the man who would be president, and “the English model was the only good one on this subject.”

       The Hereditary interest of the King was so interwoven with that of the Nation, and his personal emoluments so great, that he was placed above the danger of being corrupted from abroad.³

      Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this. Monarchy prevailed everywhere else, and historian Gordon Wood has observed that, “we shall never understand events of the 1790s until we take seriously, as contemporaries did, the possibility of some sort of monarchy developing in America.”⁴ Still, this was much further than any of the other delegates would go, and Hamilton knew an American king wouldn’t do. What he suggested instead was a lifetime appointment for the president during good behavior, a republican government but one as close to monarchism as republican principles would permit. Call the president an elective monarch, if you want, said Hamilton. That’s just what the country needs. He would also have given senators lifetime appointment, during good behavior, which was his way of engrafting a British House of Lords onto a republican constitution. “Having nothing to hope for by a change,” the senators would then form a barrier against the “pernicious innovations” of democracy.⁵

      Hamilton wasn’t the only delegate who was fearful of democracy. Many thought that the defects of the Articles of Confederation could be traced to an “excess of democracy,”⁶ with its “turbulence and follies.”⁷ Nor was Hamilton without friends. Washington relied on him,⁸ and Gouverneur Morris might silently have agreed with much of what he said. For the rest of delegates, however, Hamilton’s aristocratic government was anathema, even when adorned in republican robes. Hamilton, they thought, would be quite prepared to accept the corruption they thought endemic to monarchies, with the fawning courtiers that surround a prince and the kings who trade off favors for support. That was what they had seen of colonial government, and they meant to have something better with a republic, a form of government in which they thought that private interests would be trumped by the public good.⁹ What the delegates would have hated is the crony nation America has become, where ambassadorships are bought and sold in return for campaign contributions, and pay-for-play is the order of the day as much as ever it was in eighteenth century Britain.

      Hamilton was so far outside the mainstream that when he finished his speech no one seconded it or even thought it necessary to speak against it. A few days later a delegate reviewed the various plans that had been presented, and of Hamilton said that, “though he has been praised by every body, he had been supported by none.”¹⁰ Hamilton recognized that he had marginalized himself, and chose to absent himself for much of the rest of the debate. He left on June 29, popped in on August 13, and returned to Philadelphia only on September 6, at the Convention’s close. What the delegates adopted became our Constitution, but no one who reads their debates would ever think of consulting Hamilton on how to interpret it.

An Aristocratic Colony

Hamilton had come from the humblest of backgrounds, and it was ironic that of all the delegates he should defend aristocratic rule. It was equally ironic that the Virginia delegates should have objected to this, for their state had created a minor aristocracy in the Old Dominion, and the myth of a Cavalier Virginia was not entirely without foundation. The second generation of arrivals to the colony in the mid-seventeenth century included the younger sons of well-born Englishmen, who over the next century elbowed their way into social and financial eminence. The proudly self-assertive Tidewater planters along the James, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac, the slave-owning members of the Established Church, the Carters, Byrds, Lees, Fitzhughs, Beverleys, and Washingtons, aspired to the condition of English gentility in their homes, offices and manners.¹¹ There were no Blenheim Palaces in Virginia, but the Carter’s Grove, Sabine Hall and Shirley plantations of the Carters, the Westover of the Byrds, the Stratford of the Lees, and the Mount Vernons left no doubt that their owners were masters of large fortunes.

      Some concessions were made for local conditions, to be sure. The colonial Tidewater gentry dispensed with their periwigs and lace-ruffled cuffs in the hot Virginia summers, but at other times dressed like English gentry. Venturing forth, their carriages carried them down the sandy streets of Williamsburg, with postilions, drivers, and footmen dressed in the distinctive livery of their respective houses. Sword on hip, the planters bandied jests just short of the point where a duel was required, and sometimes past that point, as where someone was called a lout or a Scot. Or perhaps, for those more concerned to insist upon their honor, when they quarreled over the pronunciation of a word.¹² Their sons idled away the time in dancing, gambling, and horse-racing. Until 1784 Virginia asserted a claim over all the lands westward to the Mississippi, from Memphis to Manitoba. Had it not abandoned its territorial ambitions, the national pastime today might be riding to hounds and not baseball.

      Great families augmented their wealth through profitable marriages, producing the СКАЧАТЬ