6r7k9s. american tv history, every weekend, documenting america's story, funding for american tv history comes from these companies who support c-span3 as a public service. selected by president george washington in 1789 alexander hamilton was the first secretary of the treasury until january 1795. up next to american history tv, historian and author william hogeland talks about hamilton's economic ideas this. discussion 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 has written multiple books on early u.s. history, including autumn of the black snake, declaration, the whiskey rebellion and founding finance. he is the author of a recent publication, or not author, a contributor i should say. to rent publication historians on hamilton. he has penned many essays and articles that you can read in places like the atlantic monthly, salone, boston review, and huffington post. none more important than our own magazine financial history. you can find that history at www.moaf.o are -- org, for museum of finance. the topic of his next book is alexander hamilton.

it's my pleasure to introduce him, william hogeland. [ cheers and applause ] thanks a lot. i know the accoustics in here boom a bit, can anyone hear me? okay, thank you, good to know. i think some of you know maybe i'm a bit of a fish out of water here. i would like to point out that the museum of american finance, they have had me speak, this is the first time. my first ever talk on alexander hamilton and related issues was sponsored by the museum. for my very first book and that was back in 2006. so, it's a, i think some of you already know that my, you know, it's celebrate ham ton right now, and celebrate is not exactly what i do, generally speaking. those that 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 the 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 will note the irony of some of my approaches. here we are at the federal building and here's, here we are on wall street. we could say we are conveniently located 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. and so, i don't talk so much about some of the things had 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,

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 have looked in to it and read about it in joanne freeman's book, for example, you can find out about the duel ing culture. and people have families and up bringing and all of the things that people have. i am interested in what made him the dynamic force that was not like everyone else was if you know what i mean. i am looking specifically at what i call, and i'm not alone in calling it this, the great creative phenom enon that occurred. 1782-1795. you can date it differently, i will just pick that period and say, something happened there, where of course, with all of the things that went in to 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. dreeps that he. visions that he. 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. how to bring the 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 affects that he had on the founding and a, and b, how we think about money and government today are what well fascinate had me about hamilton. and so, for me, it's almost like

he gets born in 1782. the phenomenon, the creative force 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 may not be here as the nation that we are. in a sense, hamilton created the nation had in an economic sense. the thing is the details of that story get left out. you would not think they get left out because it's the reason he is famous, of course, as the secretary of the treasury. first ever secretary of the treasury. you would not think they get left out because there's been a lot of biographies of hamilton.

but they do get left out. not here, the museum of american finance. necessarily. people don't like to hear the word "the economic nation" or the word "finance," i'm writing a book on the subject and my agent said to me when i was sort of pitching it to him, i kept, i would say, you know, the financial -- he would go, don't say finance. you know, we are trying to pitch a book here that that people might want to read. don't say finance. and i'm like, right, i got you. so, and then every is so often a buzzer goeses off when i happen to say the word, no, no, it's not finance. because it's really, you know, to hamilton, of course he he would -- he would use the word. our connotations of that are not his. to hamilton, it's money, power, wealth, greatness, size, scope, expansion, things that are actually highly active and dramatic. greatness as i guess just used that word, i mean, like

dominance. making the nation in to america. the empire and that's the word with he would use and so would his contemporaies in this area. making it in to 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 the other things about his life. i have called it, for the purposes of this talk, anyway, something had that 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 kind of sort of plot or something. a skhema, it could be value

neutral and of course, we use it to mean a scheme. he is scheming in the back room, ah, ha, my plans, that kind of thing. well, when we talk about hamilton we have to talk about the fact that he did have a major plan, goes beyond plan, an incredible sort of vision and nuts and bolts engineering kind of thing going to build a that could do the dynamic, explosive things that he wanted to see it do. and there were 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 because i think in this very room, no doubt. if you go around talking to other people outside the room about hamilton, had you will get a wide variety of view on this. whether it was a scheme in a good censor a scheme in a bad sense. so that's what i want to try and tell you about today, how the scheme worked and we can think about.

