Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton an Aristocrat a Mercantilist a Nationalist a Financial Genius and Patriot: None, All, or a Mixture?
Dennis Rees
Hist 602 Historiography D04
December 18, 2020
Alexander Hamilton’s Efforts as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America
In literature dedicated to examination of Alexander Hamilton’s years in implementation of a sound beginning for the United States Treasury, we find several differing historiographical viewpoints regarding Hamilton’s motives. These views contribute to a rich historiography of the topic. Since this is an era of intense historical scrutiny there seems an endless number of opinions and recitations of events related to the formation of United States financial and monetary policy. From this voluminous pool of primary and secondary sources it is easy to find treatments of Hamilton’s policies from broad and diverse angles, some having obvious merit and others having obvious bias. Douglas Ambrose in The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Elusive Founding Father asks,
Was he a closet Monarchist or a sincere republican? A victim of partisan politics or one of its most active promoters? A lackey for British interests or a foreign policy mastermind? An economic genius or a shill for special interests? The father of a vigorous national government or the destroyer of genuine federalism? A defender of governmental authority or a dangerous militarist?[1]
These and other questions surround the historiographical treatment afforded Hamilton in the centuries since his work was accomplished. Before we consider these treatments, it is appropriate to detail the Policies and assess the conditions under which Hamilton was responsible for establishing his role as the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America.
As he began, the first government was taking over from the Continental Congress and had no history, institutions, machinery of government, or established policy other than that of the failed Continental Congress. The Continental Congress had nothing in the way of revenue generation. It had relied completely on the States to fund it. Hamilton was thus responsive only to the new Congress and President Washington who were asking him to provide for the many financial imperatives that a new government in such a state of infancy would require. In the few months before Hamilton took office as the Secretary, Congress had passed a law regarding the excise tax that would sustain the Treasury of the United States. This law as it turns out was very naïve and ineffectual and did not have the requisite underpinnings to operate at any level. Otho H Williams, collector of the customs at Baltimore wrote to Hamilton that the law “would be ruinous to individuals, without the least public benefit” and was “the most complicated and embarrassing of anything that has employed my attention”.[2] Two days before the first congress adjourned Hamilton was explicitly ordered by the House to “prepare a plan for providing adequate support of the public credit” and to “report same to this House at its next meeting” which gave Hamilton only 110 days.[3] This then was what Hamilton had to work with in 1789, an inoperable law regarding Excise Tax and a demand for answers.
In preparing his report to Congress Hamilton wrestled with several factors. He considered how much the United States owed to other Countries (about $11 Million), how much it owed for the Army and War (about $40 Million), and debts owed by the States to others (about $25 Million). The total interest on this debt would come to about $4.5 Million annually. This sum was over three times as much as Hamilton could see the Federal Government having at its disposal. This meant very few options were available; refinance on more favorable terms, raise revenue, or both.[4] These options could prove to be successful depending on Hamilton’s abilities and understanding of the people, foreign governments, congress, and all their collective willingness to do what he needed to have done. Primarily, his plans would hinge largely on assuming the $25 Million in State Debt so that he could wrest the excise taxing authority from them.[5] The task Hamilton would face and would be faced by every American political figure hence was that of satisficing all conflicting special interest groups in behalf of the greater National interest.[6]
