From Forrest McDonald’s Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (1982 paperback edition, p. 359), writing about the attempt by the New England Federalists to secede from the union after Jefferson’s election in 1800:
“Northern Federalists, convinced that Jefferson and the Republicans would destroy everything they held dear, had regarded the Louisiana Purchase as the last straw: it fundamentally altered the constitutional compact . . . . Under the leadership of [U.S. Senator from Massachussetts] Timothy Pickering, New England Federalists decided that the only way to save the Union was to leave it — to secede and form a separate country of which New York would become a part.”
Note that the man who has been described as America’s greatest historian of the Constitution calls it a voluntary compact between the states, and correctly notes that any state that voluntarily entered the compact was assumed to be entitled to leave on its own volition as well. He praises the New England Federalists here, since he is a Hamilton worshipper and a Jefferson hater. Separating from the Jeffersonians of the South would have been a good thing to do, McDonald suggests, and it would have been a right that was assumed by everyone at the time to be enjoyed by the citizens of all the states.
The New Enlanders debated secession for more than a decade and eventually decided against it for practical political and economic reasons. But Forrest McDonald’s beloved Hamiltonians, champions of protectionism, central banking, corporate welfare, and a monopolistic or “consolidated” central government, finally won out in the end. As he writes (approvingly) on page 362: “The Civil War brought the triumph of the Hamiltonian way, leaving Jefferson’s beloved South a wretched and accursed backwater. The rest of the nation moved on toward greatness.” (Yeah, like the “greatness” of the Spanish-American War, our stupid and diabolical entry into World War I, the Great Depression, which was caused by Hamilton’s beloved central bank, and WW II). Great.
Like all other totalitarian regimes the Republican Party, run by the New England Yankee ideologues, made sure that a massive re-education campaign and the rewriting of history would take place. As McDonald describes it — again, very approvingly: “[Hamilton] got his just deserts because most of american history was written by New England Yankees who . .. almost uniformly idoloized him.”
Gee, I wonder if this generational brainwashing has anything to do with the reasons why so many Americans — even many self-described libertarians — are so ignorant of the Jeffersonian, states’ rights tradition of limited, decentralized government, and its opposition to central banking, promotion of free trade, and deep suspicion of governmental activism in general? Just a thought.
9:35 am on December 7, 2005
