American History Hit - The Real Hamilton: Founding Father

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

Who really was Alexander Hamilton, and what do we actually know about his life?A Founding Father, he fought in the Revolutionary War, founded the American financial system and was the first ever Secretary of the Treasury. But who really was Hamilton? How did his face come to be on our bank notes? Did he love his wife? And why would he go to duel even after his son had died in doing so?In this first episode of our 4 part series on American History Hit, Don Wildman is talking to William Hogeland to find out. William is the author of 'The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding' and his substack can be found here.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Gilded, bejuled, festooned, in glowing bulbs and bright neon, the big names and lights. This is one of the hottest shows of the season, and we're right in the middle of things. Gliding into the gathered hubbub, bustling shoulder to shoulder, people call out to their friends, jockeying for position, everyone searching their pockets and purses for tickets, checking their coats, eyeing the merchandise, down the the last dregs of their drinks. We clear the lobby, make our way past the ushers. Two programs, please. Thank you very much.

And locate our seats. Whoa. Check it out, huh? Front and center. Now these are seats. Excuse us. Sorry. Careful.

Oh, watch your knees. It's a little tight, but not too shabby, huh? Five rows from the stage. Pricey, but worth it. The whole theater is red velvet finery, the orchestra players in tuxes. And we settle in and relax. as the lights begin to dim, and the show is underway. It's Hamilton. No, no, not the musical.

This is the Hamilton everyone's been waiting to see. The real Alexander Hamilton. Let the play begin. Good day, listeners. This is American History Hit, and I'm your host, Don Wildman. If there is a founding father who deserves to be the subject of his own podcast series, it's Alexander Hamilton, so prodigious a role did the man play in the creation of a new nation, which destiny seems to have designed him for. Well, we are trying. Dedicating to A. Dot Ham a series of four episodes. Probably ought to be more.

The monumental task of telling this punchbowl of a biography, you're forced to sip where you'd otherwise gulp, or you never make it to the end of his times. And we begin today in the company of esteemed historian, accomplished author William Hoagland, who has written a new and important book, The Hamilton Scheme, an epic tale of money and power in the American founding

Good title. William, you've returned to the pot and we're so grateful. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me. Last time we talked about the Whiskey Rebellion, which will certainly find its way somewhere in this conversation, I'm sure. But I want to start with an article you published or was published back in 2007. I mean, this is long before Hamilton, the musical and everything else we've been living with for the last, I guess, 20 years almost. The title of this article, which was on an online source, you can find it easily Googling, inventing Alexander Hamilton on the troubling embrace

of the founder of American finance. I bring this up because, A, it's a great article, very interesting, about how this storytelling of Hamilton is its own phenomenon, isn't it? It is its own phenomenon, and it's funny you bring that article up because it was 07. I guess it's amazing to think about that now.

It was in Boston Review. And, yeah, I was already kind of interested in the Hamilton, what I thought of as the Hamilton cult developing. Not that I could have possibly predicted ever an amazing cultural phenomenon like the musical, Hamilton and American musical, would have ever come along. I mean, that was an unpredictable sort of earthquake. But if you look back to 2007 and think about what I was talking about then, while the musical was unpredictable, of course,

it actually was kind of the cherry on top of something that had been going on for some time, an unpredictable cherry on top, which was, you know, that Hamilton had had a major vogue, was having a major vogue kind of in policy circles, like economic, policy circles during that really going past 2007 now and looking back, I mean, things are having to do with economics and finance that kind of bind residential administrations together across party lines. I mean, George W. Bush and Obama administration people kind of agreeing on the idea of Hamilton as a model for how the federal government ought to look at finance and economics, that was already going on. We'll get into the details of that soon, but the broadest notion of this

man's storytelling is that he's the founding father who doesn't become president, right? I mean, he's the one who lives in the shadow of Washington Adams, et cetera, et cetera. And that has always kept him out of the limelight a bit in American history storytelling. That's what this, I guess that's what the vogue was all about, right? Oh, we have this guy. We haven't told the story fully about it. Part of it is that, yeah, because, you know, there was exhaustion with Jefferson, for example, at some point. And you know how it goes. I mean, you do for sure. And I'm sure your listeners do, too. Like, someone's in, someone's out, right? So if Jefferson's in, Hamilton's out because they had this kind of conflict. Plus, it's true. Jefferson was president, along with other things. And Hamilton never was president.

