going to break -- b-r-a-k-e, before a break, b-r-e-a-k. yes, thank you. [ applause ] thank you. coming up on american history tv, programs on alexander hamilton, who served as the nation's first treasury secretary. we'll first take a look at hamilton's economic plan. later, we'll review some letters he wrote. and afterwards, a discussion on hamilton's military career and his relationship with president george washington. you're watching american history tv on c-span3. >> selected by president george washington in 1789, alexander hamilton served as the first secretary of the treasury until january of 1795. up next on american history tv, historian and author william

hogeland discusses alexander hamilton's financial ideas. this is about 50 minutes. >> now, while the museum, the gallery of the museum is closed because of a flood that we sustained, our robust programming continues, as evidenced by today. and our author who is speaking is william hogeland. he's written multiple books on early u.s. history, including "autumn of the black snake," "declaration," "the whiskey rebellion," and "founding finance." he's also the author of a recent publication -- or not author, a contributor, i should say -- to a recent publication "historians on hamilton." he's also penned many essays and articles that you can read in places like "the atlantic monthly," "the new york times," "boston review," "huffington post," but none more important than our own magazine "financial history." you can find that magazine at

www.moaf.org for museum of american finance. so, it should be no surprise that the topic of william's next book is alexander hamilton. it's my pleasure to introduce him, william hogeland. [ applause ] >> thanks a lot. i know the acoustics in here boom a little bit. can anyone hear me? okay, thank you. that's good to know. i think some of you know that maybe it's a little bit -- i'm a little bit of a fish out of water here. i would like to point out that the museum of american finance has had me speak -- this is the third time. in fact, my first ever talk on alexander hamilton and other related issues was sponsored by the museum. for my very first book, and that was back in 2006. so, it's -- i think some of you already know that my -- you

know, it's celebrate hamilton time right now, and celebrate is not exactly what i do, generally speaking. those of you who know my work know that i think critically and i write critically. i write and think critically about everything because that's just how i think. people sometimes think because i'm not celebrating that i'm filled with hatred for these people that i write about. you don't spend your life in the company of these people because you hate them. but nonetheless, for those of you who don't know my stuff, you'll note the irony of some of my approaches. here we are in the federal building. and here we are on wall street. we could say we're conveniently located right now at the corner of money and government. and what i want to talk about is how hamilton began to form those connections between money and the united states government.

so, i don't talk so much about some of the things that have sparked such great interest lately, for the obvious reason of the phenomenal cultural event that is the musical. i don't talk about dueling. i don't talk about his relationships with his family members. i don't talk about his infidelity. i feel like a lot of people dueled. i think you know that. some of you have looked into this. i think you've read about it, in joanne freeman's book "affairs of honor," where you can find out a lot about the dueling culture. and of course, a lot of people have family relationships and upbringings, and all of the things that people have i'm. i'm interested in what made hamilton the dynamic force that he was that was not like what everyone else did, if you know what i mean. so, i'm looking very specifically at what i guess i would call -- and i'm not alone in calling it this -- the great

sort of creative phenomenon that he was that occurred at a certain time. i'm going to date it 1782 to 1795. you could date it a little different different differently, i'm just going to pick that period and say, something happened there that, of course, with all of the things that went into his life before he arrived in the continental congress, he brought all that baggage and all that inspiration and everything that made him, but something happened there that was different from what everyone else was doing, things that he saw that others -- he was not alone in this, but things that he saw that others did not necessarily see. dreams that he did, visions that he had that others did not necessarily have, and some were very much opposed to. he saw also the nuts and bolts on a level that literally i think no one else saw it, how to bring those dreams about. and then there are the lengths that he went to in action, sometimes quite unsettling

lengths, i think, to bring those things about. so, the decisive effects that he had on the founding, a, and b, on how we think about money and government today are what really fascinate me about hamilton. and so, for me, it's almost like he gets born in 1782. the fphenomenon that i'm talkin about, the creative force that i'm talking about, starts about there. and i'm looking at the arc of an action, not just thinking, not just ideas, but an action that has some very compelling drama to it, some of which is, as we say today frequently, highly problematic, but nonetheless, without which we might not be here as the nation that we are. in a sense, hamilton created the nation, in an economic sense. but the thing is, that story, the details of that story get left out. you wouldn't think they get left