Another Policy Hamilton put forth was a National Bank and associated National Securities to fund it along with a sinking fund method to retire the securities. This was the primary way Hamilton proposed to ultimately monetize the national debt. It was generally known that this scheme worked for the most part as it had been enshrined as the British system for many years.[7] There was general agreement among the men known to Hamilton at the time that this policy would work in the short term but generally all of them believed that public debt in any form was bad and should be retired as soon as possible. Of course, for this plan to have any chance to work, the creditworthiness of the public debt needed to take a decided turn for the better. After the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress so abused this creditworthiness that most potential creditors had lost faith in the government ability to pay and the market had discounted the value of any security issued by the United States or the individual States to a point where speculation in the fluctuations in value became routine. Hamilton had to regain the creditworthiness of the U.S. very quickly for his policy to work to any degree. He was reliant to the greatest extent on the Dutch financial markets to buy the new United States debt. Hamilton knew that perception is reality in the case of credit and so if he could make creditors believe credit worthiness had been reestablished, it would be so. He knew that to accomplish this feat he must make sure that any new securities issued by the new, post-Constitution, government traded at or near par value on a stable basis.[8] Of course, Hamilton had to first report to Congress, allow Congress to debate his ideas, convince Congress that he was right, and furnish Congress with proposed legislation to enact that would accomplish his goals. This process began January 9, 1790 when Hamilton notified Congress that he was ready to present his report. From the outset it was fraught with dispute. Some in Congress who were not aligned with the Federalists did not want Hamilton to present his plan in person knowing how persuasive an orator he could be. They instead wanted the proposal to be submitted in writing. The Written report was duly submitted and read in Congress on January 14th, 1790. Although only 20,000 words and could be read in under two hours, the report contained 11 appendices replete with numbers and a draft of the proposed Tax revision longer than the report itself.[9] The debate would rage through July. Amendments proposed by Madison allowed time for Speculators to recoup most of their prospective losses by reversing positions in the market that swung favorable to them in the meantime. In the final analysis, Hamilton had to make a deal with Jefferson and Madison to allow the National Capitol to be moved to a place on the Potomac River favorable to Virginians. By July 29th, all the legislative differences between the houses of Congress were ironed out and the bills to enact Hamilton’s proposals were complete.[10]
Once this was done, Hamilton was free to ‘fund’ the debt by implementing a priority appropriation to pay the regular interest payments based on easily seen revenue sources in predictable amounts. He left the retirement of the debt to the discretion of the government to act on when they pleased, if ever. To accomplish an ‘instant’ increase in the market value of government securities to Par Value, Hamilton used the sinking fund to purchase public securities on the ‘open market’ driving and stabilizing the prices at par, ending speculation opportunities, reestablishing creditworthiness, while fully funding the debt through monetization.[11]
Various historiographical approaches to Alexander Hamilton’s Efforts as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States of America
Having seen what Hamilton accomplished in the paragraphs above, we turn our labors to see the historiography applied to the events described. As one would imagine, these undertakings of the U.S. Government from 1789 to 1791 with respect to financing the new Constitutional government, have been the topic of literally hundreds of historical books and essays from every possible historiographical perspective spanning almost every historical era. We find modern era historians from the Progressive period, Neo Consensus period, we find Post Modernists in the New Left Period, and Peoples History Period all writing about the founding of United States Treasury Policy of 1789, all bringing the beliefs and biases of these perspectives into their histories.
Our efforts here will concentrate on a few of the views that seemed to come into and out of vogue regarding Hamilton’s Treasury policies. In our examination we will want to consider any zeitgeist that existed when the various histories were written. We want to be aware of the times and incongruencies that may exist between the authors own times and Hamilton’s in the context of sentiments, values, and experiences. We may be able to discern any such differences by reading and comparing many writers over time and looking for ‘history in motion’ or variances in interpretation depending on the prevailing ‘public climate’ or thinking of the day.
The Aristocratic View
One view is Hamilton suggested policies that clearly benefitted the Aristocrats that were in his sphere of friends and contemporaries. Due to the life that Hamilton led, he was acquainted with, in various capacities; student, soldier, lawyer, legislator, administrator, any number of important, rich, influential people who had the potential to benefit from almost anything he would do or propose to do. Many of the things he did throughout his life, consequential things, yielded such benefits. This fact leads some to conclude that his main motives were to enrich the elite class who had the wherewithal to afford to speculate in either land or securities.
