Hamilton v. Jefferson: The Rivalry That Shaped America

acclaimed and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi, I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn you understand and appreciate that. There's really only one way that I can possibly begin this lecture. This is the story of two founding brothers, not really brothers. They had different fathers and mothers. Filled with hate. They called each other names. George Washington thought they were both insane. Hamilton's was the best,

that Jefferson was gentry. If t J had his way, he would have borrowed Hamilton's entry. But immigrant Alex had something to prove. He wanted to move America in a particular groove. Jefferson had his doubts. The two of them fought. Here comes the story of the warfare they wrought. My name is new Major. I'm a distinguished professor of American Studies in history at Rucker's University. It's great. I tried it out on my wife. She said, I don't remember

that from the play. The pilo was Hamilton's versus Jefferson, the rivalry that shaped America. I love the way your lecture begins with this wonderful reference to the musical Hamilton's. Why is that important in our current context as a history orion. I welcome anything that gets people interested in American history and what has been fabulous about Hamilton's Besides how great the play is and how creative and how inventive is it suddenly has people asking questions, who were

these guys? What do they believe in? What's the real story? And it's important to note that it's a play, it's

not a documentary. I don't think today you can give a lecture on Hamilton's and Jefferson without acknowledging the significance of the play and the interest in Hamilton's and so I use that in a way at the beginning of the lecture to sort of draw the audience in, but also to invite them to understand that what I'm about to explain is in some ways part of, but different from the experience of seeing the player listening to the soundtrack.

The rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton's was about two very different visions of government exactly. They fundamentally disagreed over the role of government, the power of the federal government, the extent to which government should be centralized or should be left to the states and to the individuals, And a lot of the policy issues over which they fought really came down to differing opinions about the role of government. Well,

let's take Hamilton's first. He wanted a strong federal government and also powers for the federal government that we're not enumerated in the Constitution. Well, let's start first with the constitution, because he's one of the pivotal figures for the creation

of the Constitution in the summer of seventeen seven. So Hamilton's is among the first to recognize that the Articles of Confederation were not working Articles of Confederation that was the document agreed to win the Federation of the first system of government under which the United States operated, indeed even during the Revolutionary War, and carried over beyond the

Revolutionary War into the early seventeen eighties. But in post Revolutionary America, with inflation, with needs to raise money, with various other questions that were coming up, they realized that this form of government was so loose, so weak. It was a confederation, it was a general agreement among the thirteen states, but they couldn't get anything done this financial economic crisis that afflicts of the states in the immediate

years after the revolution seventy two seventeen eighty four. Hamilton's is among a group of people who begin to realize that perhaps something needs to be done. Is Jefferson the big ideas guy and Hamilton's more the pragmatist. I think that's a nice distinction how I think of it. As I think of Jefferson as an idealist, Hamilton's is a realist. You have to understand in Jefferson we have the consummate Enlightenment figure. Many of you have probably heard the story,

but it's always worth retelling. In nineteen sixty two, John F. Kennedy had all of the Nobel prize winners in the Western world to the White House for dinner. And he stands up and he says, there is more genius and talent assembled in this room tonight, except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. That was Jefferson. The man was remarkable. He was a polly math. He was a scientist. He was a naturalist, a philosopher, an inventor. You cannot come up

with a field that he didn't pursue. He learned Latin, he learned Greek, he learned French. He had trouble with German. By the way, it's the only language that in trouble with music. He loved music. He played the violin, apparently terribly. John Adam said he couldn't stand listening. Jeffers said, play the violin. He is the embodiment of the Enlightenment. He is the sort of philosophy. He spends his whole life

redesigning Monticello. There's not a single piece of the of the universe that didn't interest this guy, and that he didn't write about. Hamilton's not so much. Hamilton's is much more the practical politician. Uh, he understands that not so much ideas, but interests motivate people, and that if we can harness those interests, perhaps then we can create a sort of productive society. What was Jefferson most worried about over Hamilton's view of government and needing these additional powers.

Like anything, there's a spectrum, Jefferson Madison, the party that will become the Democratic Republicans are worried about centralized authority of any kind. They worry about their liberties being taken away. For them, localism is what should govern. As long as you can keep government close, as long as you could keep an eye on it, as long as there's tendencies towards tyranny, we're okay. The problem with Hamilton's is he

not only favored a strong central government. On the spectrum of people who favored a strong central government, he tended toward the more extreme side, and over time some people saw him as becoming a little bit crazed with power, wanting to be more and more authoritarian, thinking that perhaps the United States needed a king like structure, perhaps believing in hereditary government. Even the federalists on his side, including John Adams. John Adams and Hamilton's also dislike each other.