out since it's the reason he's famous, of course, as secretary of the treasury, first ever secretary of the treasury. you wouldn't think they get left out because there have been a lot of biographies of hamilton. and yet, you know, they do get left out because people -- i mean, not here, museum of american finance, necessarily, but people don't like to hear necessarily the word, the economic nation or the word finance. i am writing a book on this subject, and my agent said to me when i was sort of pitching it to him, i'd say, you know, the financial -- he'd go, "don't say finance," you know. we're trying to pitch a book here that people might want to read. don't say finance. and i'm like, right, i got you. so -- and then every so often, a little buzzer goes off when i happen to say the word, like no, no, it's not finance. because it's really -- you know, to hamilton -- of course, he would use the word. but no, our connotations with

that are not his. you know, to hamilton, this is money, power, wealth, greatness, size, scope, expansion, things that are actually highly active and dramatic, greatness. i guess i just used that word. i mean, like dominance, making the nation into america, the empi empire. and that's a word he would use, and so would many of his contemporaries in this era. making it into the great thing that he envisioned very early that it could be. so, when you say economic nation, well, to him, you know, that's the nation. that's the nation in a lot of ways. and in a lot of ways, i think he was right about that. so, what gets left out when people say, oh, then he did all these things, but it kind of gets buried in like all of the other things about his life. i've called it for the purposes of this talk, anyway, something we could describe as the hamilton scheme, the hamilton scheme. i think i have water here

somewhere. yes, i do. okay, the hamilton scheme. scheme is obviously a loaded term. it can mean a plan, any sort of kind of plot of something, a schema. just, it could be kind of value-neutral. but of course, we also use it to mean a scheme. he's scheming in the back room, aha, my nefarious plans, you know? that kind of thing. well, it, when we talk about hamilton, we have to talk about the fact that he did have a major plan. it goes beyond even plan. an incredible sort of vision and also a nuts-and-bolts engineering kind of thing going on to build a country that could do the dynamic, explosive things he wanted to see it do. but of course, there were also other people who saw it as a scheme of corruption, a scheme designed to destroy democracy. and so, the various uses of the word scheme i throw in here just because i think in this very room, no doubt, and if you go

around talking to other people outside this room about hamilton, you will get a wide variety of views on this, whether it was a scheme in a good sense or a scheme in a bad sense. so that's what i want to tell you about today, how the scheme worked. and we can all think about, you probably all have before, what kind of scheme you think it is. i think when i set up the kind of invitation to this talk and the description about what i was going to be doing, i promised a kind of efficient 45-minute trip through every single thing you would need to know about the hamilton scheme. i now realized as i began to approach this talk that that was a slight exaggeration or more like maybe a bold-faced lie, because there's no way in the time that we have here today to go do a deep dive on every one of these topics or even on any one of them. what i'm really going to do, now that i've lured you all in here with my sales pitch, what i'm

really going to do is actually give you a kind of superficial jumping, glancing sense of what the various topics are. and on any one of them, you know, at other times, maybe we could do a deeper dive and look more closely at how it all worked. and then i can actually back up some of the things i'm saying instead of just saying them, which is really what i'm going to do today. so, realize that the sales pitch was a sales pitch and that we're actually going to get a kind of more general view of what i think the hamilton scheme involves. one thing that's funny is that since he became treasury secretary under washington, and of course, put his scheme into effect in the first half of the 1790s, that actually, i'm going to focus today much more on the 1780s, because that's when he developed the scheme and that's when the issues that drove him and the opposition to it also, began to form, and this tension that we still have today in our

society about money and government began to form. so, while there is a lot to say about what he did in the 1790s, to get at what he was really trying to do in the 1790s, you actually have to go back to his first efforts in politics in the 1780s, i think, and see him develop it and figure out what really should be going on, if he could ever get himself into power and into a position to bring it about. so, somewhat surprisingly, maybe, i will be focusing in the time that we have largely on what he did in the 1780s to develop the scheme. so, he comes to the continental congress right after his service in the war, the revolutionary war, the war of independence. and again, here's something i don't really talk much about or think too much about, you know, yorktown. everyone knows about it now. and the redoubt and the defense of the redoubt and all that sort of stuff. you know, to me, that's all pre -- that's like juvenalia or something.

