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"I doubt whether we should have had
a real Union but for Hamilton; I think you must know
that Jefferson would never have given us one."
Letter from Horace Greeley to Henry Stephens Randall
Written in 1861, this letter from Horace Greeley to Henry
Stephens Randall emphasizes Alexander Hamilton’s role
in building a strong federal government and stable economy.
As the editor of the New York Tribune, Greeley controlled
the most influential Northern newspaper. He used his paper
to denounce the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Kansas-Nebraska
Act of 1854, and the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which illuminated
the erosion of the federal power that was taking place in
the 1850s.
Randall, a native of Cortland County in New York, is best
known for his tour-de-force three-volume biography The
Life of Thomas Jefferson, which was begun in 1853 and
finished in 1858. As an authorized biographer, Randall worked
at Monticello with the help of Jefferson’s descendents.
Randall’s work on Jefferson has been criticized for
its cumbersome prose, but has held up over time as a masterful
example of meticulous documentation.
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Office of The Tribune
New York, Nov. 20, 1861
Friend R.
I only acknowledge yours of the 18th inst at hand, to say that
I hope you understand me as thoughtful to you for your vindication
of Jefferson from the personal calumnies which had somewhat
blackened his reputation with the cultivated portion of mankind.
I do not suppose Mr. Jefferson, any more than other great men
of his time, was immaculate; but I rejoice to be assured that
he was in the best sense human I must always reverence and incline
to love the author of the declaration of Independence; and,
if you would let him have some venial faults, I think it would
be easier to love him.
I glory in him also as an instinctive and hearty champion of
Public Economy. We need such men in the [pg. 2] public councils
today, and are likely to need them. His gunboats were failures
but his opposition to the Navy was glorious, because founded
in a natural antipathy to saddling the support in luxury of
idlers on the producing classes.
In building up a government and Nation, I think him far behind
Hamilton, who was essentially an organizer, humanly, a creator.
I doubt whether we should have had a real Union but for Hamilton;
I think you must know that Jefferson would never have
given us one. Hamilton remaining in the convention of ’87
when both his colleagues had given it up as a bad job, is to
me one of the grandest figures in history – and the most
beneficent.. Hamilton’s proposal that the holders of public
[struck: securities] debts should be paid their face, seem to
me the simplest honesty combined with [pg. 3] the noblest and
most foreseeing policy; Jefferson’s opposition to it I
can reconcile with neither. I have a good many slow notes that
I should like to sell at from 10 to 40 per cent of their face;
if I had so sold them, and the makers should propose
to pay me half their debt and the other half to the buyers,
I should consider my personal integrity impeached by even entertaining
proposition. When I sell debt, though for one per cent of its
face; I sell all my interest in it: whatever is ever paid thereon
belongs of right to the buyer, and I am a swindler if I compel
him to share it with another.
Jefferson’s suggestion that one generation could contract
one debt that would be building on another was very wild: we
can only repudiate the debts imposed on us by former generations
by surrendering [pg. 4] whatever of possessions we inherit from
them. We cannot take the benefits and repudiate the burdens.
The assumption of State debts at the close of the Revolution
was eminently wise and right. They had been contracted to achieve
the liberties of the whole country, and the whole country ought
to pay for it. In short, what Jefferson so fiercely denounced
as Hamilton’s jobbing, peculating projects seem to me
so simply just and honest that I can hardly see how an honest
man could oppose them.
As to the Adamses, I cannot change my opinion of them. They
are a bad lot – conceited, cold-hearted, selfish and (on
occasion) treacherous. I have always supported those of them
who have lived in my day, for they have been on the right side;
but I have never coveted their personal acquaintance. Depend
on it, blood tells all the way through.
- Here – I only meant to write you a line – but
such screeds much. It is late and I have much yet to do tonight.
Yours,
Horace Greeley
H.S. Randall, Esq.
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Click to see Greeley's letter.
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GLC00935. Horace Greeley to Henry Stephens Randall, 20 November
1861.
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