“While I am a Jeffersonian in my genuine faith in democracy and popular government,” President Theodore Roosevelt once said, “I am a Hamiltonian in my governmental views, especially with reference to the need of the exercise of broad powers by the National Government.”
By invoking both the author of the Declaration of Independence and the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Roosevelt was giving voice to two contrasting yet often harmonized strains in the American tradition: on one hand, the independent, individual, government-skeptical streak of the Democratic-Republicans embodied by Thomas Jefferson; and, on the other, the centralizing, national, energetic government favored by the Federalists, whose avatar was Alexander Hamilton.
As Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center (no relation), explains in his learned and absorbing longitudinal study of these dueling philosophies, The Pursuit of Liberty, the tension between them has defined the American political tradition for centuries and continues to do so today.
At root, Rosen contends, “Jefferson construed the Constitution strictly to limit federal power” while “Hamilton construed the Constitution liberally to expand” it. In evocative language, Rosen argues that these “competing positions” resemble “golden and silver threads woven throughout the tapestry of American history, sometimes side by side, sometimes crossing each other, and at critical moments, pulling so far apart that they threaten to snap.”
Jefferson imbibed his skepticism of authority early on, regarding “all of English and American history as a Manichaean battle between liberty and power, reflected in the struggle by self-governing freemen to reclaim the ancient liberties that the English had first lost after the Norman Conquest of 1066.” His democratizing platform ultimately came to incorporate four key planks: the separation of powers, the expansion of the right to vote, the enduring authority of the states, and the enshrinement of individual liberties in the Bill of Rights.
By contrast, Rosen reckons, “Hamilton was a conservative who embraced the Tory theory of English history” and recognized the importance of a strong, centralized executive. “We must have a Government with more Power,” he wrote in 1780. We must have a Tax in kind. We must have a Bank on the true Principles of a Bank.” Critically, Hamilton argued for “government capable of resisting the popular current.”
Their arguments reverberated down through the Federalist Papers, to the debate over the national bank, and down to their respective approaches to the insurrections that gripped the early republic, which Hamilton vigorously opposed and Jefferson largely indulged. They also clashed over the 1798 Sedition Act, with the Federalists “express[ing] confidence in the government to strengthen its legitimacy” and the Republicans insisting upon their “responsibility to keep watch over the government, to protect liberty.”
The debate persisted in legal philosophy, too. Channeling contemporary originalists, the newly inaugurated President Jefferson declared in 1801 that “the constitution, on which our Union rests, shall be administered by me according to the safe and honest meaning contemplated by the plain understanding of the people of the United states [sic] at the time of it’s [sic] adoption.” Meanwhile, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, appointed by President John Adams, a staunch Federalist, relied upon “a fair construction of the whole instrument,” including its “great outlines” and “important objects,” or what would later be called “living constitutionalism.”
Even after Hamilton and Jefferson had departed the scene, their ideological instruments continued to resonate. President Andrew Jackson resisted efforts by his own Vice President John Calhoun to grant states the right to nullify federal statutes, insisting that “Our Union: it must be preserved,” while Calhoun called national unity “next to our liberty, the most dear.” Jackson, however, did veto legislation establishing a second national bank. The first populist president, he also claimed to be “the direct representative of the American people.”
Following the Civil War, Rosen argues, the Supreme Court was riven by a similar fight, with the fiercely anti-Reconstruction Justice Joseph Bradley striking down the 1875 Civil Rights Act on states’ rights grounds and the Hamiltonian Justice John Marshall Harlan adopting his own father’s tendency to “regard[] ‘Jeffersonianism’ (speaking generally) as an evil that needed to be watched and overcome.” (This same divide would later split the high court during FDR’s presidency, as well as the Warren, Rehnquist, and Roberts Courts.)
In the 1912 election, Woodrow Wilson took up Hamilton’s mantle, calling him “one of the greatest figures in our history” while denigrating Jefferson as “rather a dim figure.” His Republican successors — Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover — would also embrace Hamiltonianism, right up until the Great Depression. When Roosevelt took office, though, denouncing the enormous corporations he blamed for the financial calamity, he affected Jeffersonian airs. In addition to inaugurating numerous populist New Deal agencies, Roosevelt placed Jefferson’s face and Monticello on opposite sides of the nickel and proudly laid the cornerstone for the Jefferson Memorial.
Several decades later, Ronald Reagan claimed Jefferson’s legacy, urging Democrats in a 1965 address titled “The Myth of the Great Society” to “ask yourself if the leadership of your party still follows the leadership of Jefferson and Cleveland.” By slashing government, devolving power to the states, and reviving the originalist tradition, Reagan echoed the libertarian and strict constructionist aspects of our third president. “The federal government did not create the states,” Reagan intoned during his first inaugural. “The states created the federal government.”
The pendulum swung back toward Hamilton a few decades after Reagan, when Barack Obama restored the power and the glory of the federal government in general and the executive branch in particular. The Affordable Care Act marked the largest new federal entitlement program of several generations. And, not to put too fine a point on it, days after Obamacare’s passage in the House, a young playwright named Lin-Manuel Miranda was summoned to the White House to perform an early version of the musical Hamilton.
At times, Rosen overstates his case. “The references to Hamilton and Jefferson,” he asserts, “are so pervasive that their debate turns out to explain nearly everything — not only American political history but also our constitutional, intellectual, economic, and social history.” But this claim simply proves too much. Any monocausal explanation for such a wide variety of phenomena is unlikely to withstand scrutiny. For instance, the fact that numerous political parties have simply swapped their respective Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian viewpoints depending on whether they held power, including the original Republicans and Federalists themselves, indicates these approaches may at times represent looser, rougher, more contingent orientations than rigorous ideological commitments.
In addition, many American leaders have combined aspects of both philosophies. “By defining America … as a nation founded by ‘one people’ rather than by sovereign states,” Rosen contends, “Lincoln sided with Hamilton and nationalism; by making clear that the goal of the new nation was government ‘of, by, and for the people,’ he sided with Jefferson and democracy.” Teddy Roosevelt’s predilection for both strains began this essay. And Rosen shows how modern presidents, including Nixon, Ford, Clinton, and Bush drank from the fountains of both Hamilton and Jefferson.
In the end, then, perhaps this is the ultimate truth that Rosen illuminates: American history, politics, jurisprudence, and culture depend on both centralization and independence, the collective and the individual, the federal government and the states. American exceptionalism entails managing, if never quite resolving, the tension between these poles. “The success of the American experiment,” Rosen concludes hopefully, “doesn’t require agreement between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians about how to balance liberty and power; it requires a good faith commitment to participate in the inevitable tug-of-war between them.”
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI.