We have other founders who were never president or had unsuccessful presidencies, you could say. Like John Adams, his presidency isn't held up as one of the great presidencies. But still, it's true that Hamilton never was in that role. And I think that has played a part in the kind of the sense of him as an outsider, you know. But that was the deal right from the start. I mean, his likely rise starts right at the beginning. We're on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean, and this is a child of a man, James Hamilton, who comes like so many Englishmen of the day to get rich in the sugar business, isn't he? Yeah, and didn't succeed in getting rich in the sugar business or in much else. But it's also funny that, you know, it's true, Hamilton was born in Nevis,

which was part of the British Leward colony. And, you know, later, people who hated him like John Adams again, hated Hamilton so much later for political and personal. personal reasons, that he liked to describe Hamilton as coming from like a speck on the map, just an absolute nowhere, sort of, and that he came from nowhere to the place where all the important historical business was going on, which is looking at it from a funny angle, but that angle has been adopted. But really, you know, the Lerd colony, in terms of its economic and commercial importance, was, it was far more important than all of the 13 Atlantic colonies put together, really. And so Hamilton wasn't really from some remote place coming

to like the metropole. He left the Caribbean, which was really a dynamic commercial engine to come to New York, which was not like New York now, the center of the immigrant universe or whatever. He came to a place that was kind of a hustling competitor port, you know. And it's even funnier to think about the fact that, I mean, the idea that he was this scrappy outsider immigrant kind of clawing his way in is odd because, you know, he wasn't, you know, the classic idea that comes, I think it's largely comes from Ron Cherno. very popular biography of Hamilton, that this kind of precursor of the immigrant experience, it's funny because he had been living before he came to New York in a Dutch colony. So he kind of

had been living as a kind of immigrant, you could say, switching empires. But when he arrived in New York, this son of a British citizen born in a British colony was back in a British colony in New York. And in that sense, and certainly as much a citizen of empire as anybody else in New York. We know so much about his chaotic family upbringing, lots of tragedy. His mother dies very early. He's separated from his brother. His father is a deadbeat. He leaves him. He's really left to his own means to figure out life at a very early age. Fortunately, he happens to be a brilliant person in general. But that starts very early and he survives. How much was he aware, would you say, of his unlikelyhood? Or was this a condition of the times in this kind of place? I don't know the answer to that because you'd have to be in his head and he was not forthcoming about some of the stuff. And many people then wouldn't have been. But if you look at some of the other famous founders and think about the fact that, you know, unlike Jefferson and Madison, leave them aside. But like, look at Adams, actually, the sort of the country cousin branch of the Adams family.

Or look at Washington, who of course became extremely august and so forth, but grew up actually in a condition of disadvantage in his world. a look at Benjamin Franklin arriving in Philadelphia from Boston, and pretty much in a runaway apprentice situation with nothing and becoming fabulously well off and making and doing so many important things. And there's a way in which Hamilton's story is not as unique in that way. Like what makes him unique has to do with what he then did with it all. But a lot of them had to sort of strive to come back from a disadvantage

and maybe that drove some of the revolutionaries, you know, to become the political figures they were. I think it's very true. The intersection of these, you know, strong egos and these very creative men with the birth of a nation is a really lucky one for these guys in terms of, you know, releasing their creative natures. Let's just talk about a few details. It's finance right from the start for Hamilton, learning the ways of a business through a certain institution. Beekman and Krueger, I believe, right? Yeah, that's right. He was a clerk in the Caribbean and he worked, you know, in a fairly low-level job. job that would be. But you have your hands in the guts of the thing. You're doing the paperwork. You know, I always say, like, he could dot the teeth and cross the eyes. No, the other way around. But, you know, he was a detail guy. He was a quick learner. There's no way around that. I mean, he just, he could learn fast. And he learned fast both as a clerk and then when he got to

America, he learned fast there, all having to do with the ways of commerce, really, which involves finance and lending and borrowing and balancing interest. financial interests and how a great nation, how a great empire, like the British Empire, controls or fails to control those money issues via government power, was something he became very aware of probably before he was even conscious of becoming aware of it. And then he starts to apply it to a country that didn't have anything like that going on when he got there. His natural abilities with numbers combined with his ability with prose. I mean, he's a very good writer.

He distinguishes himself early on by writing a letter that's descriptive of the hurricane that hit Nevis, I guess. And that's noticed. And there's sort of a collection made in the community to get this kid educated and send him to the colonies, right? The new world up there. And that's how he ends up getting to New York. What interests me about this in the general condition of his childhood is how the sort of danger of his childhood, he's already familiar with life being on the edge. that's a very interesting quality of this man. And he will be willing to take himself to the edge in many an argument and many a political debate as the times come. He's bringing that kind of energy into this crucible that is a brand new nation. He definitely took risks and big ones.

