A Republic No More. Jay Cost

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СКАЧАТЬ countries to bid against each other, for the privileges of our markets.”²⁸ In other words, Hamilton sees the possibility of a great commercial empire, one that could even force the fearsome Great Britain to deal with the United States on terms dictated by the latter.

      But, as Hamilton had demonstrated in the preceding essays, disunion among the several states kept the United States from making the most of its potential. A lack of a central authority had enabled the European powers to play each state off the others, and ultimately get for themselves a better deal than they would have if Americans were bound together in a tighter union. Hamilton sees worse things to come should the states fail to unite:

      It would be in the power of the maritime nations, availing themselves of our universal impotence, to prescribe the conditions of our political existence . . . and confine us to a passive commerce. . . . The unequalled spirit of enterprise, which signalizes the genius of the American merchants and navigators, and which is in itself an inexhaustible mine of national wealth, would be stifled and lost, and poverty and disgrace would overspread a country which, with wisdom, might make herself the admiration and envy of the world.²⁹

      On the other hand, a “vigorous national government . . . directed to a common interest, would baffle all the combinations of European jealousy to restrain our growth.” But even more than this, the sort of economic coordination that could come only from a central government would bind the country together in a shared quest for ever-increasing prosperity:

      An unrestrained intercourse between the States themselves will advance the trade of each by an interchange of their respective productions, not only for the supply of reciprocal wants at home, but for exportation to foreign markets. The veins of commerce in every part will be replenished, and will acquire additional motion and vigor from a free circulation of the commodities of every part.³⁰

      Taken as a whole, Federalist #11 is a magnificently prescient statement, and a testament to the brilliance of Hamilton. Somehow, he saw beyond the America of 1787—an undeveloped, disconnected, fractious collection of states dominated by subsistence farmers—and perceived the vast economic powerhouse that the United States is today. Thanks to her commerce, America today dominates the world without having to hold a single foreign people prisoner, and Hamilton saw this potential before anybody else in the country or the world. He is the originator of the concept of American exceptionalism.

      At the same time, however, the potential for conflict with Madison should be obvious. Madisonian balance and Hamiltonian prosperity are goals that are not necessarily in conflict, but they are not necessarily in harmony, either. A Hamiltonian government that promotes national development may not retain a balance between all factions; quite the contrary, it may systematically favor those deemed most helpful to the leadership’s long-term goals. In fact, as we shall see, one of Hamilton’s goals was to yoke the prosperity of the wealthy merchant class to the fate of the Union through policies that favored both. Madison was thoroughly appalled by this.

      The potential for tension is especially apparent when we consider Federalist #11 in light of Hamilton’s view of the English Constitution. As mentioned above, Hamilton envisioned an executive branch almost entirely independent of swings in the mood of the public. He had a similar desire to see the Senate so inoculated. Only the House would be directly tied to the people, and here Hamilton once explained to Jefferson that he was comfortable with the executive wielding extralegal influence within that chamber, much as the king of Great Britain used patronage to acquire the votes of recalcitrant members of Parliament. In his notes, Jefferson recorded a dinner conversation he once had with John Adams and Hamilton:

      Conversation began on other matters and, by some circumstance, was led to the British constitution, on which Mr. Adams observed “purge that constitution of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, & it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” Hamilton paused and said, “purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, & it would become an impracticable government: as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.”³¹

      What is Hamilton on about here? Return to his broader theory of republican government: the people’s representatives were not to be trusted to perceive the public interest, let alone sacrifice their own parochial desires for the sake of the common good. What was needed was a strong executive, largely free from public meddling, that had the capacity to, in effect, bribe small-minded members of the legislature to do the things that they should otherwise be doing. For Hamilton—a man who never took a dishonest dollar—this is not about venality for its own sake. This is about compelling venal men to do what they really ought to do, anyway.³²

      Intentions aside, one can see why Madison would not truck with any of this. In his vision of the new American republic, there were simply to be no special favors whatsoever to be dispensed by the government—no patronage, no sinecures, no insider information leading to vast fortunes. The whole point of his system was to enable factions to rise up to prevent other factions from doing precisely these things, so that the only product of public policy was well and truly public spirited. Corruption was not a tool to be used ultimately for the public good by a natural elite; instead, it was a form of cancer that could pervert otherwise good men into destroying the republic itself. Ironically, the main focal point of the disagreement was none other than their old colonial master: Great Britain. In the old mother country, Hamilton saw an example of republican empire to be emulated while Jefferson and Madison saw a cautionary tale of how a true republic may be destroyed.³³

      Thus, what united them in defense of the Constitution was not so much a shared vision of what the new government should be, but rather what it should not be. Both judged the Constitution to be a supreme improvement over the Articles of Confederation, but once the fight to replace it was won, it is not terribly surprising—in historical retrospect, at any rate—that the two would part ways, and indeed become leaders of the political factions that would dominate American politics for the next decade.³⁴

      In the final analysis, it was not so much that the two held views that necessarily contradicted one another; rather, they possessed different priorities that could, and did, come into conflict. For Madison, the ultimate goal of the new government was to balance different factions and produce public policy that was only in the public interest; for Hamilton, the goal was a vigorous government to spur the country on to national greatness. Insofar as these views suggested divergent policy demands, Madison and Hamilton could be expected to turn from allies into opponents. That is precisely what happened, as the public debate turned from ratification to the Bank—a controversial institution that may have been necessary from Hamilton’s perspective, but was anathema to Madison.

      Washington was chosen unanimously to be the nation’s first president, and while his cabinet did not sample from Anti-Federalist sentiment, it drew from a broad spectrum of nationalist political opinion.³⁵ Jefferson—a skeptic of expansive federal power—became secretary of state. Randolph—who refused to sign the Constitution but eventually supported it for ratification—became attorney general. Washington chose for secretary of the treasury his former chief of staff Hamilton, who had grand plans for the office. In Federalist #11, he hopes to make “one great American system, superior to the controul of all trans-atlantic force or influence.”³⁶ The first step in this process was to get a handle on America’s disastrous public finances.

      That would be no little feat, as there were centuries’ worth of precedent demonstrating America’s reckless approach to its debt. Some of this was due to Great Britain refusing to allow the colonies to coin their own money, but the balance of the blame lay with the colonial governments, the first in the world to print fiat paper money. The result was rampant inflation and eventually an insistence by Britain that СКАЧАТЬ