This Aristocratic view will come from the writings of Joseph Charles, specifically his book The Origins of the American Party System. Charles posits the argument that follows; “but from the point of view of the creation and strengthening of a moneyed interest, his whole plan was flawless both in conception and execution.” In Charles’ view, Hamilton is promoting policies that would help his allies and benefactors, the monied class, at the expense of the regular people.[12] Charles Beard in his 1915 book Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy, another imminent progressive historian of the period, supplied drive to this ‘aristocratic’ view in this and many of his other works.[13] Beard focused on Hamilton’s supporters in his contention that since many of these men engaged in speculation and investment, Hamilton must have been protecting their interests when he proposed the policies he pursued as Treasury Secretary. Beard makes Charles’ point regarding the benefit of Hamilton’s policies to the monied class a half century earlier. Charles believes that despite Hamilton himself having little to gain from his policies, he nonetheless made sure benefit would accrue to the very men who could ensure his power and prestige in government.[14] It follows; Hamilton prized power above riches in this scheme and so would forgo the fortunes that he could have otherwise amassed had he inclination to do so.
Others inspired by Beard’s works were Henry Bamford Parkes and Claude Bowers. Although not as analytical as Beard, Bowers takes a similar position behind the fact that some of Hamilton’s supporters engaged in speculative actions and benefited from Hamilton’s policy suggestions and therefore the purpose must have been to enrich those elites who supported him. Even worse than benefiting the elites, writes Bowers, such policies exploited the ordinary people:
The Common soldier had not profited by these policies. The farmer and mechanic could see no benefit to themselves, but among speculators, some of them members of Congress, they observed evidence of new-found wealth. These men were building better houses, riding in coaches where they previously had walked and there was an ominous rumbling and grumbling beneath the surface, to which the Hamiltonians were oblivious and indifferent. After all, this was merely the wining of the ne’er do wells in the taverns and illiterates of the farms.[15]
The progressives such as Bowers and Beard of the first quarter of the twentieth century were not necessarily interested in historical objectivity. They saw a world in which the elites kept a boot on the necks of the ordinary man. Although Parkes agrees with Bowers, Beard, and Charles, he is less critical of Hamilton’s motives. Hamilton was simply misguided in his economic theories that believed by strengthening the elites he was “making America into an orderly, disciplined, hard-working, and wealthy nation.” [16] At some level, the Aristocratic school progressives are the same as progressives today in believing “trickle-down economics” in the capitalist world never quite reaches the working class.
The Mercantilist View
Another view is that Hamilton was something of a British system sycophant and that his policies were designed to align the United States as closely as possible to British interests. The Mercantilist view can be seen from Russel Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, Bradley Birzer in Recovering the Conservative Mind as well as Vernon Parrington in Main Currents in American Thought. These and others believed Hamilton to have leanings toward imperialism. His defenses of the loyalists in court after the Revolutionary War seemed to pit him against the general tide of public sentiment while painting him a sympathizer with British interests. This coupled with his ‘strong government’ views in the constitutional convention and then laid alongside his efforts as Secretary of the Treasury all pointed these historians to an inescapable finding of British Imperial tendencies (Mercantilism). Parrington believed Hamilton to be a Machiavellian operative steeped in the fascination for and of big government. The machinations brought “…wealth that would accrue from buying toll in the weak and helpless.”[17]
Kirk primarily discounts Hamilton’s financial genius and acumen. He believes Hamilton to be stuck in outdated and antiquated economic notions that includes 17th century principles of ‘Balance of Trade’ outdated mercantilism. He ignores Hamilton’s conservative credentials in favor of a failure to see the result of the policies and institutions Hamilton created that operate today in the conservative tradition.[18] Kirk alternatively determines “indeed Hamilton was contemplating not so much the creation of a new industrial system as the reproduction of a European economic system …”[19] Kirk also sees Hamilton as naïve and a pretend Conservative. His policies were reactionary in a search to fill a void in a new system of government. Kirk believes Hamilton to be rooted in a 17th century view of economics based on the mercantile “balance of trade” system.[20] British Imperialism was the root of Hamilton’s thinking according to Kirk. We find little time devoted by Kirk to an examination of the detail of Hamilton’s plans, yet he believes Hamilton to be a British sycophant intent on modeling the new American Government on that outdated Imperialistic system.
