As the effective party leaders in an age that was even less genteel than our own, Hamilton and Jefferson heartily loathed each other. Their views about the Constitution and the future of America were largely incompatible, and remain fodder for political argument today.
As I will discuss in a future post, the differences between the two largely mirror the differences between Whigs and Country Tories in early 18th Century England. The question for the day is, where did they agree? Here is my list:
1. Government is a purely human contrivance, and can be ordered in accordance with the needs of the nation. Divine right kingship was by no means dead as a political theory in the late 18th Century. Both Hamilton and Jefferson would have rejected it and maintained that Americans could set up any kind of government they thought appropriate.
2. The establishment of a state religion is inappropriate. Neither man was an orthodox Christian. Jefferson’s beliefs were fluid, but apparently leaned towards Deism; when Hamilton was asked why God was not referenced in the Constitution, he put his tongue in his cheek and said “We forgot.”
3. America is destined to play a great role in the world. They would not have agreed on what that role was to be.
4. Making war on a European power would be a mistake. Hamilton favored the British, and Jefferson the French, but neither was stupid enough to think that war on either would be a good idea, given the military weakness of the new country.
5. America should not have a rigid class system. Hamilton admired Great Britain and might have had some sympathy for the notion of a Whiggish hereditary aristocracy, but his background would have made it impossible for him to support any kind of rigid system.
6. For the foreseeable future, most regulation will take place at the state and local levels. Hamilton, of course, supported a stronger federal government than Jefferson, but it would have been absurd, given the size of the new country and the state of its communications and transportation networks, to think that the federal government could be the predominant regulatory power in the 1790’s.