The Hamiltonian Era
"The rights of government are as essential to be defended as the rights of individuals. The security of the one is inseparable from that of the other." - Alexander Hamilton
After America's war for independence from a tyrannical English monarchy, the founding generation set about to build a government that was decentralized and limited in power. The Founding Fathers believed "that government is best which governs least" (normally attributed to Thomas Jefferson but source is in question). The end result was a Federal form of a representative republic. This government, codified in the Constitution of the United States of America, was an ingenious blend of checks and balances between the powers of the sovereign States and the Federal government as well as between branches of the Federal government itself.
From the beginning, though, there were those who urged that the country should have a National form of government rather than a Federal one. Unlike a Federal government, which maintains the sovereignty of the States, a National government gives all power to the central government and subordinates the States. One of the chief proponents of a strong National government was one of the founders, Alexander Hamilton.
During the early years the country was in great disarray. With ongoing military action against the British a necessity, the individual States did not provide adequate support to the effort, either financially or with the supply of soldiers in the field. The Federal government was tasked with prosecuting the war, but were given no power to raise money or an army under the Articles of Confederation that preceded the Constitution. Commander-in-Chief George Washington was left to constantly petition Congress, with hat in hand, for proper support of the war effort. It was eventually agreed that The Articles were insufficient, as they stood, for the operation and defense of the federation of States. The Federal government had to be given more power to raise resources, without the direct assent of the States, to carry out its appointed duties. For this reason a Constitutional Convention was called to strengthen the Articles of Confederation Eventually, though, the Articles were scrapped for a whole new document, The Constitution.
Throughout the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton lobbied aggressively for a central government with "more energy" (or power). While Hamilton was, in the beginning, allied with James Madison in support of stronger Federal Constitution, his desire for a strong and supreme central government eventually made Madison a rival. Hamilton proposed a permanent President with the power to veto State legislation...in effect, an American king. Additionally, he wanted a permanent senate and the ability of the National government to appoint the State governors. In effect, he wanted a centralized government that would rule over the new country rather than serve it. As historian Clinton Rossiter put it, "Hamilton's overriding purpose was to build the foundations of a new empire." When he was unsuccessful in getting a National form of government from the Convention, he bitterly denounced the Constitution as "a frail and worthless fabric."
Hamilton did not see his failure at the convention as the end of the subject...far from it. He set about to make the country after his own image, in spite of the apparent set back. He now saw the Constitution as an item to be manipulated and circumvented through lawyerly cunning. It was Alexander Hamilton who invented, seemingly from thin air, the concept of implied powers in the Constitution. Hamilton wrote that in the Constitution "there are implied, as well as expressed powers, and the former are as effectually delegated as the later." Hamilton believed himself capable of properly interpreting which powers were implied and accrued to the Federal government. Rossiter said that with this new doctrine of implied powers Hamilton "converted the ...powers enumerated in Article I , Section 8 into firm foundations for whatever prodigious feats of legislation any future Congress might contemplate." This stands in stark opposition to the original intent of the Constitution as emphasized with the addition of the 10th Amendment which reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
As Treasury Secretary, Hamilton believed that the Federal government had unlimited power to lay taxes and tariffs to raise money for the government. For this he used, or rather abused, the General Welfare clause. And yes, again Hamilton was the arbiter of what was in the general welfare of the country. For as he said, "The terms general Welfare were doubtless intended to signify more than was expressed." And that is why the Federalists had the term inserted into the Constitution in the first place. The Commerce Clause was also used as a tool of his nationalist ambitions stating, "What regulation of commerce does not extend to the internal commerce of every state?"
With this unlimited ability to tax and lay tariffs, Hamilton sought to control and manipulate citizens to act as he believed they should. It was he who decided that whiskey was a luxury and should have a special tax applied to it. Distillers on the western side of the Appalachians, however, used whiskey, being easier to transport than grain, as an item of barter for goods from the east. And, yes, I'm sure the frontiersmen also liked to drink it themselves. But the issue became one of equity. The inhabitants of the south had no such special tax laid upon their products, cotton and tobacco. Hamilton admitted that the tax raised the price of the whiskey to the consumers, but as Richard Brookhiser states, "His solutions to the problem were that frontiersmen should drink less, and that government should crack down on scofflaw distillers."
When a local militia in western Pennsylvania laid siege to the home of the federal excise inspector, Hamilton urged immediate action against the whiskey rebels and lobbied President Washington to move against them, as author William Hogeland wrote "with an overwhelming force of at least twelve thousand men, bigger than any American army to date, more than had beaten the British at Yorktown." Hamilton meant, as Hogeland describes it, "to frighten the states with the threat of a military takeover" if they did not acquiesce to the Federal governments power to tax with, as Thomas J. DiLorenzo called it "a standing army of tax collectors." James Madison too saw in Hamilton's fervor over the so-called Whiskey Rebellion a hidden agenda to expand "the glories of a United States woven together by a system of tax collectors."
Much more could be said about Hamilton's push for nationalism, with his belief in highly centralized power, using national debt to justify higher taxes, and his endorsement of judicial activism. All of this stood in stark, heated contrast to Jefferson's view of a limited, decentralized Federal government. Hamilton often complained of "an excessive concern for liberty in public men." Hamilton and Jefferson became bitter political rivals. They and their followers aligned into two camps, the improperly named Federalists (Hamiltonians) and the Republicans (Jeffersonians). The election of Thomas Jefferson as President in the election of 1879 was widely viewed at the time as a final repudiation of the Federalist's programs and goals. However, even this setback was only temporary. Even after Hamilton was killed in his famous duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, his disciples pushed on. As Dilorenzo says, "Hamiltonian hegemony would not be established in America until the second half of the nineteenth century, and the capstone on the Hamiltonian revolution would not come until the early twentieth century." We will look into some of the major steps along this path in the next segment.
