Jefferson vs Hamilton: The Dispute that Led to the Two-Party System and Nearly Caused Civil War

A Skeptics Guide to American History (2012)

Episode 4 Confusions About Jefferson and Hamilton

Mark Stoler PhD

Film Review

This presentation traces how the bitter political dispute between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson led to the creation of America’s two-party system – and almost caused civil war.

The two men first clashed when they served in George Washington’s cabinet, where  Jefferson served as Secretary of State and Hamilton Secretary of the Treasury. Their political dispute concerned main areas, the creation of an 80% privately owned (20% government owned) national bank, known as the First Bank of the United States, and the ongoing alliance with France following the French Revolution.

In addition to serving as a depository for import taxes, the First Bank of the United States also had the authority to print bank notes to supplement gold and silver in circulation. Hamilton wanted to create a national bank to help repay the country’s war debts. Jefferson opposed it for two main reasons: first because the US Constitution specifically assigns Congress the power to create money and secondly (which Stoler doesn’t mention) because the vast majority of the bank’s investors were foreign (mainly British). The official ownership breakdown would be 70% foreign investors (see https://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/BofUS.htm), 10% domestic investors and 20% government.

Jefferson supported an interpretation of the Constitution that assigned states (as per the 10th amendment) all powers not specifically mentioned in the Constitution. Hamilton, in contrast, favored a strong federal government operating in close alliance with wealthy commercial interests (via the national bank).

Hamilton and Jefferson also differed on whether to support the French republic following their revolution. Following the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, numerous European countries (Great Britain, the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, Russia, and several other monarchies) declared war on France.

As secretary of state, Jefferson believed the US should support the French republic (because he favored republicanism over monarchy, because the French had supported the US colonists during the War of Independence, and because the US had a treaty with France). Hamilton wanted the US to support Britain because he felt trade with the UK was essential for US economic development.

Jefferson also opposed the Jay Treaty* (1794) with the UK, which was extremely unpopular with the American people. Like Jefferson, they feared closer ties with Britain would undermine US independence. Hamilton claimed it was essential to prevent another war with Britain.

The political dispute between Hamilton and Jefferson would give rise to America’s two-party system, with Hamilton and his supporters forming the Federalist Party (1789) and Jefferson and his supporters the Democratic-Republican Party (1792). President John Adams, who supported the Federalist Party, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. These were four laws directly primarily against the Democratic-Republican Party.

At the time, most immigrants supported Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. As well as allowing the president to imprison or deport aliens considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” the Alien and Sedition Acts (which the Supreme Court later declared unconstitutional) prohibited all speech critical of the federal government. The latter resulted in the prosecution and conviction of many Jeffersonian newspaper owners.

Jefferson and his supporters responded by passing resolutions in the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures declaring the Alien and Sedition Acts unconstitutional. A civil war with northern states was narrowly averted when Jefferson was elected the third president of the US on the Democratic-Republican ticket in 1800.

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*Instead of being negotiated by Jefferson, who was Secretary of State, the Jay Treaty was negotiated by John Jay (a federalist like Hamilton), who was Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Through this treaty, the British agreed to withdraw their remaining army units from Northwest Territory (all the land west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi River and below the Great Lakes). In return, the US agreed to end the confiscation of British loyalist estates and arbitrate the US-Canadian boundary and the settlement of wartime debts owed to British financiers. It also granted Americans limited rights to trade with British colonies in the Caribbean in exchange for some limits on the American export of cotton.

The film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/confusions-about-jefferson-and-hamilton

History of the World: Global Revolution and Australian Genocide

The History of the World Part 6 – Revolution

BBC (2018)

Film Review

Episode 6 focuses mainly on attitudinal changes occurring in the 17th and 18th century that would lead to the overthrow of royal rule in the southern half of North America, France, and Haiti.

The episode links the rise of revolutionary ideas rather simplistically to Galileo’s challenge (attributed to his invention of the telescope in the early 17th century) to official Catholic dogma placing the Earth (rather than the sun) at the center of the solar system. s revolve around the earth. They neglect to mention a Catholic cleric named Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to propose a heliocentric view of the universe 100 years earlier.

The film also oversimplifies the root causes of the US War of Independence. While they accurately depict efforts by Samuel Adams and other wealthy merchants and landowners use of the hated Stamp Tax to stir up the Boston mob, historical evidence suggests their key motivation in declaring independence was George III’s ban on settler expansion into Native American territory west of the Appalachians. As Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz reveals in The Indigenous History of the United States, the main purpose of the Stamp Tax was to finance British troops to evict settlers who were illegally squatting on Native land.

By 1789, Louis XVI had bankrupted the French royal treasury by financing the American rebels. Punitive new taxes on the middle class (the nobility, typically, refused to pay tax) would trigger a mass insurrection that removed the king from power. Yet only seven years after the revolutionaries declared France a republic, the same middle class would allow Napoleon to declare himself emperor of France.

In 1791, inspired by the French Revolution, the slaves of Haiti would revolt, overthrowing their white plantations owners and declaring their independence from France.

One of the longest segments of this episode concerns the British settlement of Australia, following its “discovery” by Captain James Cook. Beginning in 1787, British judges would sentence petty criminals (many of them children) to hard labor in Australia. Thanks to the European “Enlightenment,” it was no longer politically acceptable to hang British poor who stole food to survive.

By 1900, 80% of Australia’s aboriginal population would be wiped out , thanks to colonial policies that allowed British settlers to steal their lands by hunting and massacring them.

The film ends with a bizarre segment extolling Dr Edward Jenner for his role in promoting the use of smallpox vaccine. Historic evidence reveals that inoculation for smallpox first originated in China in 1000 AD and was practiced in Turkey and Africa long before making its way to Europe.

 

 

The Inherent Right to Rebel

The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf

J A Scott

MW Books (1988)

Book Review

Babeuf’s speech available free on line at: Defense Speech

Babeuf was a whistleblower under Louis XVI, who in 1782 exposed corruption in the tax system imposed by the French aristocracy. He spent the years immediately preceding the French revolution (1789) either in hiding or in jail. On learning the Bastille had fallen, he joined the revolutionary struggle. In addition to launching a newspaper, he circulated numerous pamphlets and petitions calling for the abolition of private property and an end to the private expropriation of the commons and the division of society into exploited and exploiting classes.

In September 1792, he was elected to the revolutionary government, only to be arrested in 1795 by the counter-revolutionary forces that overthrew Robespierre. He was charged and found guilty of advocating for the re-establishment of the Constitution of 1793.

The book is the verbatim defense Babeuf presented to the court that sentenced him to death. He cites the writings of Plato, Sir Thomas Moore, Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau, Diderot and other Enlightenment thinkers to argue that human beings have a natural right to rebel against political and economic injustice and that violence, poverty and war all have their roots in the concept of private property.

He further argues that the natural function of society and social institutions is to protect the weak against the tyranny of the strong (whereas in reality they do the opposite). He contends that the 1789 revolution wasn’t complete because it allowed the wealth to continue to control all social power and government. He also (correctly) claimed that the election adopting the 1795 constitution was rigged and thus failed to represent the true will of the people.

For me the significance of Babeuf’s courtroom oration (which predated Marx by more than 60 years) was the surprising realization that Marx wasn’t the first to argue against the argue against the damage wealth inequality wreaks on society. It’s easy to forget that Karl Marx was but one of a long line of thinkers (which includes Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith) who advocated against class exploitation.