you can all think about, you all probably have before, whether you think it's, what kind of scheme you think it is. i think, when i set up the kind of invitation to this talk and the description of what i was going to be doing, i promised a kind of efficient 45 minute trip through everything, single thing you would need to know about the hamilton scheme. um, i now realized as i began to approach this talk that that was a slight exaggeration or maybe like a bold faced lie, because there's no way in time that we have here today to go do a deep dive on every one of the topics or any of them. what i willy really do, now that i lured you all in here with my sales pitch, what i'm really going to do is actually give you a kind of superficial glimpse at any of the topics. in another time, we can do a deeper dive and look more closely at how it all worked and i can back up 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 are 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 in to affect in the first half of the 1790s. that 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's 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 have to go back to his first efforts in politics in the 1780s, i think, and see him

develop it. and figure out what should be going on. if he could get himself in to power and in to a position to bring it about. so, somewhat surprisingly, maybe, i will focus in the time we have largely what he did in the 1780ss 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 is something that i do not talk about or think too much about. yorktown. everyone knows about it now, all that sort of stuff, that is juvinalia, now he comes to do what he is going to do that other people couldn't do and didn't do. he comes to the continental congress, which hat that time was meeting again in philadelphia. interesting because the war is coming, 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. what we may think. oh, and out of this, this great victory. the fantastic building of nation hood, the country will emerge from independence. fully unified and ready to take on the world. what is actually happening as he arrives in the continental congress, because of the war is about to end. the country is about to fall apart. that's because what's holding the country together, this, these virus states, these various entities. they are confederated, they are not a nation. what is holding them together is this war. has been this war. what the unity of of the country is around the war. what hamilton sees is it's all about to crash and burn and there's incredible ppotential. it's a pretty outlandish thing to envision for a 20

something-year-old man arriving, you know, with his elders and superiors, many of whom were committed to different visions from that at that time. he did begin to see it. he was not alone in that. he a mentor in that whole vision. robert morris. a name that is 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 aproblematic character for a lot of reasons. he becomes hamilton's most important mentor in the area that i'm interested in, i should say. because of course, there's 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 financeer of the revolution and he was known and he was that, spending his vast wealth on financing the revolution out of his own pocket.

the revolution also financed him. he did not have any problem with mingeling 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 hamilton, who saw the brilliance of hamilton. the young hamilton and to whom hamilton gravitated, they were looking at the issue of keeping the country together. what we are talking about, is how to keep the country together as a political force and 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 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 when i study it, smoke comes out of my ear when i try to handle the debt. the country needed money to fight the war. the interest they took were the form of bonds, paid bonds issued to a small number of wealthy people of the robert morris type. who were expecting and hoping to get paid 6% interest on their bonds. remember there was no tax on that at the time. so it's a nice rate of return. and that was what was supposed to finance the war and this was an interstate investing class. an interstate lending class. these were the merchants with money, gold and silver, or the equivalent in their possession. so the war debt, this is what is fascinating when people talking about debt now and about hamilton. the war debt is what'spulling

the country together as far as the people who envision a future for the country. because you have all the richest people in the countrier on many of them invested in this, in these bonds. so, it's fun toi 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, oh, he was, you know, he was confronted with all the debt after the revolutionary war and he to wrestle with this and get it paid off because oh, my god, they had run up all the money. that was the opposite of what happened in the 1780s, as you also probably kno hamilton is famous for funding the debt and assuming in the debt, the federal obligation, the state debts. hamilton funding assumption. funding a debt and paying off a debt are not the same thing. they are in some ways opposites.

we know this, when we make payments on our credit cards on or whatever that we are not paying them off while we make the minimum payment. so, this is a funny thing that is happened to hamilton's legacy. and it's not just that most people don't get it or whatever. i will read you something very quickly from the web, the worldwide web. the internet. if you put in search terms around hamilton and debt. paying for the american ref are lusionary 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 negligenter -- and the netherlands to pay for the war. that is true. but the foreign debt is not the important part of the debt. the domestic debt is what drives the, 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 of hamilton founded and it's describing his approach to debt inspect precisely wrong terms. what fascinated him, what got him up in the morning was to us, might sounder boring. public debt, was a thrilling opportunity and it was a domestic debt, the debt to rich americans that was the driver of everything that i have been trying to talk about. it's really kind of amazing here are liberal scholars, writing something unrelated but try to fill you had in on the background of hamilton and debt. the most pressing issue was what to do with the debt.

hamilton wanted the state to assume the states debts and pay them in full. no he wanted to keep it going, because for the obvious reason that you have the richest people in the country invested in the country. i don't know where that comes from, but this is, he heard they were saying things like that, he would be like, wow, all the years later and they still don't get the brilliance of what i was trying to bring about. i don't know how he would feel about that, but i find it fascinating that we don't understand the real relationship to the debt. he did not try to hide it. it was not scheming. he put forth in the most brilliant and cogentlemaner an entire program based on this

very idea. so that's weird, the risk to all this visionary stuff that he and morris are working on. a central bank and state bonds and getting the state debt in to federal hands. coalessing 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? they are meeting like they are sovereign entities. they are not going to pay the bonds. they may ignore them or cancel the debt. peace is a problem. and to the extent that robert morris' assistant wrote a letter to general washington asking him if he could keep the war going longer so we can continue to unity of the country a little longer around this debt.

