There is nothing in the writings, speeches, or declarations of General Hamilton inconsistent with the truth of this statement. In papers which have been referred to, and others, he submitted ingenious arguments to show that the Convention might have so intended, and that Congress had a right to hold from the words employed that it did so intend, but he was too circumspect to insist that the intention of the Convention ought not to prevail when it could be ascertained, or to make the actual intention, as a matter of fact, a point in the argument. Giving due weight to the intention of the body when that was ascertained, he adopted a course of reasoning which every body understood went to defeat it, desiring no other efficacy for the opinion he labored to establish than the vote of the majority. The better knowledge of the country overthrew his specious deductions in a short time, and its traditions will, it is to be hoped, render them forever harmless.
The principle of construction contended for by Hamilton, and for a season to some extent made successful, was not designed for the promotion of a particular measure, for which the powers of Congress under the Constitution were to be unduly extended, on account of its assumed indispensable importance to the public safety, but intended as a sweeping rule by which those powers, instead of being confined to the constitutional enumeration, were to authorize the passage of all laws which Congress might deem conducive to the general welfare and which were not expressly prohibited; a power similar to that contained in the plan he proposed in the Convention. He desired, in short, to make the Constitution a tablet of wax upon which each successive administration would be at liberty to impress its rescripts, to be promulgated as constitutional edicts.
Hamilton never well understood the distinctive character of our people, but he understood human nature too well to believe that any people could long respect or desire to uphold a Constitution the most stringent provisions of which were thus regarded or treated. Its inevitable fate is illustrated in the experience of France, after one of her unscrupulous wits had aided in consigning to general derision that litter of Constitutions which had rapidly followed one after the other, by accompanying his oath with a grimace and a jest upon the number which he had successively and with equal solemnity sworn to support. The example of France was not lost upon a mind so watchful as Hamilton's, and he did not doubt that our Constitution would be overthrown with the same certainty, if not with equal facility, after it had been long enough treated with similar disrespect, and that the door would be thus opened for the ultimate introduction, under the influence of the money power, of the only political institutions in which he placed absolute confidence. He declared it to be his opinion, in the Convention, that he regarded ours as the last chance for a republican government, and assigned that opinion as a reason for his attempt to infuse into the new system qualities as stringent as those he proposed and which he knew very well were not generally regarded as belonging to a republican system. No man better understood than he that the inviolate sanctity of a written Constitution was the life of a republican government, and that its days were numbered from the moment its people and rulers ceased thus to preserve, protect, and defend it. Mr. Jefferson spoke, in his letter, of Hamilton as "professing" that it was "the duty of its administrators to conduct the Government on the principles their constituents had elected." I did not at first, and for a long time afterwards, attach as much significance to the word I have here italicized, as I do now, when I have studied Hamilton's course more carefully. I knew the letter was written in a liberal spirit toward his memory. As I have elsewhere said, during my visit to Mr. Jefferson we talked most of Hamilton, and the general course of Mr. J.'s remarks was substantially similar to those now related, more than thirty years after his decease, and without the slightest knowledge of what I have said upon the same subject, by his relative, Mr. Trist, who was also a member of his family. Mr. Jefferson was evidently disposed to confirm the favorable impressions I had imbibed of the personal side of Hamilton's character, and the words quoted above from his letter were designed to qualify his imputation of monarchical principles to the latter, and I can now appreciate the motive for the expression used, which did not commit him to a concession that the opinion of Hamilton in regard to the duty of administration was that upon which he acted.
With all these considerations before him, Hamilton did more than any, and I had almost said than all, his contemporaries together, to counteract the will of the people and to subvert by undermining the Constitution of their choice. If his sapping and mining policy had been finally successful, if the Republican party, mostly composed of old Anti-Federalists, led by so bold a spirit and such a root-and-branch Republican as Mr. Jefferson, had not arrested the farther progress of his principles and demolished his scheme, this glorious old Constitution of ours, of which we all seem so proud, of which it is so great an honor to have been and of which so many have been ambitious to be, regarded as the faithful expounder, under the wings of which we have risen from small beginnings to be a puissant nation,—attracting the admiration and able to command the respect of the civilized world,—would long since have sunk beneath the waters of time, an object of neglect and scorn. Our system might then have dissolved in anarchy, or crouched under despotism or under some milder type of arbitrary government,—a monarchy, an aristocracy, or, most ignoble of all, a moneyed oligarchy,—but as a Republic it would have endured no longer. In this aspect, notwithstanding his great and good qualities,—and he had many,—Hamilton's course was an outrage upon liberty and a crime against free government.