like, now he comes to do what he's really going to do that other people couldn't do and didn't do. he comes to the continental congress, which at that time was meeting again in philadelphia. interesting because the war is going to be over quite soon. and so, with the war almost over, the revolution almost over, victory in a sense on the horizon, well, we might think, oh, and out of this, this great victory comes this fantastic building of nationhood. the country's now going to emerge from independence fully unified, ready to take on the world. what's actually happening as he arrives in the continental congress is that because the war's about to end, the country's about to fall apart. that's because what's holding this country together is these various states, these various entities. they are confederated. they are not a nation. what's holding them together is this war, has been this war. what the unity of the country is really around this war. so what hamilton sees when he

comes to congress is that, actually, it's all about to crash and burn. and there's such incredible potential to do something different, to actually pull it all together and create an amazing, new phenomenon, a growing, expanding, even imperial phenomenon. that's a pretty outlandish thing to envision, actually, for a 20-something-year-old man arriving with his elders and superiors, many of whom were committed to completely different visions from that at that time. but he did begin to see it. he was not alone in that. he had a mentor in that whole vision, robert morris. a name that while it's known, i believe, at the museum of american finance, is not actually widely known by people who see the show or even read many of the bios, because morris is a problematic character for a lot of reasons. he becomes hamilton's, i think, most important mentor in this area that i'm interested in, i should say, because of course, there are other areas of hamilton's life -- the area of

his creative period. but morris is a difficult character sometimes for us to deal with, because while he was the financier of the revolution -- that's how he's known -- and he certainly was that, spending his own vast wealth on financing the revolution out of his own pocket -- the revolution as some people say also financed him. he did not have any problem with mingling private and public funds. he was a shipper and a merchant and probably the richest man in america, casually corrupt, obese, witty, charming, and quite a character, and really the first major banker the country had. and this was someone who saw the brilliance of hamilton, the young hamilton, and to whom hamilton gravitated. they're looking at the issue of how to keep the country together. and what we're really talking about here is how to keep the country together as a political force, but the way they saw it -- and this was the genius --

the way they saw that had to do with keeping the country together as a kind of an economic phenomenon, a financial phenomenon. what they were talking about here is what is known as the revolutionary war debt, which is to say in very simple -- i mean, it's an incredibly complicated topic. and when i've studied it, like smoke comes out of my ears as i try to get a handle on all of the aspects of this debt. but you know, the country needed money to fight the war. the kind -- part of that that morris and hamilton were interested in took the form of bonds issued to a small number of very wealthy people of the robert morris type who were expecting, hoping to get paid 6% interest on their bonds. remember, there was no tax on that at the time, so that's a pretty nice rate of return. and that was what was supposed to finance the war. and this was an interstate kind

of investing class, an interstate lending class. these were the merchants, the people with actually money, gold and silver, or the equivalent in their possession. so, the war debt -- and this is what's fascinating when people talk about debt now and about hamilton -- the war debt is what's pulling the country together as far as the people who envision a future for the country. because you have all the richest people in the country, or many of them, invested in these bonds. so, it's funny to think about national unity being equated with, you know, war and public debt, but that is the way they looked at it, for obvious and cogent reasons. and what people say about hamilton frequently is, oh, you know, he was confronted with all this debt after the revolutionary war as treasury secretary, and he had to wrestle with this and try to, you know, get it paid off because, oh, my god, they'd run up all this money. that is exactly the opposite of what happened in the 1780s. as you actually also know,

probably, hamilton's famous for funding the debt and assuming in that debt the federal obligation all of the state debts, funding and assumption. hamilton funding assumption. everybody knows that. funding a debt and paying off a debt are not the same thing. they're actually in some ways opposites. we know this when we make payments on our credit cards or whatever, that we're not paying our credit cards off while we make the minimum payment. so, this is a funny thing that's happened to hamilton's legacy. and it's not just that most people don't get it or whatever. i'll read you something very quickly from the web, the world wide web, the internet. if you just put in a few search terms around hamilton, debt, et cetera, you can get this -- "paying for the american revolutionary war was the start of the country's debt." true. "some of the founding fathers formed a group and borrowed money from france and the netherlands to pay for the war." well, that is also true, but that's where that particular entry stops on the war debt. we know -- oh, yeah, john adams

