Friday, June 24, 2016

A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress, Part VII: Perception and Process

            It ought never to be forgotten that Alexander Hamilton was unusual among the Founding Generation because of the humble circumstances of his birth and upbringing. He was not the only “self-made man,” if the term can be said to apply – Benjamin Franklin was certainly, and self-consciously, that – but he was perhaps the only one of them to grow up in conditions that in many respects resembled abject poverty. Without question, this fact colored his outlook, though in what manner it is not always clear. As has hopefully become evident by now, Hamilton tended to view the great political and social issues of the era in which he lived through a highly utilitarian prism. Whether or not something was right seemed to interest him less than whether it was possible. His strained circumstances as a youth in the West Indies doubtless affected his understanding of economics. Likewise, his rise from merchant clerk to undergraduate at one of the most prestigious colleges in the American colonies surely nurtured an appreciation on his part of the capacity of the lowborn for feats of intellect and ambition. Consequently, it may have been that his various attempts to praise the judgement, the commercial instincts, and the shrewdness of his plebeian audience were entirely sincere. Though not a farmer himself, he was also not a clergyman, planter, or statesman. Putting aside his two years in America as a student, he almost certainly had more in common with the rural colonists he sought to address than with his pseudonymous opponent Samuel Seabury, or than Seabury had with them. A Full Vindication may thus represent, in spite of its haughtiness and elevated language, an attempt by a lowly clerk who had ascended beyond his station to speak to, and on behalf of, the class to which he had lately belonged.

            There remains, of course, the possibility that Hamilton was not in the slightest bit interested in relating to or speaking for his supposed social equals. Attempting to distance himself from the lowly circumstances of his birth and upbringing was a recurring theme throughout his adulthood, and no doubt the early years of his residence in America were where and when that effort began. As a result, speaking to the farmers of colonial New York as though they were his equals in judgement, morals, or intellectual ability, even anonymously, may not have seemed an attractive prospect. Rather, in keeping with the tendencies and biases of the class he hoped to join, he may have preferred to establish some degree of intellectual and rhetorical distance between himself and the audience he was attempting to sway. Thus, rather than understanding his appeals as genuine, it may be wiser to view them as flowing out of the same 18th century elite ambivalence toward the common people and their innate capacities that Seabury himself was given to. Hamilton’s attempts at flattery seem especially to square with this assessment. Had he truly intended to express sympathy with the farmers he sought to address, and to speak well of their discretion and their integrity, he might have chosen language that appeared less haughty, dismissive, and calculating. After asking in paragraph eighty of A Full Vindication whether his readers were unwilling to rise to the defense of their own rights, he declared, “I would not suspect you of so much baseness and stupidity as to suppose the contrary.” Had he meant to compliment the agriculturalists to whom he explicitly addressed himself, he might have more directly expressed admiration for their intelligence and their nobility of spirit. Instead, he phrased his appeal so as to dare them to prove they were not, as he claimed, base or stupid.

            In truth, it may always be unclear whether Hamilton truly sought to speak for the farmers of his adopted homeland with A Full Vindication or was guilty of speaking through them – failing to take their perspective into account while using them to make a point. Because Hamilton was born into bastardy and destitution and fought hard to shed the stigma attached to both, it can be difficult at any given time to determine whether he was speaking as a man of humble origins or as a man whose humble origins were a source of shame. That being said, Hamilton’s freshman pamphlet remains a fascinating object of study. Compared, for instance, to Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British North America, also published in 1774, it represents a uniquely matter-of-fact take on the conflict then mounting between the American colonies and the British Parliament. Whereas A Summary View approached the relationship between the American colonies and the British Crown in terms of the legal and philosophical principles that bound them together – the colonies, Jefferson asserted, were sovereign entities that voluntarily acknowledged the British monarch as their own – Hamilton portrayed the link between London and the various colonial capitals as fundamentally economic and opportunistic.

Since their foundations, he argued, the colonies had become integrated into the economy of the British Empire. The raw materials that they produced or extracted – timber, fish, tobacco, wool, hemp, iron, etc. – were purchased by British merchants and sold to British manufacturers. They in turn sold finished goods like textiles and metalwork, and luxury goods like sugar and tea, on the American market. The profits generated by this Trans-Atlantic relationship were far from insignificant, to the point that Britain became willing to go to significant lengths to see it prosper and would have been quick to respond to any potential threats. The mutually dependent nature of this relationship consequently left both parties vulnerable to manipulation in the event of, say, a political disagreement. Hamilton proved to be keenly aware of this fact, and counselled his fellow colonists to use it to their advantage amidst the ongoing dispute between the colonies and Parliament. If the citizens of British America wished to focus the attention of recalcitrant British ministers on responding to the demands of their American constituents, he argued, the plan of action most likely to produce a viable result was a disruption of British commerce. The First Continental Congress had recommended as much at the conclusion of its meeting in October, 1774, and Hamilton pressed his adopted countrymen express their support.

It is noteworthy that at no point in A Full Vindication did Hamilton express support for the independence of the colonies from Britain. Parliament may have suspected that a latent desire for independence resided in the breast of every American, he allowed in paragraph thirty-seven, but it was not a motivation he gave voice to himself or attributed to his fellow colonists. What he and his countrymen desired, he asserted, was merely the preservation of their accustomed liberties and a general redress of the grievances that they nurtured. A fundamental break with Britain, it seemed, was not on Hamilton’s mind as yet. Indeed, his invocation across A Full Vindication of various concepts rooted in British political philosophy and history would seem to indicate that he remained attached to many elements of British culture and believed that his readers felt likewise.

In paragraph five, for instance, Hamilton declared, “No reason can be assigned why one man should exercise any power or preeminence over his fellow-creatures more than any other; unless they have voluntarily vested him with it.” In spite of how clearly this idea seems to resonate with later developments in American republicanism, in 1774 it was almost certainly a legacy of the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689). Charles II’s ascension to the throne at the behest of Parliament in 1660, the overthrow of his brother James II in 1688, and Parliament’s designation of George I as rightful heir to the throne in 1701 combined to solidify the notion that the British monarch could no longer expect to rule without the consent of the kingdom’s elected representatives. By affirming this concept while applying it to the American context – the colonists, he avowed, had never been asked to give their consent to being ruled by Parliament – Hamilton was arguably acknowledging his own commitment to the ideals theoretically at the core of contemporary British political culture. Similar references to British legal and political traditions, notably including the unwritten British Constitution, can be found in paragraphs six, seven, seventeen, fifty-seven, eighty-one, one hundred eleven, and one hundred sixteen. Whereas Jefferson’s A Summary View was prepared to effectively declare that the colonies were independent already, had always been, and maintained a connection to the British Crown out of a sense of tradition and respect, Hamilton seemed to maintain a high personal regard for British political philosophy and accordingly sought to preserve the customary relationship between Britain and America. The First Continental Congress, whose defense Hamilton came to, had been convened to do just that.

