#1580 Ten Things about the Hamilton-Jefferson Relationship

Jefferson was certainly born in 1743, Hamilton died in July 1804. Jefferson lived all the way to 1826.

Jefferson was not the last of the founders that would have been James Madison, but he was there for a long period. Lived 83 years and was able to shape the history and the discourse of the early national period in a way that most of his adversaries and friends were not able to do so. It's a fascinating subject, we talk about a whole range of issues today. Number one, the Bank Bill in 1791, where Hamilton got the National Bank of the United States against the objections of the strict constructionist Thomas Jefferson.

Number two, the Mariah Reynolds sex scandal and Jefferson's complicity in the leaking of that to the public. We did not really talk about Hamilton's collaboration with Madison, but it sort of came up implicitly a couple of times. Hamilton's anxiety about his illegitimate birth He was born illegitimate in the Caribbean, and it kind of haunted him, more him than I think others. But it was used against him, and sometimes even by the Jeffersonians, Jefferson's and Hamilton's competition. For the love and support of the great Father. George Washington You know, Washington had no sons. Both Hamilton and Jefferson had no fathers by the time they met in the Cabinet of the United States in 1790..

Their behavior in the cabinet, Jefferson went on to say that they fought like two cocks, two roosters in the cabinet. What that was like? And Lindsay is the world's expert on that subject from her book On the Cabinet. Hamilton's role in the election of 1800, where he sort of wound up supporting Jefferson in the contested election with Burr. Not because he particularly admired Jefferson, but he certainly didn't admire Aaron Burr. The famous duel and Jefferson's very detached response to all of that. In the only letter he ever wrote about it, a letter to his daughter Martha. The famous dinner party that Jefferson hosted when he just got back from France. To determine whether the funding bill would pass and whether the national capital could be sited in the Upper south on the Potomac, that famous compromise occurred at a Jeffersonian dinner party, we think.

And then, of course, slavery, which always comes up. Hamilton was a principled antagonist to slavery, was part of the New York Manumission Society. Jefferson was all over the map.

Of slavery. But it's not really what you say in the end, it's what you're able to do. And Jefferson was able to do almost nothing anyway. It's always great to talk to Lindsay, She's really added a lot to my life in both ways. She's a serious Jefferson detractor, I would say, or she probably would object to that.

She puts Jefferson in his place, There's more balance in her view than most Jefferson people allow. But she also is very, very well read and smart and insightful, and she's taught me a lot. I'm really glad to have this relationship with her.

We've never been in the same room together, but she's now a central figure in my life and the collaboration has been terrific. When I travel, people say, Oh man, do we love when Lindsay gives it to you? But they also say we love it when Catherine gives it to you. And they also say we loved it when Swenson gives it to you.

So I guess there's a I don't know if there's a common theme there or not, anyway. Everybody. It was an amazing time in my life. I'm teaching an online course at the moment about Books of the Road, my next online course. And you can find out all about this at ltamerica..org. Will be on Religion in the space program. Strange spiritual things happened in the space program. The most famous of which is the reading of the first ten verses of the Book of Genesis from Lunar Orbit on Christmas Eve, 1960..

I can remember that as if it were yesterday, but more. For example, Edgar Mitchell in Apollo 14 conducted ESP experiments from lunar orbit. People back home holding up cards and vice versa. And many of the well, some of the astronauts who went to the moon came back and became evangelical preachers. And so it had an effect. You know, this is Newtonian science.

These are engineers who have been trained in just the facts, just the data, just the readout of the dials. But you can't go to space without at least having the opportunity to open yourself spiritually to what that must mean. And then there's something called the overview effect. It has to do with the famous photograph from Apollo 8 Earthrise, where we see the Earth rising above the horizon on the moon. And one of the most important photographs ever taken. And this leads to something called the overview effect, which argues that once you've seen the whole world at once. So you don't if you're in the space station, because you just see a continent here and an ocean there.

But once you see the whole world in a single glance, the theory is you never really look at anything the same way. After that, this changes some fundamental thing in your consciousness. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm fascinated by it. So that's coming in the spring. The Religion and the space program, one of my very favorite subjects.

You know, when I was young, I barely remember mercury, I certainly remember genesis. In our schools in western North Dakota, they would roll in television on a cart to watch some of the launches of that. And I remember where I was when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon.