went over there and he negotiated, blah, blah, blah. the foreign debt is not the critically important part of the debt. the domestic debt to the rich americans i was just talking about is what drives all the issues we still deal with today. it was substantially larger in numbers and overwhelmingly more important. but the fact that some website gets this wrong should not surprise anybody, right? except that this website is called treasury direct kids. it's supposed to educate kids about debt and fiscal matters. it's the bureau of the fiscal service, which is the department of the u.s. treasury, which is the department hamilton founded. and it's describing his approach to debt in precisely wrong terms. what fascinated him, what got him up in the morning was, to us might sound boring, public debt, was a thrilling opportunity, and it was the domestic debt -- that means the debt to rich americans -- that was the driver of everything i've been trying to talk about. it's really kind of amazing. here's some liberal scholars

writing a piece about something unrelated, but they're trying to, you know, authoritatively fill you in on the background to hamilton and debt. and they say, "the most pressing issue was what to do about the new nation's debt. both the continental congress and individual states had accumulated massive debts during the revolutionary war, close to $80 million, an enormous amount in those days." true. "hamilton, now secretary of the treasury, wanted the new federal government to assume the states' debts." yeah. "and pay them back in full." that's not funding, no. he wanted to keep it going for the obvious reason, that you have all the richest people in the country invested in the country. so, this sort of general sense of he came into office, oh, my god, we've run up so much debt irresponsibly, i've got to the pay it off. i don't know exactly where that comes from, but this is -- if he heard that we were saying things like that, he'd be like, wow, all these years later and they still don't get the brilliance of what i was trying to bring about. and i don't know how he would feel about that, but i find it fascinating that we don't really want to know about his real

relationship to the debt because he didn't try to hide it. it was not scheming like that, ha ha, they'll never know what i'm doing. he put forth in the most brilliant and cogent manner an entire program based on this very idea. so, that's weird. now, the risk to all this visionary stuff that he and morris are working on -- a central bank, federal bonds, getting the state debts into federal hands as well, coalescing this massive economic force through government -- the threat to all this in the 1780s, early 1780s, is guess what, peace. the absence of war. because this -- what is the congress going to do? this is a meeting of sovereign -- supposedly, they think they're sovereign entities. they're not going to make good on these bonds. they might just ignore them or just cancel the debt.

peace is definitely a problem. and to the extent that robert morris' assistant wrote a letter to general washington explicitly asking him if he could keep the war going longer so we could continue the unity of the country a little longer around this debt. the idea frequently with robert morris is when he got, actually was able to get requisitions and get money, pay the bondholders. it wasn't about paying the soldiers and the troops. pay the bondholders. and this might sound somewhat familiar. i mean, if you don't pay the bondholders, if you force the bondholders to take too big of a haircut, hann yarky will prevail, stability will falter. first you pay the bondholders. that's how you keep things together. this idea is not new. this is an idea that robert morris had. the idea was to get a tax going, a national tax. there was no nation, but a national-style tax. get the states to agree to go beyond the powers they had

granted in the articles of confederation, and impose an impost, they called it, on imported goods. and morris told hamilton and others, this impost is just the beginning. if we can get them to do that, we can have other kinds of taxes, too, other kinds of domestic taxes as well. this is the vision for forming nationhood. you can tie the country together by collecting in an interstate manner taxes earmarked for federal bonds. now, that doesn't sound exactly like what we think of when we think of a unified american nation, but to morris and hamilton, brilliantly enough, that is what they thought would gather up all of this economic force, all of this wealth, all of this power, and make it grow and become dynamic. so, let's see now. that's like a really skeletal idea of the things they began to develop in the 1780s, which hamilton in a far more nuanced way, i believe, than morris ever could have, probably, put into

effect in the 1790s. now i'm going to check the watch to see how we're doing and what else we can talk about here, about how this went. and sip some water while i cogutate. in the 1783, they -- this is hamilton, to my mind, because i see -- of course, i see him being born in 1782, which is my con kreept aboceit about this w thing -- his first formative political action on the countrywide stage was to involve himself in a conspiracy. maybe that's tendentious, could argue about that, to threaten the continental congress, threaten the states with a military coup in order to bring about the very scheme i've just described. and this came -- this is fortuitous, provincial in some