He had that sort of knack of being pretty sure he was right about everything. Certainly thinking of himself frequently as the smartest person in the room probably sometimes was. He had a lot of, I mean, he just went for what he, what he, he wanted and what he thought was right, sometimes to great length, sometimes looking at it sort of clearly, I think you can see these lengths as somewhat unsettling. But he was not to be deterred by argument, as you just put it, that's right. I mean, he was out to win every argument, always prove he was right. And also just in action as well. I mean, it was a life of action, not a life of philosophy, a life of action. When he gets to the country, he enrolls himself

in eventually into King's College, which is Columbia University today, lying about his age. He knew that he was a little too old for the game. And so he pretends that he was born three years earlier. And thus begins this sort of myth about this Wunderkind personality. You know, because basically he's always three years older than people think he is. Yeah, the birth date issue is an interesting one. I'm relying on pretty recent new research by Michael Newton looking really closely into what year Hamilton probably really was born. And there's still controversy about that. But I'm, I'm going with that, whatever year it was, he definitely changed his age. And I think, you know, it did probably make him seem, you know, far more, even more, you know, brilliant and accomplished and

precocious than he was, not that he wasn't anyway, to some degree. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, again, that's an example of sort of just like the making a decision at a very young age, like, okay, I'm in a new place, I'm going to do something different. And being fairly unscrupulous about what that decision would mean. How would he have known about what was going on in the colonies in those days. I guess stories were being told down there into Caribbean even, right, about the unrest and the issues at hand. Sure. I mean, the news was covered. I mean, there were newspapers and the news was covered. His arrival and then very quickly coinciding with the whole thing that had been going on now for a long time, the imperial crisis with the colony's conflict with

the empire coming to a head, you know, it coincided kind of beautifully for him with opportunity because it just started to really get hot right when he was right at the age to sort of take advantage of the opportunity to move up there. He was already moving up. But, I mean, this was a great stroke of luck, really. And there was a lot of luck in his early life that suddenly, you know, I mean, when the British invaded, they invaded New York. And there he was, you know.

Right. And his desire, like so many in those days, was to distinguish himself in an armed conflict. You know, this was the sort of romantic notion of his early on. And that's what it makes me wonder, how much did he engineer his trip to New York versus the community, which is always told in this sort of, oh, my gosh, you know, a spriticor on his behalf. But he would have seen the possibilities rising, a smart kid like that. I could become a soldier. I don't know that it was as calculated as that. And I don't know that it could have been because I'm becoming a soldier. I mean, he certainly had the martial dreams, that romance you're talking about. That was a key part of his young life. And it was a part of a part of a. his life throughout his career, actually. So that's for sure. But, you know, I mean, like very, not that long before the imperial crisis, George Washington wanted a commission in the British

army, you know. So, I mean, Hamilton's Marshall dreams were not immediately necessarily, or essentially tied up at first with a revolutionary posture. So he would have gotten that right as soon as he got off the boat with his roommate, you know, Hercules and all of the connections that he made at that time. He would have thought of himself as a British citizen. Of course, course, like all people did, he has to catch up on what's happening in the colonies. Yeah, and it's interesting that it was kind of, again, coincided perfectly with his interests, because, you know, to a great extent, it was a merchant resistance, right? And it had to do with taxation and with navigation policy and so forth, restricting business. These were his people. You know, he already

knew that landscape. He knew about the merchant business. And so he's going to connect with these people pretty naturally, I think. But it's an exciting time. I mean, he gets there in 1770s. So in a matter of just a few years, all the Sons of Liberty stuff, all that everything is happening that he's hearing about. It's got to be exciting to be a part of all of that. And the ideas make sense to him. This is going to be a new nation that I'm going to be a part of and I'm going to possibly help found. Already his writing skills are going to be put to work. I mean, he becomes what's known in the day as a pamphleteer, right? He publishes a couple of pamphlets, which were, you know, notable. He had a good command of the style. And again, given his young age, it was impressive and given that he seemed even younger than he was. it was even more impressive. But, you know, it was a kind of a standard style, you know, I mean, there was a lot of, there's a certain or a tonned quality to those pamphlets. There's a certain sarcastic kind of snarky quality as well. This was, he could, you know, he just picked it up. You know, he knew that stuff and he could channel it. But really, I think what started to really make him was just being in an artillery company, you know, volunteering and putting something

together. And again, took initiative, you know, took initiative to actually take action. The British invade New York, July 1776. This is when he really sort of makes his mark in the eyes of the likes of George Washington. He steals the cannons. He gets his roommates together in New York and they create this unit, small unit called the Corsicans, based on the Corsican independence movement. And suddenly he is part of this army, which is forming. How soon does he become an actual member of it? Is he an officer?

