A History of the American People

and the Admiralty, with professional staffs, simply to get things done. This was the beginning of
executive government. Courts had to be created to hold Admiralty appeals from state courts. This
was the beginning of the federal judiciary. In September 1779, the doctrine of US citizenship
began to emerge. There was the first suggestion, as war supplies ran out, that Congress had the
power to coerce mean or uncooperative states-the doctrine which ultimately was to enable
President Lincoln lawfully to coerce the Confederacy.
The biggest formative force was financial need. The improvised currency broke down under
the pressures of war. Inflation started to accelerate. These were the evils which, in Latin America
during the next generation, were to poison the youth and malform the maturity of the Spanish-
speaking republics. The men of New York, already emerging as a center of sound,' that is expert, finance, were determined not to allow this to happen. Gouverneur Morris, Philip Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton, and James Duane got together to propose what would later be termed afederalist solution,' that is a strong government pledged to an honest currency. They
believed in government deliberately creating the framework in which the economy could develop
and expand rapidly by sponsoring an advanced banking system, managing credit, and promoting
fiscal efficiency. They got their ideas from Britain and Adam Smith, and the man who advanced
them most confidently, Alexander Hamilton, first gave them expression in his 'Continentalist
Letters,' published in 1781-2.
That was the beginning of the debate on the Constitution. So who was this Hamilton, who
began it? He was born in 1755 in the small West Indian island of Nevis, and it is vital to
remember that he was not an American, except by adoption, and could never have become
president, though he was in some respects better fitted for the job than any other of the Founding
Fathers. In a sense he was the archetypal self-made man of American mythology-born out of
wedlock, deserted by a no-good father, left an orphan at thirteen by the death of his mother, he
was helped by friends and relatives to find his way to New York where, at seventeen, he entered
King's College (later Columbia University). There he thrived and absorbed a mass of political,
historical, constitutional, and forensic knowledge which made him one of the sharpest lawyers of
his generation. He was soon in the thick of the Revolutionary agitation as a speaker and churner-
out of pamphlets, having a gift for rapid writing for print unequaled by any of the time, even
Paine and Franklin. He joined the army, found himself in the artillery, where he quickly mastered
the art of gunnery, became a lieutenant, saw action repeatedly, attracted the attention of the
Commander-in-Chief, and so served on Washington's staff, as his best and closest ADC for five
years. Washington was his hero, his aegis,' as he put it. Washington, in turn, found him the best executive officer in the army, a man who could be trusted to carry out the most difficult staff- duty with efficiency and speed, who was full of ideas, brave to a fault, and absolutely loyal. Hamilton left Washington's staff to command a battery at Yorktown (it was the guns which made Cornwallis' surrender unavoidable), and he undoubtedly saw more military action than any other of the great Constitution-makers. But he never quite strikes one as a typical American, or even an extraordinary one. He might perhaps have been more at home in the House of Commons and in Pitt's Cabinet of the 1780s. He had no fear of kingship as such: if it worked, use it. He was an empiric, a pragmatist on the English model, and his instinct was always to look at how England did things and see if America would be well advised to follow suit, ceteris paribus. He was a disciple not so much of Locke as of Hobbes, a man who believed that society was inherently chaotic and in need of a strong Leviathan-figure (whether a man or an institution) to keep them all in awe.’ In 1780 he married Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of a major-general and
large-scale Hudson Valley landlord. Once demobilized, he started a highly successful law