Alexander Hamilton is well-remembered as a protagonist in America’s founding drama. He is celebrated widely as a war hero, foreign policy genius, architect of the economy, and framer of the Constitution. Even over the yawning distance of years, young Americans are inspired by the romance of his life. Conservatives and progressives alike claim his mantle to justify their pet projects. “There is an elegant memorial in Washington to Jefferson, but none to Hamilton,” columnist George F. Will once observed. “However, if you seek Hamilton’s monument, look around. You are living in it.” Though his Federalist Party failed, America became a deeply Hamiltonian country.
Among the most neglected aspects of his legacy, though, is his unflinching opposition to the radicalism of the French Revolution. Although many Americans in the Early Republic initially thought of the uprising as part of an expanding flame of liberty set alight on this side of the Atlantic, Hamilton quickly saw how its rising fire differed from his Founding. Unlike certain European reactionaries, however, he never wavered in his republicanism or commitment to natural rights. Indeed, his arguments from the 1790s show the conservative foundations of the American way of thinking about such concepts. Like his contemporary Edmund Burke or Alexis de Tocqueville a generation later, Hamilton believed that religion and self-government are mutually elevating principles necessary for a free and responsible society.
Many of the pamphlets in which he articulated this counter-revolutionary republicanism can be found in the late Northern Illinois University professor Morton J. Frisch’s Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton, recently rereleased by the American Enterprise Institute to honor the semiquincentennial anniversary of the independence for which Hamilton sacrificed so much. Featuring an insightful introduction by the editor as well as forewords from Gary J. Schmitt, Adam J. White, and William J. Baroody, the volume is a useful and affordable compilation of the New Yorker’s most important works. From Revolution-era pamphlets and The Federalist to state papers and late-career reflections, this collection demonstrates the consistent, conservative vision at the core of Hamilton’s politics.
Hamilton’s fullest articulation of the natural rights roots of his republicanism came in his 1775 pamphlet The Farmer Refuted, one of the earliest documents in Frisch’s collection. While still a student at what would become Columbia University, he launched himself headlong into the controversy over the Imperial Crisis, arguing forcefully against parliamentary policies being imposed on the American colonies. At the same time Burke advocated a similar position in the House of Commons, the New Yorker not only objected to them on practical grounds, but also because they violated what he considered to be the very moral basis of the British constitution.
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