Mr. President (11 page)

Hamilton admitted that republicanism could not be entirely abandoned, but he would limit its reach as best he could. He started with a frontal assault on confederations, which could not produce viable governance. All confederations were doomed to fail, he asserted. He produced numerous examples from history, he leaned on political philosophy, and, most significantly, he pointed to human nature, to people’s timeless pursuit of power, influence, and their own parochial interests. Judging from the proportion of notes that Madison and three other delegates took on this subject, Hamilton spent a good two hours demolishing New Jersey’s plan for continuing the confederacy.

Did Hamilton think the Virginia Plan was any better? A little, perhaps, but not much. The states still retained some degree of sovereignty, which would hamper the national government. Worse yet, its solution to the “excess of democracy” (here Hamilton echoed the words of Elbridge Gerry) was yet more democracy. From Hamilton’s own cryptic notes: “Gentlemen say we need to be rescued from the democracy. But what the means proposed? A democratic assembly is to be checked by a democratic senate, and both these by a democratic chief magistrate. The end will not be answered—the means will not be equal to the object. It will, therefore, be feeble and inefficient.” And from notes taken by the delegate Robert Yates: “What even is the Virginia plan, but
pork still, with a little change of the sauce
.”
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To find a better way, Hamilton proclaimed, delegates need look no further than the government they had rejected eleven years earlier. “British constitution best form,” he wrote cryptically in his notes. According to Madison, Hamilton stated “he had no scruple in declaring … that the British Government was the best in the world; and that he doubted much whether any thing short of it would do in America.”
At the outset, delegates had promised to share their thoughts, even if unpopular, and Hamilton, with heightened drama, indulged liberally, even gleefully, in that permission.

Ironically, Hamilton was the only delegate not taught obedience to the British Crown as a child; he came to this view not from nostalgia but by some combination of reason and taste. The House of Lords was “a most noble institution.” As to the executive branch, “The English model was the only good one.” A hereditary monarch possessed so much power, privilege, and influence that he was above corruption. “See the excellency of the British executive,” he said according to Yates’s notes. “He can have no distinct interests from the public welfare. Nothing short of such an executive can be efficient.” Only the House of Commons failed to receive any praise.

There was no place in a strong government such as Great Britain’s for shared sovereignty, as proposed in both the New Jersey and the Virginia Plans. The individual states of the confederacy only added to the expense of government and made administration less efficient. If state governments “were extinguished,” Hamilton argued, “he was persuaded that great œconomy might be obtained by substituting a general Govt.” States were simply “not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture.”

Hamilton said he was not
advocating
a return to monarchy and abolition of the states, even though those were his preferences. He understood he might have to modify his wishes to suit “public opinion,” or what Mason and others referred to as “the genius of the people.” Still, he argued that public opinion was changing and might soon conform more closely to his views. He also reminded his fellow delegates that they were duty-bound to seek the optimal form of government and then come as close to that as they could. That is why he formulated his own schema, which he presented not as a “proposition” like the others but “to give a more correct view of his ideas, and to suggest the amendments which he should probably propose to the plan of Mr. R. [Randolph] in the proper stages of its future discussion.”

In Hamilton’s plan, the lower house of the legislature, representing “the mass of the people,” would fight incessantly with the upper house, modeled after the British House of Lords and representing “the rich and the well born.” To prevent this incessant conflict from immobilizing the government—to provide a “mutual check” on the two competing
branches of the legislature—he called for a strong executive, very strong indeed. His notes labeled the executive a “monarch”:

In his speech, Hamilton elaborated. Any finite term of office—even seven years, as in the working draft of the Virginia Plan—would be insufficient to guard against an executive’s power lust. Being ambitious, as men are, the executive would wish to “
prolong
his power.” To this end he might even use the excuse of a war to create an “emergency to evade or refuse a degradation from his place.” Only a monarch who already possessed all the power he could ever hope to obtain would be impervious to the pursuit of more. It was Hamilton’s eeriest and most dangerous argument, and strangely naïve. The notion that the lust for power could be satiated, that some absolute ceiling would satisfy all monarchs, had already been disproved countless times in history. Hamilton himself could have torn his argument apart, had he been inclined to do so.

In the formal outline for his plan of government—written out in advance and read from the floor—Hamilton refrained from the use of the term “monarch,” even though he had used it liberally in his speech. Instead, he used the term “governour,” one who governs, still a step up from “president,” one who merely presides. The governour would be selected by special electors, not by the people, and once elected he would serve for life if not impeached, entirely free from popular influence. Once in a generation, people would choose electors, who would in turn choose their governour; this one slender thread, which tied the people with their leader in the most tenuous manner, permitted Hamilton to label his plan “republican.”

Hamilton’s governour would possess the absolute negative over all laws passed by the legislature, a power that had been resoundingly rejected two weeks earlier by a vote of ten states to none. He would also possess powers not specified under the Virginia Plan:

Senators, who also served for life, were the only check on the governour. They had the “sole power of declaring war,” and their consent was required for treaties and all appointments not allocated specifically to the governour. Hamilton gave no special powers to the lower house, undeniably the stepchild in his plan.

