◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE: Energy in the Executive I am Alexander Hamilton. Born on Nevis, in the West Indies, the year disputed, and I encouraged the confusion. Illegitimate. My father left. My mother died beside me when I was eleven, and I was put to work in a counting house on St. Croix, weighing other men's cargo, some of it human. I came here on money raised by strangers who read something I wrote about a hurricane. I had no name, no family, no country. Adams called me the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar. He was not wrong about the facts. And I built your financial system. The bank, the mint, the assumption of the states' debts, the credit that made a bankrupt confederation into a country that could borrow. The dollar in your hand is a thing I had to argue for. Jefferson and Madison fought me — they thought a national bank was unconstitutional and a federal debt a chain. I won. When you spend American money, you are spending my victory over them. I did that in six years, from nothing, as an immigrant, and I would like that noted in the present climate. Now. I want to talk about the executive, because I am the reason it is strong, and I will not pretend otherwise. I argued for energy in the executive. A feeble executive means a feeble government, and a feeble government is a bad one. I wanted one man who could act, decisively, quickly, and alone, because a committee cannot repel an invasion or answer a crisis at three in the morning. At the Convention I went further than anyone. I proposed an executive serving during good behavior, which is to say for life, and a Senate the same. They called me a monarchist for it. I did not lose much sleep. So understand: the office your strongman occupies is the office I wanted. But I did not hand you the engine without a governor. I wrote eighty-five essays to persuade the country to ratify the Constitution; we signed them Publius. In the sixty-eighth, I explained the safeguard. The presidency was to be filtered — a body of chosen men standing between the office and the popular passion, whose purpose was to stop two things. First, the man with talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity. Second, foreign powers gaining an improper ascendant in your councils. That was not decoration. It was the safety mechanism, written in the same hand and the same season as the argument for a powerful President. And in the very first of those essays I told you how republics die. Of the men who have overturned the liberties of republics, I wrote, the greatest number began by paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants. You kept my engine. You threw away my governor. The filter became a formality, then a rubber stamp, and the office designed to be strong is now strong in the hands of precisely the man the filter existed to exclude. In the second of these I will tell you whose fault that is, including mine, and what the correction costs, because I paid it. PART TWO: The Choice I am Alexander Hamilton again. In the first of these I told you I built the strong presidency, and built the filter that was meant to keep the wrong man out of it, and that you kept the one and discarded the other. Now the harder half. Whose fault that is, and what it costs to correct — because I paid the price myself. I will own my share. My remedy assumed the screening would be done by men of a certain sort, men like me, frankly, and I did not imagine the mechanism would be captured, or that it would simply stop being a judgment and become an arithmetic. I distrusted the passions of the many and put my faith in the discretion of the few, and the few turned out to be purchasable. That is my error, and it is not a small one. I guarded against the mob and left the door open behind me. Now the last thing, and it is the reason I am dead. In 1800 the choice fell to men I could influence, and it lay between Thomas Jefferson, who had opposed me on nearly every question for twenty years and whose politics I believed would injure the country, and Aaron Burr, who believed nothing whatever. Burr had no fixed principle. He had appetite, and charm, and a talent for arriving wherever the advantage was. I chose Jefferson. My enemy. I worked to place in that office the man who had fought me my whole public life, because he had convictions and the other man had none. I judged that a country survives a President who is wrong far more easily than a President who is empty. A wrong man can be reasoned with, voted out, outlasted. An empty one is a hole the country pours itself into. Burr understood what I had done to him. Four years later he called me out, and I stood on that ledge at Weehawken, and he shot me in the hip, and it took me thirty-one hours to die. I do not recommend the duel. I recommend the choice that led to it. When it is put to you, the one who is wrong or the one who is hollow, take the one who is wrong. You can argue with wrong. You can lose to it and live to fight it again. There is nothing inside the other man to argue with, and nothing that will ever be enough. I built the office. I built the safeguard, and watched you lose it. The one thing I could not build was the man who fills the chair. That was always going to be your work, and it comes around every four years, and it has come around again. Choose better than the few who were supposed to choose for you.