Inquiry Into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States

by Martin Van Buren

"To those who, with me, abhorring the practice of dueling, may think that I ought on no account to add to the number of bad examples, I answer that my relative situation, as well in public as private, enforcing all the considerations which men of the world designate honor, imposed on me, as I thought, a peculiar necessity not to decline the call. The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen, would probably be inseparable from a conformity with prejudice in this particular."

Although not so pointed in expressing it, his disposition toward the State governments was scarcely more favorable than toward the plan of the general government. In his letter to Pickering, at a period when their usefulness and importance to the system were better appreciated, he says: "Though I would have enlarged the legislative power of the General Government, yet I never contemplated the abolition of the State governments, but, on the contrary, they were in some particulars a part,—constituent parts,—of my plan." But let us see what part it was that he would have them perform. He said in the Convention: "If they (the State governments) are extinguished, he was persuaded that great economy might be obtained by substituting a general government. He did not mean, however, to shock the public opinion by proposing such a measure. On the other hand, he saw no other necessity for declining it. They are not necessary for any of the great purposes of commerce, revenue, or agriculture. Subordinate authorities, he was aware, would be necessary. There must be district tribunals, corporations for local purposes. But cui bono the vast and expensive apparatus now appertaining to the States?"

These were Hamilton's views in respect to the State governments, as expressed in the Convention, according to Mr. Madison's report. In this case it is also fortunate for the cause of truth that, from a paper written by Hamilton just as the General Convention adjourned, and published by his son, it appears very plainly that his views upon the subject cannot have been greatly misreported by Mr. Madison. In this paper he speculates upon the probable fate of the Constitution; after saying, in confirmation of my suggestion that he doubted the dispositions of the people in other respects than their intelligence and capacity, that the Constitution would have in its favor "the good will of men of property in the several States who wish a government of the Union able to protect them against domestic violence, and the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property," he adds: "If the Government be adopted, it is probable General Washington will be the President of the United States. This will insure a wise choice of men to administer the Government, and a good administration. A good administration will conciliate the confidence and affection of the people, and perhaps enable the Government to acquire more consistency than the proposed Constitution seems to promise for so great a country. It may then triumph over the State governments and reduce them to entire subordination, dividing the larger States into smaller districts. The organs of the General Government may also acquire additional strength." The italics in the above extracts are all my own except as to the word organs. He would not "shock the public opinion" by proposing to extinguish the State governments, but there was no other reason for omitting to do so. It would be well if it were done, but it was not wise to shock the public mind upon a point in respect to which it was known to be sensitive. But he would reduce them to entire subordination, triumph over and consequently humiliate them. It would be a poor compliment to Hamilton's knowledge of men and of the effect of public measures, to assume that he did not know that such would be the surest as well as the safest way to extinguish them in the end.

In a letter to Gouverneur Morris, so late as in 1802, a little more than two years before his death, and which will be found in "The Works of Hamilton," edited by his son, (Vol. VI. p. 529,) he thus unbosoms himself to his friend: "Mine is an odd destiny. Perhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself; and contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know from the very beginning, I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my reward. What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me."

There would seem to be no force in evidence, however appropriate its source or credible its character, if that we have produced is not conclusive in regard to the opinions of General Hamilton upon certain points. It proves, first, that he regarded monarchical institutions, according to the English model, as being the most perfect government that ever existed; secondly, that he would have preferred the establishment of such a government here, and was only prevented from advocating it by a conviction that it was made impracticable by the adverse public opinion of the time; thirdly, that he thought it was our duty, nevertheless, to approach that model with our Government as nearly as the prejudices of the people would permit, and that he introduced into the Convention a plan by which that object might be reached; fourthly, that he regarded the present Federal Constitution, which, as lately as two years before his death, in a free communication to his trusted friend, he called "a frail and worthless fabric," as inadequate to the purposes of a good government; that he had accepted it at the time as a temporary bond of union, but believed from the beginning that it would prove a failure and fall into contempt; that he believed that this result would open the way to popular tumults forcing intervention, and to convulsions through the evils of which the people would, at no distant day, become convinced of their error, and consent to institutions substantially similar to those he favored; and, fifthly, that his preference for monarchical institutions was a fixed and cherished sentiment; that although at times encouraged by his success in measures he had no right to hope for under the Constitution as he knew that instrument was intended to be, he yet invariably returned to his first opinion adverse to the sufficiency of the Constitution, and descended to the grave not only without a change in his opinions, but with increased convictions of their perfect soundness.