I mean, how does it happen? Well, you know, he's commissioned by the state. Well, now I guess we can call it a state, was very recently a colony. But he's not in the Continental Army, really, until he joins Washington's staff. So, you know, that's how that worked. There were the state forces. And then there was the Continental Army, and they had a complicated relationship. But he distinguished himself in a couple of battles. And he arrived with skills from his time at Beekman and Kruger. You know, he could be officious. He could be annoying, probably. But the fact is, he was pretty good at giving orders and making decisions and moving paper around and all the kind of administrative pieces of war that

actually are maybe less romantic, but are necessary. So he came to Washington's attention, I think, pretty quickly. And he really becomes a Continental Army officer when he joins Washington's staff and takes an important role there as he was not like chief of staff. But I think he was pretty good at acting like chief of staff. And Washington really came to rely on him. There's no doubt about it as a right hand in the very, very, very challenging times. The, the continental army was not doing well. The war was not going well. But Hamilton's career went well. But it's important to underscore the fact that he'd had action. I mean, he had done a lot. He'd been, of course, in New York, but then fought in Princeton. You know, he's down in Valley Forge. He's,

he is in the war prior to becoming this administrator. He resists this role, of course, because He doesn't, he wants to be in the, you know, distinguishing himself on the field. But as you say, Washington sees his skills and puts them to good use. It was so much about that war at that time, wasn't it? The Congress just operating in such a fashion as to not really supply them as much as they should, et cetera, et cetera. And Hamilton is central in that struggle. He is central in that struggle because he's very much, to your point, in the war on the staff. I mean, he's at headquarters. They're in the war. But the issues that he begins to get interested in very quickly have to do with the bigger question of supply, finance, money, how do you run this thing?

What is Congress not doing? The Continental Congress, what is it not doing for us? And why is it so inert? Why is it so weak? Why is it so dysfunctional? Which is how a lot of the people in the Army looked at it at the time for pretty good reason. And this is how he begins to get into the whole question of public finance, which is what

excited him. Today, we are not necessarily thinking, oh, this is the most romantic thing on earth. public finance. I mean, you know, but to him, it was, and it's because it wasn't about, you know, finance. It was about wealth and strength and power and building a country and consolidating power. And so this is what got him up in the morning and out the door from a pretty early age. He begins to look at that issue and study closely the famous thinkers on public finance. And this sort of launches him into the, it overlaps with the war and it launches him into that phase of his career. This is the theme that interested me about him because so much

of his development and so much of his thinking comes from really stressful circumstances, you know, from the get-go in his life. But then he's creating these ideas of a nation, even while they're fighting a war and a chaotic one at that. It's going very badly. And yet, this guy's playing sort of multi-level chess in his life. I'm tempted to call it genius, right? I mean, that's just there, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it's pretty brilliant to be thinking about the potential future of a country that doesn't exist and might actually go under tomorrow. when things were going so poorly, potentially for Washington and the Army, to be frustrated by the fact that we're not yet forming into a consolidated power, takes a certain kind of amazing ability to project toward the future. He is on that staff for four years. I mean, the bulk of the war, he is serving George Washington as basically his chief of staff. He basically runs Washington's office through all those years. Meanwhile, he does have a personal life. And he meets Elizabeth Schuyler.

And thus begins an alliance, really, with an amazing family, the Schuyler family. And he begins to climb. Yeah. He was a quick learner, as we've been saying. And he learned, A, he learned how to get ahead. But he also learned so much from, I think, the Schuyler family and from his connection to them. I mean, his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, was one of the most powerful people in New York. And really, in that sense, one of the most powerful people in the revolutionary elite, powerful, ruthless, wily.