Though only a year and a half elapsed between the publication of A Full Vindication in the winter of 1774 and the formal declaration of American independence in the summer of 1776, independence was itself far from inevitable at the time Hamilton penned his freshman political pamphlet. The Congresses that convened in September, 1774 and May, 1775 took their inspiration from prior successful efforts by the united colonies to seek redress for ill-judged British legislation. Neither body was conceived as a vehicle for colonial independence, and the second of the two proposed a number of alternative measures before Britain’s resort to arms forced some of the more conservative delegates in attendance to seriously contemplate a fundamental break with the mother country. Consequently, the debate that Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Seabury, and many others were engaged surrounding the calling of the First Continental Congress should not be understood as being between advocates of independence on one side and reconciliation on the other. The Revolution had yet to progress to that point, and there were still a great many perspectives on the mounting crisis being daily advocated in newspapers and in pamphlets across the colonies.

The perspective that Alexander Hamilton put forward in A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress is noteworthy among them for several reasons. As aforementioned, Hamilton’s experiences growing up in the West Indies and working as a clerk in a trading firm left him with a unique understanding of the relationship between commerce and politics. Whereas a classically educated and well-read man like Thomas Jefferson addressed the conflict between the colonies and Parliament in terms of sovereignty and history, Hamilton believed that raw economics were what defined the web of relationships within the British Empire. This would have been a very unusual perspective for the era, and one which could not have helped but strike its audience so. It is also worth considering, on a more personal level, where Hamilton was in the course of his life when A Full Vindication was published.

Two years out from an obscure existence in the Danish West Indies, he was a further eight months removed from forming a volunteer militia company with his Kings College classmates and taking up arms against Great Britain. A Full Vindication thus represents one of the most influential members of the Founding Generation at an incredibly crucial turning point in his life. Not yet a diehard revolutionary, he was willing at least to support aggressive retaliation in response to British intransigence and advise his adopted countrymen to do the same. Some portion of his affections seem to lie with Britain still, yet he was evidently content to see British ministers and the merchants and manufacturers that supported them suffer for presuming to take liberties with their American cousins. The events of 1775 evidently convinced him that more drastic action was called for, though they should not be understood as having turned him into an insurgent overnight. As easy, and comfortable, as it is to conceive of the American Revolution as having begun with a “shot heard ‘round the world,” the reality is somewhat more complex. From protest to armed insurrection, the Revolution proceeded slowly. Petitions gave way to debate, which gave way to coordinated disobedience, which gave way to rebellion. The individuals who helped shape these various stages and gave form to the end result proceeded along a similar course of radicalization. A Full Vindication is effectively a signpost along Hamilton’s path from uninitiated immigrant to dedicated revolutionary. For that reason, and others, it is absolutely worthy of close consideration.  

Anyway, that’s how I see it. Give it a look yourself: http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-01-02-0054                       

Friday, June 17, 2016

A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress, Part VI: Perspectives, both Nuanced and Otherwise

One further element of Hamilton’s rhetorical approach within A Full Vindication is worth commenting on before moving along to some concluding remarks. The element in question, unlike those cited previously, is more of a general philosophy than a specific tactic, and seems to permeate the text of A Full Vindication from beginning to end. Simply put, it takes the form of a tendency on Hamilton’s part to characterize and communicate with his intended audience in a somewhat condescending fashion. This manifested itself in the way he used flattery to ingratiate himself with his readers, the appeals he made to their commercial instincts, the power he was inclined to assign to their religious sensibilities, and frequent instances of his praising arguments that were “simple,” “obvious,” “plain,” or “evident.” Combined, these aspects of A Full Vindication would seem to indicate that Hamilton did not view his audience as particularly sophisticated, well-read, or capable of seeing beyond their own interests.

This was not an uncommon tendency among contemporary political theorists, social commentators, or members of the civil elite. “The People,” as mainstream 18th century thought conceived of them, were not understood to possess a great deal of restraint, intelligence, or reason. Though Enlightenment philosophy had developed a fairly sympathetic conception of the rights that all individuals possessed regardless of birth, education, or ability and reserved an important place for the “lower orders” in political society, even the statesman and theorists most directly responsible for the American conceptions of republicanism and democracy (Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Adams, et al.) did not always view the common people of America all that charitably. To them, the People were untrustworthy, generally ruled by their emotions, and needed to be led by the hand towards a common good that would have otherwise escaped them.

            Hamilton, though of far humbler origins than any of the luminaries cited above, appears to have nurtured a similarly patronizing view of the common people’s basic faculties. As aforementioned, much of the portion of A Full Vindication specifically addressed to the agrarian population of colonial New York is heavily laden with un-ironic flattery. While castigating A. W. Farmer for thinking so little of his audience that they would be fooled by his assuming a sympathetic pseudonym, Hamilton showed himself no more convinced of their shrewdness in the way that he lauded their judgement, their good sense, and their prudence. Had they been as canny as he claimed, they doubtless would have seen through his attempt at sympathy as they had through Seabury’s. Likely as not, he failed to account for this outcome because he did not think it possible. By the same token, Hamilton’s appeal to the commercial instincts of New York’s agricultural community seems to underrate their ability to see beyond the lustre of financial advantage. The farmers of New York ought to have supported the boycott proposed by Congress, he argued, because they stood to gain from the sudden demand for their produce that would be the immediate result. This claim, hardly without merit in itself, made no allowance for any higher principles which might have motivated the audience to whom it was addressed. It was not a devotion to liberty or a jealously of their rights that Hamilton ascribed to the agriculturalists of his adopted homeland, but a love of profit. That this was the same motivation he attributed to the British Empire – a regard for wealth being, he explained, the only thing that moved British ministers one way or another – would seem to indicate that he considered his audience no better at base than the authority he was enjoining them to oppose.