And I remember Ed White's Spacewalk, and I remember many of the most important moments in all of this. Apollo 13. Although I think the film has probably taken over our actual memories of that event, so that's. It's something that I find fascinating. And I guess what I want to say is how lucky I think I am, and I'm so lucky in having all of you. Because I get to range over the map. Whether it's Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, or Virgil's Aeneid or St.

Augustine's Confessions, or the Letters of Erasmus of Rotterdam, or Shakespeare's Plays, or John Donne's Holy Sonnets and Sermons, or Milton's Paradise Lost, or Moby Dick, or Henry David Thoreau. Or Religion and the Space Program. Or the Life and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, or the explorations of Lewis and Clark. And John Wesley Powell and Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of the seekers for The Source of the Nile. I've been very, very fortunate this. Last week, I gave a two-hour Smithsonian talk on Eliot's The Wasteland. Before that, I had talked about Gulliver's travels or whether Huckleberry Finn can survive the 219 instances of the n-word in it.

I'm going to be doing a retreat at Loxah Lodge on Moby Dick and the Epic of Gilgamesh here shortly. And another round, this time in Los Alamos, about J. Robert Oppenheimer. It's just a lovely thing. It's exhausting. I am a little exhausted right now because I've been.

Burning the candle at four or five ends here lately, but what a thing. And then also Books of the road. I've reread On the Road a couple of times in the last month, and now I'm rereading Travel to Charlie for the ninth or tenth time. I'm also reading a book I read first in college, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance. Which is not holding up quite as well as I would hope. But they're book after book after book, on the subject of the life on the road, beginning with Marco Polo and coming all the way to contemporary times. So I love what I get to do and I love it that you're part of it. And I hope you will continue to tell your friends fund us if you can, so on and so forth.

But this is, in many respects, the golden time of my life. And I've been realizing that it's so much about you, that I'm not talking into empty space here. That there are people all over the country, to a certain degree outside of the country, who take some satisfaction and solace in having a weekly conversation in full sentences, a weekly conversation that attempts to be centrist and attempts to be evidence-based, and attempts to be wry and at times funny. This is what I've dreamed my life would be. I wish the megaphone were a little bigger, but not too much. And now, next year, I get to go see what John Steinbeck called this monster country. So thanks to all of you, happy holidays to all of you.

I look forward to a spectacular 2024 and I can't imagine doing it without you there to help. Thank you.

Hello everyone and welcome to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. And across from me today is my friend Dr. Lindsay Juravinski. Today, 10 things about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Welcome Lindsay, and you have a book coming out in 2024.?

I'm not sure that's true. I think that the better debate is really between Adams and Jefferson, because they both wanted a republic. But they had very different ideas of how to make that work. Certainly, I think the.

And, in fact, most federalists were much more moderate and agreed with Adams, and were more amenable to Jefferson than their antagonism would suggest. Jefferson surprised them a little when he turned.

And Madison and Hamilton had been very close cronies up until this point. They had worked together to try and get the Annapolis Convention going. That didn't work. They had worked together to try and revise the articles of Confederation, that didn't work.

And they worked together when they both initially got to the convention. So what happened when Hamilton gave the speech? First of all? It was so darn long that by the time he was done, everyone was like, Okay, I think we're just going to go home today. And then when they came back the next day. Madison put forth what was quite a departure from what they had been discussing as a proposal. But seemed unbelievably moderate in comparison to Hamilton's outlandish five-hour strategy. And so I can't help but wonder, and I don't really have concrete evidence for this. Because they really didn't keep a lot of records at this moment. But I can't help but wonder if they hadn't sort of planned that in some way.

And so, certainly, Hamilton thought there was no reason that Washington shouldn't serve for life, which would have been, you know, president, essentially for the rest of his life. But I'm not sure he.

It was a trial balloon. He was trying to get them to move a little bit to the right and so he said something far right. And then the compromise would be much more moderate, but it would still fulfill something of his vision that he didn't really mean what he said when he said. Governors to serve for life, and president to serve for life, and governors to be appointed by the national executive. That we need to see this as just a gambit, really.

I mean, come on, if this were Jefferson and the situation were reversed, you would say it's important to take people at their word. Well, I do believe in taking people at the word.

I would never disagree with that. The reason I hesitate is. He then became such an ardent supporter of the Constitution with the federalist papers, and such an ardent supporter of the Constitution. Once it was in practice, if it was really that far of a departure from what he had envisioned, I don't know that you would see that sort of support, of course, we'll never know, because unless someone has a treasure trove of documents hiding in their attic, which I suppose is in theory, possible. Any partnership they may or may not have at that point is sort of lost to the.