It has been a question often mooted whether the idea of using the power with which he was or might be clothed to overthrow the actual government, and to introduce the system he so earnestly preferred, was ever seriously entertained by Hamilton. Such designs were freely charged upon him by many of the old Republicans, who, under the full influence of partisan prejudices, doubtless believed that he waited only for a fit opportunity to attempt them. His repeated and undisguised expressions of a preference for monarchical institutions, to friends and foes, when the people of the United States, whose officer he was, had established a government which they intended should be so widely different from such institutions, were well calculated to engender the suspicion. Plain men naturally imagined that a man like Hamilton would do much and incur high responsibilities for the accomplishment of an object so near his heart. Mr. Jefferson, who was not a man of a suspicious temperament, through the fiery and protracted contests of parties, at the head of which they respectively stood, was evidently at times alarmed by similar apprehensions. But toward the close of his life, when partisan asperities had been long since forgotten, in a letter to myself he virtually exonerated Hamilton from the charge in these expressions:—"For Hamilton frankly avowed that he considered the British Constitution, with all the corruptions of its administration, as the most perfect model of government that had ever been devised by the wit of man,—professing, however, at the same time, that the spirit of this country was so fundamentally republican that it would be visionary to think of introducing monarchy here, and that therefore it was the duty of its administrators to conduct it upon the principles their constituents had elected."[12]

Mr. Charles Francis Adams has placed before us, in his life of his grandfather, John Adams, a series of facts bearing upon this point with no ordinary significance. They are not brought forward in support of any such charge, but as raising a question for the consideration of his readers, whether it is not possible that in the pains he took to increase greatly the provisional forces authorized to meet our difficulties with France, and to convert the whole into a permanent military establishment; in the readiness with which he fell in with the scheme of Miranda, to conquer, through the joint operations of Great Britain and the United States, the Floridas, Louisiana, and the South American possessions of Spain, in case of a rupture between us and France; and in his prompt consent to take command of the troops to be so employed, General Hamilton was influenced by a desire to bring about the crisis to which he had always looked as one that would present a fit opportunity for the establishment here of the political institutions he preferred.

These are grave matters, and of a nature calculated to challenge a new and stricter examination of one of those critical periods which have often occurred in our history, and from which we have had so many providential deliverances. The subject is treated with becoming delicacy and great caution by the author, whose conclusion, of which we have only a hint, may possibly have been influenced by family traditions, tinctured unavoidably with strong personal prejudices but never wanting in intelligence. I will not undertake to speculate even as to what General Hamilton might have done or have left undone if he had found himself at the head of a large and permanent military force, and the country convulsed by those popular outbreaks, the expectation of which seems to have been never absent from his mind or from the minds of his disciples. He might have mounted his "hobby"—as Morris termed his passion for monarchical institutions—and have struck a blow in their behalf, acting in the spirit of other "strong minds" who, as Mr. C. F. Adams well and truly says, "seldom fail to associate with dreams of their own glory the modes of exercising power for the good of their fellow-men. Considering their happiness as mainly dependent upon a sense of security from domestic convulsions, his first aim would have been to gain that end at any rate, even if it should be done at some expense of their liberties." But looking at the subject with no other feeling than a sincere desire to arrive at a correct solution of the circumstances narrated by Mr. Adams, I cannot bring my mind to the conclusion referred to.

I can well conceive that Hamilton might have been led to avail himself of such a state of things for a coup de main of some decided character if its existence had been brought about by others, or had been the result of fortuitous circumstances—a contingency which his mind had doubtless often contemplated. But I do not think that he would have planned or contributed to bring about such a state of things involving to so grave an extent the public order and the peace of the country. Such a course would have been at variance with some of his most cherished principles and inconsistent with his personal character. The preservation of order, and a respect for the individual rights of persons and of property, appeared always to be the objects of his greatest solicitude. It was only because he did not think that these could be effectually secured under any other form of government that he preferred monarchical institutions, acknowledging at the same time that they were at war with the principles of natural justice, and only allowable upon that of their absolute necessity to secure society against the occasional waywardness of a majority of its members. It was mainly because of the very erroneous opinions he had formed of the dispositions in this respect of a majority of his adopted countrymen that he was induced to devote his splendid talents to hopeless efforts to sustain principles so irreconcilable with those for which he had periled his life in the war of the Revolution. I say erroneous, not only because I think them such, but because experience, the only unerring test, has so proved them. We are, at the moment when I write, a half century from the transactions which form the subject of our consideration, and I venture nothing in saying that there is no country in Europe in which order has, in the interim, been better preserved, or the rights of persons and property been more secure, than in the United States; none in which the power of government has been more stable or more adequate to the purposes of its institution.

But this is a wide field, for which I have neither space nor time. It becomes me to remember, whilst occupied not without pleasure with these retrospective investigations and meditations, that I have already passed by several cheerful years, the allotted threescore-and-ten,—that period of such solemn import which the undeserved favor of an always kind Providence has permitted me to pass, not only with life but with the means and the faculties to enjoy life,—and that if I hope to complete the work before me I must confine myself more to the highway of my subject, and leave its by-paths to the explorations of younger men.