Hamilton: Red state denizen ... or blue state dweller?
Yes, the very premise of this article should make your dormant inner historian rear its wrathful head: It is most certainly fallacious and irresponsible to impose our contemporary institutions and worldviews onto historical figures and speculate about what political camp they might have fallen into. But come on. We still do it, and we know you do it, too.
Now that Alexander Hamilton has become so trendy thanks to a certain musical, the natural corollary for us partisan Americans is to ask who gets to claim him as their own philosophical forefather — red states or blue states?
The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is both.
Why Hamilton might have said, “I’m with her”:
He thought the government should regulate commerce: “There are some, who maintain, that trade will regulate itself, and is not to be benefitted by the encouragements, or restraints of government . ... This is one of those wild speculative paradoxes, which have grown into credit among us, contrary to the uniform practice and sense of the most enlightened nations.”
— Continentalist essays, 1782
He believed that a strong, robust national government was essential to protecting natural rights: “The vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.”
— Federalist Paper No. 1, 1787
In having the federal government assume the debt of the states from the Revolutionary War, he created the national debt. “It was the price of liberty,” he wrote. “It is a well known fact, that in countries in which the national debt is properly funded, and an object of established confidence, it answers most of the purposes of money. Transfers of stock or public debt are there equivalent to payments in specie.”
— The First Report on Public Credit, 1789
He argued that banks benefit the poor, especially in times of greatest need, as well as the affluent: “If banks, in spite of every precaution, are sometimes betrayed into giving a false credit to the persons described; they more frequently enable honest and industrious men, of small or perhaps of no capital to undertake and prosecute business, with advantage to themselves and to the community; and assist merchants of both capital and credit, who meet with fortuitous and unforeseen shocks, which might without such helps prove fatal to them and to others.”
— The Second Report on Public Credit, 1790
Why Hamilton might have said, “Make America great again”:
He thought taxes on commerce should be kept low: “Experience has shown that moderate duties are more productive than high ones. When they are low, a nation can trade abroad on better terms — its imports and exports will be larger — the duties will be regularly paid, and arising on a greater quantity of commodities, will yield more in the aggregate, than when they are so high as to operate either as a prohibition, or as an inducement to evade them by illicit practices.”
— Continentalist essays, 1782
If Hamilton saw virtue in big government, he also saw virtue in big business, promoting manufacturing and commerce to a degree that might make contemporary environmentalists cringe: “The multiplication of manufactories not only furnishes a market for those articles which have been accustomed to be produced in abundance in a country, but it likewise creates a demand for such as were either unknown or produced in inconsiderable quantities. The bowels as well as the surface of the earth are ransacked for articles which were before neglected. Animals, plants and minerals acquire an utility and value, which were before unexplored.”
— Report on Manufactures, 1791
He believed the debt should never exceed the country’s ability to pay it off. Here he is, writing about himself in the third person: “Yet he is so far from acceding to the position, in the latitude in which it is sometimes laid down, that ‘public debts are public benefits,’ a position inviting to prodigality, and liable to dangerous abuse, that he ardently wishes to see it incorporated, as a fundamental maxim, in the system of public credit of the United States, that the creation of debt should always be accompanied with the means of extinguishment. This he regards as the true secret for rendering public credit immortal.”
— The First Report on Public Credit, 1789
In arguing for the creation of a national bank, he wrote of his faith in bankers to make judicious loans: “The practice of giving fictitious credit to improper persons is one of those evils which experience guided by interest speedily corrects. The bank itself is in so much jeopardy of being a sufferer by it that it has the strongest of all inducements to be on its guard.”
— The Second Report on Public Credit, 1790