Hamilton’s notion of a strong national government did err on the
side of oppression at times. This is best evidenced by his warm
support for the final form of the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798.
Hamilton did not agree with Jefferson that the general public
should control government. “Men,” he said, “are reasoning rather
than reasonable animals.” His last letter on politics, written two
days before his death, illustrates the two sides of his thinking
already emphasized; in this letter he warns his New England
friends against dismemberment of the union as “a clear sacrifice
of great positive advantages, without any counterbalancing good;
administering no relief to our real disease, which is democracy,
the poison of which, by a subdivision, will only be more
concentrated in each part, and consequently the more virulent.”
No judgment of Hamilton is more justly measured than James
Madison’s written in 1831. “That he possessed intellectual powers
of the first order, and the moral qualities of integrity and honor in
a captivating degree, has been awarded him by a suffrage now
universal. If his theory of government deviated from the
republican standard he had the candour to avow it, and the
greater merit of co-operating faithfully in maturing and supporting a system which was not his choice.”
Bibliography
COLLIER’S ENCYCLOPEDIAvol. 11, 608 (1995).
FLEXNER, JAMES T., THE YOUNG HAMILTON: A BIOGRAPHY (Little 1978).
HENDRICKSON, ROBERT A., THE RISE AND FALL OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1981).
Jack Hitt, America’s First Lecher: Sex romps? Cover-ups? Questions of character? Public confessions? You’d think Bill
Clinton would have learned something from Alexander Hamilton, GENTLEMEN’S QUARTERLY 347 (Nov. 1998).
LODGE, HENRY CABOT, ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1898; reprint, AMS Press 1972).
LODGE, HENRY CABOT, HAMILTON’S WORKS (New York, 9 vols. 1885-86, and 12 vols., 1904).