the idea for morris is he paid the bond holders. not the soldiers and the troops. pay the bond holders. this may seem somewhat familiar. if you force the bond holders to take too big of a haircut, anarchy will prevail and stability will falter. first you pay the bond holders. this is an idea that robert morris had. the idea was to get a tax going. a national tax get the states to go beyond the powers that they agreed to in the articles of confederation and impose an impost on imported goods and he told them that it's just the beginning if we can get them to do that we can have other kinds

of taxes too. this is the vision for nationhood, you can tie the country together by collecting in an interstate manner taxes earmarked forfederal bonds. that is not what we think of. morris and hamilton, brilliantly enough, that is what they thought would gather up all of this economic force. all of the wealth, all of this power and make it grow and become dynamic. so let's see, that was the skeletal idea of the things they began to develop since the 1980s. i will check the watch and see how we are doing and what else we can talk about how this all went. um, and sip water.

in 1783, they this is hamilton, to my mind. because of course, i see him being born in 1782, which is my consite about the whole thing. his first political action on the country wide stage was to involve himself in a conspiracy. maybe that is -- could argue about that, to threaten the continental congress, threaten the ta states with the military coup. the officer class was not paid and they were fed up with that. they sent officers to philadelphia to demand payment. well, hamilton and morris and their crew are finding it difficult to get the tax passed that will have the affect of

creating the interstate, sort of unification of the country around the bonds. they seize on the opportunity it's presented by the angry officer class to suggest to the officer class that they should become bond holders. 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 the arms with the coming of peace. you have the strongest force behind this. you have an armed force behind this. it was a very dangerous thing to try to do as washington told hamilton later. this was, this was a threat potentially to the republican nature of the country that was being, supposedly being formed to the states. they did it though, they tried. and again, think of the incredible, like, audacity, the incredible fearlessness and incredible ability to take risks with his future reputation and maybe even with his life.

his relationships. his relationships with his father-in-law, skyler. if this had come to light in the way it could have. think of the, 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 the effort, washington de demers and fascinatingly, what happened is by the way, people say the newberg crisis was a fairly of a conspiracy. in many ways it was, washington was not deposed by angry officer, the system continued, and the army happily conditioned under civilian command, all that was good so, you can see the

newberg conspiracy as a failure and you can see it as a success. coming out of the newburgh conspiracy, he kind of sets the table in a way for what he is going to do in the 1790s. he has a new relationship with george washington, and you might think, because washington counciled hamilton, an army is a dangerous thing to play with. i don't think i have that quoted exactly right, some of you probably know it. you would think that washington would think, this hamilton is crazy, i have to do stay away from him. actually, their correspondence after the newberg conspiracy is fascinating, in their tense and all important relationship are. they actually get closer after the newberg 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 nation hood, nationalism, that the country is in a

position to pay the public creditors, those same bond holders that we were talk bmpths that -- that we were talking about. this is a vision that washington shared. we see the picture of the scheme t concentration and growth of american wealth in a federal and bonded government debt to the rich and an obligation at the rich all in federal rather than state hands which is what they were trying to do. that was hard and they felt they were not getting somewhere. now it's a puzzle and you have the final click piece is the concentration of military power in the same bonded debt. so this combines wealth with

government and force. this leads to the idea of tax collection. pulling the country together and tax enforcement, pulling the country together. and there you have 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 it a bit of a scheme, and a scam, and i say the whole thing, the war of revolution, the war of independence, the forming of the nation itself as a mechanism of enriching the rich at the expense of the poor and the ordinary. you can see how some may take that position given everything that i have described.

hamilton had enemies and i think you know he enemies and we are told about the division that is what we are told a fundamental division, jefferson and madison, and hamilton. in the final few minutes that i will be able to talk. i want to complicate that story a bit. there are other eneies that come first. we are still talking about the 1780s. jefferson and hamilton were not enemies, they did not have anything to do with each other. they come in the cabinet and they are supposed to work together in the 1790s, you meet people in a new job. excited to work with you, help the ball team. all that, blah, blah, and then you realize this person is my enemy and then you realize this person will ruin everything. hamilton became madison's enemy.