            As discussed previously, Hamilton’s attempt to use the terms of the Quebec Act to incline his chosen audience toward supporting the boycott proposed by Congress likewise seems to indicate a tendency on his part to view said audience as rather narrowly prejudiced. While acknowledging, rightly, that the act of Parliament in question re-established the Roman Catholic Church in Quebec and annexed to it a large portion of the colonial interior, he further stated that the potential consequences to these measures may well have been the imposition of Catholicism on all of British North America. Though this was far from a likely outcome, Hamilton sought to manipulate his readers into thinking it was by putting to them statements and questions their faith would not permit them to ignore. “Does not your blood run cold,” he wrote in paragraph eighty-nine, “To think that an English Parliament should pass an act for the establishment of arbitrary power and Popery in such an extensive country?” Despite the fact that this was not evidence for the outcome that Hamilton described – the establishment of Roman Catholicism in New York – calling attention to the perceived effrontery of its establishment in Quebec surely seemed a useful means to conjure the sense of fear and unease he felt was necessary to his ultimate goal.

In order for this tactic to succeed, of course, the farmers that Hamilton sought to address would have had to privilege their religion to such a degree that it blinded them from exercising their sense of reason. Whereas Hamilton himself, as A Full Vindication and its subsequent texts demonstrate, was an arch-pragmatist who viewed life through a distinctly utilitarian lens, he seemed to understand his audience as being more or less ruled by their partialities. Doubtless he did not believe that Britain would ever attempt to impose the Catholic faith on any of its North American colonies – a task requiring far more than might possibly be gained – yet he ascribed no such clarity of thought to the agrarian community A Full Vindication sought to convince. Surely, as a community, their faith was important to them. But they were not so foolish or naïve as to be incapable of seeing the world as Hamilton did. That he assumed otherwise testifies once again to his uncharitable view of them.

The final aspect of A Full Vindication which seems to attest to Hamilton’s rather condescending impression of his chosen audience is perhaps the most subtle and insidious of the lot. Throughout said pamphlet, in a very casual manner, Hamilton deployed certain words, phrases, and ideas with the evident intent of portraying the conflict between the critics and supporters of the First Continental Congress as a dispute between artifice and logic. This he accomplished by making clear that the position he supported, and which he felt his readers were naturally inclined to support, was that of plain, unadorned common sense. Indeed, that specific phrase made its first appearance in the second paragraph of A Full Vindication. A.W. Farmer and those of his ilk, he stated, were “restless spirits” who manifested a “violent antipathy” to “the natural rights of mankind,” “common-sense” and “common modesty [.]” This “invincible aversion to common-sense” he continued, was clearly evident in the way such writers attempted to convince their fellow colonists of the truth and wisdom of things that were plainly and demonstrably false.

Putting aside that this is on its own a rather empty argument, the language that Hamilton used is quite telling. “Common sense” was the quality he seemed to praise most highly. As opposed to the obscure, complex, and convoluted reasoning of political theorists, philosophers, and statesmen, common sense was not the product of a cultivated mind. Rather, it was the basic, rock-bottom intellectual inheritance of all people. Not without reason, the phrase echoes the notion of a “common people” whose understanding of the world is simple, straightforward, and obvious. Keeping in mind the 18th century intellectual ambivalence that members of the contemporary social, political, and intellectual elite widely manifested in regard to this “common people,” it ought to be added that the notion of common sense perhaps also indicated an inelegance or bluntness of thought and expression. Thus, though Hamilton no doubt intended to flatter his audience by assigning value within his argument to a trait that every one of them possessed, it is also important to be conscious of the potential slight inherent in any 18th century use of the word “common.”

Variations on the basic thesis that Hamilton laid out at the beginning of A Full Vindication – that the logic of supporting the boycott proposed by Congress was plain and obvious – appear unobtrusively throughout the paragraphs that follow. In paragraph four, for instance, Hamilton wrote that he would attempt to make his case, “by the most obvious arguments [.]” Similarly, in paragraph forty-two, he responded to the question of whether an attempt by Britain to subjugate the colonies by force would have ended in disaster by simply stating, “It is evident it must.” Things that are evident or obvious are by their nature also uncomplicated. With this in mind, it might perhaps be fair to conclude that Hamilton’s intention in using these words when and where he did was to portray his argument in A Full Vindication as being straightforward or lacking in complexity, and thus easy to grasp. Though his chosen audience – the farmers of New York – may well have responded positively to affirmations of this kind, it’s also worth considering that Hamilton tacitly thought them incapable of understanding arguments of a more complex nature.     

Another example of the potentially backhanded nature of Hamilton’s praise for the sensibilities of his audience can be found in in paragraph seventy-eight. In a declaration doubtless calculated to provoke a sense of solidarity between him and his readers, he wrote, “I despise all false pretensions and means arts […] ‘T is my maxim to let the plain, naked truth speak for itself: and if men won’t listen to it, ‘t is their own fault: they must be contented to suffer for it.” Presumably Hamilton felt such a statement would have resonated with an agrarian audience because they too were “plain dealers” who let the facts speak for themselves and disdained artifice and pretension. As flattering as this conception of New York’s farmers might have seemed, however, it did not come from a place of experience. Hamilton was not a farmer, or the son of farmers, and was not a native of New York. If he believed the colony’s agriculturalists were plain and honest, it was because that was the image he held in his mind. Tantamount to a caricature, this image – doubtless formed out of vague cultural assumptions – did not account for farmers who were cunning, shrewd, well-read, or deceitful. In short, Hamilton’s apparent conception of the farmers of his adopted homeland did not seem to afford them the same variation of human character and human personality that he might have attributed to a more learned or more cultured people. In his mind, it seems, the farmers he intended to read A Full Vindication were universally unpretentious, down-to-earth, and simple. So simple, in fact, that they would have swallowed a stranger claiming that he was cut from the same cloth.