They disagree fundamentally over this question of power. So we have Jefferson in part to thank for the Bill of Rights. In this debate over the Constitution. One of the reasons why we get a Bill of Rights is because Jefferson and Madison basically say, Okay, fine, if we're going to give the government more power, what are we going to do to assure the fact that the government will not rob us of our rights at root? That's what the debate is about. You talk about how the founding fathers

were actually suspicious of democracy. That's right. That's right in the same way that too much power in the hands of a single individual becomes tyrannical, too much power in the hands of the people becomes anarchy. I think Hamilton's is very early on someone who understands the importance of the nation. The concept of the nation is going to take a long time to development, but Hamilton's he had a vision of a nation. Jefferson, it's the individual right,

it's individualism. Uh, it's it's freedom, it's it's the word democracy is still an epithet in the eighteenth century. This comes as a news to a lot of people. None of them like the word democracy. And the problem with democracies that put too much power in the hands of the people who ultimately can't be trusted. Listen to this. I walk around with random federalist papers, and I'm not making any comment whatsoever about current events. I'm disclaiming right

now that this has anything to do with that. I just want you to understand the anxiety that the founding fathers had about the people. He said, we know from experience that the people sometimes are and it is a wonder that they so seldom are as they do, beset as they continually are, by the wilds of parasites and sycophants, by the stands of the ambitious, the avaricious, and the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to

possess rather than to deserve it. That's Hamilton's Federalist number seventy one. But so that's the other side of it, right, you know, at the end of his life, Hamilton's is gonna say democracy is our real disease, all right, I mean,

that's fine, But for Jefferson. Jefferson's famous saying is that government is best which governs least Now we've talked about Hamilton's being ahead of his time in terms of understanding the important role of finance and economics, but it sounds like Jefferson was also ahead of his time in appreciating the importance of the role of the individual and the wisdom of the collected populace, the people. I make this argument that I think is right, that that Jefferson is

sort of optimistic, but he's backward looking. He wants to preserve things the way they are in a certain fundamental sense. Hamilton's the Realist, is much more pessimistic, but he's forward looking. He really sees the direction in which American society is going, and he helps to lead it. There the pessimism of Hamilton's this this this sense that people are motivated by self interest. They're not going to deny their self interests

for the good of the whole. And so therefore, once we recognize that we can harness that we can harness the power of people's self interests. Now, this is all classical liberalism, and Hamilton's not alone and thinking of this. Adam Smith at this time publishes The Wealth of Nations. This is all lazy, fair economics. Let people basically do their thing and in the end it will down to

the benefit of the society and the economy. Jefferson doesn't want to unleash necessarily that kind of individual self interest. He still believes in this older, what small our republican sense, that people have to be moral, they have to be virtuous, they have to be temperate and industrious, they have to deny their self interest for the good of the community, and only if the people move forward together there as a whole in society prosper. There's a fundamental tension there

between the two of them on that question. Yeah, Um, it is a rivalry that's personal, isn't it deeply personal? And that's the thing that a lot of people don't fully understand or appreciate, is that we venerate the founding fathers. But they were deeply opposed on a number of issues, and those opposition became not only political, but at times violent. How do we know that the profound differences were not just over matters of theory government. It's a great question.

And the reason why we know is we're fortunate enough that the two of them could not help but write lengthy letters to anyone who would listen. In which they complained bitterly and denounced one another. And and they wrote some of those letters to their boss. They wrote to George Washington. People may not they served in the cab of it together, right, Hamilton's secretary of the Treasury. Jefferson is Secretary of State. So imagine these meetings with the

President and Washington. While he's sort of a federalist, he stands above and beyond politics. So here's Jefferson's letter to George Washington. He said, letter George ord top Serf, September nine, everything right for us, Gary fit us. He's just warming up. This entire letter is complaining about Alexander Hamilton's look at us. There are no paragraphs. He is just blistering blue europe historian, but also in this context a performer. Poor George Washington.

I mean, all the guy wants to do is like retire and go back, you know, to mal Vernon. Well, very few people expect a distinguished professor in suit and tie to come out and begin by rapping. But I think entertainment should be part of and is part of of education. I think that's part of why I enjoy

lecturing for one day university. It's an opportunity not only to present information, but to prevent it with passion, with engagement, uh, to present it in a way so that people really come to understand more than just the material that's being delivered. The One Day University crowd they're amazing. Yeah, what do you get from doing these lectures? I love doing it.