Another more contemporary writer, Larry White, in an article “Alexander Hamilton, Banking Mercantilist” states, “Hamilton’s ‘masterpiece’ was oblivious to the benefits of competition in banking, much less the separation of banking and state. In his banking policy views, as in his tariff policy views, Hamilton was a retrograde mercantilist.”[21] White is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and professor of economics at George Mason University since 2009. An expert on banking and monetary policy, he decries Hamilton for making the National Bank of the US a monopoly bank rather than allowing free competition in the banking industry. His criticism does not credit the fact that States were chartering private banks at the same time as Hamilton was opening the Bank of the United States. The fact that States denied entry to banks with charters from other states seems to be the central point of divergence between White and Hamilton on the issue. Although it appears that State Chartered Private Banks provided a competitive force in the Banking industry, White persists in his criticism of Hamilton as a “retrograde mercantilist”.
The Nationalist View
A third view would posit Hamilton as a dedicated Nationalist, this is to say that Hamilton’s policies were designed to the benefit of all and would extend to everyone who was able to avail themselves of any type of productive employment. In this view Hamilton was able to rise above the regional and fractional anti-federalist views of his cohort in government. We have seen in the previous historiographical approaches Hamilton is pictured as the spokesman for the monied classes or as the defender of British-like imperial policy. This Nationalist view says Hamilton was neither. He rang true as the unifier of the people through a sound and strong central government, cementing the foundations of a new world order. Louis Hacker articulates in Alexander Hamilton in the American Tradition:
Hamilton concerned himself with Banking for the same reasons that he endlessly devoted himself to the matter of public credit: both would make his country secure and prosperous. He was constantly weaving together in an intricate and seamless fabric public policy and private striving, the good of the whole community and the benefits accruing from enterprise.[22]
Hacker further takes issue with historians that cannot see that Hamilton understood that there are “a hundred and one different places” where fiscal policy is linked to a secure government and a robust economy.[23] Hacker suggests that Hamilton is “no mercantilist with an erroneous understanding of the roles of Gold and Silver… the intrinsic wealth of a nation is to be measured not by the abundance of precious metals contained in it but by the quantity of the productions of its labor and industry…”[24]
This Nationalist view seems to have the greatest number of adherents among professional historians. Louis Hacker, John C. Miller, Clinton Rossiter, Forrest McDonald, are all in the Nationalist Camp. These vaunted historians have taken different approaches to come to the same conclusion. Some have written extensively about and against the other historiographical viewpoints and historians showing where they erred in their opinions. For instance, Forrest McDonald has written in his book We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, that he used Beard’s own words about his 1913 work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, against him as Beard had admitted that his work was “frankly fragmentary”, and he left it for later students to fill in the details.[25] McDonald did just that in a devastating attack on Beard’s work proving in the minds of many reviewers that the Aristocratic view was not valid.
John C. Miller in both The Federalist Era and Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox imbues Hamilton with the qualities of a vigorous and creative statesman whose policies and leadership enabled the American Government to achieve national union and economic security within a few years of the framing of the Constitution. In his works he lists Hamilton’s primary accomplishments between 1789 and 1792.[26] These accomplishments were such major objectives that Hamilton was able to use them in conjunction with the national debt as “a sword with which to vanquish the States”[27] Vanquish in this sense means to have wrested the power of the purse from them on both raising tax revenue as well as paying the national debt and to cede the dominant authority on these matters to the central government henceforth.
Broadus Mitchell in Alexander Hamilton: The National Adventure Takes a similar Nationalist approach. He takes issue with Charles specifically by questioning how Charles took the measure of Hamilton’s policies. After the Constitution was adopted it was left to the first session of Congress to enact instruments to make the Constitution a reality. For this they turned almost exclusively to the first Secretary of the Treasury.[28] Hamilton was the first Secretary therefore his ideas were considered by the Executive to be those most on point for the task at hand. It had little to do with Hamilton’s personal relationships with elites and financiers but was more driven by what he believed would work in the current circumstance to stabilize the credit and good faith of the fledgling government while providing for the massive debt that had been undertaken by the States and expended by the War effort. Hamilton had to think in terms of the public good. While most others were dealing in theory and abstraction, Hamilton dealt in concrete plans, actions, and administration. Real financial issues that would otherwise prove fatal to the Union must be solved.