ways, that because the officer class had not been paid and they were very, very fed up about that, they sent officers to philadelphia to demand payment. well, hamilton and morris and their crew are finding it very difficult to get this tax passed that will have the effect of creating this interstate sort of unification of the country around the bonds. they seize on this opportunity that's presented by the angry officer class, to suggest to the officer class that they should also become bondholders. they should join in the fight to get the bonds funded via the tax. if the officer class of the army were to refuse to lay down its arms with the coming of peace, well, now you have the strongest lobby, literally strongest, that there is, because now you've got an armed force behind this. this was a very dangerous thing to try to do, as washington told hamilton a little later. this was a threat, potentially, to the republican nature of the

country that was supposedly being formed to the states. they did it, though -- they tried. and again, think of the incredible, like, audacity, the incredible fearlessness, the incredible ability to take risks with his future reputation, maybe even with his life. i mean, his relationships now would go to his relationships for a second -- like his relationships with his father-in-law, skyler, if this had come to light in the way that it could have, think of the incredible high-wire act this was. and hamilton goes so far as to try to get washington involved and try to get him to lead this effort. washington demev. and what happened is, by the way, people say the newberg crisis was a failure of a conspiracy. in many ways it was. washington was not deposed from the office by angry officers. the system continued. the army happily continued under civilian command. all that was good.

but really, what happened partly also was that the officer class did get added to the bondholding class. that was the compromise in the end, and washington supported that. so, now you have the other component of the scheme, which is you have the armed forces, the officer class of the armed forces involved in this very same economic dynamic relationsh relationship. so, you can see the newberg conspiracy as a failure, but in terms of what we're talking about with bringing forth the hamilton scheme, you can also see it as success. because coming out of the newberg conspiracy, he kind of sets the table in a way for what he's going to do in the 1790s. he has a new relationship with george washington, and you might think because washington counseled hamilton, an army is a dangerous thing to play with. i don't think i have that quote exactly right, but some of you probably know it. you would think that washington had thought, this hamilton's crazy, i've got to stay away from them. actually, their correspondence after the newberg conspiracy is just a fascinating study in the dynamics of their always-fantastic nating, tense,

but also all-important relationship. they actually get closer after the conspiracy and washington makes it clear to hamilton that he is 100% in favor of being sure that the country is put in a position -- and this is, again, leading toward nationhood, nationalism -- the country's in a position to pay the public creditors, by which he means those same bondholders that we're talking about. this was a vision that washington shared. so, coming out of newberg, we have this sort of picture of the hamilton scheme. the concentration and growth of american wealth in a federal, in a bonded government debt to the rich, an obligation to the rich, all in federal, rather than state, hands, which is what they were trying to do. it was hard and they weren't getting -- they felt they weren't getting anywhere sometimes. an interstate mutual obligation to align with the interests of the rich, the interest in the sense of interest payments on those bonds, but also the financial interests in general and the social interests. and now you've got -- like, if it's a puzzle you're trying to put together like in the system

and make it perfect or complete is what perfect would have meant in the 18th century, you have sort of the final click piece is like the concentration of military power in the same bonded debt. so, this combines wealth with government with force, actual literal force. and this leads sort of to the idea of tax collection, kind of pulling the country together and actually tax enforcement pulling the country together. and there you have kind of the basis, i would say, of the hamilton scheme. so, i think here, we might begin to see how some people at the time could consider this whole thing a bit of a scheme, a bit of a scam, even. and when i say the whole thing, i mean the american revolution, the war of independence, i mean

what's about to happen, which is the forming of the nation itself, as a mechanism for enriching the rich at the expense of the poor and the ordinary. you could see how some people might take that position, given everything i've just described. hamilton had emmeez. and i think you know that he had enemies because we know about the division in american culture that we're told is sort of a fundamental division, which is jefferson versus hamilton, basically, or jefferson and madison versus hamilton. but in the final new minutes that i'm going to be able to talk, i want to tell you, i just want to complicate that story a little bit. there are other enemies that come first. you know, if we're still talking about the 1780s, jefferson and hamilton were not enemies in the 1780s. they didn't really have anything to do with each other. you know, jefferson comes into the cabinet and hamilton into the cabinet and they're going to work together in the 1790s. and you know, they didn't know they were going to be -- you

