
Some rivalries just never seem to end. It’s not too often, though, that a rivalry between two people goes beyond the grave—much less two whole centuries beyond it. Still, the heated dispute between Hamilton and Jefferson—and the seemingly incompatible visions for the nation both held—goes on until today. It’s no surprise, then, that the university Thomas Jefferson founded recently hosted a conversation applying these visions to a question about modern society: can democracy and capitalism coexist?
The conversation, presented by the Miller Center’s Project on Democracy and Capitalism and the Karsh Institute of Democracy’s John L. Nau III History & Principles of Democracy Lab, was held in the Rotunda on Monday, March 18th. The participants were Joanne Freeman, Professor of History at Yale University and an expert on Alexander Hamilton, and Frank Cogliano, Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh and an expert on Thomas Jefferson. Scott C. Miller, an economic historian and Adjunct Professor of Finance at Darden, moderated the talk.
Miller began the talk by noting that the divide between Hamilton and Jefferson parallels many divides in modern American society: urban vs. rural, immigrant vs. native-born, industry vs. agriculture, and many more. He also noted that many politicians today frequently put forward the same question—“What would the founders think about ____?”—despite the fact that in reality, the founders disagreed on a lot of issues. Indeed, he worries that Americans tend to misunderstand the founders entirely, forgetting to put them in the context of their own time—he quotes the novel The Go-Between that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
This leads into Miller’s first question: how can we translate the question of whether or not democracy and capitalism can coexist into terms Hamilton and Jefferson would understand? Freeman responded that democracy and capitalism had very different meanings in their time: democracy was associated with Ancient Greece and direct popular control without representative government and was generally viewed with skepticism by politicians; capitalism was an amalgamation of ideas and policies that hadn’t really yet formed into a cohesive economic system. Cogliano responded that “republic” was the term the founders were more comfortable with, though the age of the American and French Revolutions marked a turning point in the acceptability of the term “democracy.”
The next questions dealt with what affected how the two thought about politics and economics and what the ideal economic system each envisioned actually was. Freeman and Cogliano both emphasized the imprint of the Revolution on each man, though Hamilton felt it proved a need for social order, while Jefferson felt it was a way to break from Britain. As for economic systems, Cogliano quipped that what we all learned in school about Jefferson is basically true: Jefferson wanted the United States to be an agrarian republic. However, he also noted that Jefferson supported an agrarian republic not of subsistence farmers but of independent yeoman farmers who owned their own land. This, to Jefferson, was the only way to preserve virtue and halt the corrupting influence of industry. Freeman explained that Hamilton was more pragmatic: he had little concern for virtue and instead prioritized “power” and “energy,” which could be achieved through emulating the European system of industrialization and a strong government. As for the “corruption” Jefferson obsessed over, Cogliano explained that Jefferson felt any form of dependence—in a factory or elsewhere—bred corruption and was tantamount to slavery. For Hamilton, as Freeman explains, corruption was simply a part of life—Hamilton’s flexibility may have been why European diplomats preferred him to Jefferson.
The conversation then moved to the purpose of the economy and the role of economic classes. For Hamilton, there wasn’t really any end goal for the economy besides stability—which is partially because he was too busy keeping America’s new economy running to care about anything else. For Jefferson, economic expansion had to be grounded in geographic expansion—hence the Louisiana Purchase. As for class, Hamilton believed strongly in social mobility, but he also believed there was naturally a “better sort” who would govern and a “lower sort” who would keep the machine running; Jefferson, on the other hand, was more complicated. Cogliano used a term originally employed by Richard Hofstadter to describe Jefferson: an “Aristocratic Democrat.” Jefferson, he explained, supported giving land to people to help them meet the property requirement to vote but was not outright against property qualifications, and his vision was limited to free white men. Hamilton, on the other hand, was more openly elitist, but having (unlike Jefferson) come from a poorer background, he was also willing to communicate with the people. Freeman provided a fascinating and slightly bizarre anecdote: when the streets of New York filled with people protesting a recently-passed treaty with Britain, Hamilton went out and offered to read the treaty line-by-line in public to show why it was right; the crowd responded by jeering and pelting him with stones. Not deterred, Hamilton offered to go door-to-door instead.
The final regular question asked whether the cliché depiction of Hamilton as a big-government statist and Jefferson as a hands-off libertarian was correct. Both agreed that the depictions were more-or-less true, but Cogliano provided two caveats for Jefferson: the Louisiana Purchase and the Embargo on Britain in the years preceding the War of 1812. He also noted that those who have looked to Hamilton and Jefferson as inspirations in the past might not be who we expect: 20th-century socialists idolized Hamilton, the father of American business, for his support of a strong government, while Franklin Roosevelt used Jefferson’s rhetoric to justify his own expansion of government. To both Cogliano and Freeman, for many Americans, Jeffersonian rhetoric represents the sappy idealism we strive for, while Hamiltonian policies represent the ugly system—but perhaps the only feasible system—we really live in.
The audience’s questions were equally fascinating. One person asked about debt (Hamilton saw the power a national debt could have from the British system, while Jefferson, himself plagued by debt from Monticello in his later years, was invested in paying both personal and national debts off), another asked about how each envisioned the role of education (Jefferson supported education to promote virtue, Hamilton supported it to provide energy for society), and if either could imagine a labor union (Jefferson wouldn’t have supported a society where unions were possible in the first place, while Hamilton would either have abhorred them as a threat to order or seen them as a means of preserving it).
To close things up, Miller provided a couple of contradictory quotes: one from the aristocratic Jefferson, lamenting “the aristocracy’s extravagant waste of resources,” and another from the staunchly pro-business Hamilton, who bluntly stated, “I hate money-making men.” Both historians, however, felt these made sense in context and, at worst, showed a bit of the cognitive dissonance every human holds. As for the ultimate question—whether or not democracy and capitalism can coexist—Cogliano summed up the issue quite succinctly: “Jefferson saw capitalism as a threat to democracy, while Hamilton saw democracy as a threat to capitalism.”
All this considered, I now have a question of my own: would Hamilton and Jefferson, if brought back from the dead, be happy with today’s America? The optimist in me wants to say yes—Jefferson would adore our commitment to liberty and the success of the school he founded, while Hamilton would be dazzled by the success and evolution of his financial system that now fuels the most powerful country on Earth. One thing is certain, however: the two wouldn’t spare a second before starting another argument.
Leave a Reply