It was just almost sort of mentally tabled, as that's interesting, but now let's write a Constitution. I've always felt that he meant it, you know, the last things that he ever said, really on earth, were that the constitution was a shilly-shally thing, a thing of milk and water that he had more than anybody. He had given his life to trying to support the fabric of the thing, even though it wasn't in any way ideal. So we don't know, right? And he died young and he didn't have a chance.

He died, what? at 47?

He didn't have a chance to revise his views later in life as some of the others did. But this comes to one of our lists, so let me just give the list. Hamilton's bank Bill. That's in the administration of George Washington, when Jefferson and Hamilton crossed swords in a constitutional way.

The famous Mariah Reynolds story and Jefferson's involvement, or Jefferson's cronies involvement in that scandal, Hamilton's collaboration with Madison, you touched on it? They were very thick during the period leading up to the ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton's illegitimate birth and how that dogged him through life, Jefferson's and Hamilton's competition for the support and affection of the father figure. George Washington, the two of them in the Cabinet of Washington. The contested election of 1800 and Hamilton's amazing role there, the duel, of course, in 1804, and the famous dinner that Jefferson set up on behalf of Madison and Hamilton. When they settled on the national funding proposal. And the new capital of the United States, and, of course, inevitably, slavery.

So let me start with this famous dinner party. Jefferson has been in Europe for five years. He's literally out of touch. I don't think he realizes that there's been a kind of conservative reaction to the revolution that people are rethinking. Some of the more idealistic and utopian things that were circulating during the first months, some of the more radical and utopian things that were circulating early on after the revolutionary moment began. When Jefferson comes back, he's the secretary of State, Hamilton's the secretary of the Treasury.

There are only four members of the Cabinet. Hamilton is trying to get the country to get on a firm fiscal footing. And so he decides that the national government should absorb not only the national debt and pay it off, of course, but it should absorb the state debts, too. Because this would not only make things a lot faster and more efficient, and improve the credit rating of the U.S. But it would link, it, would tie the states more fully to the new experiment, the new national government. Jefferson hosts the pretending that he's completely neutral in all of this, he's just a man with great wines and good cuisine. And during that famous dinner, they hammer out a compromise that Madison will make sure that the funding bill passes the next time it goes through Congress.

But in return, Hamilton will get the New Englanders and the Federalists to accept the idea of a national capital in the Upper South on the Potomac. Is that fair analysis? Well, it is certainly the story that Jefferson.

The only documentation we have of this dinner is a description that Jefferson wrote many years later. And we know that sometimes his later recollections were crafted with a particular intention in mind, and that intention was not always 100 accuracy. So certainly, there were two sides. There was an assumption bill that Hamilton wanted to get passed, but didn't have the votes.

Madison wanted the future capital to be in Virginia, but didn't have the votes. Out of some compromise, in some fashion, they both agree to swing support to the other. How that happens is not totally clear. We do believe that there was some form of dinner, whether that was when the details were hammered out, we don't know. But sort of the loose.

And he's walking up and down the street in New York. And Hamilton is disheveled, and he's nervous, and he's talking about resigning, and he looks melancholy and defeated. And Jefferson, they go arm in arm, says Jefferson, the way men sometimes did in that era.

And they stroll up and down the street in front of the President's House. And Hamilton said, It's all over. If we don't get this funding bill, it's all over, Jefferson said. At the time, I didn't really understand, I never really understood economics, but I agreed for the good of the country to call this dinner.

And the dinner then led to the great Compromise. So I don't know that that's necessarily 100 wrong, but I'm sure that Jefferson is making the best possible case for two things. Lindsay One is that Hamilton was at wit's end and ready to resign, which I doubt, and the other one is that Jefferson was completely blindsided by this. That he didn't really understand the economic thing that Hamilton was about to try to do to the country. And if he'd known more about the machinations and the centralization policies of Hamilton, he might have resisted.

Yeah, I mean, I think that even if.

And so he certainly understood the assumption piece when he sort of agreed to support it or to tacitly support it.

Wherever the Capitol was placed, that region was going to have an enormous amount of cultural and political and economic influence over that area. In terms of trade and everything else. And the third reason, of course, was slavery. Because if it was in an abolitionist state. It would make it harder for Southerners to bring their enslaved servants to that place, and would make it easier for those individuals to self-emancipate.

