Hamilton: Impulse and Paradox
AYRES, C. E.
WRITERS and WRITING Hamilton: Impulse and Paradox Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox. By John C. Miller. Harper. 659 pp. $8.05. Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, University...
...and if anybody failed to see this, he had only to listen to the loud and eloquent outcries of Virginians, from Thomas Jefferson on down, to become aware of the fact...
...More than anyone else, Alexander Hamilton foresaw the growth of his adopted country and provided sound foundations for it...
...In the words of Samuel Eliot Morison, he was "one of America's greatest statesmen...
...On the contrary, it is a faithful, understanding and eminently readable study of a truly great man...
...But if he drew heavily on John Law and could quote Milton to his purpose, that is hardly to his discredit...
...All his life Hamilton yearned for military glory, so much so as to raise a question in the minds of some contemporaries and some later scholars as to whether he was not a would-be dictator...
...and yet in the battle of Monmouth and again at Yorktown, when he led his troops in a preposterous close-order drill on a parapet, he seemed even to his friends to be courting a hero's death...
...In justice to Miller I must make it clear that his is not a derogatory book...
...As an 18-vear-old undergraduate at King's College he burst into print as an anonymous pamphleteer, with prodigious effect...
...According to John C. Miller, "the supreme irony of Hamilton's achievement is that the methods by which he sought to lay the foundations of the American union actually aggravated political sectionalism in the United States—the very eventuality he most dreaded...
...Reviewed by C. E. Ayres Professor of Economics, University of Texas THAT ALEXANDER Hamilton was a paradoxical figure has always been evident...
...Otherwise his might be one of the obscurest names in American history...
...Certainly the Report on Manufactures deserves to be classed among the greatest state papers of all time...
...Some of these seem positively inspired, others were highly dubious and still others were fatal...
...allowed himself to become involved in a squalid duel in which he was killed...
...What is most remarkable about the Bank of the United States is not its actual performance, which was regrettable from the first...
...Could it be that for all his greatness Alexander Hamilton lacked ordinary common sense...
...And what are we to think of this great man who at the height of his career—Secretary of the Treasury of a new nation whose destiny he foresaw more clearly than any of his contemporaries, the loving husband of a beautiful, rich and superlatively well-connected wife — fell for the crudest sort of badger game and even prolonged the squalid affair long after the "injured" husband's exactions had bled him white...
...And yet, as every schoolchild knows, this great man, out of office and increasingly out of favor before reaching the age of 50...
...It is easy enough for us, looking back to the 18th century with the hindsight of the 20th, to recognize the funding of the national debt, the creation of the Bank of the United States and the Report on Manufactures as works of genius...
...His subsequent break with Washington was even more impulsive...
...Nor could his appointment of egregious crooks to run the Bank of the United States be classified as statesmanship...
...But how could it have been...
...It was this triumph that thrust him into the forefront of the Revolutionary movement and brought him the invitation from General Washington to become his aide-de-camp with the rank of lieutenant colonel...
...As Miller remarks of this escapade, "It could hardly be regarded as war...
...But even at that time it was perfectly evident that such efforts as he was making favored New York against Virginia...
...Certainly he was a master draftsman...
...At a time when expository prose attained new heights of clarity, precision and vigor, and when some of the best minds were engaged in polemics," says Miller, "Hamilton emerged at the age of 19 as one of the most adept practitioners of the art of persuasion...
...It is this alone that makes the paradox significant...
...His greatest achievements were all of this character...
...His first pamphlet was ascribed both to John Jay and John Adams...
...Nevertheless this peerless drafter of state papers and exponent extraordinary of prescient planning was himself capable of almost incredibly impulsive actions...
...But the memoranda with which Hamilton herded reluctant Congressmen into the corral of fiscal righteousness were truly remarkable...
...To be sure...
...In a sense his whole career was punctuated by acts of impulse...
...The actual operations were somewhat piebald...
...It was only through Washington's great-heartedness that he was later restored to favor...
...Even more significantly, this was "for him [a] wholly unexpected development...
...Hamilton's ideas were not quite as original as some of his admirers have made out...
...The genius of the first Secretary of the Treasury is most clearly manifest in its conception and design as expounded in his messages to Congress: and the same is true of the debt-funding operations...
...Granted that he had long been chafing at the dependency of his position, the occasion he seized upon to quarrel with the great man was utterly trivial and his pique indefensible...
...What Miller is chiefly concerned with is of course the nature and substance of Alexander Hamilton's greatness...
Vol. 43 • March 1960 • No. 10