Clinton Rossiter’s work discusses critically the period of the forming of the Constitution and Hamilton’s role. It ties this early period with the later implementation of government where Hamilton argues and plans for a broad interpretation of key parts of the Constitution that allow the government to take advantage of ideas put forth by Hamilton. Assumption of State debt struck a blow for the broad Nationalistic, consolidating view of the Constitution.[29] Rossiter points out that The Bank Report spoke directly to the ‘implied powers’ interpretation receiving judicial sanction from Justice Marshall in the celebrated McCullough vs. Maryland decision. Hamilton relied on the ‘general welfare clause’ in his Report on Manufactures to ensure that the government could stimulate commerce and industry through bounties, tariffs, and subsidies.[30] In all his work Hamilton was simply finishing what he had started at the convention of 1787. He had in mind a strong central government that could withstand the rigors of the times and thrive in the world that existed across the Atlantic.
The Selfless Citizen
Henry Cabot Lodge, James Bryce, Tallyrand, Lord Acton, MacMaster and Hoist, all these men, place Hamilton in the category of Financial Genius who had no motive save the implementation, of what to his belief, was the most sound and meaningful course of action, providing for the most accommodating and enduring central government possible for himself and his fellow citizens. Hamilton was born for this time and place. From the beginning he wanted to be the person to make things happen. He obviously did not do it for money as he died in debt. He obviously did not do it to impress his elite and wealthy friends for he ended up alienating many when he stood against Adams in 1800 and others earlier when land speculators were bankrupted by his policies. He was not in the pocket of British merchants trying to recreate the Monarchy in America for he was realistic about the value accommodating terms in peace time would bring to the US in trade.
One thing many Hamilton critics seem to gloss over is the fact that Hamilton as our first Secretary of the Treasury was given the Constitution and little more. He was responsible to create the machinery of state that would allow the Constitution to operate. In many instances the Constitution was vague and uninterpreted in its infancy. The States had been strong up to this point and Hamilton was removing the power from the States and investing those powers in the Federal Government through invention and administration of the machinery of the national government. Even in the face of such incredible and daunting tasks that ultimately provided definition to many of the ill-defined clauses in the Constitution, many were not willing to credit Hamilton with a more benign motive like Nationalism or belief in the natural goodness of Humanity and Democracy.
Hamilton’s reputation is tied to the various historiographical portrayals and waxes and wanes according to the treatment afforded him in each. With so much source material both primary and secondary about the topic it is virtually impossible to make an adequate survey to definitively mark Hamilton one or the other. We are back where we started with Douglas Ambrose; the choices are stark: villain or hero, genius or buffoon, scoundrel or saint. Obviously in the final analysis the answer is complex and requires a great deal of knowledge and research to understand and form a just opinion free of bias, anachronism, and sentiment. Some historians believe that triangulating in on a solution that eliminates the sources without broad support from other historians while pursuing diversified sources interpreting similar facts will yield a satisfactory answer. In this case there is overwhelming primary source material that one can access to hear exactly what Hamilton thought and felt about the topic at hand while acknowledging other historian’s thinking about events considering this great volume of primary evidence. In my view, Hamilton was a Nationalist Selfless Citizen. His work has stood the test of time. His status as a Founding Father is not in dispute. I would rank Hamilton next to Washington in importance and value of contribution to the Constitution and the founding of the United States of America.
Bibliography
Ambrose, Douglas. “Introduction: The Life and Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton,” in D. Ambrose and R.W.T. Martin, eds., The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Elusive Founding Father. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Beard, Charles A. Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915.