You're listening to a special edition of Listening to America.

Welcome back everyone. I'm talking with my friend Dr. Lindsay Sierpinski, who has a new book coming out this year in August. So we're all very, really happy to be, in some ways, observers of this process for you.

A great achievement. I can't wait to see the hatchet job you do on Mr. Jefferson in that, but leaving that alone for the moment, okay.

Slavery Tell me if I'm too cynical here, almost every proposition that the Southerners made from 1787 until well after the Civil War has to be read in part. With their protection of slavery. That slavery is the thing that they do not want, slavery to be meddled with, to go away, to be overregulated, to be overtaxed.

And that when we see something? And it looks like, where are you going to put the Capitol? Or it looks like what you're going to do about the Second Amendment? Or where it looks like states rights? Behind that kind of peeking to the surface, almost like a hidden iceberg, is enslavement. I don't know that I would say that.

Is the political heart. And it's almost impossible to explain how that that has shaped things, but it certainly has had a big impact on our identity and how we have evolved. It had a huge impact on the run-up to the Civil War and the evolution of race relations after the Civil War. Because there was always the question of what was D.C Was D.C. a slave state or a slave territory?

Was it a place where free African Americans could live and work and have their families? Could they vote there, could they own business there? As these questions began to be resolved? —so, for example, once slavery was abolished in Washington, D..C. it was just across the river from Alexandria, Virginia. Before it was abolished, it was one of the biggest slave trade locations. And that was obviously going to be incredibly awkward for Northerners who had abolitionist sentiment.

So I think that its location as really on the border of all of these issues. It just permeated the life of people who are both in D.

C.

But also Congress could never get away from it. Jefferson is a utopian, I think.

That has to be part of this story, right? That Jefferson is always thinking like this, Yeah, and I think there's actually.

There's real beauty and symbolism in that. He wanted the architecture to remind citizens of the values of a republic and why they were trying to do this thing. They wanted to have the city layout include a lot of green space so that people would have good quality of life. They wanted it to be well organized, to avoid some of the really poor housing conditions and sort of slum-like areas in a lot of older cities. And they wanted it to be inspiring to foreigners who visited to understand the project they were trying to create.

Those were all good goals, I don't object in any way to those goals. I think that they could have been created in a lot of different spaces, and so they didn't have to exist on the banks of Potomac.

But Jefferson then said in one of the letters to Washington, Here's a man from the moment that history can be said to have stooped to recognize him. I mean, that's clearly an attack on Hamilton's legitimacy. He's basically saying, he's not one of us. WASHINGTON Are you sure you want? Even he may have merit, but are we sure we want him to be central to the government of this country?

And his father died young, which meant that he didn't have the funds or the support to get formal education. And really had to figure out a way to support himself for a while. With through, I mean, again, through, sort of his own merit and as many connections as he could find, and he worked as a surveyor. As a result, Washington always had, I think, a lot of respect for self made men and an understanding of what it was. To have to be self-educated or to support yourself. While I think he always probably saw himself as Hamilton's better, I don't think he would have taken kindly to that type of argument.

Do you think, if Hamilton had been one of them, a Pennsylvania Grandee or a New York Grandee of some sort, that he would have fought a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804?

So the famous bank bill, all right, just to set it up. Hamilton, SECRETARy of Treasury, Jefferson The Secretary of state Jefferson regards Secretary of state as sort of prime minister, but Hamilton behaves as Treasury is prime minister. And he decides we need a national bank, that this is going to be so much easier. We have a clearing house and if we can amortize the debt through bank bills and so on. We need some currency to be traveling around the country, we're cash short. He realizes that the Constitution does not enumerate a national bank, but he believes that it is necessary and proper. It comes out of the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution.

The Constitution says, Look, we've made a list of all the things we think we should do. But other things that are necessary and proper to fulfill those goals have to be allowable, too. So Washington is, I think, instinctively Jeffersonian in this way, but he's practically Hamiltonian. And so he asked the principal members of his administration to weigh in. And Jefferson writes a totally brilliant statement, maybe the best statement ever, of limited constitution, strict construction and deference to states rights. Hamilton replies with an even more persuasive and brilliant argument, saying, Oh, come on. If we're going to be a great nation, we're going to have to have some flexibility in this thing. If we're really, we want to straitjacket ourselves every time we want to do something, we have to see. Oh, if it's not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, now we have to amend the Constitution.

