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 18^th 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 18^th 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 17^th and 18^th 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 18^th 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.