220 YEARS OF CONFRONTATION OVER WHO WAS RIGHT - HAMILTON OR JEFFERSON
Very few American's have any notion of who Alexander Hamilton is. Even informed Americans have only misrepresentations to go on which are frequently and lamely repeated in the media. This is due to the two great duels Hamilton fought. - with Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. The first was an intellectual fight over policy. Hamilton literally crushed Jefferson in this battle. He not only won almost every policy debate with Jefferson during the Washington administration but Jefferson came to agree with Hamilton later in life on many of the issues they disagreed on as members of Washington's cabinet.
The second duel was the more famous one. It literally shortened Hamilton's chance to define his legacy. The fact is that Jeffersonians have largely won the political and historical propaganda war even though history shows Jefferson lost the arguments with Hamilton on almost every count. Jefferson could never match Hamilton's intellect on the important issues of the day but Jefferson was a better politician - no compliment intended. In the 1930s FDR decided to lift Jefferson's place in the pantheon of America's founders by building the Jefferson Memorial. It was not a generally accepted sentiment at the time that Jefferson was exceptional among the founders. Compare his contributions to John Adams, for example, and it's hard to understand why Jefferson would be memorialized and Adams wouldn't be. Just one decade before FDR the movement had been to build a great Teddy Roosevelt monument in Washington - but Teddy was another Republican in addition to Lincoln and Washington, so that didn't move forward. FDR had the Jefferson Memorial built in 1939-43 to finally enshrine a Democrat in Washington, DC (Washington was a Federalist, seen as more equal to a modern Republican and Lincoln a modern Republican) and curry political favor with Southerners for his re-election. Prior to the memorial Jefferson hadn't been seen as particularly significant among the founders and Americans had debated Jefferson's policies and legacy. Stephen Knott's book (see below) chronicles very well this 220 year debate, the swings in popular opinion between Hamilton and Jefferson, and the historians and politicians who sided with one or the other.
More recent scholarship (since the 1970s) has turned against Jefferson for a number of reasons. Here's a list of my top reasons. He was the consummate hypocrite through much of his political life. He was a slave holder and lived his entire, extravagant life on the back of slave labor. He was openly racist in his Notes on Virginia and treated blacks as inferior mentally and physically - he thought of them as children. He is now commonly accepted to have fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings. He was fanatical on many issues such as the French Revolution and advocating death to tyrants. When he said the tree of liberty was to be watered with tyrants' blood he was speaking prior to the passage of the Constitution not during the revolution. He had come to see things the way the French mob saw things. He was also terribly wrong on a number of his central convictions on economics and government such as banking (Madison even parted with Jefferson when he refounded the National Bank.), manufacturing, taxation, military and naval power, and debt assumption - which was a huge success - and is not to blame for our massive national debt today. Jefferson had a fairly disastrous presidency (saved only by Napoleon's need for money to finance conquest of Europe and Lewis and Clark) and declared the Embargo of 1807 against England that crippled the U.S. economy - an extremely stupid and disastrous policy decision. Finally - and most poignant to me - he spent most of his career slandering (through surrogates) the greatest man in U.S. history, George Washington. He has clearly become less and less the virtuous leader he made himself out to be on closer, more objective examination. In Jefferson Post DNA Joseph Ellis categorizes the word "Jeffersonian" as having evolved into not only a political philosophy but also a mental condition that allows for self-deceit. Ellis kindly calls it "mental agility." http://www.studythepast.com/his597/jeffeson_post_dna.pdf
A quick side note - many modern conservatives take offense at any criticism of the founders. They hold them in high esteem as they should. However, it is one thing to admire men of great courage and character (Washington, Adams, Hamilton and others) and another to ignore the faults, mistakes, and bad behavior of other founders. It is also fair to recognize the contributions of all the founders, but to put some above others merely out of ignorance or manipulation of the truth is unacceptable. Jefferson deserves credit for the good things he accomplished, but he should not be held above founders - such as Adams and Hamilton - who did far more to found our nation.
I have read or researched several Hamilton biographers. Here are my favorites. Stephen Knott's book was a terrific source for much of this information. Also, here is a link to the Congress's Hamilton biography list: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/bibdisplay.pl?index=H000101
Ron Chernow's biography (2004, 818 pgs) is in my view the best Hamilton biography ever written and a "must-read". Chernow is a fantastic, award-winning writer and approaches Hamilton with balance and fairness. Chernow is unique as well in that he has the financial aptitude to appreciate what Hamilton accomplished with the U.S. economy.
Alexander Hamilton and the Persistence of Myth is a priceless book for any Hamilton apologist or student of history in America for that matter. It chronicles the ebb and flow of the Hamilton/Jefferson conflict amongst historians and political figures for the last 220 years. (Stephen Knott, 2002, 336 pgs)
Gertrude Atherton's 1902 book The Conqueror is a romanticized story of Hamilton's life. She depicts him as something of a super hero. This book - which was quite popular - shows how popular Hamilton was at the turn of the 20 century.
Henry Cabot Lodge wrote a Hamilton biography for the American Statesman series in 1882. He was very fond of Hamilton and did a 12-volume series of Hamilton's works in 1902. Other favorable authors of note include: John Torrey Morse (1882), Richard Brookhiser (1999), Forrest McDonald (1979), Richard Morris (1957) and Harvey Flaumenhaft. Reading the perspectives of these authors from different eras is quite interesting because it shows how history has been shaped - if not edited - over the decades.
On the other hand, there are Hamilton biographers and other authors whose work is biased against Hamilton - usually because they are Southerners or Jeffersonian apologists. Let me note here that I love the South - just not some of their historians. These two groups generally depict Hamilton as a power-mad monarchist or form of evil incarnate. These include Dumas Malone, Henry Adams, Claude Bowers, Julian Boyd, and Adrienne Koch.