That's a failure of any realism about what happens in a great nation state. And Washington then sides with Hamilton and we get the first National Bank of the United States. Jefferson never gets over that, although he learns to use it during his two terms as president. You know, my view is that Jefferson's argument is brilliant. It's great.

In some ways, I want to live in that nation. I don't particularly want to have a C.I.A. I don't particularly want a national security apparatus. I sort of like the idea that these small-R Republican utopians were trying to keep the lid on what can happen to a government. But Hamilton was right, you know?

Do we want to be a fourth or fifth-rank farmer's nation where nothing much happens? Is that your?

So first, we didn't have a federal reserve, we didn't have anything like that. And so when the United States needed money for something, whether it was to pay off existing debts or to create a navy, for example, they had to go to foreign nations to get loans. And depending on how the state of the international community was, or how the state of their loans were, the interest rates on those loans could be really, quite exorbitant. And so one of the ideas was, if you have a national bank, you can have a lot of people invest in it. And that will be a source of funds for the nation. If they need it to tap into a loan.

And that was something that was actually used quite effectively, so this seems like it makes a lot of sense to us. It was not revolutionary at the time because it was a model that was borrowed from Great Britain. Britain had a national bank, and it had enabled really the British Empire to be what it was. But it wasn't all that common.

Britain's version of it really was revolutionary and had been very unique when it first arrived on the international scene. Where I can't quite get a read on what happened was. Jefferson responded first. And it almost let me back up and say that it almost looks like Washington crafted this series of interactions to give him a reason to side with Hamilton. So they had discussed the National Bank.

He knew that Jefferson and Madison, who was still a close advisor and Randolph, were opposed to the National Bank. Randolph was the attorney general at the time. So he asked Jefferson to explain why he was opposed to it. And Jefferson, as you said, writes this lovely treatise. It's a couple pages, not too long, explaining his objections.

Washington then gave Hamilton Jefferson's argument and allowed him to write a very lengthy rebuttal. So he's setting Hamilton up to be able to address all of the weaknesses in Jefferson's argument, but does not give Jefferson that same opportunity, which is unusual for Washington. That's not his standard practice, and that implies to me that Washington understood that this might be unpopular, especially with a lot of his fellow Virginians. But he needed a reason to say yes.

I agree with.

So I think it's a form of great statesmanship on the part of George Washington. I'm sure Jefferson would not agree with this, but what delights me about this moment, Lindsay, is that. Both of these two ministers wrote papers that it'd be hard to think that any cabinet member in recent administrations could write this effectively, this thoughtfully, this intelligently about key issues.

And Washington doesn't have. He knows Washington, knows the world of Jefferson, he knows the Virginia aristocrats and how they operate, but he needs to get stuff done.

And the Cabinet meets, I think, 51 times in 1793, sometimes five times per week, up to several hours per day. Most of the meetings took place in the summer in Philadelphia without air conditioning. And when they were meeting at the President's House, they were meeting in Washington's private study. Which was about 15 by 21 feet and was jam smushed with furniture. So it would have been a very uncomfortable meeting space, and not a whole lot of room, and not a whole lot of personal space. What's really interesting about the documentation of the Cabinet? And thankfully, Hamilton and Jefferson both wrote their own versions of these meetings. And so you can kind of triangulate between the two of them. What probably happened.

But even taking Jefferson's with a bucket of salt, it's clear that Hamilton, as he was wont to do, would go on and on and on and on. And at times. Speak for 45 minutes uninterrupted in this room and probably gesticulated wildly, and maybe even paced. Because that's what he did when he got on the subject and felt passion for it. What I find most interesting is that Jefferson then gave back. So he didn't like engaging in these conversations, he didn't want to engage in these conversations, but he did anyway.

Now I don't think he was talking for 45 minutes at a time, uninterrupted, but he was definitely debating with Hamilton. And they were going back and forth and they were at it with each other at this point. In 1793, it was over Genet and France and the neutrality crisis, but they were really battling. And there's a reason he called the cabinet meetings cockfights. Which, by the way, I used once that quote as an article title, and it was one of my all-time favorite moments as a professional historian.

Yes, a journal article, let me do it. I was shocked, I was very pleased with myself, I was very happy anyway, so I think that vibe. It shows that Jefferson wanted to be above the fray and was happiest when he was above the fray. And obviously didn't like the conflict. But could get down dirty in the mud if he needed to.