know, you meet people in a new job and you're like, oh, hi, nice to meet you, excited to work with you, help the team, blah, blah. then you realize this person is like my enmaey. then you begin to realize, this person's going to ruin everything! none of that had happened who effective enemy in the legislature, madison and hamilton were close allies in everything i've just told you about except maybe the newberg thing. i'm pretty sure madison was not in on that. madison was committed to all of the things we talked about. they were the two kind of young hot shot lawyers in the continental congress, pouring over the articles of confederation to find ways to expand the power -- the federal power. you know madison was committed to federal power and to nationhood. everyone knows that. only late dr did the difference become to overwhelming. the enemies that hamilton had in the 1780s are people whose names are not super well-known. they represent a movement, a

populist movement which had its own ideas about finance, if i may use that word, about money, about american wealth, about accountability to the people. they meant themselves, the ordinary people. these are people frequently without the vote, because, of course, you had to have property to have the vote and to run for office. had you they wanted the vote. they wanted the vote for white men i'm talking about. but they wanted the vote for white men without property. they didn't want to have the property kwaqualificatioqualifi. they wanted to break up government monopolies, fix prices, stop foreclosures, enable small-scale credit for ordinary people. in that sense, build their own financial system in a more what they considered democratic way. without the vote, they rioted. they rescued people from debtor's prison. they did all kinds of illegal things.

so we get this sort of torches and pitchforks idea of the mob at the time. and for sure, they tore down people's houses. there was violence involved in this. however, along with the torches and pitchfork image, they wrote petitions. they organized. they said what they wanted. they said what they wanted. and what they wanted actually is democracy. and, of course, this is anathema to the founding generation of famous people. if you think about what that meant, what the populists wanted to do was break the connection between property and participation. citizenship in that sense, not -- i mean, people were considered citizens even if they couldn't vote. they wanted to break the property connection between property and rights, property and liberty. this is an ancient connection as far as the famous founders are concerned. breaking it is sort of like a horror show. because then you have just --

you have mob rule. you have anarchy. these people's names are not names that have gone down in history the way the names of the famous founders are. i'm going to tell you some of them anyway just to get them on the record right here for this moment. thomas young, a doctor and a professional activism, troublemaker. james cannon, a math teacher. christopher marshal, a pharmacist. they were labor organizers. william finley, a weaver who became a lawyer and ended up entering the pennsylvania assembly. robert whitehill and herman husband who had a vision of an entirely egalitarian society, american society. he wanted to end slavery, stop steali ining indian land. he started writing about this in the 1760s and 1770s. he believed in progressive taxation. there should be some form of taking care of people when they get too old to work, which we might call social security. he wanted government credit

programs, full employment and the end to dynastic wealth, regulation. they called it regulation of the power of wealth. the thing about husband -- i would like to get this on the record. he was not alone among the populists of the day. he saw these things like literally he had the kind of mind like, say, maybe a st. joan or something like that where he actually saw these things. he had literal visions. everything i just said which sounds like the new deal, he saw them. he spent his life on the book of daniel. the populists were not in our terms necessarily -- they were not all modern secular, rational, scientific liberal types. there's a certain illibberalism. like you might find in some of the abolitionist movement. you are speaking not to -- it's not like, we did a study and we

find it's more effective if you don't have slavery. no. it's a high moral calling from a vision that might seem outside of the enlightenment vision that i would say hamilton represents among others. so there's an opposition for you. and of course we won't have time to get to the jefferson/madison opposition. i want to get this other piece in to complicate what was going on with the hamilton scheme coming on strong. about to get put into place. he is about to become in the constitution, the secretary of treasury. the opposition is this kind of the white working class of the day. in an interesting scope between socialistic ideas and small capitalist ideas, in dire opposition to that. that's what sets off a lot of the explosions that i believe -- to end on this note, so we can get q and a in here -- are still in many ways with us today.