Similarly, in the penultimate paragraph of A Full Vindication (one hundred twenty-four), Hamilton requested of his readers that they judge for themselves the wisdom or folly of his words. “I don’t desire you to take my opinion, nor any man’s opinion, as the guide of your actions […] It is your business to draw a conclusion, and act accordingly.” In the context of late 18th century America, this was an extremely important idea. The American Revolution unleashed, among other things, the latent political and social awareness of the “common citizen” by bombarding them with rhetoric that praised the equality of all men and held that “the People” were the paramount sovereign authority in a properly constituted government. The judgement of the common people was continuously appealed to – perhaps most famously by English pamphleteer Thomas Paine – as a bulwark against the arbitrary authority of distant kings and ministers, and the American tradition of social and political deference slowly began to break down. While it took decades for this realignment of American culture to coalesce – culminating in the rise of Andrew Jackson in the late 1820s – its origins were very much rooted in the Revolutionary era and the rhetoric it spawned. That being said, many of the people directly responsible for the emergence and popularization of the new American vocabulary of liberty and equality were themselves disinclined to view the common citizens of the nation they had helped construct as particularly well-suited to govern themselves.

Even Thomas Jefferson, who promoted the role of the common people in American republicanism more strenuously than just about any of his peers, demonstrated a reflexive antipathy toward the emergence of popular politics in the 1810s and 1820s. He and his contemporaries had empowered the farmers, blacksmiths, butchers, and millers of rural and small-town America by telling them time and again that they were the equal of any king or aristocrat, that their judgement was sound, and that their vigilance was essential to the survival of an American republic. Yet these same members of the Founding Generation were unprepared, and in some cases actively horrified, when the common citizens of the nascent United States seemed to take their words to heart. Alexander Hamilton’s attempt to encourage the farmers of colonial New York to exercise their own judgement in evaluating the rightness or folly of the case he had made in A Full Vindication would seem to fall exactly into this larger context. By praising the prudence of his fellow colonists, Hamilton was taking part in a much larger linguistic and intellectual shift that would in short order transform the American colonies into American states. Whereas in the colonial era a gentleman of wealth and education asking his neighbors to elect him as their delegate to the local assembly might reasonably expect them to comply out of a sense of social obligation, Hamilton implored his readers to judge for themselves if he spoke for them or not. Whether he truly trusted his agrarian readers as implicitly as he claimed is another matter.  

Friday, June 10, 2016

A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress, Part V: Pride and Prejudice

            Having contemplated, at some length, the various economic arguments in favor of an American boycott of British trade that Alexander Hamilton brought to bear in A Full Vindication, it yet stands to examine the various rhetorical urgings he deployed in that same document in an attempt to stir the emotions of his chosen audience. This aspect of Hamilton’s freshman political treatise, as mentioned previously, appears markedly more clumsy and overbearing than sections that rely solely on considerations of supply, demand, cost, and benefit. While such financially-rooted entreaties were not universally flawless or lacking in some degree of indiscretion, it is in the manner that Hamilton attempted to tweak the pride, anger, and ambition of his readers that the youthful inelegance of A Full Vindication really shines through. Not content to simply disprove the assertions of his chosen nemesis, the pseudonymous A.W. Farmer, by exhibiting the flaws and contradictions in his logic, Hamilton evidently felt it necessary to question the man’s intentions, decry his manner of address, and repeatedly call into doubt the intelligence of any who believed the claims he put forward. The results were often blunt, at times needlessly aggressive, and generally quite transparent. That being said, they are highly indicative of the way Hamilton understood public debate and his seemingly inborn talent for reading an audience and responding to their prejudices.

            Of the various rhetorical devices that Hamilton brought to bear in A Full Vindication, several stand out for how often and how aggressively they were repeated. They include appeals to the pride, fear, and ambition of the pamphlet’s chosen audience (i.e. the farmers of colonial New York). These elements, though often lacking in subtlety, were nevertheless skilfully structured. Beginning in paragraph seventy-seven and continuing right through to paragraph one hundred twenty-five, Hamilton directly addressed the agrarian residents of his adopted homeland in an attempt, he stated, to dispel any familiarity of sympathy Seabury’s use of the pseudonym “A Westchester Farmer” might have engendered. As aforementioned, his approach was somewhat blunt, if not entirely tactless. After calling attention to the fact that A.W. Farmer was in fact nothing of the sort, castigating him for thinking so little of New York’s agricultural community, and then promoting the virtues of said community in the most flattering terms, Hamilton proceeded to pepper the paragraphs that followed with similarly ham-fisted pleas and approbations.

Paragraph seventy-eight well represents this rather obsequious manner of address. “I wish well of my country,” Hamilton confessed, “And of course to you, who are one chief support of it; and because an attempt has been made to lead you astray in particular.” If the farmers of New York had felt flattered by Samuel Seabury’s decision to address his concerns about the actions of Congress chiefly to them, Hamilton’s declaration that their community was one of the “chief supports” of life in the colony surely did little to dispel any lingering sense of self-importance. This was, without a doubt, precisely what Hamilton desired. Seabury’s A.W. Farmer had directed his complaints to an agrarian readership because he understood that the boycott proposed by the First Continental Congress would be a dead letter without their support. Their livelihood depended on access to British markets, and the subsistence of their countrymen in the event of a prolonged cessation of trade would hinge on the ability of farmers like themselves to produce sufficient staple commodities. By playing to their fears and their financial sensibilities – by asking them to envision lost profits and the accompanying privation – Seabury doubtless hoped to convert the agriculturalists of his home country into ardent opponents of non-importation. Hamilton, as aware as his opponent of the important role New York’s farmers stood to play in the event of a boycott on British trade, thus appealed to their sensibilities and their emotions for the same reasons as the pseudonymous Seabury. “You are the men […]” he admitted, also in paragraph seventy-eight, “who would lose most, should you be foolish enough to counter the measures our prudent Congress has taken [.]” This too was an appeal to the pride of his chosen audience. By declaring that denying the measures of Congress would have been a foolish endeavor, Hamilton defied New York’s farmers to prove that they were otherwise.