Hamilton got an object lesson and was meshed in the desires and needs of these very ambitious elites. Their search for gain, their kind of relentless self-interest was something he was right up against and seeing from, you know, up close and personal in what was now his extended family, his in-laws. This was certainly critical to his social rise, as you're saying, absolutely. But I think also critical to his beginning to understand how to create a public finance for the United States, at that point really didn't have one. You know, we did an episode a little while ago on Theater Roosevelt, having nothing to do with this, obviously, but there was the idea of the Dutch ecosystem of Hudson Valley and how

unique that culture really was, and it contributed to Roosevelt's upbringing as well, and his outlook on life. Certainly, Alexander Hamilton is diving straight into that world with the Skylars and the Van Renslers, this whole world of these Dutch, who have a more open-door notion about society and how to get into it and how to advance. It's much more commercially driven. That's the world that he steps into. Yeah, very commercially driven. I mean, for a long time, those families, those Dutch patroon-type families had been, A, intermarrying, creating kind of imperial, commercial imperial culture in the Hudson Valley, and also, I mean, and yet growing huge amounts

of produce for the export market in the imperial system, now transferring all of that power, all of that knowledge, all of that wealth over to a revolutionary thing. situation. And again, incredible opportunity there, also incredible risk, right, because it all might not have worked. But for Hamilton, he entered a world there that gave him, you know, inspired him to think about how some of those impulses could be yoked to a national style benefit that some other people were thinking about. He wasn't the only one, but a lot of people didn't really want to create a consolidated nation state out of the revolution. He did. And one of the ways he figured out how to do it was by watching people like the Skyler's.

As an inveterate underachiever, I admire a man who knows what he sees ahead and knows how to pick and choose his arena, you know, the arenas of his life. And that's really the statement on Alexander Hamilton. He knows how to advance himself. And it's not as ugly as all that. You know, this is attached to that or intelligent ideas and an advancement of his mindset as much as his pocketbook, I suppose. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. At the end of the war, I mean, he distinguishes himself again on the field or he finally gets back onto the field at the Battle of Yorktown. Can you explain to me his role in that battle and how much did he really play a part in it?

Well, I mean, this is controversial to some degree because some people really want to see him. When you make Hamilton the center of the revolutionary story, you want to see him everywhere, like being the key person. The Battle of Yorktown in general, the victory there was largely dependent on the French anyway, and whether his taking of that redoubt, which of course is now fabled in song and story, was really that critical or not. I'm not really in a position to say from a military strategic point of view. It was critically important to Hamilton himself that he actually do something in the field, not just be in the office.

I mean, he had already kind of broken up with Washington over this issue. I mean, they had huge conflicts about it because Hamilton wanted to, field command, and Washington wanted him in the office because he'd made himself indispensable. So you have this conflict right there. The fact that he finally gets kind of released into the field, I don't know how important it was even to his future career, let alone to the victory in the revolution. It was very, very important to him to check that box, the glory box. He wasn't alone in that. It was just common among young men in that situation that he was in. They would want that, you know, and he got it. What an amazing time. Hamilton is 27.

in mid-20s when all of this is going down. And suddenly there's the possibility, it still isn't for sure, that they've got a new nation that's going to work. Oh, my Lord. How to dig in your heels on your career here. But there's still work to be done to settle the matter about this war thing. There's an incredible episode that most Americans don't really know much about. And I've been sort of racing to this in this conversation because I think it deserves it.

The Newberg controversy, the Newburgh crisis is often called. we're after the war. The problem is the army, the Continental Army soldiers have not been paid. They're not happy about this. Explain to me the circumstances of their unhappiness and how Hamilton intersects with this. The events known as the Newburgh conspiracy are really, and sometimes the conspiracy, sometimes the crisis, are really how Hamilton steps into public life and really for the first time. This is when he came to Congress from New York. and the issues have everything to do with everything that he was working on in terms of finance for the rest of his career, because the Army officers were extremely upset about not having been

paid, understandably. Hamilton and his mentor in finance, Robert Morris. Now, I'm going to mention Robert Morris and say that's not a name people know from the musical. He's barely mentioned in some of the biographies. This was the most important mentor Hamilton had in finance and politics, and a fascinating character in his own right. A gregarious... Well, talk about a roller coaster ride. Yeah, I mean, really, it's quite a ride. I mean, one of the richest men in America, if not the most, one of the most powerful people in the revolutionary period under-discussed today because he's also maybe slightly an embarrassment. Morris was, he was certainly a war profiteer. He mingled public and private funds with flamboyant impunity. He was just quite a character. And from him, Hamilton learned a

lot about what might coalesce power and money in the country, which made both Morris and Hamilton quite controversial. While they're trying to pass a federal tax in order to earmark the funds from that tax for rich people who had loaned the Congress money to fight the war, bondholders, war bondholders. And they're having huge difficulty passing this tax because a lot of people in power did not want a federal tax or the Congress to have any kind of consolidated power. I mean, imagine if If you're one of the state's rights type of people in the day, you don't want Congress now suddenly to have the kind of imperial power you're fighting the British to get rid of. You don't want a federal tax.