First of all, there's a tremendous energy. And while it's wonderful to teach undergraduates, we all know that undergraduates have a lot of other things going on and they're not necessary at the point where they fully appreciate what it is that you might be giving to them. The people who come to One Day University are there to learn. They understand what education means. They have a passion for

deepening their knowledge of various events. And it's delightful to hear people say to me, oh, I wish I had you when I was a junior or Saphram College. And I remind them that they're romanticizing their college years. But it's delightful to hear it because the fact is, at different times in our lives, we're ready for something else to learn, to take in to study, to move us along. And in that sense, we're all lifelong learners. We venerate

both of these men, But what about their dark sides? Sure? Absolutely, I mean we can't talk about Jefferson of course without talking about Jefferson and slavery. Uh. It's the great enigma of the great paradox. Uh. It troubles generation after generation, and then well it should you know, how can the man who wrote the line all men have created equal

not emancipate his own slaves? Uh? He understood that slavery was wrong intellectually, and this goes back to the whole idea of Jefferson as ideologue, but he can't ever really get himself to the point of freeing him slaves, though he lives long enough to predict that slavery's the institution that's going through in some fundamental way under America. And Hamilton's, for his side, is governed by personal passions. He has an extra mental affair that he ends up talking about

publicly in all kinds of ways. His opponents cannot believe. They're good luck that Hamilton would actually acknowledge this in the seventeen nineties, and his ambition is so great that some people see him as tending towards becoming the next Napoleon. So there are these darker sides, deeper passions behind both men. I'm not sure you could have the one necessarily without the other, but it's important to see them, I think,

in their whole, in their totality. Is Hamilton's overrated today because he's become something of a historical rock star as a result of the extraordinary success of this music. Hamilton's musical is not overrated. Hamilton's the man is He's He's having his moment, and I think that that's great. I think every so often we recover really important figures from

the past and reassess them. It's not surprising that in this moment of Wall Street and capital and development and progress, that suddenly, instead of Jefferson and Adams in Washington, Hamilton's has been recovered. The other really important point that the play makes that really helps us to understand what is it about historical memories? Why do we venerate and remember some figures and not others. Of course, part of the answer for Hamilton's is very easy. He's killed by Aaron

Burr very early on. One of the things that happens about history is the survivors get to write it, and Adams and Jefferson live until eight They've got twenty two years held the story of the revolution, and they begin this amazing correspondence with one another. Again, I know I've given you a few things to read tonight. Another thing to look at is the Adams Jefferson correspondence in retirement.

Because these two hated each other, not the way, not the way Hamilton's and Jefferson hated each other, I mean, but they had violent political disagreements. Jefferson said of Adams that his presidency was a reign of witches. So uh, there was some nastiness there. But they heal those wounds, and between eighteen thirteen and eighteen twenty six they have this amazing correspondence in which they reflect upon all subjects, including Hamilton's, and it gives them an opportunity to write

Hamilton's out of the story, and they do. And I think that's part of what happened. It's part of why the play has been so successful. It's kind of like suddenly everybody woke up and said, we'll wait a minute, there's this other Titanic figure there. What did he do? And so um, And that's great because he is a Titanic figure in in all kinds of important ways, but like all of them, a complicated figure filled with paradox is filled with tensions, a figure who changes over time.

So I don't think Hamilton's is overrated. I do think because of the play, there's a certain romanticization, a certain idealization that goes on. And that's what's so nice about setting him intension with Jefferson, because you get to see them not as single individuals to venerate, but as as real life and humans who are battling one another. How does this rivalry influence today's politics. I think we have a tendency to idealize or romanticize the politics of the

Founding Fathers, and I would caution against that. Politics is all ways filled with conflict, it's filled with difference, it's filled with contest. There's a line that one can trace. Now at sometimes is it more intense, more rancorous than at other times? Sure? Absolutely, But we have to be careful not to believe that the Founding Fathers were just brilliant men engaged in the politics of trying to create

this new nation. They were, but they were human, They had passions, they had personal opinions, power was always at stake, and they weren't afraid to use it against one another. I'm Richard Davies. Thanks for listening. Sign up on our website one day you dot com to become a member and access over six hundred full length video lectures from the world's finance professors.