Paragraphs eighty, eighty-one, and eighty-two of A Full Vindication contained similar appeals to the self-respect – nay, vanity – of colonial New York’s agricultural community. Acknowledging that the boycott proposed by Congress indeed represented a potential inconvenience for the colony’s farmers, Hamilton asked his chosen audience if some degree of aggravation was not worth the, “security of your life and property [.]” He followed this in paragraph eighty by restating the question and providing a rather blunt reply. “Will you not take a little trouble,” he wrote, “To transmit the advantages you now possess to those who are to come after you? I cannot doubt it. I would not suspect you of so much baseness and stupidity to suppose the contrary.” In one stroke Hamilton thereby acknowledged the importance of legacy and inheritance to a landed population while also delivering a distinctly backhanded compliment to the same. Without calling the farmers of his adopted homeland base or stupid, he made it abundantly clear that he would consider them so if they rose in opposition to the boycott proposed by Congress. Paragraph eighty-one contained a similarly passive-aggressive affirmation – having asked whether American farmers were willing to suffer at the behest of their British cousins, Hamilton answered, “I know you scorn the thought. You had rather die than submit to it” – while paragraph eighty-two sought to remind the reading audience precisely what was being debated. It was not, as A Full Vindication made abundantly clear, “The foolish trifle of three pence duty upon tea [.]” “Surely you can judge for yourselves,” Hamilton declared, adding, “The man that affirms it deserves to be laughed at.” Once again, it was the pride of his chosen audience that Hamilton set his sights on. By stating a position, asking his readers to decide for themselves, and then claiming that those who disagreed would be subject to ridicule, he doubtless intended to make dissent seem an unattractive proposition.

Similar attempts to tweak the pride of colonial New York’s agrarian population, with varying emphases, are in evidence throughout the remainder of A Full Vindication. Some, as in paragraph ninety, appear by 18th century standards to be quite harshly phrased. Having stated that his intention was to warn his fellow New Yorkers of the danger they faced by rejecting the proposals of Congress, Hamilton wrote,

If you still neglect what you owe to God and man, you cannot plead ignorance in your excuse. Your consciences will reproach you for your folly; and your children’s children will curse you.

For most uneducated populations in the 18th century Christian world, and particularly among Protestants, invoking the spectre of God guaranteed a response that simple invective could not have hoped to match. Hamilton was evidently aware of this, and accordingly invoked fealty to the Almighty and the burden of conscience while addressing a population to whom such concepts were of great cultural and spiritual importance. Other of Hamilton’s attempts to sway his audience set about manipulating their sense of dignity and honor. In paragraph one hundred twenty-one, he asked his readers whether they would allow themselves to be “duped” by the arguments put forward by Seabury’s A.W. Farmer. “Will you act in such a manner,” he demanded,

As to deserve the hatred and resentment of all the rest of America? I am sure you will not. I should be sorry to think any of my countrymen would be so mean, so blind to their own interest, so lost to every generous and manly feeling.

Thus phrased, the choice before the farmers of New York was fairly simple; deny the measures of Congress and be thought ignorant, thoughtless, despicable, and greedy, or support them and embody the opposite of these wretched traits. Again, by denying that his readers were foolish or stupid and tying that denial to a disavowal of Seabury’s position, Hamilton effectively dared them to disagree and prove themselves otherwise.  
  
            In addition to their collective sense of self-worth, Hamilton also seemed intent in A Full Vindication on arousing the fears and aversions of his agrarian readership. This he accomplished by recalling the economic consequences of certain recent events – the controversies surrounding British tax policy – and offering sensationalized warnings as to the results of others – the passage and enforcement of the Quebec Act. The former was first deployed in paragraph eighty-five. Though the Sugar, Stamp, and Tea Acts, as well as the Townshend Duties, were not particularly onerous in terms of the costs they added to colonial commerce, many in the colonies feared that accepting the rationale behind them – taxation for the purpose of generating revenue as opposed to regulating trade – would result in a barrage of new tariffs, tolls, and levies. “How would you like to pay four shillings a year,” Hamilton accordingly asked, “Out of every pound your farms are worth [?]” And, in addition, “A tenth part of the yearly products of your land to the clergy?” To this he added further, “Ten shillings sterling, per annum, for every wheel of your wagons and other carriages; a shilling or two for every pane of glass in your house; and two or three shillings for every one of your hearths [.]”  For reference, pre-decimal British pounds contained twenty shillings, and the average farm income in the early 1770s in a colony like New York was approximately £20 per year. With this in mind, the farmers Hamilton sought to address might have been forced to surrender two or three pounds yearly – ten to fifteen percent of their earnings. This was a weighty assessment indeed, and one which was surely intended to alarm whoever read it. Hamilton’s attempt at consolation – “Methinks I see you stare,” he wrote, “And hear you ask, how you could live, if you were to pay such heavy taxes. Indeed, my friends, I can’t tell you” – doubtless magnified this sense of distress.

Worse than the hardship that the boycott proposed by Congress would have occasioned, it seemed, rejection of the same entailed consequences unknown and all the more terrifying. In an evident attempt to give some form to this latent terror, perhaps as a means to further focus the attention of his audience, Hamilton proceeded in the same paragraph eighty-five to speculate about all the myriad taxes Britain might attempt to levy if Americans decided to forego resistance. “Perhaps before long,” he cautioned,

Your tables, and chairs, and platters, and dishes, and knives, and forks, and every thing else, would be taxed. Nay, I don’t know but they would find a means to tax you for every child you got, and for every kiss your daughters received from their sweethearts; and, God knows, that would soon ruin you.

In spite of the rather sensational nature of this conjectured outcome – imagining it were possible for British tax assessors to levy excises on gestures of affection – the subject matter itself is quite mundane. Whereas other commentators spoke in terms of rights, principles, natural laws, and social contracts, Hamilton attempted to rouse the sentiments of his audience by asking them to imagine threats to their everyday existence. By thus conjuring images of tables, chairs, children, and young men on the make, A Full Vindication was doubtless intended to cut to the heart of the things its intended audience took for granted. Even if the implied threats themselves were improbable at best and ridiculous at worst, they were still capable of provoking fear because they coupled the simple comforts of the agrarian classes – income, children, a home, and its furnishings – to their loss via excessive taxation. In this sense, though Hamilton’s approach was somewhat lacking in subtly, his intent was nevertheless well-calculated.      

            The very same could be said of his attempt in paragraphs eighty-eight and eighty-nine to play upon the religious partialities of his chosen audience. Granting that New York was among the most religiously diverse of the original thirteen colonies that would go on to form the nucleus of the United States, Protestantism was by far the dominant branch of Christianity in practice. While the various sects that existed under this broad umbrella – notably including the Dutch Reformed congregations of the western counties and the Congregationalist of Long Island – did not always agree on a great deal in terms of doctrine and practice, they were at least united in their opposition to and distrust of the Roman Catholic faith. Hamilton, seeking to harness this shared suspicion, made a point of reminding the readers of A Full Vindication that the recent passage of the Quebec Act (1774) afforded official British protection of Catholic practice in the selfsame territory. “The English laws have been superseded by the French Laws [,]” he wrote in paragraph eighty-eight,

The Romish faith is made the established religion of the land, and his Majesty is placed at the head of it. The free exercise of the Protestant faith depends upon the pleasure of the Governor and Council.