So that's the fight that's going on when these events called the Newberg Crisis break out. Robert Morris's and Hamilton's and others attempt to get a federal tax passed by the Congress had suddenly hit a huge wall. And what they're seeing is that all consolidation of funds is just going to collapse because they need these rich lenders to get paid. Well, suddenly arrive in Philadelphia, officers coming from Newburgh, New York, where Washington has got his troops kind of holding them before disbanding the army, they show up and say, we need to get paid. Well, the Morris team in Congress, including certainly Hamilton, sees this as an incredible opportunity to yoke the needs of the rich

bondholders to get their interest payments, to the armies need to get paid. And that's a pretty good opportunity because if an army is standing there saying we need to get paid, and if the army can be convinced to say, we need everybody to get paid, including the bondholders, well, then it's going to be hard for Congress to say no to passing the tax. You've got an armed force that's effectively threatening to not lay down their arms in peacetime unless you pass a tax. So this is a very tricky moment because it's actually tantamount to a military coup in a way if the army is telling us. Congress what to do about passing a tax to pay them and also to pay the bondholding class. It also speaks to Hamilton's outlook, political outlook, economic outlook, on how this nation is

going to operate or how it ought to in his mind at the time. He's not the most democratically minded man in the world, is he? No, that's the understatement of the year. He's not democratically minded at all in the sense that we would think of democracy or as he would have thought of democracy, most of the time when he uses the term, not every time, but most of the time when Hamilton uses that term, he means it effectively as a slur, as our chief disease is democracy. What he believes will make a powerful nation out of this chaotic collection of states is consolidation of power in a small group of people. And that would also mean the consolidation of wealth. He wants to consolidate government and wealth and keep power in the hands of the wealthy

whom he would consider to be the best qualified people by sort of by definition to make big decisions of the kind that would create a consolidated imperial type of country. So the last thing he's interested in is expanding access to government for ordinary people who were already largely restricted and kept out of government anyway. He's not looking to expand that. He's looking to keep it quite restricted. And he's looking to consolidate money with political power. And so this is what comes up in the Newberg crisis is sort of how are we going to do that. And he takes a fairly big risk in flirting anyway with throwing in his lot with making that happen by, you know, military pressure on the political body that is

the Continental Congress. These are the sprouts of what will become the conflict between the Jeffersonian, and the Hamiltonians, the Federalists. I mean, it's really the beginning of the theme of American political society, isn't it? It is. There's the conflict between Hamilton and Jefferson types over this, and we use those very broad stroke, that binary. And there's another conflict, which is less often discussed, which is there were people in America at the time who were not among the elites and were the ordinary working people of the day who had a different idea for what the revolution should lead to. And this is something that I've been studying and trying to bring into the Hamilton story for a long time. One of his major opponents was this kind of

movement that doesn't really have a name, but this kind of white working class movement, you might say, the movement on behalf of free labor, to get the place more democratic, exactly what Hamilton didn't want. And this is where you get rioting and revolutionary activity against the elite revolutionaries, things like the Shea's Rebellion, for example, which is famous, and other things that are less famous, other actions that are less famous. And one of Hamilton's main goals was to suppress all that stuff too, because to him, democratic agitation for more democratic approaches to economics and finance would have a terribly deleterious effect on his goal, which was to consolidate power and wealth in government. I just want to be clear on how that consolidation is done. The nuts and bolts of it

really boils down to bonds, doesn't it? The paying off of bonds. The nuts and bolts of Hamilton's idea for consolidation has to do with public debt, handled third. through bonds issued to well-off people who were in that sense lending the government money. Frequently when people talk about Hamilton and the public debt, they're talking about the foreign debt, which did exist. The U.S. had to borrow money from other countries in order to fight the war. To Hamilton, and he learned some of this from Robert Morris, the real driver, though, the thing it could drive nationhood was the domestic debt, which was far more important to his thinking and actually far more dynamic than the foreign debt.

He wanted to sustain the domestic debt after the war. The idea was not to pay it off quickly. The idea was to keep the lending class, you know, that elite class. So he wanted to be whose interests he wanted to connect to the interests of the state, I mean, the national state, he wanted to keep those things connected. So he wanted government to get into a position, the federal government, to get into a position of paying those people regular interest over a long period, that is, enriching them and their children, you know, creating a kind of a lending class whose interests are connected to those of the federal government.

