Alexander Hamilton: Early Roots of the Civil War

[Al Mackey]

https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2019/08/08/alexander-hamilton/

 

[jgoodguy]

https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2019/08/08/alexander-hamilton/

From your article.

In one of the few times he was right on the Ken Burns series, the novelist Shelby Foote said the Civil War was “the crossroads of our being.​

An interesting comment. I found Shelby acceptably accurate in the context of his day and considering he was not an official historian. I personally would revise that sentence to "In one of the few times, he agreed with me .........." but it just a moot in the eye of an otherwise excellent review.

IMHO the ideals of freedom clash with the practicalities of nation-building. I have conflicting views on Hamilton. A strong financially secure nation is essential, but I found that in achieving this, the 1% of the day was allowed to prey on the poor debt-ridden underclass resulting in the Whiskey Rebellion in some ways betraying the ideals of the Revolution. Like an omelet, some eggs must be broken and the US had fewer eggs broken than other revolutions.

Like his mentor and chief patron, George Washington, Hamilton favored establishing a nation with a strong central government. During the Revolution, “as Hamilton evolved from private secretary to something akin to chief of staff, he rode with the general in combat, cantered off on diplomatic missions, dealt with bullheaded generals, sorted through intelligence, interrogated deserters, and negotiated prisoner exchanges. This gave him a wide-angle view of economic, political, and military matters, further hastening his intellectual development. Washington was both military and political leader of the patriots, already something of a de facto president. He had to placate the Continental Congress, which insisted on supervising the army, and coordinate plans with thirteen bickering states. Both Washington and Hamilton came to think in terms of the general welfare, while many other officers and politicians got bogged down in parochial squabbles. In their mutual desire for a professional army and a strong central authority that would mitigate local rivalries, the two men felt the first stirrings of an impulse that would someday culminate in the Constitution and the Federalist party. Like Washington, Hamilton was scandalized by the dissension and cowardice, the backstabbing and avarice, of the politicians in Philadelphia while soldiers were dying in the field.” [p. 90]
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Most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. In Revolutionary America Slavery was unremarkable. Emancipation's seeds came from the Revolution when the patriots had the luxury of time to contemplate what they had wrought. As late as the Constitutional Convention, there was only one free State in the Union(+ the protostate of Vermont). Without the support of Southern slaveholders, the Revolution would have been stillborn. Imagine Washington leading British troops. The Brits mentioned had the advantage of living in a protected society. They were protected from seeing slavery daily in a nation where slavery was not municipal law re
Somerset v Stewart
(1772). Yet benefiting from the wealth of the Indies sugar plantations. An enviorment that was much different than the future US.

War is the enemy of slavery as opponents find the need to exchange freedom for men in the ranks or to deprive the enemy of wealth and production. We will see that later in the Civil War. We will see slavery ending not so much as emancipation as an ideal, but for political reasons(some good, some not so good) and military necessity.

Slavery even played a role in the Revolution. Hamilton’s best friend, John Laurens of South Carolina, son of the wealthy slave owner Henry Laurens, wanted to put together a battalion of freed slaves to fight. John Laurens was antislavery as well. “Unfortunately, despite a supportive congressional resolution, Laurens’s battle in the South Carolina legislature to enact his program proved futile. South Carolina had a special stake in the slave trade, with Charleston acting as the largest port of entry for slaves arriving in North America. As in many places, planters lived in dread of slave insurrections, constantly inspected slave quarters for concealed weapons, and sometimes themselves refused to serve in the Continental Army out of fear that in their absence their slaves might rise up and massacre their families. The northern states were not about to override their southern brethren on the slavery issue. All along, the American Revolution had been premised on a tacit bargain that regional conflicts would be subordinated to the need for unity among the states. This understanding dictated that slavery would remain a taboo subject. There was also the ticklish matter that many slave owners had joined the Revolution precisely to retain slavery. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, had issued a proclamation offering freedom to slaves willing to defend the Crown–an action that sent many panicky slaveholders stampeding into the patriot camp. ‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?’ Samuel Johnson protested from London. Horace Walpole echoed this sentiment: ‘I should think the souls of the Africans would sit heavily on the swords of the Americans.’ Many on the patriot side recognized the hypocrisy of the American position. Even before the Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams had bewailed the situation: ‘It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me–to fight for ourselves for what we are robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.’ And yet, to the everlasting disgrace of the rebel colonists, it was General Sir Henry Clinton in June 1779 who promised freedom to runaway slaves defecting to the British side. The defeat of the Laurens plan left Hamilton utterly dejected. ‘I wish its success,’ he wrote to Laurens later in the year, ‘but my hopes are very feeble. Prejudice and private interest will be
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Good points and they would be more popular after the failure of the AOC. Free reading materia!