Birzer, Bradley J. “Recovering the Conservative Mind.” In Russell Kirk: American Conservative, 89-124. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.
Bowers, Claude G. Jefferson and Hamilton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925.
Charles, Joseph. “Hamilton and Washington: The Origins of the American Party System.” The William and Mary Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1955): 217-67.
Charles, Joseph. The Origins of the American Party System. Williamsburg: The Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1956.
Charles, Joseph. “The Jay Treaty: The Origins of the American Party System.” The William and Mary Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1955): 581-630.
Cooke Jacob E. (ed.), The Reports of Alexander Hamilton. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
Dorfman, Joseph. The Economic Mind in American Civilization: 1606-1865. United States: A. M. Kelley, 1966.
Dorfman, Joseph and R. G. Tugwell. Early American Policy: Six Columbia Contributors. New York: Columbia University Press, 1960.
Hacker, Louis M. Alexander Hamilton in the American Tradition. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957.
Kirk, Russell. The Conservative Mind. London: Faber & Faber, 1954
Lodge, Henry Cabot. Alexander Hamilton. Boston, 1896.
McDonald, Forrest. We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958
Miller, John Chester. The Federalist Era, 1789-1801. United Kingdom: Harper & Row, 1963.
Miller, John Chester. Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox. United States: Harper & Row, 1959.
Mitchell, Broadus. Alexander Hamilton: The National Adventure, 1789-1801. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962.
Moramarco, Fred. “Hamilton and the Historians: The Economic Program in Retrospect.” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 8, no. 1 (1967): 34-43. Accessed October 26, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40640678.
Nettles, Curtis. The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775-1815. New York: Holt Reinhart, 1962.
Oliver, F. S. Alexander Hamilton. London: Allen and Unwin, 1921.
Parkes, Henry Bamford. The American Experience. New York: Random House, 1959.
Parrington, Vernon L. “Main Currents in American Thought”, Vol. I: The Colonial Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954.
Rossiter, Clinton. Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution. United States: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964.
White, Lawrence A., “Alexander Hamilton, Banking Mercantilist”, Alt-M: Ideas for an Alternate Monetary Future, February 22, 2019, accessed December 15, 2020, Friday Flashback: Alexander Hamilton, Banking Mercantilist – Alt-M (alt-m.org)
[1] Douglas Ambrose, “Introduction: The Life and Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton,” in D. Ambrose and R.W.T. Martin, eds., The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Elusive Founding Father (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1-22.
[2] Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography, New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1982, 141
[3] Ibid, 142
[4] McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 148
[5] Ibid., 149
[6] Ibid., 152
[7] Ibid., 161
[8] McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 153-161
[9] Ibid., 171
[10] Ibid., 163-186
[11] McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 171
[12] Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (New York, 1961), 30.
[13] Charles Beard, Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1915) 1-41
[14] Charles, The Origins, 30
[15] Claude G. Bowers, Jefferson and Hamilton (Boston, 1925), 69-70
[16] Henry Bamford Parkes, The American Experience (New York, 1959), 145
[17] Vernon L. Parrington, “Main Currents in American Thought”, Vol. I: The Colonial Mind (New York, 1954), 311.
[18] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago, 1953), 69-70
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid., 70
[21] Larry White, “Alexander Hamilton, Banking Mercantilist”, Alt-M: Ideas for an Alternate Monetary Future, February 22, 2019, accessed December 15, 2020, Friday Flashback: Alexander Hamilton, Banking Mercantilist – Alt-M (alt-m.org)
[22] Louis M. Hacker, Alexander Hamilton in the American Tradition (New York, 1957), 148
[23] Ibid, 162
[24] Hacker, Alexander Hamilton, 152
[25] Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958), xvi
[26] John C. Miller, The Federalist Era; 1789-1801 (New York, 1963), 68-69
[27] John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (New York, 1959), 231
[28] Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: The National Adventure, 1789-1801 (New York, 1962), 107
[29] Clinton Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution (New York, 1964), 77
[30] Rossiter, Alexander Hamilton, 77-79
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