In truth, the intention of the Quebec Act was to shore up the loyalties of Britain’s Canadian subjects – predominantly Catholic and French-speaking – by extending to them religious and civil liberties they had not previously enjoyed. No restrictions were placed on the practice of Protestantism in Quebec, and English common law was only superseded by French law in civil cases. If Hamilton was aware of these subtleties, he was no doubt also aware that they would have amounted to little in the eyes of New York’s Protestant farmers.

To them, as to the Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Puritans that filled the American colonies from Massachusetts to Georgia, the Roman Catholic Church was unequivocally the enemy. Widely viewed among contemporary Protestants as authoritarian, close-minded, and acquisitive, the Catholic faith had been restricted and suppressed in Britain for centuries under successive Protestant monarchs. The colonies, peopled in the 17th and 18th centuries by mainly British Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters, followed suit in limiting the ability of individual Catholics to take part in mainstream political, economic, and social life. When Parliament approved the Quebec Act in June, 1774, it was consequently viewed by many Americans as something of a betrayal. This reaction was no doubt partially motivated by an additional provision of the act that annexed a vast swath of territory to Quebec in the Great Lakes region formerly claimed by New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Deprived of land that was evidently to become a protected province of Catholicism, many residents of these colonies reacted with particular outrage.

 Hamilton shrewdly, if somewhat indiscreetly, seized upon this sense of indignation and conjured his readers’ worst attendant fears. “They may as well establish Popery in New York, and the other colonies, as they did in Canada,” he speculated in paragraph eighty-nine. “They had no more right to do it here than there.” In point of fact, there was virtually no chance that this scenario, or any like it, would have ever come to pass. British antipathy towards Roman Catholicism had been well attested by the 18th century through a series of wars, revolutions, and uprisings dating from the foundation of the Church of England in 1534. The Hanoverian monarchs – in 1774 including George III, his grandfather George II, and great-grandfather George I – ascended to the throne precisely because they were not Catholic, and had fought to quell a series of bloody rebellions by Catholic dissidents over the course of their collective reign. Notwithstanding the decision to allow Catholics in British Quebec freedom to worship – a choice born of strict pragmatism – an attempt by the British Parliament to impose Roman Catholicism on the colonies of British North America would have represented the complete reversal of almost a century of political and military campaigns to the contrary. Hamilton was almost certainly aware that this was so, yet seemed intent on exploiting the comparative ignorance of his fellow New Yorkers in order to garner their support for the measures lately proposed by Congress.

To that end, he tied public resentment of the Quebec Act and latent hostility towards Roman Catholicism to the theoretical result of colonial acquiescence to recent British measures. “If they had any regard to the freedom and happiness of mankind,” he wrote in paragraph eighty-nine of A Full Vindication,

They would never have done it. If they had been friends to the Protestant cause, they would never have provided such a nursery for its great enemy; they would not have given such encouragement to Popery.

While, again, the fundamental claims being made appear at times almost comically exaggerated, the manner in which Hamilton deployed them was undeniably astute. If Seabury’s A.W. Farmer had attempted to prove to his audience that Britain had the best interests of the colonies at heart – thus rendering any boycott of British trade unnecessary and uncivil – all that was required of Hamilton was to convincingly prove the opposite. To the many thousands of Protestants who labored tilling the earth in colonial New York, British support of Catholic practice in neighboring Quebec was evidence enough of how far Parliament had strayed from holding their interests in high regard. Even those who were capable of seeing Hamilton’s “doomsday scenario” for what it was – a rhetorical device meant to rouse their emotions – would doubtless have been hard-pressed to reconcile traditional British hostility towards Catholics with the religious permissiveness embodied by the Quebec Act. So important was their faith to their individual and collective existence, they may well have permitted themselves to be swayed by such an appeal. In this sense, though his technique was somewhat crude, Hamilton demonstrated at eighteen the same canny ability to read an audience that would nurture his success for decades to come. 

Friday, June 3, 2016

A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress, Part IV: Supply and Demand

