Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s radically different responses to Shays’s Rebellion represent an opening skirmish in one of the most consequential intellectual battles among the Founders. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson had defined America in terms of three shining ideas: liberty, equality, and government by consent. Just a decade later, after the new Constitution was drafted, he and Hamilton began a debate about the relationship among these three ideas that has shaped American life ever since.
For Jefferson, centralized power threatened liberty; for Hamilton, a vigorous national government could help secure it. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, was determined to expand democracy; Hamilton, the defender of the Constitution, viewed democracy as a turbulent force to be filtered and checked. Jefferson believed in local self-government and states’ sovereignty; Hamilton believed in the Union and national supremacy. Jefferson, the gentleman planter, exalted rule by the people and feared the tyranny of consolidation; Hamilton, the scholar-warrior, preferred rule by elites and dreaded the anarchy of the mob. Jefferson revered the white farmers of the agricultural South; Hamilton championed the financiers and manufacturers of the urban North. Their opposing visions led to opposing approaches to the Constitution. Jefferson interpreted it strictly, to limit federal power; Hamilton interpreted it liberally, to expand federal power.
The competing positions of Hamilton and Jefferson are like golden and silver threads woven through the tapestry of American history, sometimes running parallel to each other, sometimes crossing, and at crucial moments pulling so far apart that they threaten to snap. From the founding until today, a productive tension between the two men’s ideas has mostly kept American politics from descending into violence. Whenever the threads have been pulled too far in one direction, however, the shooting begins.
The new Constitution wasn’t yet five years old when the nation was tested again by internal violence. White farmers in Western Pennsylvania resented a new federal tax on grain, one of their main sources of revenue—and the fact that those accused of evading the tax had to stand trial in federal court in Philadelphia, far from the frontier. In July 1794, an armed mob of about 500 men attacked the federal tax collector. Like the Shaysites, the Whiskey Rebels saw themselves as a protest movement against economic inequality.
Once again, Hamilton and Jefferson reacted to the violence in radically different ways. The whiskey tax had been Hamilton’s idea. It was the centerpiece of the financial plan he’d proposed in 1790, intended to help the new federal government pay interest on debts it had assumed from the states. Hamilton recommended a military response to the rebellion, with himself at the head of an expanded army; he believed an “imposing” force was needed to “suppress the insurrection and support the Civil Authority in effectuating Obedience to the laws and the punishment of offenders.” Jefferson, by contrast, viewed the uprising as a legitimate form of civil disobedience. He saw the yeoman farmers as virtuous freedom fighters reluctantly trading their plowshares for swords.