How happy would it have been for himself and for every interest if he had not parted from his friend and faithful fellow-laborer through so many and such trying scenes,—if, like Madison, not entirely satisfied with the Constitution, but knowing that many others were in the same predicament, he had applied his great talents to the business of making it as generally acceptable as possible, and in giving to the masses an administration of the Government according not only to the form but to the spirit also in which it had been framed. The country would then at length have rested after so many storms, and his great and good friend Washington, instead of being steeped to the lips in partisan anxieties, (as his nephew, Judge Bushrod Washington, described him to me to have been within the year of his death,) would not only have had a glorious and successful administration, but would have lived in his retirement and finally passed from earth without having been ever annoyed by the canker of party spirit. His own political career would doubtless have been far more prosperous and more agreeable; no occasion would then have arisen for such reflections as he expressed to his confidential friend describing his only reward, after all his efforts and sacrifices, as "the murmurs of the friends of the Constitution and the curses of its foes," and concluding, sadly enough for one who had so greatly distinguished himself in its service, that "the American world was not made for him!"
In these views of General Hamilton's course and in the opinions expressed in respect to it, I have designed to confine myself strictly to what I consider the deliberate judgment of the country, pronounced in various ways and among others through the ballot-box—its constitutional exponent. The most prominent of his measures have been, as already said, discarded, and those who constituted the party in whose name they were first introduced have so far yielded to the current of public opinion as to abandon them forever. I have also before alluded to the gratifying circumstance that the odium attached to those measures never in any degree affected the confidence of the people in the patriotism of Washington or in his fidelity to republican institutions, or weakened their affection for him while he lived, or their respect for his memory when he was no more. These were not the results of mere personal devotion, but of an intelligent and just discrimination on the part of the people. Hamilton designed to effect a civil revolution by changing the powers of Congress from the restricted character given to them in obedience to the wishes of the people to one in effect unlimited. Washington entertained no such views. His constructions of the Constitution were designed for the cases that called them forth, and had no ulterior views.
The subject of the bank presented the principal and almost the only question upon which President Washington gave a construction to that instrument which met the disapprobation and excited the apprehensions of the old Republicans. To the assumption of the State debts Hamilton, as has been seen, succeeded in obtaining—how much to his mortification and regret his writings show—the coöperation of Mr. Jefferson, and thereby the unanimous support of the cabinet; and his Report on Manufactures, as to most of its obnoxious details, was not acted upon during Washington's administration, but in respect to its principal objects remained a dead letter. President Washington, notwithstanding the conflicting opinions of his cabinet, gave no reasons for his approval of the Bank Bill. The public were therefore left to draw their own inferences in regard to their character. Diverse opinions upon the point of course arose, and there is much reason to believe (and that belief is strengthened by his subsequent course in respect to another important matter) that he was induced to regard a bank as indispensable, in the then condition of the country, to the success of the new Government—an exigency in public affairs of that peculiar sort which men in power assume to deal with under the sanction of the great principle, Salus populi suprema lex. (See [note].) Mr. Madison, who had demonstrated in Congress its unconstitutionality at its creation, who had opposed the banking system through his whole public life, and whose fame was in a very great degree founded on the ability with which he had defined the true principles of constitutional construction, in a way to exclude the idea of any power in Congress to establish such an institution, did, notwithstanding, at the close of his public career, in a condition of the country not unlike that in which President Washington acted, and viewing the subject from the same official station, arrive at the same conclusion in regard to its imperative necessity, and gave his approval to the erection of a new national bank.
[Note].—(Feb. 16th, 1858.) Whilst reviewing the "era of good-feeling," as it was called, during the administration of Mr. Monroe, I conceived the idea of adding some account of the rise and progress of our political parties, and entered upon the task immediately, designing it to stand as an episode in my Memoirs. The subject grew upon my hands to such an extent that for the last two years it has, in necessary reading and examinations into facts, &c., occupied most of the time that could be devoted to the general object. The idea of limiting this portion to a mere digression was therefore substantially laid aside, and the dignity of a separate and distinct consideration, to which its dimensions, if nothing else, entitled it, was assigned to it. Accordingly I continued my examination of the course of parties in the United States down to the present time, including the first months of President Buchanan's administration. Whilst engaged in correcting the manuscript and arranging it to be copied, and after I had, by many pages, passed the place in the text to which this note is appended, the first volume of Mr. Randall's Life of Jefferson, recently published, came to my hands, and on reading its last two chapters first, because they have a more immediate bearing on my subject, I find the following very striking confirmation of the correctness of my inference as to the state of General Washington's mind, on the occasion spoken of:—
FROM RANDALL'S "LIFE OF JEFFERSON," VOL. 1. p. 631.