Hamilton’s extreme concentration of power at the top was not the only shocking feature of his scheme. While other delegates were arguing over what role to reserve for the states, Hamilton stripped the states of any vestige of power. The national government, not the people of Virginia or Massachusetts or New York, would select the “Governour or president” of each state. This, he said, would help ensure state compliance with national laws, and just in case that failed, all state acts conflicting with national ones were automatically declared “utterly void.” Equally heretical, by the standards of Revolutionary-era Americans, was the placement of state militias “under the sole and exclusive direction of the United States.” At the time, simply calling up state militias to meet a national emergency remained controversial. For a powerful central government to commission all officers and take over militias entirely would produce outrage, if revealed to public view.

How did delegates receive Hamilton’s plan?

Nobody spoke when he at long last finished his speech—perhaps because they were stunned, and certainly because Hamilton had worn them out. They were done for the day.

The following morning, June 19, a Tuesday, delegates said nothing of Hamilton’s plan. It was Paterson’s they discussed and Randolph’s, which they reprinted, as revised thus far, so they might compare the two. James Wilson did make one oblique reference to Hamilton’s dismissal of the states, causing Hamilton to respond that he “had not been
understood yesterday.” Virginia and Massachusetts would remain as “subordinate jurisdictions,” he explained, but “as
States
, he thought they ought to be abolished.”

In truth, other delegates had understood him perfectly well, and they also understood that following his lead would not only doom their entire undertaking but also end their political careers. Not surprisingly, they continued to disregard Hamilton and his ideas. At day’s end, they reaffirmed their commitment to Randolph over Paterson by seven states to three, with one divided.

Although Hamilton’s plan was not addressed, it did produce a potent backlash. On Wednesday, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut moved that the term “national government” in the opening resolution of the Randolph plan be changed to the more neutral “government of the United States.” The motion passed by unanimous vote. Three weeks earlier, Gouverneur Morris had engineered a nationalist revolution within chambers; now, after seeing how far one man at least would take the concept of “national,” the delegates, running scared, backed off. George Mason followed the vote on Ellsworth’s motion with a diatribe against national usurpations, stating “he would never agree to abolish the State Governments or render them absolutely insignificant.” Maryland’s Luther Martin followed in kind, and Roger Sherman piled on.

On Thursday, June 21, three days after Hamilton’s speech, William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut, in his opening remarks about the fundamental differences between the New Jersey and the Virginia Plans, included this passing comment: “A gentleman from New-York, with boldness and decision, proposed a system totally different from both; and though he has been praised by every body, he has been supported by none.” (Yates’s account.) Historians over the years have vested this parenthetical aside with momentous import. Radicals, attempting to demonstrate the reactionary thrust of the convention, have assumed “praised by every body” meant that other delegates shared Hamilton’s extreme views, including his espousal of monarchy, while “supported by none” meant they were embarrassed to admit it. Hamiltonians, similarly, have used this passage to suggest that their man was not such an outlier after all, but in the mainstream. If others failed to spring to his defense, that was only for political reasons, not because they didn’t admire the man and his ideas.
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These readings misinterpret Johnson’s ironic intent. Johnson was
juxtaposing Hamilton’s ideas, particularly the annihilation of state power, which were “supported by none,” with his performance, which was “praised by every body.” This is clear from the other firsthand accounts of the proceedings. From Madison:

And from Rufus King:

“One Gentleman alone,” in Madison’s rendering of Johnson, advocated the abolition of state governments. “All other Gentlemen,” according to King, disagreed with Hamilton’s scheme. Even Gouverneur Morris, also an outspoken proponent of an independent executive and a strong national government, thought Hamilton had gone too far. “General Hamilton had little share in forming the Constitution,” Morris later recalled. “He disliked it, believing all Republican government to be radically defective.”
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Hamilton, at this point in time, was indeed an outlier. If his speech influenced the convention at all, it was by establishing the boundaries of acceptable discourse. When he suggested a monarch for life and the abolition of state power in any form, he lost every other man in the room. Those who were old enough to remember the hated royal governors no doubt recoiled when he suggested they place state governorships in national hands. Not one man present could have shown his face back home if word got out that he favored the total commandeering of local militias, the last resort of free men, by a distant national government. Hamilton had gone where they dare not tread. True, some of his
particular suggestions were more acceptable, and several of the powers he outlined for the presidency found their way into the final document, but at that moment no delegate wished to discuss even these, lest he be seen as supporting the rest. Delegates must have deemed these features reasonable since they later incorporated them, but any suggestion Hamilton made at that time had to be tabled, tainted as it was by his overarching philosophy.

Yet Hamilton was “praised by every body.” To understand why, we need to appreciate the importance of oratory at the time. Giving speeches, arguing points, offering and debating resolutions—these were sport, and contestants were judged by style as well as content. William Pierce, who in his thumbnail sketches often commented on the delegates’ oratorical skills, noted that despite Hamilton’s “feeble” voice, “he enquires into every part of his subject with the searchings of phylosophy, and when he comes forward he comes highly charged with interesting matter, there is no skimming over the surface of a subject with him, he must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.” Pierce was a tough critic, and Hamilton in this account fared much better than most. He dazzled his audience not only with his brilliant mind but also with his stamina. From personal experience, they all knew how difficult it was to go on as Hamilton did, always cogent, connecting thought after thought, always on target—even if the target was his, not theirs.
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