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 18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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 18^th 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.