In the summer of 1781, Hamilton published four essays called “The Continentalist,” which he signed as “A.B.,” in which he laid out a philosophy for the US government. “These four articles seemed spirited precursors to The Federalist Papers. Instead of carping at problems in random fashion, Hamilton delivered a systematic critique of the current political structure. He introduced a critical theme that the dynamics of revolutions differed from those of peacetime governance; the postwar world had to be infused with a new spirit, respectful of authority, or anarchy would reign: ‘Ann extreme jealousy of power is the attendant on all popular revolutions and has seldom been without its evils. It is to this source we are to trace many of the fatal mistakes which have so deeply endangered the common cause, particularly that defect which will be the object of these remarks, a want of power in Congress.’ Where revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. ‘As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.’ Unless the central government’s hand was strengthened, asserted Hamilton, the states would amass progressively more power until the union disintegrated into secessionist movements, smaller confederacies, or civil war. He especially feared that populous states would indulge in separatist designs and take advantage of commercial rivalries or boundary disputes as pretexts to wage war against smaller states. To avert this situation, Hamilton listed a litany of powers that Congress needed to strengthen the union, especially the powers to regulate trade, levy enforceable taxes on land and individuals, and appoint military officers of every rank.” [p. 158] You can read “The Continentalist” at these links: No. 1; No. 2; No. 3; No. 4. He later added two more essays in this series: No. 5; No. 6.
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Hamilton like the US had a complicated relationship with slavery. That complicated relationship also complicated the Revolution. A good article, but I will end my review of the review here.

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[Carmel]

https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2019/08/08/alexander-hamilton/

I have read many of your posts and find your blog a cornucopia of information and links. This post is particularly fascinating and well written. You've highlighted the fateful compromises that the Founders made over slavery that would lead to the Civil War decades later. I like the way you have pulled together a picture of Hamilton's evolution as a rare Founding Father opposed to slavery. It's all there in Chernow's book, but easily obscured by the many other accomplishments and preoccupations of Hamilton. This post pulls that particular thread together very clearly.

 

[Al Mackey]

I have read many of your posts and find your blog a cornucopia of information and links. This post is particularly fascinating and well written. You've highlighted the fateful compromises that the Founders made over slavery that would lead to the Civil War decades later. I like the way you have pulled together a picture of Hamilton's evolution as a rare Founding Father opposed to slavery. It's all there in Chernow's book, but easily obscured by the many other accomplishments and preoccupations of Hamilton. This post pulls that particular thread together very clearly.

Thank you for your kind words, Carmel.

 

[5fish]

Here I found this on the founding fathers mistakes leading to our civil war ... it is a good short read...

Link: https://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter11/war.cfm

Snip... interesting way to think about the number of died in the civil war...

Whether America’s founders could have sown seeds of a more perfect union without dooming a following generation to reap the whirlwind of civil war is a question yet on the minds of the nation’s historians. Could anything have been done to avoid the bloodbath that took the lives of 2 percent of America’s population? It’s a staggering figure: 2 percent in today’s terms would mean the deaths of everybody in Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. We usually think of nineteenth-century events—the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision—when we consider what precipitated the crisis. But the roots of the conflict go back further, back to the formative years of the United States.

Snip... Slavery

The flowers of death and destruction germinated from slavery, unmistakably the chief cause of the Civil War
It was an evil which, in the interests of revolutionary unity, the Second Continental Congress declined to eradicate in the Declaration of Independence, and which the Articles of Confederation left to blight the Constitution.

Snip...

Slavery’s taproot was the three-fifths clause, cultivated in the steamy Philadelphia summer of 1787, as a nation struggled to be born. Then, on July 16, they reached the Connecticut Compromise, a deal that broke a deadlock and cleared the way for the arrival of a strong federal union to replace a loose confederacy of states.

Snip... the compromise encouraged slavery...

Three-fifths gave the slaveholding states incentive to embrace slavery forever—the more slaves, the more political clout—as it helped radicalize abolitionists.

Snip...

But the Northwest Ordinance’s exclusion of slavery was not entirely purehearted, Bernstein said. It created states with “no slave past, and this was good—there was no sense of slavery as the default position. But it was bad, in that in Indiana and Illinois there was real racism against black people: ‘We want no slaves—or even free blacks—in this state.’ Some abolitionists didn’t want black people around.”

Snip... Jefferson

These manifestos said states could “interpose”or, —as Jefferson said in a draft—use “nullification” to defeat the authority of objectionable federal laws.
This is where the states’ rights movement got rolling. During the Civil War, future president James Garfield said the Kentucky Resolutions “contained the germ of nullification and secession, and we are today reaping the fruits.

My snips are just a particle look at the article so here is the link for the whole experience... https://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter11/war.cfm