Recovering a founder

THE year of Alexander Hamilton, which saw the publication of Ron Chernow's imposing biography and the bicentennial of Hamilton's duel, comes to a conclusion with a blockbuster exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America," open from September 10 to February 28, 2005 (I am the Historian Curator). The carnival of Hamiltonia is good for the country, as part of the ongoing Founders' Revival. It is good for Hamilton who, while never forgotten, was cast in the shade by the Jefferson/Jackson Day school of American history, which read our past as a long, long road to the New Deal. But it is of special interest to conservatives, who should take the opportunity to rethink their often sour attitude to the man on the ten-dollar bill.

Russell Kirk's grudging account of Hamilton in The Conservative Mind set the tone for conservative minds. Kirk saw Hamilton as a sorcerer's apprentice, who, by encouraging the growth of manufacturing and cities, uncorked the genies of mass politics and change. Kirk also, inconsistently, thought Hamilton was a 17th-century mercantilist. Libertarians suspect Hamilton as the big-government man among the founders. Free traders dislike him as a patron of protection--a mild patron: He supported subsidies for new industries only, which is anathema to pure free trade, but a long way from Bismarck. What militates most against Hamilton is the cult of Jefferson, the anti-statist southern agrarian, for it was Jefferson who said that Hamilton's career had been "a tissue of machinations against the liberty of the country."

Some of this criticism is true; anyone in search of a perfect father among the founders (or in life) will be disappointed. But why does Hamilton deserve a second look?

One large, though seldom acknowledged, factor in the great game of historical favorites is personality. One must know Jefferson and James Madison well to dislike them, but dislike them one inevitably does (wisdom comes when we recover our admiration). One of the star pieces in our Hamilton show is Jean Antoine Houdon's great bust of Jefferson, which shows his intelligence, his charm--and his guile. When I took my wife through the show as it was being installed, she saw Jefferson's shifty eyes and remarked that he looked like a used-car salesman.

Three aspects of Hamilton's career claim the attention of conservatives.

First is what put him in George Washington's cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury--his understanding of debt and finance. America emerged from its revolution encumbered by a load of debt, unable even to make the interest payments. In the exhibition, we try to show America's plight by showing the array of currencies, some of them worth little, that late-18th-century Americans used: a copper coin from New Jersey; bills issued by states, colonies, and a private company; and a two-real piece, one quarter of the Spanish dollar or piece of eight. So dependent were we on Spanish dollars that the New York Stock Exchange didn't end its custom of listing prices in eighths of dollars until April 2001.

The Constitution, ratified in 1788, gave the government of the United States the tools to deal with the problem. But Hamilton, almost alone in his generation, saw the problem as an opportunity for a new stage of growth. Hamilton understood that a credible funding of America's debt would make American IOUs circulate like money. Debt, properly handled, could become credit. He understood this because, as Forrest MacDonald and Richard Sylla point out, he understood the financial revolution that had just begun in the modern world, in Holland and Britain. (France tried it under the financier John Law, stumbled, then drew back, with dirigiste consequences that still resonate.) Through a combination of youthful experience--Hamilton grew up working in a counting house in the West Indies--and autodidacticism--during the Revolutionary War, he filled an old military paybook with economic trivia--Hamilton understood this modern world. Few of his peers did. Reading the economic opinions in the correspondence of Jefferson and Adams is like reading the anti-usury cantos of Ezra Pound. Washington knew little more than Jefferson and Adams, but he knew that Hamilton knew, and gave him his head.

A second subject Hamilton understood was the world. He knew it was a dangerous place, and that the United States would have to back diplomacy with military might. Hamilton's experience of the Revolution underlay this insight. Many of the great founders--Adams, Jefferson, Madison, the aged Franklin--served as political leaders or diplomats. Hamilton fought. He was with an artillery unit in New York during the disastrous battle of Long Island; he led an infantry charge at the battle of Yorktown. In between, he devilled on Washington's staff, drafting orders, handling correspondence, and getting horses shot out from under him in various engagements. He had been led to fighting by his temperament: When he was a twelve-year-old orphan (mother dead, father AWOL), he closed a letter, the earliest of his that survives, with the adolescent hope, "I wish there was a war."