This was his vision. And that's the function of the public debt in Hamilton's view. Is it fair at all to find, you know, a connection between the John Kenneth Galbra, the, you know, deficit-funded government and Hamilton's view as expressed in the Newburgh crisis? Is that any kind of tie there? Yeah, I think there is a tie there. I mean, I think in a lot of ways Hamilton founded the idea of paying for projects, not sort of like raise taxes, create a budget, fund it through these taxes, move on to your next project, raise new earmark taxes. No, the idea was to have a pool of money that government could use that was coming through borrowing, sort of on a broad, long-term scale. Then you could do your big national projects. So yes, he did not see a public debt as a negative. He clarifies that he sees it as a positive if, he said, not too large, which everybody who talked

about debt would always say, oh, if it's not too large. But compared to what they had before him, it was large because there hadn't really been one before him. But in his case, it was a political outlook that had to do with, you know, control in terms of the structure of the country, you know, the wealthy class controlling things. That's really important to this. That is right. I mean, he's looking at a public debt, meaning, you know, we want to keep paying interest to this small class of lenders because these are the people that, you know, the Skyler's of the world. And the Robert Morris is of the world, the merchant class and the commercial class, we want that class tied to federal aims, i.e. keep power in the hands of those people, political power and

financial power. And you do that by paying them regular interest. That's what they want. They want profit. They want to get ahead. There's a lot of controversy there. How does the Newburgh crisis finally work itself out? Well, deals are made. I mean, Washington sees Robert Morris and Hamilton and the others as really playing a pretty dangerous game with the army. Washington also wanted exactly what they wanted. He was one of them. He wanted exactly what Hamilton wanted. He wanted government and financial power consolidated. And he wanted a national, federal, strong government, not a loose collection of states. But he saw, he could see what they were doing, that they were actually, he wanted his army paid also, Washington. He wanted that too. He wanted to achieve it all,

but actually saw Morris and Hamilton and that crowd playing a dangerous game, where the fact is, if you get the army going, well, they might go with your opponents. You know, you might not win what you want to win. You don't know what the army's going to do. He cautioned Hamilton on this kind of after the fact. So Washington really, I think, played a very important role in managing this thing down, keeping it under control, and in the end telling Congress, Washington ended up telling Congress, look, I've just managed a potential mutiny here. It's not going to happen. right now. But it could happen unless you pay these people. And what he really meant was unless you pass that tax that Robert Morris wants and Hamilton wants. So in the end, that's kind of what happened.

They passed that tax. But then you get this weird bumpy moment where you'd think, oh, okay, they've passed the tax. We're moving straight on to having a national government that works in the Hamiltonian sense. Great. But that's not what happens. Congress just sort of starts to fall apart. The tax they passed was not really what Hamilton wanted. It was weak. He was so disgusted by it as a watered down measure that he ended up voting against it, and he ended up leaving the Continental Congress, and so to many of his cohort. And you get into this weird period known as the critical period before the Constitution occurs, where, you know, to Hamilton, like everything's just going completely out of control now.

The democracy, as they called it, is taking over more and more. Everything he didn't want starts to happen. And that's like an oddball piece of American history, like between the war and the Constitution. It's chaos to Hamilton, you know. and his goals of consolidating power and money are being overrun by these democracy types. Sure. And that results in the worst case scenario, which is the Articles of Confederation for him, which is, you know, heavily favoring the states over a national government that barely exists. Wondering, did this vision of his, the national debt being such a tool, was that expressed in one of the federalist papers that he writes?

I mean, was that clearly put out there? Or did he always know he had to sort of play a sleight of hand? That's a really interesting question. I mean, there was a slight of hand involved. I mean, we could jump ahead to when he becomes Treasury Secretary where he had to spring this idea on a lot of people that we're going to fund that debt. And it had to get couched. I mean, it did get couched in terms where he's not going to say, I want this debt to last a long time. On the other hand, he's very careful to signal to the bond holding class.

This debt's going to last a long time. Don't worry. We're not going to pay it off quickly. So there always was a push-pull here where you need everyone to. understand what you're doing up to a point, and you need them to vote for it, ultimately, because it is a representative government. At the same time, you know, he's going to, he'll make the argument for a public debt, but he also has to fend off constant criticism that he's trying to make the country permanently indebted, always in a state of debt. He also has to fend off

criticism suggesting that he's trying to combine a military power over the citizenry with a financial power over the citizenry. I mean, all the things that got sort of of slightly flagged in the Newberg crisis, remain a question for a lot of people like, what's he really trying to do? This becomes the tricky part of his career as he goes forward. Well, the psychoanalysis is so tempting. You've got a guy who comes from such a chaotic background, you know, in his childhood, et cetera, who would be naturally tending towards control. Like, get me back to some idea of coherence in my life and projecting that onto this new nation and how it's going to be structured. And then,

And he's this brilliant guy with numbers. It all makes sense to me. I figured it out. Thank you very much. Yeah. I avoid the psychoanalysis to a great extent. I will say this, though. I mean, I do, you mentioned something earlier that I think we need to, we need to focus on.

