For the last few months, my reading diet has been dominated by weighty tomes on the Great Men of American history. Perhaps the disturbing events over the water have prompted in me a new spirit of historical investigation, that the precipitous collapse from the empyrean heights of the Hamiltons and Lincolns to the ogre who currently defiles the White House might be seen in greater relief. James Flexner’s biography of Washington is the first of these. I read the one-volume edition that Flexner compiled from a capacious three-volume blockbuster that went on to inspire a mini-series on this much over-praised personage. Washington has never been my favourite Founding Father – as a history nerd I have always been far more interested in the exploits of those around him. He was a mediocre general during the American Revolutionary War, spending much of his time conducting his troops in the art of retreat whilst the real tactical geniuses struck blows against the Redcoats. Only his reputation as a disinterested and non-partisan figure saved him from a scalping at the hands of his political enemies, and he undoubtedly played a key role in holding the fragile unity of the rebellious colonies together. Reading Flexner’s biography, I was begrudgingly forced to acknowledge that he was a more substantial man than I once thought. It is unclear who else could have successfully assumed the role of first President once the fighting was over, if only because he was less divisive than any other notable emerging from the struggle for independence. He was no Bismarck, but his subtlety in handing the partisan rancour of the period perhaps saved the country from a brutal civil war between the partisans of Hamilton (advocates of a strong central government and tending towards abolitionism) and Jefferson (advocates of states’ rights and the unadulterated dominion of the slaveowning agrarian plantocracy), anticipating the bloody internal conflict of later decades between the industrial North and the slavers of the South. I am not entirely convinced this would have been unwelcome – had the Jeffersonians been crushed by the federal government, the American Civil War of the 1860s could have been avoided, and the issues attending to it litigated and resolved there and then. However, the nascent republic could ill-afford the prospect of internal disintegration at a time when Britain, the old colonial power, remained a threat. Flexner maintains a strong sense of narrative progression in his book, aptly summarising the bitter political disputes of the period and making them comprehensible to a layman. He retains a guarded admiration for Washington, sensible of his faults but saluting his virtues. He also alerts the reader to Washington’s increasingly abolitionist tendencies as he grew older, including the provisions he made for his slaves to be freed upon his death. Flexner is clearly in no doubt as to what side Washington would have been on during the civil war of the 1860s – he is quoted as saying that if push came to shove, he would side with the North over his fellow Southerners if it came to a civil war. The prickly Virginian officer, who started out his revolutionary career with some condescending feelings towards his brother colonists in the North, ended his life a convinced American, having subsumed his old identity into a new sense of nationhood that he, more than anyone else save perhaps his second-in-command Alexander Hamilton, had done to foster.
Ronald C. White Jr’s biography of Lincoln is even more impressive. Not only does he mould Lincoln’s fascinating life into a compelling narrative, but he provides incisive commentary on his key decisions and a thorough literary analysis of his speeches, using them to illuminate the nuances of Lincoln’s political thought. He enters into the mind of the statesman, almost ventriloquising him, and bringing out all of the contradictions of his political and personal selves. Everything that can be said of Washington’s virtues can be said of Lincoln, but more so, because Lincoln was the greater orator and articulator of his political project. The tight-lipped Washington preferred to allow others to speak for him. As President Washington tended to follow events, but Lincoln was happy to anticipate them. When an opportunity came for him to rid his country of slavery for good, he took it, and secured his renown in history for all time. Reading it, I was struck by how much failure Lincoln endured in his life before he even became President, losing almost as many elections as he won. The first four decades of his life were lived in practical obscurity, and for much of his political career he was sitting in a provincial legislature in Illinois. From such unpromising beginnings he was catapulted to national spokesperson for the growing abolitionist movement and the supreme leader of the Republican Party. Before he could even take in this extraordinary transformation, the defenders of chattel slavery had chosen to secede from the Union, plunging it into civil war. Washington may have helped found the country, but Lincoln kept it together – and took the project started by Washington and Hamilton to its logical conclusion by smashing the sectarian, pro-slavery provincialists of the South who had first coalesced as a party under Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s. He did not live to establish his victory on a firmer footing – a Confederate traitor took his life in 1865. Subsequent presidents would undo much of the legacy that he had left behind.
Ron Chernow’s biography of the great Alexander Hamilton has been on my TBR for years. It lay unread on the sill of my bedroom window until just a week ago. Having seen the musical last year, my justification for leaving this unread was even more unfathomable. I am still in the process of reading it now. It is more than just a biography, it is a study in character and an education in the art of politics. I have long admired Hamilton, and had more time for him than the much overpraised, slave-owning hypocrite and demagogue Jefferson. Chernow’s glowing biography has simply added to my esteem of this individual, the greatest American politician never to become President. From his restless brain poured, almost fully formed, the machinery of American government. After the Revolution, the American states were but a patchwork of loosely-attached entities orbiting a weak federal government with a sorry excuse for a constitution. Hamilton saw to it that these ‘Articles of the Confederation’ were replaced with a lasting settlement, and he and James Madison laid down the principles that, with adjustments here and there, have governed American political life ever since. Madison would later disavow their work and ally with Hamilton’s enemies, but this foreign-born son of a dissolute Scotch aristocrat and disgraced housewife pushed ahead with his burning vision for his adopted country. He did not allow anyone to stand in his way. On issue after issue – creating a central bank, getting the federal government to assume the country’s debts, empowering the executive to make foreign policy, the ratification of the Jay Treaty – Hamilton out-argued everyone who opposed him. Showers of pamphlets and treatises flowed from his pen. Overly sensitive to perceived slights, he threatened duels left, right and centre against anyone who questioned his patriotism. Jefferson and his poisonous clique poured venom into the ears of anyone who wanted to hear, preaching to all and sundry of Hamilton’s monarchist ambitions and partiality to British interests. Hamilton was, it is true, an admirer of the British system. He despised the anarchy and bloodletting of the French Revolution. He saw that it was good sense for the new republic to retain its close commercial links with what was still its biggest trading partner. He married revolutionary idealism with a good dose of realpolitik that was all too lacking in the American Jacobins who made up Jefferson’s party. He laid the foundations for America’s future prosperity, in the teeth of reactionary opposition from those who wanted America to be a petty-bourgeois planters’ Eden, mired in what Karl Marx called the ‘idiocy of rural life’, and basking in the glow of a spurious liberty that was utterly denied to those who happened to be dark-skinned. No demagogue, he had none of Jefferson’s credulous belief in the pure-hearted citizen-farmer, the embodiment of the revolutionary ideal. He knew that the masses were dangerous, and their passions had to be corralled and contained by the rule of law, backed by a strong central authority. Today’s America is without a doubt Hamilton’s more than Jefferson’s.