they were close allies in everything that i told you about, except the newberg thing. i'm pretty sure madison was not in on that part. madison was committed to all of the things we just talked about. and 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 federal power. you know, madison was committed to federal power and to nationhood. everyone knows that. only later the did the differences between hamilton and madison become so overwhelming. the enemies that hamilton had in the 1780s, are a group of people whose names are not well known, but they represent a movement, a populist movement that had its own ideas about finance, if i may use that word about money, about american wealth, about accountability to the people they met 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. you had to have more property. they wanted the vote. they wanted to 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 qualification because they wanted to do was do things like break up government monopolies, fix prices, stop the foreclosures, and enable small scale credit for ordinary people and in that sense, build their own financial system in a more what they considered a democratic way. without the vote, they rioted, they rescued people from debtor's prison. they did all kinds of illegal things and 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, you know, they wrote resolutions and petitions and organized, and

they said what they wanted. they said what they wanted. and what they wanted actually is democracy, and of course, this is an antheme to a founding generation of famous people, because if you think of what it meant at the time, 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 could not vote. but they wanted to break the property connection between property and rights. property and liberty. that is an ancient connection as far as the famous founders are concerned and breaking it is sort of a horror show, you have mob rule, anarchy, these people's names did not go down in history the way the famous founders did. i will tell you, thomas young, a

doctor and a troublemakerer and james cannon, a math teacher. christopher marshall a pharmacist is -- william finley, robert whitehill, a farmer and herman husband who had a vision of a egalitarian society, american society, wanted to stop slavery and liberate indian land, he believed in progressive taxation. he believed there should be some form of taking care of people when they are too old to work. which we may call social security. he wanted government credit programs. full employment, and the end to dynastic wealth. the thing about husband, i would like to get this on the record too, and he was not alone among the populists of the day. he didn't, he saw these things

like literally he had the kind of mind like say maybe a st. joan or something like that, where are he saw these things. he literal visions. everything i just said which sounds like the new deal in the great society, he saw them. he spent his life on an exegysus on the book of danielle. the populists in ours terms were not scientific liberal types. there's a certain il-liberalism around about their visions. il-liberalisms like you may find in the abolitionist movement, it's a high moral calling from a vision that may seem outside 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 there with the hamilton scheme coming on strong. about to get put in to placement he is about to be in the constitution. he is about to be the secretary of the treasury. and the opposition is the white working class of the day in a interesting scope, between socialistic ideas and kind of small captain list ideas in dire opposition to that. that is what sets off a lot of the explosions that i believe, to do end this, on this note, so we can get q&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. [ cheers and applause ] thanks a lot. as we are about to do the q&a, let me say one more thing.

i want to, because i will forget. i want to thank the museum of american finance for its multi-time tolerance of my approach to the hamilton problem. ifyou are not speaking to me after this, i thank you very much for your liberal had, i should say, approach to these dissenting views. thanks a lot. how are we doing this q&a? is there a microphone going around? >> hi, i have a proposal for nancy spanis, i run an american system now blog on hamilton. the proposal for a substitute for the word finance, credit. >> yeah. >> since hamilton's work was all devoted to the idea of public credit and i suggest that gives a higher concept to the kind of

machinations, it was to develop the country. he 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 the 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 the book, but i agree it's the more accurate term. possibly. >> was hamilton a bond holder himself? >> oh, you know, this is, i'm glad this came up actually. people spent a lot of time, jefferson, madison, was hamilton himself a bond holder? that raises the question of personal corruption. right? 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 fact he

wanted to hang out with them and encourage them and make things more sort of better for them. that is how he was building the country. people spent a lot of time, jefferson, madison, others, trying to prove that hamilton was personally corrupt that he was personally skimming and would benefit from his projects. it's fascinating that they failed to prove. that and they failed to prove it because his vision was -- robert morris was skimming and he did not think anything was wrong with it. i don't know if he hasn't, i don't know if we would be here or not. he was skimming and he did not think of it as skimming. hamilton had a vaulting vision. he wanted to author an empire. he was not trying to get a few bucks on the side. i'm glad that came up, because i think when people accuse him of corruption. if they wanted to do that, they should have arraigning the system, not his personal

