America 757
the cities in America were still small compared with those of Europe in any case;
and the broad features of the transposition would appear to be valid.^13
This reversal of roles can best be explained by the differences between the
United States and Europe, differences which Louis Hartz has summed up as the
lack of the “feudal factor” in America.^14 It was due also to a certain failure on the
part of Americans, because of these very differences, to understand the Revolution
beyond the Atlantic. In Europe the revolutionary movement, though it carried
aristocratic liberalism and Babouvist communism at its fringes, was most espe-
cially a middle- class or “bourgeois” affair, aimed at the reconstruction of an old
order, and at the overthrow of aristocracies, nobilities, patriciates, and other privi-
leged classes. It is hard to see how Jefferson, who so much disliked cities with their
moneyed men and their mobs, could have been so sympathetic to the French Rev-
olution had he seen it in an altogether realistic light. The same is true of American
democrats generally. But Hamilton and the Federalists were if anything even more
mistaken. They imagined that men like themselves, in Europe, were as hostile to
the Revolution as they were. Or rather, in their own self- definition, they failed to
identify with the European urban middle classes, which they really resembled, and
preferred to associate themselves with the British and European aristocracies,
which they hardly resembled at all. Hamilton was a self- made man, a parvenu;
even George Cabot, who became a very “high” Federalist, and whose family later
became prominent, was the author of his own fortune, largely made in privateering
during the War of Independence. These men could not see, and probably did not
even know, that many men of business in Europe—the Watts and Boultons,
Walker and Wilkinson, Gogel, Sieveking and the Bohemian banker, J. F. Opiz, to
name only those mentioned in preceding pages—were willing enough to sympa-
thize with the ideas of the French Revolution in principle.
Hamilton began in 1790 to borrow money in Europe, to pay off the debt to
France incurred during the American Revolution. For this purpose it was awkward
to obtain funds in England, and he turned to Holland. The principal Dutch banker
in these transactions was Nicolaas van Staphorst, who with his associates provided
the United States with 23,500,000 guilders between 1787 and 1794. Staphorst, an
old Patriot of the 1780’s, accepted the Dutch revolution of 1795 and was active in
the early months of the Batavian Republic. He worked on American affairs
through a leading Antwerp banker, Joseph de Broeta. Broeta was very pro- French;
he welcomed the opening of the Scheldt river, collaborated with Dumouriez, and,
at some personal risk during the Austrian restoration of 1793, concealed 267,000
livres due to the French, which he paid over to them on their return to Belgium in
- Yet Alexander Hamilton preferred to believe that the Revolution in Europe
was the outbreak of an unruly and ignorant populace.^15
13 For comparisons of Europe and America, both explicit and allusive, see above, pp. 377−79,
387−88, 395−96, 453, 456, 461, 472, 486, 510, 525, 537−39, 632−35, 641, and below, 765−66, 773,
793−95.
14 L. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since
the Revolution (New York, 1955).
15 On Staphorst see P. van Winter’s account in Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, VIII,