so i'm going to leave it at that and thank you for your very kind attention today. [ applause ] thanks a lot. [ applause ] as we're about to do the q and a, let me say one more thing. i want to -- i will forget. i want to thank the museum of american finance for its tolerance of my eccentric and uprou uproarous appropriate. i thank you very much for your liberal approach to these views. thanks a lot. how are we doing this q and a? is there a microphone going around? >> i have a proposal for nancy. i run an american system now blog on hamilton. a proposal for the substitute for the word finance.

credit. since hamilton's work was all devoted to the idea of public credit, and i suggest that that gives a higher concept to the kind of machinations he was carrying out. the purpose of the credit of wedding the financial class to the government was to develop the country. he had tremendous support from some working class people, as you know from the constitutional activities here in new york, the great ship hamilton that was sent down broadway in support of the constitution. because it was going to build the country. that's what i would suggest. >> yeah. i think credit is a better word. i'm not sure it's going to sell copies of my book necessarily. but i agree that it's the more accurate term, possibly. >> was hamilton a bondholder himself? >> i'm glad this came up, actually. people spent a lot of time --

jefferson, madison -- sorry. i thought that got through. was hamilton himself a bondholder which raises the question about personal corruption. i would like to make this clear. i think it's really interesting that while he hung out with a lot of the people who would very directly benefit -- in he fact he wanted to hang out with them. he wanted to encourage them and make things more better for them. that's how he thought. that's how he was building the country. people spent a lot of time -- jefferson, madison, others -- trying to prove that hamilton was personally corrupt. he was personally skimming and would personally benefit from his own projects. i think it's so fascinating that they totally failed to prove that. i think they failed to prove it because his vision was -- robert morris was skimming. he didn't think there was anything wrong with it. i don't know if he hadn't, i don't know if we would be here. i don't know. but he was skimming for sure. he didn't think of it as that. hamilton had a much more vaulting vision.

he wanted to author an empire. he wasn't looking to get a few bucks on the side. i'm glad that came up. i think when people accuse him of corruption, they should have been -- if they wanted to accuse him of corruption, they should have been arraigning the system, not his personal interest. yes. sorry. this gentleman is carrying a microphone. then you, sir. >> i thank you for your lovely talk. i went to st. croix to get insight into his early years. i have the greatest esteem for him. i wondered if you could give us more information on the development of his character being born out of wedlock. he was denied access to christian education. >> i can't give you -- partly because as i was saying, that aspect of his -- there he is. michael, that man in the back,

he has his hand up, he can tell you everything, i would say, there is to know about that. he is working on that now. i guess as i was saying, my interest just doesn't lie in the back story. even if -- i talk about his relationship with washington for a second. i could do a long deep dive on that. i find it one of the most fascinating relationships there is. but i find i'm not interested in how that might relate to his father issues or whatever. not because i don't think that's an interesting subject. it's just that, again, i'm interested in my father issues. you know? if i knew some of you better, i would be interested in yours. but like, everybody has got 'em. i'm always looking for things about him that make him different. there are obviously whole other ways to look at this. michael has a lot of that information. the microphone has been handed away. i don't think we can hear you. we can come back to that. >> how did the revolutionary war

soldiers, enlisted people, fare under this scheme? i understand that the officers became bondholders. how did the revolutionary war enlisted soldiers -- how did they fare? >> there's a long answer i can't go into right now. will make a short answer. in their opinion, they did not fare very well. they did not -- they were not made gentlemen. many, many, many of them went home unpaid in the end. they began to get a sense, whether you will agree with them or not, that this whole long seven years of war had been nothing for them and only for enriching the class of people who were rich, who they knew as their local creditors who they were already indebted to at rates we would consider userous and who were foreclosing their properties and so forth. you can see how this conflict would develop. is the microphone -- anyone

else? so sorry. there's one over there. >> hi. we all passed on the pay in this statue of george washington out there. and i can see it from where i'm at. behind him there's this bundle of sticks wrapped up, which is a roman symbol for strength and uni unity. so i'm -- it's not useful, of course, to call hamilton a fascist. but is what you are talking about the complication of financial power and military power, is it not on the spectrum, so to speak? >> yeah. you know, it's not useful to me to use that term, partly because i don't think i know enough technically speaking about fascism to apply it. also, it's not an 18th century term. i think i have seen arguments