In addition to acknowledging the avidity that motivated most British decision-making, Alexander Hamilton also directed A Full Vindication to dispelling the misgivings he attributed to A.W. Farmer that a suspension of trade would prove either harmful to the colonies or harmless to Britain. In so doing, he demonstrated a keen understanding of the web of economic dependence that bound together the various regions of the 18th century British Empire. In particular, he seemed eager to communicate to his readers that the commercial relationships that existed between Britain proper and its various colonial dependencies (in the Americas, the West Indies, and elsewhere) did not merely serve to funnel resources from outlying areas to a central metropolis. As much as the American colonies depended on Britain for manufactured goods, luxury items, and military protection, so too did Britain depend on the natural resources and markets that the colonies provided. Severing this relationship would thus have been substantially harmful to both sides. Acknowledging this fact, as Hamilton doubtless hoped his adopted countrymen would, might accordingly have afforded the aggrieved colonists a lever by which to pry loose from Britain the accommodations they desired. This represented an uncommon perspective on the contemporary disagreement between the colonies and the British Parliament – lacking in either philosophical rigor or sentimentality – but one that was very much in keeping with the experiences and temperament of the author of A Full Vindication.
As to the potential harm that a boycott on British goods was said to entail, Hamilton was convinced that very little would be lost in the event of a cessation of trade. Indeed, he was rather of the mind that his adopted countrymen had a great deal to gain. Beginning in paragraph forty-five of A Full Vindication, Hamilton ran down a list of some of the commodities that the colonies had customarily supplied to Britain which a boycott would allow them to make use of on their own terms. “Our climate,” he avowed, “Produces cotton, wool, flax, and hemp; which, with proper cultivation, would furnish us with summer apparel in abundance.” To this he added that cotton could also function to provide suitable winter garments, as could the sheep it was possible for Americans to cultivate in large numbers, and the, “Large quantity of skins we have among us [.]” He also estimated that silk production was not beyond contemporary American capabilities – “The silk-worm answers as well here,” he asserted, “As in any part of the world” – and further argued that even manufactured goods were within the colonists’ ability to provide. “Those hands which may be deprived of business by the cessation of commerce,” he opined, “May be occupied in various kinds of manufactures and other internal improvements.” Far from inaugurating a period of hardship and privation, it seemed to be Hamilton’s ardent belief that the boycott proposed by the First Continental Congress stood to unleash America’s latent productive capacity.
Hamilton also stressed that the farmers of his adopted homeland stood to benefit from a sudden reliance on the goods they produced. The agriculturalists, he avowed, upon which Britain already depended for raw materials (cotton, hemp, flax, wool, tobacco, rice, indigo, etc.) could quite easily shift to supplying the needs of their fellow Americans, and in particular the merchants and tradesmen that a boycott would injure most directly. “Manufactures must be promoted with vigor [,]” Hamilton declared in paragraph ninety-four, “And a high price will be given for your wool, flax, and hemp.” To this general affirmation he added, “It will be your interest to pay the greatest care and attention to your sheep. Increase and improve the breed as much as possible.” Then, “If matters be not accommodated by spring, enlarge the quantity of your flax and hemp. You will experience the benefit of it.” This kind of specific, even banal, advice – repeated in paragraphs ninety-five, one hundred nine, and one hundred thirteen – was unusual for a political treatise in the Revolutionary era. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, men whose philosophical convictions helped form the basis of American republicanism, were less inclined than Hamilton to delve into such distinctly agrarian subjects. Yet Jefferson and Adams were farmers by trade, and Hamilton was nothing of the sort. What he seemed to understand, however, was the impact of simple economics – of necessity, desire, and profit – on the lives of individuals at every level of a complex social order. British manufacturers and Americans farmers alike could trace their well-being to the same fundamental source, to the basic interaction of supply and demand. By tapping into the needs of one population and the abilities of another, great change could be affected on the level of individuals, communities, and even great empires. This realization, and Hamilton’s ability to communicate it to an audience, was no small measure of what set him apart from his more philosophically inclined contemporaries.
Hamilton further demonstrated his knowledge of commerce, resource management, and general economics by addressing the inability of Britain to make up for the loss of American trade in the event of a boycott. The claims put forward by A.W. Farmer, he asserted in A Full Vindication, that the loss of American resources could be made up by increasing British trade with the Netherlands and the Baltic, and by increasing the productive capacity of British Canada, were patently false. This, he proceeded to clarify at length, was because the Farmer in question evidently lacked an appreciation of how finely balanced the British Empire truly was. “The Dutch,” he explained, “Are rivals to the English in their commerce.” Though they had been known to supply Ireland out of their yearly surplus of flax, once their own needs had been met, it would have been foolish to expect them to come to the aid of their cross-Channel neighbors out of any sense of charity or concern. Rather, Hamilton opined in paragraph sixty-two, hearkening back to his previous commentary on the power of self-interest, the Dutch, “May take advantage of the scarcity of materials in Ireland, to increase and put off their own manufactures.” Self-preservation was what guided 18th century Great Power politics; colonies were a function of the constant competition for resources and markets. It would not have been in the best interest of the Dutch to supply Britain’s needs, just as it was not in Britain’s interest to behave more charitably towards its colonial subjects than was absolutely necessary. 
The Baltic, Hamilton continued in paragraph sixty-three, would have offered no greater aid to Britain in the event of an American boycott. Though the region was not under the hegemony of nations in direct competition with Britain’s colonial ventures – divided in 1774 between the German states, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Russia – it had previously, “Supplied Ireland with its flax; and she has been able to consume that, with all she could derive from other quarters.” Even Canada, a wholly British territory, was deficient in its ability to produce the resources British manufacturers increasingly required. “I am well informed,” Hamilton affirmed on that head, that Canada, “Could at present afford but a very inconsiderable quality [of flax]. It has had little encouragement, hitherto, to raise that article; and, of course, has not much attended to it.” Doubtless without intending to, A Full Vindication made clear, Britain had locked itself into a state of total dependence on its American colonial possessions. No other region of the globe could supply the resources they turned out – the flax, cotton, wool, and tobacco – and as British manufacturing increased its efficiency and its output, fewer and fewer alternatives could possibly satisfy the growing demand. And even if this was not the case, Hamilton pointed out in paragraph sixty-five, securing adequate supply was only half of the equation. Even if Britain had been able to find a new supplier for its textile mills – if the Baltic and Canada had not been so mortally deficient – “She would want purchasers for her linens after they were manufactured; and where could she find any so numerous and wealthy as we are?” The American colonies, Hamilton was inclined to believe, were the basis of Britain’s 18th century economic preeminence. They supplied British industry and bought British products – had done for over a century. To expect a sudden breach of this relationship to go unnoticed would have been quite simply unrealistic.  
Other corners of the empire – valuable and vulnerable in equal measure – would have felt the sting of an American boycott as well. The West Indies, global centre of 18th century sugar production, were governed based on a notably precarious economic logic that did not well tolerate sudden shortages of vital commodities. Arable land on islands like St. Kitts, Martinique, or Cuba were too valuable to be turned over to anything other than sugar production, and slave labor brought with it a whole host of associated costs (food, clothing, housing, etc.). As a result, Hamilton argued in paragraph sixty-six, “There is seldom, or never, in any of the islands, a sufficient stock of provisions to last six months […] the necessaries they produce within themselves, when compared with the consumption, are scarcely worth mentioning.” North America had accordingly supplied Britain’s Caribbean possessions with staple goods, purchased some quantity of their slaves, and absorbed a sizable percentage of their yearly sugar harvest. If this mutually profitable relationship were to suddenly cease, in the event, say, of a non-importation agreement being enforced by the American colonists, the consequences for the West Indian planters would have been very nearly catastrophic. “To suppose the best,” Hamilton posited in paragraph sixty-seven,
