In these abnormal times, even scholars of American history haven’t been entirely immune to the “History will judge” mantra. They, too, have turned to history to buttress political claims, participating in a broader tendency to look to the Founding Fathers for an understanding of modern American values. In this effort, even some of our most important historians are showing how the current belief in history’s redemptive power is itself a product of a certain time and place—a postwar model of inquiry whose relevance may have passed its expiration date with the election of Trump.
The valorization of Alexander Hamilton—influenced no doubt by a current contingency: excitement about the musical Hamilton—offers a telling example. In December, the more than 2,000 members of the group Historians on Impeachment rendered a professional judgment—their own, not the future’s—on the president’s fitness for office by signing a statement urging the House to impeach him. In making their case, they cited parts of a passage by Hamilton, not related to impeachment, that has been frequently posted on the internet since the 2016 election:
When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents … despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”
It is not hard to see why Hamilton’s seemingly prescient words have become so popular. They have been quoted approvingly in The New Yorker and in the Twitter feed of the Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. They have been invoked in impeachment speeches by Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Schiff. The problem with the meme-ification of this particular passage, however, is that Hamilton isn’t saying what people think he’s saying.
What conjures the sense that Hamilton is speaking through the years, directly to us and to our crisis, is the total erasure of the context in which his words originated. Hamilton wrote this passage in a white heat. In 1792, President Washington asked him to respond to criticisms of his policies and goals as Treasury secretary. The harshest charge against Hamilton—who was known for his strong position in favor of executive authority—was that he was secretly seeking to turn the United States from a republic into a monarchy. Hamilton knew the political enemies who had launched that attack, and he turned the tables on them with force.
In the section leading up to the clipped internet quotation above, he mounted an argument against favoring the popular will. Those who promote democracy, he said, are really the ones who risk destroying republican government. “It would not be difficult,” he claimed, “to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected” of scheming to topple the republic by pandering to the people. The man that Hamilton was darkly alluding to was probably his bête noire, Aaron Burr.
When reading the historians’ statement, the last thing you’d think is that the quoted words were an ad hominem screed in response to an ad hominem screed. “Hamilton understood,” the historians’ statement says, “as he wrote in 1792, that the republic remained vulnerable to the rise of an unscrupulous demagogue.” That description replaces the real Hamilton with some bookish philosopher type, setting down for posterity the authoritative warnings on the operations of demagoguery. But what he was really arguing, based on his own close study of the past, is that the greatest threat to a republic is too much democracy. “The truth unquestionably is,” Hamilton said, when introducing the out-of-context quotation above, “that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions.”