A History of the American People

went back to the times when specie or currency of any kind had been hard to get hold of, and the
British government had frustrated local attempts to create credit. Now, almost everything that
Hamilton did further inflamed them. They were not impressed by Hamilton's triumphant claim
that government issues were not floating over par-whom did that benefit, except the money-men?
Nor did they think much of his promise that federal effort would be put into industrializing the
South as well as the North-Eli Whitney's 1792 invention of the cotton gin, which immediately
revolutionized cotton-planting, made such changes, in their view, unnecessary and undesirable.
So two parties began to form in the new state-North versus South, farmers versus manufacturers,
Virginia versus Massachusetts, states' rights men versus federalist centralizers, old versus new.
Jefferson protested that he had no wish to found a party: If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.' But that is what, in the I790s, he did. It may be asked: was Jefferson the Leader of the Opposition then? No: he was the Secretary of State in Washington's administration. Strictly speaking, he was Hamilton's superior in the government pecking-order. In fact, Hamilton had more power. At this stage in the evolution of government, the Treasury ran everything not specifically covered by other departments. It ran the Post Office, for instance. It employed 325 people, more than half the federal civil service. Hamilton was always thinking of additional reasons for bureaucratic empire-building. Jefferson was jealous of him. Just as, in England, Pitt was a high-powered financial statesman, cold, hard, unemotional, and interested chiefly in efficiency, beloved of the City of London and the Stock Exchange, and Charles James Fox was a libertarian romantic, who did not care a damn for the price of Consols or the credit of the pound sterling, but who watered the Tree of Liberty with his copious tears, so Hamilton, America's Pitt, and Jefferson, America's Fox, were at opposite poles of the political temperament. It was characteristic of Hamilton that he deplored the revolutionary events in Paris, and entirely typical of Jefferson that he applauded them. The difference between Hamilton and Jefferson was as much temperamental as intellectual. Jefferson came from a secure background of landowning privilege, going back generations. Hamilton's background was so insecure and, to him, mysterious that we know more about it than he did. He thought he was born in 1757; in fact it was 1755. What happened was this. His mother, Rachel Faucette or Faucitt or Fawcette or Fawcet or Foztet-it was spelt in a score of different ways, just as Ralegh, the founder of Virginia, was spelt in ninety-six different ways-married at sixteen an old fellow, John Leweine, Levine, Lavien, Lawein etc., said to bea smallish Jew.' At the age of twenty-one she left her husband and set up
house with an itinerant Scotsman called James Hamilton, a drifter and failure, who promptly
drifted away. In 1759 Levine sued for divorce, alleging several illegitimate children.' Divorce was granted but, under Danish law, which was then the common law of Nevis and the Leeward Islands, Rachel did not have the right to remarry. So Hamilton was never legitimized. As we have seen, his career as a self-made man was spectacular, but the illegitimacy ate into his soul. He hated poverty, which he equated with the forces of darkness, and therefore he avoided or tried to ignore or despised the poor, who reminded him of it. Small, red-haired, blue-eyed, Hamilton had an intensity about him which made him both admired and genuinely feared. He gave his opinions with a frankness which, in America, was already becoming a political liability.Every man ought to be supposed a knave,' he wrote, `and
to have no other end, in all his actions, but private interest. By this interest we must govern him
and, by means of it, make him cooperate to public good, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice
and ambition.' This was the gutter-philosophy of the West Indies, where the racial mix was a
minestrone of buccaneering and sly skulduggery, and where it was war of every man against