His goals, his goals in terms of moving up in the world and so forth, really were never to line his own pockets. He knew all the people who spent all their time trying to line their own pockets, the Skyler type, the Maris type, et cetera. Washington, too, by the way. He knew those people and knew them well. But what he saw there was something he could leverage for what he saw as a much higher goal, a much more satisfying goal to him, which was to be the author himself, really personally, the author of the great nationhood he was envisioning. And this is a vaulting ambition. I mean, it's much more than anything as sort of

paltry as just trying to get rich. He wasn't really interested in that. He didn't engage in the kind of corruption that the Jeffersonians accused him of because his goals were much more, his ego was bigger than that. I mean, he wanted to create for sure a nation state and he wanted to be the one who created it. And you don't necessarily create that by being the president. You might create it by being the prime minister and he saw the finance role as that of the prime minister. You know, take your psychoanalysis and develop it like this because it's really you're seeing somebody with the goal of being the author of a nation, a hero. in that sense. And to him, that was a romantic vision, for sure. So yeah, what motivates it,

we can go back and forth. You might be right. But the vision itself is beyond getting rich. I should explain that for anyone who doesn't understand, the Federalist papers were basically op-eds. You know, they were basically editorials that were being written by three men, John J, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, a task which is wildly taken over by Alexander Hamilton for various reasons. He writes 51 of the 80-some essays that are written. They're brilliant, brilliant essays about how this government is going to work, how this Constitution should be structured, a sort of mythological argument between these characters. It's a really fascinating example of what it takes to create this brand new idea of this country, really cool. William,

the Constitutional Convention 1787, Alexander Hamilton is sent as a representative of New York. It's going to be a multi-year process. He's already done a lot of legwork, you know, writing these federalist papers and so forth. Tell me how he behaves in this convention and what role does he play. He's famous for not speaking very much in the convention and sometimes not even attending. He makes one speech that it was an endless speech, I think the longest one of the convention, widely considered a terrible faux pa because he says that he would really prefer a monarchy, a certain kind of monarchy, an elected monarchy. He would like to actually eradicate the states as governments. This is kind of like horrors to many of the people who were there. But I think

that played a role in kind of creating the outer bound of like what federalists really wanted, you had to kind of walk back from the abyss there, from the precipice over the abyss. And I think he kind of in a way caucused with Madison, whether consciously or not, to make Madison seem like the kind of sainer alternative and get through the things they really wanted. And what Hamilton's goal for that convention was had to do with suppressing the democracy, ending democratic approaches to finance and consolidating the country around his financial vision. And this is rarely discussed as an aspect of what came out of the constitutional convention. Provisions in the Constitution that are not the sexy ones in which Hamilton's goals are largely

achieved. And he got the tools that he knew he needed if he was going to become Secretary of the Treasury, which I think he had a good feeling he was going to get to be. he had the constitutional tools he needed to create the nation as an economic nation, which to him this means the nation. And thus is baked in the dilemma of America, which is basically the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, in a more elaborate fashion over the years. But this idea that the central power is controlled largely economically is a Hamiltonian vision versus Jeffersonians' egalitarian agricultural vision, which was, I believe, somewhat unrealistic in the modern. world, but nonetheless, it encapsulates, these two visions encapsulate the American identity, which is a push-pull that will really define our times, our centuries, really. It's a fascinating thing to discuss, and it just spins out forever. We didn't even get to the

Whiskey Rebellion. Darn it? I think you mentioned it in that article that I opened with talking about. When the New Deal comes along, there's a real question, how to frame the New Deal? Is it a Hamiltonian thing because it's centralized power, taking care of problems, or as a Jeffersonian because they're helping the good, the common man, you know, with a leg up. It's a really fascinating problem. And it, in its own way, kind of captures the dilemma that we all live with today. Interesting. William Hoagland is a very, very accomplished author. I really enjoy talking with him. I hope you can tell. But I also follow him on social media at William Hoagland. He has a new book coming out, which is the reason we've been talking, The Hamilton Scheme, an epic tale of money

and power in the American founding. William, I should have started with the word scheme. It was a screaming beginning to this interview. A loaded term, yeah. Yeah, but... Interesting. Fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us.

I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's been fun. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the...

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