where people are saying what you are saying, it's on the spectrum. if you are trying to enrich x number of families and manage the economy in that way from the top down, maybe. i just -- i guess i would go with your statement that it's not really useful, partly because whether -- categorizing is not really what i try to do when i'm talking -- when i'm writing books about this stuff or talking about it. i think it throws a damper on -- what i try to do is make it for my own interpretation, my own imagination, my own engagement with the material, i try to make it feel to me like it's coming alive. so because that term wouldn't have existed and it has so many connotations that are obviously, for obvious reasons, damning. i want it to feel like, what was it like for them? how excited was hamilton when he saw the opportunities? other people can do that. other people can decide -- can have these debates and analysis.

maybe it's ironic, because i'm taking you to places that are critical. but i don't like -- it's not because i'm scared to use the term, because then people won't like me or will be angry. i have been accused of that, i think. i'm not scared to use it. i just don't think it helps bring anything to life. but i do think it's a good line of thought and worth pursuing. thanks for bringing it up. again, the mike -- i have to watch the microphone. i can't just call on people. i'm watching. i'm watching. this gentleman. okay. >> is this working? >> yes. >> i think i don't understand something, because what you just explained, i don't know why the hamilton awareness group would hate you for that. >> i don't think they hate me. >> what is bad about this?

am i just a hopeless capitalist? >> you may be. i was just kidding when i said i don't know if they are speaking to me after this. my take on hamilton is obviously critical. and so there's nothing necessarily bad about it. some people -- this is what is so interesting. i wrote "the whiskey rebellion." it comes out of everything i talked about that i didn't have time to talk about today. some people say, i really -- i finished that book and i hate that guy. i hate him. i thought, well, that was not my intention. i get why you could find him frightening in some ways and overly intense. you might not subscribe to his vision for the country. a lot of people then didn't. i don't hate him. but i do think sometimes that major enthusiasts do not -- i'm not saying this about the a-ha

people because here i am. but i would also say that -- i do think some of the big enthusiasts at the moment are touchy when you bring up some of the nuts and bolts realities of how this stuff actually worked or seemed to work to those who did everything they could to stop it. i don't think it's necessarily bad. i just think some people think it is. one more. >> not all of us hate you, by the way. >> i'm not saying anybody here hates me. >> that was a joke. when you talk about hamilton and his affect on the economy and i dichotomy between the soldiers and upper classes, hamilton actually believed that corporations should be citizens, have the same rights, and the

founders, in my understanding, were totally against that, however, the supreme court has just put that into play in other pro-business things that deal with the federalist society and going back to the original intent of the constitution. and you have written about that quite a bit. what do you think -- i don't know if you want to talk that much about it. >> how long do we have here? 30 seconds for that one? here is what i want to say about that. i'm not going to delve into the whole corporation people thing. in federalist '78 beloved by many as a great defense of the independence of the judiciary, he makes explicit his belief that one of the things an independent judiciary can do is sort of slap down more democratic fiscal type of legislation. since you bring up the supreme court, and since we are thinking

about that right now, liberalism, modern liberalism has placed a lot of faith in the independence of the supreme court and had its way for a number of years on a number of important issues. that's not necessarily the way hamilton thought that was supposed to work. the independence of the judiciary can often make undemocratic decisions and in some ways to him that was a lure for getting people to ratify the constitution. would you say we're wrapping up? thank you again. thanks to everyone who sponsored this and you all for coming out. thanks a lot. [ applause ] >> you are watching a special edition of american history tv during the week while members of congress are in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. american history tv's reel america series looks at history through archival films. tonight the focus is health issues. a 1958 american medical association march of medicine program that highlights american doctors working at health

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c-span3 every saturday at 8:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv. and lectures in history is available as a podcast. find it where you listen to podcasts. the national council for history education moved their conference online due to the coronavirus outbreak. the session up next features yale university history and american studies professor joanne freeman, editor of "the essential hamilton, letters and other writings." >> good morning. i'm a professor of history at the university of central florida and a proud member of the board of the national council for history education. i trust all of you are doing well and keeping safe. these are very strange times, bewildering even for historians who have a long-term sense of history. thanks for joining us today.