Which is, that by applying their cane-lands to the purpose of procuring sustenance, they may preserve themselves from starving; still, the consequences must be very serious or pernicious. The wealthy planters would but ill relish the loss of their crops; and such of them as were considerably in debt would be ruined. At any rate, the revenues of Great Britain would suffer a vast diminution.
This “vast diminution” was the key. By attacking Britain’s financial interests, Hamilton believed that it was possible to bring even that vast and powerful empire to its knees. If, in the process, the planter class of the West Indies were made to suffer, they would have had nothing more or less to blame than the essential law of self-preservation.   
Though under normal circumstances the web of interdependence that bound the 18th century British Empire together – tying Caribbean sugar producers to American farmers to English weavers – was a source of stability and prosperity, it was perhaps more delicate than it appeared. By making this argument in A Full Vindication, Alexander Hamilton effectively drew attention to a very basic truth – of which most Americans were likely unaware and Britain would have been loath to admit. Over the course of a century and a half, Britain had come to depend on access to American resources. The flax, hemp, cotton, and wool that the colonies supplied were the lifeblood of the British textile industry, and suitable replacements would have been near impossible to locate in sufficient quantities and at reasonable costs. Britain’s possessions in the West Indies were similarly locked in to an inflexible economic framework. Lacking the means to produce almost anything but the sugar harvests that made them profitable, plantations in places like St. Kitts and Antigua were absolutely dependent on other British territories to supply them with food, textiles, building materials, and tools. Having access to these commodities abruptly cut off would have severely limited their productivity, and in short order transformed them from cherished prizes into financial liabilities. Hamilton’s awareness of this harsh economic reality, uncommon among his contemporaries, was almost certainly the product of his tumultuous upbringing in this same region of the globe.
In spite of his first-hand knowledge of commerce, economic inter-dependency, and supply and demand, however, certain aspects of Hamilton’s forecasts in A Full Vindication do not bear close scrutiny. While in all likelihood the American colonies did possess the natural resources to meet the needs of their growing population, what they lacked (and would continue to lack for decades to come) was the infrastructure to make purely internal commerce viable. Late 18th century Britain, even in the earliest phase of the Industrial Revolution, enjoyed the use of textile mills and the beginnings of what would become an extensive system of navigable canals. The latter investment in particular allowed British manufacturers to cheaply and quickly transport raw materials and finished goods to and from sea ports and urban centres. The increased profits that resulted led to investment into larger factories, more canals, and in time innovations like the steam engine. America was perfectly capable of following this pattern of commercial and industrial development, as time would bear out, but the portrait that Hamilton painted in 1774 of his countrymen’s prospects in the near term seemed to lack an appreciation of what the transformation actually involved.
In 1774, there were no textile mills in the American colonies. There were no canals to speak of, barely any decent roads, and no means of communication faster than a horse. The first toll roads, paid for by the sale of shares in a chartered corporation, would not surface until the 1790s, and major infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal (connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes) would not see completion until the 1820s. The textile mills of New England were likewise a turn-of-the-century innovation, the first of its kind appearing in 1787 in Beverly, Massachusetts. To achieve what Hamilton seemed to propose in A Full Vindication – the replacement of distant British industry with an indigenous equivalent – would have required some combination of all of these advancements, and taken far long and cost a great deal more than his rather sunny predictions made it appear. Under the circumstances it would thus seem the height of naiveté to declare that manufacturing, once established in the colonies, would, “Pave the way still more to the future grandeur and glory of America; and, by lessening its need of external commerce, will render it still securer against the encroachments of tyranny.” Strictly speaking, this was true. The 18th century American colonies did possess a vast store of untapped economic potential which a few short decades would see fantastically unleashed. And much of the economic growth that followed did result from the utilization of American produce, raw materials, manufacturing, and transportation technologies. This economic renaissance was, however, a great many years from becoming a reality at the time A Full Vindication was written.
In light of Hamilton’s famously pragmatic turn of mind, it would seem strange for him to have nurtured such an idealistic vision. Granting that his youth at the time of writing may have inclined him to view his adopted homeland’s prospects more favorably than a man of greater wisdom and maturity, this would still seem to conflict with his otherwise hard-nosed approach to political discourse. To that end, it may have been that Hamilton was simply deploying a rhetorical device disguised as a pragmatic assessment of America’s economic potential. Seeking to sway an audience dependent on commerce into thinking that continued reliance on Britain was unnecessary, he simply attempted to portray the advent of America’s economic autonomy and prosperity as being somewhat nearer than he knew it to be. Events in the short term, and his role in them, would seem to bear this out. The Jay Treaty, signed in London in 1794, made significant concessions to British demands in an attempt to re-establish the commercial relationship that the Revolution had severed. In spite of the treaty being broadly reviled, and the principle negotiator John Jay (1745-1829) being widely burned in effigy, it was successfully ratified by the Senate in 1795. Symbolic of what he understood Britain and America as having to offer one another, Hamilton was a principle supporter of closer ties between the two and of Jay’s efforts in particular. Had he truly believed, as he seemed to in 1774, that America’s “future grandeur and glory” were near at hand, his ardent promotion of the Anglo-American relationship in the 1790s would be difficult to explain.    
This is, of course, only a theory. Hamilton may in fact have been far less knowledgeable at eighteen than he perhaps liked to think. Economics is an exceedingly complex topic, and though he was uniquely qualified to speak to the precarious finances of West Indies planters and merchants, it may have been the case that the interaction of supply, demand, resources, debt, infrastructure, and technology on a global scale were beyond Hamilton’s ability to accurately interpret at such a tender age. There can be no doubt that he was a logical, rigorous thinker, blessed with confidence, clarity, and drive. But he was also, as of 1774, sparsely educated. The events of the two decades that followed – service in the Continental Army, in Congress, at the bar, and in cabinet – would do a great deal to round out his understanding of economic theory and its practical applications. While this should not diminish the significance of his youthful projection of America’s vast potential – a projection which time would eventually validate – it ought to underscore both the uncertainty of the moment in which A Full Vindication was written and the shortcomings of its author. In spite of his evident presumptuousness, neither Hamilton nor any of his contemporaries really knew what was about to unfold. They tried their best to predict it, explain it, assuage fears and stoke jealousies. But in the end they were only small, imperfect humans groping for some sense of equilibrium amidst a particularly tumultuous moment in history. Despite his reputation, and the way that he carried himself during his life, Alexander Hamilton was as imperfect as any of them. For all his genius, his ambition, and his myriad accomplishments, he sprang as did so many of his fellow revolutionaries from humble beginnings. A Full Vindication is an early, somewhat awkward, but undeniably meaningful milestone along his journey.