"On the subject of President Washington's feelings on the Bank Bill we find the following entry in Mr. Trist's memoranda:—
"'Montpelier, Friday, May 25, 1827.
"'Mr. Madison: "General Washington signed Jay's Treaty, but he did not at all like it. He also signed the Bank. But he was very near not doing so; and if he had refused, it would, in my opinion, have produced a crisis. I will mention to you a circumstance which I have never imparted, except in strict confidence. You know, by the Constitution, ten days are allowed for the President's veto to come in. If it does not appear within that time, the bill becomes a law. I was conversing with a distinguished member of the Federal party, who observed that according to his computation the time was running out, or indeed was run out; when just at this moment, Lear[27] came in with the President's sanction. I am satisfied that had it been his veto, there would have been an effort to nullify it, and they would have arrayed themselves in a hostile attitude. Between the two parties, General Washington had a most difficult course to steer."
"'The foregoing is written immediately after the conversation, which has not lasted half an hour,—Mr. Madison having stepped out, and I taking advantage of this interruption to retire to my room and commit the substance to paper. The very words I have retained, as near as I could. In many instances (where I have run a line over the words[28]) I have done this exactly.'"
This statement by Mr. Madison substantially sustains the view I have taken of General Washington's position at that period. The letters of all the leading Federalists of that day, and those that followed it for some years, show that they looked with great unanimity to Hamilton rather than to Washington for the tone and direction that was to be given to the movements of the Federal party, and leave scarcely a doubt that they would have sided with Hamilton if a difference had arisen between the two, as is here intimated by Mr. Madison.
How much is it to be regretted that the latter did not leave behind him a history of the events of his life and an account of what he knew of the views of others. No man was better informed upon all political subjects than himself. At the time he referred to, in his observations to Mr. Trist, he probably enjoyed as large a share of Washington's confidence as any other man, and was at all times most reluctant to be placed in opposition to him. Afterwards General Washington placed in his hands the papers from which to write his Farewell Address. But it was a rule of Mr. Madison's life, as I have noticed before, never to injure the feelings of any man as long as it could possibly be avoided, and he suffered long and much to avoid it. His papers will be examined in vain for imputations of faults to his contemporaries. They are even omitted in cases where they would have been the readiest and apparently the indispensable means of repelling unjust imputations upon himself. He carried this self-denial farther than any other public man. The pain and regret that he exhibited in his conversation with Mr. Trist, in respect to the parting between Hamilton and himself, were obviously genuine, but the necessity was absolute, and the danger that justice might not otherwise he done to his character imminent. He was on the eve of his departure for another world,—his well earned and well established reputation was about to lose his own personal guardianship,—and the subject was brought before him in such a way that he must either confess the forthcoming impeachments by his silence, or repel them by declaring the truth.
Some other citations which I have found occasion to make from Mr. Randall's work are incorporated in the text.
Other instances have occurred in our Government and elsewhere in which statesmen have transcended the constitutional limits of their power under a necessity sincerely believed to be controlling, trusting to that circumstance for the indulgence of their constituents; and in no case which has presented itself here has that indulgence been withheld where the motives for the assumption of responsibility were pure. Mr. Jefferson's course in the purchase of Louisiana and General Jackson's conduct at New Orleans were striking cases of that description.
But we have, fortunately, evidence the most authentic and unequivocal that President Washington never intended by his approval of the Bank Bill to express an approval of the systematic and general disregard of the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, in respect to the powers of Congress, whenever such disregard should be deemed expedient. The provisions of the first Apportionment Bill sent to him for his approval were contrary to the Constitution, and Mr. Jefferson gave an opinion to that effect and recommending a veto, whilst the opinion of General Hamilton was in favor of their constitutionality. The division by which the bill passed had been exclusively sectional, and the objection of unconstitutionality was raised by the South. The Union was, at that early period, believed to stand upon a precarious footing, and the President was seriously apprehensive that the worst consequences might result, in the then state of the public mind, if he were to throw himself on the side of his own section by a veto.