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A Biography of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)


Junior Propagandist for the Revolution (1774)


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"A Westchester Farmer," later identified as the loyalist Reverend Samuel Seabury--not a farmer at all--wrote a series of newspaper editorials criticizing the Continental Congress's decision to wage economic warfare on England by refusing to import British goods. Seabury maintained England's right to tax her colonies, and, eerily foreshadowing arguments that would resurface at the inception of the federal government, contended that the actions of the continental congress were simply a mercantilist plot which would eventually impoverish agrarians. Seabury urged New York to consider her own local interests, and to stand aloof from the rebellion gripping New England. Hamilton wrote two pamphlets attacking Seabury: "A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress", and "The Farmer Refuted."

Although Hamilton's response was largely a textbook statement on natural rights and representational taxation, it was important in many other aspects. Here we can see the phenomenal scope of the nineteen year-old's primarily self-taught knowledge, drawing on the likes of Blackstone, Locke, Montesquieu, and contemporary revolutionary writers. Much more interestingly, we see a young Hamilton confronting deep-seated issues he was to revisit as a statesman some fifteen years later, such as the animosities between the growing merchant class and agrarian interests, the problems of union and centralized authority, and the independent New York political machine. Hamilton does not fault the British government for the impasse, but Parliament's deviation from the principles of law contained in the constitution. He stresses, however, that the colonies have the most important advantage, the fiscal one.

From "A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress":

"What then is the subject of our controversy with the mother country? It is this, whether we shall preserve that security to our lives and properties, which the law of nature, the genius of the British constitution, and our charters afford us; or whether we shall resign them into the hands of the British House of Commons, which is no more privileged to dispose of them than the Grand Mogul?"

" . . . we can have no resource but in a restriction of our trade, or in a resistance vi & armis. It is impossible to conceive any other alternative."

"The evils which may flow from the execution of our measures . . . are comparatively nothing. . . .Reason and experience teach us, that the consequences would be too fatal to Great Britain to admit of delay. . . .The experiment we have made heretofore, shews us of how much importance our commercial connexion is to her; and gives us the highest assurance to obtaining immediate redress by suspending it."

Hamilton urged New Yorkers to consider their position as a member of a coalition of states whose interests are one and the same:

"Will you follow [Seabury's] advices, disregard the authority of your congress, and bring ruin on yourselves and posterity? will you act in such a manner as to deserve the hatred and resentment of all the rest of America?"

By the time Hamilton wrote his second pamphlet, "The Farmer Refuted," the anonymous authors had found out the identity of the other. Seabury made sport of Hamilton's youth; and the plucky Hamilton, who made sure to polish his prose this time, criticized the Reverend's questionable use of religious arguments:

"As you, sometimes, swear by him that made you, I conclude your sentiment does not correspond with his, in that which is the basis of the doctrine, you both agree in; and this makes it impossible to imagine whence this congruity between you arises."

Hamilton reveals in his pseudonym of "A Friend to America" that he saw himself as an outsider in the society he was urging to unite in opposition to the tyranny of Parliament. As an immigrant with no sectional or state ties, he was able to envision more clearly than most of his compatriots a unified America; but, to his disadvantage later in his career, often underestimated the power of those ties among rooted Americans.

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