[quote]Mikeyali wrote:
Uncle Gabby wrote:
Hey Mikeyali, don’t mean to hijack the thread, but why Hamilton?
That’s a good question. I hope I can supply a satisfactory answer. I’ll try to make this brief, but no one has asked me this question before so I will certainly fail.
I consider myself a Goldwater Republican. I suppose that’s essentially a vigorous libertarian. When I first started down the road to being a libertarian I read a great many people who canonized Jefferson and demonized Hamilton. I was among them. But as I got more and more interested in the politics and the history behind the early republic I ended up reading McCullough’s John Adams. That led me to sympathize much more with federalist thought than before. Then I read Joseph Ellis’s Alexander Hamilton. I figured I should read the flagbearer of federalist thought before completely damning the man. What I read changed my perspective completely.
Hamilton, like myself, feared the masses much more than individual tyrants. He developed that fear by seeing the lawlessness of mobs in colonial America. Hamilton was a man of laws - just laws. While the two men hated each other, that Hamiltonian mentality of justice and law is what led John Adams to defend the British during the Boston Massacre.
When we look around at the world we live in today it’s easy to see that our tyrant isn’t George Bush. It’s George Smith working at the ATF, or George Jones working at the DMV. It’s the thousands of Georges around you that vote for laws every day that infringe upon your rights and it’s the thousands of other Georges that enforce those whether as the lady at the DMV or IRS or as the building inspector.
Hamilton was often accused of being an anglophile and monarchist. This was completely untrue. He was for preventing the power of the people from becoming unlimited. The French Revolution was a contemporary demonstration of democracy out of control for him. For Paine such unrestrained democracy was great…until he found himself awaiting his own execution only to escape by Providence. That helped shake a little sense into him. Jefferson once told Abigail Adams that he’d rather see half of the Earth ravaged than to see the failure of the French Revolution…during the terror.
It was Hamilton who headed the Manumission society calling for abolition. Jefferson KNEW it was wrong, yet kept his slaves. At least Washington freed his and provided them with money upon his death. That isn’t to demonize Jefferson. You simply have to accept him for what he was. He was human, just as Hamilton as he had his affair with Mariah Reynolds.
I still hold a great regard for Jefferson. His picture will certainly find itself as an avatar in the future. Frankly, the guy I most relate to is Adams, with Hamilton inching out Jefferson. They all had great thoughts and were truly part of the greatest generation history has given mankind. Jeffersonian republican thought contended that if it isn’t in the Constitution then the government couldn’t do it. Hamilton said that government can do anything as long as it wasn’t prohibited by the Constitution. Both schools of thought have been grossly violated by our government today.
So in brief, I like Hamilton because under-restrained democracy has put shackles on our lives and liberties. That wasn’t the fault of any particular tyrant (although FDR comes close), but rather the fault of the people, fat, greedy, and asleep at the wheel. Hamilton warned us.
mike [/quote]
That’s well said. I always like Jefferson’s ideals, but he was far too sheltered from life. These days he would be considered an ivory tower intellectual. Franklin, Adams, and Hamilton pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, so I think their attitudes were tempered by a more realistic veiw of human nature.