interest. yes. i guess -- sorry, okay. let's, this gentleman is carrying a microphone. another microphone and then you, sir. >> i thank you for your lovely talk i went to saint croix to get insight in his early years i have the greatest esteem for him. i wonder if could give us more information on the development of his character, being born out of wedlock, he was denied access to christian education. >> where is michael? i can't give you -- well partly because as i was saying, you know, that aspect of his -- right, there he is. michael. that man in the back, he has his hand up briefly, he can tell you everything i would say there's to know about that. and he is working on that now. i guess as i have been saying my interests just doesn't lie in the back story. you know, like 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. i find i'm not interested in how it may relate to his father issues or whatever. not because if i knew some of you better, i would be interested in yours. but everybody's got them. i'm always looking for the things about him that make him different. but there are obviously whole other ways to look at this, and michael has a lot of that information. the microphone has been handed away and i don't think we can hear you. >> how did the revolutionary war soldiers, the enlisted people, fair under this scheme? i understand that the officers became bondholders. how did the revolutionary war enlisted soldiers, how did they fair? >> there's a long complicated answer to that which i can't go into right now. i'll make a short answer which is that they did -- at least in

their opinion, they did not fair very well. they were not made gentlemen. many, many, many of them went home unpaid in the end. and so 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 already rich who they already knew as their local creditors who they were already indebted to at rates we would now consider usurious and were foreclosing their properties and so forth. so you can see how this conflict would develop. is the microphone -- anyone else? there's one over there. >> hi, we all passed on the way in this statue of george washington out there and i can see it from where i'm at. behind him there is this bundle

of sticks wrapped up which is a roman symbol for strength and unity and called fascites, the root word of fascism. it's not useful to call hamilton a fascist, is what you're talking about a combination of financial power and military power, is it not on the spectrum, so to speak? >> yeah, 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've seen arguments where people are saying exactly what you're saying. it's on the spectrum. if you're trying to enrich the richest "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 it -- categorizing is not really what i try to do when i'm writing books about this stuff or talking about it. i think it kind of 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 like it's coming alive because that term wouldn't have existed and it has so many connotations that are just so obviously -- for obvious reasons damning. i just wanted to feel more like, what was it like for them? how excited was hamilton when he saw the opportunities? and so other people can do that, and other people can decide -- can have these debates and analyses. this may be ironic because i'm taking you to places that are, quite critical. it's not because i'm scared to use the term because people won't like me or be angry or whatever. i've been accused of that. i think.

no, 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. you know, so thanks for bringing it up. again, the mic -- 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. it is now. >> okay. 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. like what is bad about this? >> i don't think they hate me. >> or 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. but some people -- i mean, this is what's so interesting.

i wrote "the whiskey rebellion." it was my first book, and hamilton plays a major role. it comes out of everything i talked about that i didn't have time to talk about today. people read that, they said to me, 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. but, you know, 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 at all, because here i am, under them, i'm happy to say. 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 any way seemed to work to those who did everything they could to stop it. but, no, 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. >> no, i'm not saying anybody here hates me. >> that was a joke. when you talk about -- when you talk about hamilton and his affect on the economy and 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. you mentioned it. >> how long do we have here? [ laughter ] 30 seconds for that one? here is what i want to say about that. i'm not going to delve into the whole corporations people thing. i will say 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. but that is 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 wrapped up? all right. thank you again. thanks to everyone who sponsored this and you all for coming out. thanks a lot. [ applause ] weeknights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on c-span3. tonight we look at the cherokee nation. in the 1830s, under president andrew jackson, the cherokees were forcibly removed from their lands in the southeastern u.s. in what became known as the trail of tears. oklahoma university law professor lindsey robertson discusses the decisions issued by the u.s. supreme court in cases involving the cherokee nation, especially the role of chief justice john marshall. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy american history tv every weekend on c-span3.

american history tv on cspan3. every weekend documenting america's story, funding for american history tv comes from these companies who support cspan3 as a public service. cspanshop.org is the new upline store. go there to order a copy of the congressional directory, a book with contact information for every member of congress. also contact information for state governors and the biden administration cabinet. order yours at cspanshop.org. next on "history bookshelf" former secretary of state condoleezza rice talks about her

memoir "no higher honor." she served as secretary of state from 2005 to 2009 during the george w. bush administration. in this event in 2011 she was interviewed by university of miami president donna shalala and also responded to questions submitted by students. >> thank you. >> madam secretary, welcome. >> thank you very much. >> how long have i been inviting you here? >> a few years. a few years, yes. >> most of our questions today were submitted by students. let me start with the first one. one of our students asked, how do i get to be secretary of state? >> good question. let me just start by thanking you very much. and i have known president shalala as secretary shalala, as but also as my friend donna. and so thank you very much for having me here at the u, right?. and so k