And if you get it wrong, the rest of time is going to reflect that these things have to be laid down with great care. Jefferson wanted a minimalist government he sometimes called the national Government, the foreign department. He really believed the states were more competent and more legitimate to make these decisions.

He was always a Virginian first, I think that goes back to Hamilton's obscure beginnings. He was not attached to any one state in quite the same way that Jefferson and Madison were super attached to the destiny of their own Virginia.

Do you think this got heated? Do you think that tempers really flared in these conversations, or did they maintain a kind of a gentlemanly restraint?

So I think that it got hot and heated. Just like the cabinet, I'm sure, maybe not cabinet meetings today, but certainly the president loses his temper with advisers. I think that's a constant in American history because the decisions are so intense and the stakes are so high. And you're spending so many long hours working on these subjects and you lose your temper, I think, but that's just kind of how it goes.

Welcome back to the third segment of our program, Listening to America, this one on Hamilton and Jefferson. Lindsay. Cockpit You know, the British government had a room they called the cockpit. Dr. Franklin was dressed down in it in a really humiliating way once.

So I think Jefferson would say that he was fighting for the future of human liberty. I think that Hamilton would say something like, No. We're actually doing policy so that the nation can pay its bills, mind its business, have an army, you know, control its borders, and so on. I'm sure Hamilton was really annoyed by Jefferson's constant jumping up into the high minded area. Where it's always about some vision of America, rather than what are we going to do? About the fact that the British want to cross the country to fight with Spain on the West Coast?

One of the reasons their hatred for each other began to burn so hot is because. And this is one of the arguments that I make in the Cabinet is that they wouldn't have hated each other quite so much had they not spent so much time with one another. They began to think that the other was really a mortal threat to their vision for what the nation should be. And they wouldn't have had that conviction had not been in the cabinet together all of the time, that's really. One of the things that spurred them to try and take action against the other person is because they saw up close and personal the.

He writes a public letter about it. But the part that I'm interested in is Jefferson's complicity here. So Hamilton is thought by the Jeffersonians to be fiddling with funds and a cronyist and helping his buddies get insider trading tips and so on. That there's corruption at the heart of his work as the first secretary of the Treasury. We know this is almost certainly without any evidence at all that this is really not true. When the Reynolds story broke, Hamilton was confronted by James Monroe and a man named Venable.

And they came to say, Look, what's what's going on here? and tell me if I'm getting this wrong. But Hamilton said, Look, here's the deal. I mean, blackmail, this is a horrible thing.

I is not a public issue, it does not in any way color my work as the Secretary of Treasury. And as I understand it, Monroe and Venable said, Fine, we're gentlemen, we accept that.

End of story.

It was he actually showed them the documentation, they said that they accepted that documentation. They accepted what he his explanation. And that it would remain basically in the room. And they would let that issue die.

It nearly led to a duel. I think Jefferson knew about this within hours of Madison's knowing about it, Jefferson had to decide what to do about it. And he was probably torn because I do think that he would be willing to.

I don't think he would use this against Hamilton in a salacious way, but he also didn't discipline his troops very well either, and he wanted Hamilton damaged. And the story came out and it seems to me that if Jefferson had been stronger, this probably wouldn't have leaked.

Yeah, so we don't to be.

It was very clear that he was not interested in dueling with Hamilton, but they came close several times. And what ultimately led to the Reynolds pamphlet is Hamilton. Felt like he couldn't get any satisfaction, he couldn't get the Jeffersonians to retract this allegation. And so he felt like he had to explain where the money had gone. And it made it in his hierarchy of embarrassments and honor, and slights to his honor.

It was better to cop to an affair and blackmail than it was to allow people to think that he had misused public funds.

But not otherwise. Really. A great moment.

Here, your man Hamilton winds up being a kind of a well, it goes both ways. When it became clear that the Jeffersonians had won in New York. Hamilton wrote that letter to Governor Jay, saying, Maybe we change the election procedures ex post facto. So things come out a little bit more to our liking, which sounds familiar, doesn't it? And John Jay did not reply. But he, there's a little note on the letter that we the document exists where he says it's not. No, this is not in my interest, this is not something that should happen.

So that's what's Hamilton in the worst possible light that he's essentially an election denier. On the other hand, when push came to shove in, the House of Representatives, and Jefferson and Burr were tied. And it didn't, no one knew how this impasse was going to be broken.

Hamilton was essentially the shadow president of the United States, and everyone turned to him. What's the right thing to do here? Should we just should we deny Jefferson the office? should we toy with a collapse of the country? And then, as you know, Hamilton said, No.

Jefferson is the better of the two we had. It's in our, it's in everyone's interest to make sure Burr is not the president of this country.

And Hamilton doesn't. I don't think he explicitly says, don't do that, but he shows he does not encourage it in any way. And at this point, his his influence had waned a little bit in the party. Because first he had done the Reynolds pamphlet, which was at the beginning of the Adams administration, and then he did the letter to John Adams. And by then, people are thinking like, this dude's a little nuts and like, can't, can't keep his? yeah, can't keep his mouth shut. And one of the things that people said is that, you know. In the letter, he accused John Adams of unforgivable vanity.

And most people concluded after that letter that Hamilton had unforgivable vanity, and so it really backfired on him. But he still did have a lot of influence with this core of what was called the Essex June Joe, and was the the core of the most extreme federalists that were. Most of them had been born in Essex County, Massachusetts, they were allied with people in Connecticut, et cetera, et cetera. And so Hamilton doesn't exactly throw cold water on this plan, but he doesn't encourage it. And then the federalists decide they're going to try and push Burr into the presidency. Because if they helped him, he would need to appoint some of them, and he might be more amenable to some of their measures.

He might be easier to work with. And they hated Jefferson, they just despised him, and he was not. Hamilton was instrumental, I think in a couple of ways. He didn't necessarily convince a lot of people to support Jefferson, but he convinced an important number of people not to support Burr.

So John Marshall was one of the key people that he wrote to, and Marshall basically says, I can't support Jefferson, but I won't support Burr. And sometimes that's enough, sometimes it's enough just to urge people to have restraint. And so I think that in this case, he is one of the people who shows sort of just enough civic virtue of putting the good of the country. Of their own political interests and their own partisan needs at the moment, at the last moment. And it sort of redeems them for some of their.

And he's an intellectual voluptuary, and he gives this litany of reasons to really dislike and distrust Thomas Jefferson. And then he says, But better.

He's a Southern slaveholder, he tilts towards France, whereas Burr, Who knows what Burr is? So let me ask you that question What if Burr had been the third president of the United States? would it really have been a disaster?

I mean, why? I mean, Burr knew how to do these things. When he presided over the Samuel Chase impeachment hearing, everyone on both parties thought he did a superb job, that he couldn't have done it better.

I don't think Burr's going to.

So I think there's so what I guess I want to say is that Hamilton had a special, deep, fundamental distaste for.

And sometimes the people that you know best and have fought against the most personally are the ones that you hate the most. I think that was certainly true for them.

He admired the ability to organize and to get people motivated and to work towards a long-term goal. He certainly admired Jefferson's ability to write and his rhetoric, and his ability to think big thoughts, even if he often disagreed with them. And there were moments when Jefferson was secretary of state, when he was an ardent defender of executive power on behalf of George Washington. And I think there were times that Hamilton understood that if he could get Jefferson to make an argument coming from him, it would be more powerful than coming from Hamilton.

He admired economic industry, he admired military bravery, he admired shipbuilders and explorers, and things that required a certain amount of, I think, physical bravery. He admired, I think, less people who were philosophers and thought in theoretical ways. Which is interesting because, of course, Hamilton was able to produce these incredible things and produce such a great, at least, volume of words. But I think that he generally had less time for men, who spent a lot of their time in mental capacity as opposed to physical.

What do you think? I think that's probably right.

I think they all got that, but that didn't necessarily work for them. But I think they all understood that they were in the presence of a truly remarkable other human being. But maybe not one fitted to be a statesman in a political system, well, if he had been less remarkable.

That's a very interesting question. I didn't say the one you have to date, this is dinner, this is just dinner, I don't know.

He would get such different things from them. I think, honestly, if I were to have a conversation with Jefferson, obviously he could have talked about so many different things. And we share a lot of the same interests. But I wonder if I would come away feeling like we had actually had a deep, meaningful conversation. I wonder how many people actually felt that they had a deep, meaningful conversation with him. He was so good at the mask. Whereas with Hamilton, even if he would have ranted and raved and mansplained over everything I said, which he probably would have, you at least would have known that he was probably being.

If you went with Jefferson, I promise you a the wines would be outstanding. That's true. That's a really excellent point, and you would come away thinking that Jefferson thought you were the most interesting person in the room. That's true.