Cronyism

CHAPTER 5

PRIME MINISTER HAMILTON: THE IMPERIAL PROGRAM

The Whiskey Rebellion

By President George Washington’s second term, “Prime Minister” Alexander Hamilton enacted the crony Federalist economic program, solidifying the allegiance of Robert Morris. But the Hamiltonian Era was nowhere near finished. While the power of Morris waned during the Adams administration, the New Yorker’s rose, and Hamilton surpassed his old mentor. During the Quasi-War with France he strove to establish the United States as a world superpower along the lines of Great Britain. In other words, he wanted an Old Order Empire that could grant even larger privileges. Perhaps most crucial of all, he wanted to lead it. The resurgent classical liberal forces resisted Hamilton’s drive for an Empire of Power and first tried to reform the government illegally through nullification and resistance—the so-called Whiskey Rebellion of 1794.

Treasurer Hamilton’s debt assumption, designed to benefit Morris and other speculators, called for revenues larger than what Madison secured in 1789. Hamilton reasoned that internal taxes, such as excise taxes, must play a crucial role in making up the difference. In The Federalist Papers Hamilton previously argued that unpopular internal taxes would be “confined within a narrow compass.” This fit in well with the dictum his idol, the mercantilist Jean-Baptiste Colbert, preached: “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount of hissing.” Of course, after ratification Hamilton could conveniently drop his promise, because the hissing no longer mattered. In May 1790, Congress debated a bill calling for excise taxes on domestically distilled spirits to pay for the planned assumption of debts. The bill failed, but Hamilton, Assistant Secretary Tench Coxe, and fellow ally Congressman Fisher Ames of the Essex Junto remained optimistic about its future prospects.

Lo and behold, after the Funding Act passed, Congress debated a similar bill in early 1791. Opponents reasoned that an invasive whiskey tax would remind too many people of similar depredations Great Britain previously inflicted. One congressman argued that the tax would impose a “swarm of harpies” disguised as “revenue officers,” who will pry “into every man’s house and affairs” like a “Macedonian phalanx.” Ames could only sneer at such hissing, considering the protests of the Pennsylvania State Assembly as “anarchy” because state legislatures had no business in federal matters—the Constitution established apodictic federal supremacy! Congress passed the whiskey tax bill in March 1791, with opposition located in every state outside of New England and especially among western delegates from Antifederalist regions.

Westerners considered the whiskey tax devastating. First, whiskey formed the lifeblood of the isolated frontier economy, transported more easily than grain, and could be exchanged for eastern goods. In addition, the law empowered the authorities to search property for illegal distilling operations and contraband. Second, the tax forced distillers to cough up nine cents per gallon of whiskey. However, they could instead pay a fixed rate on their distillery’s capacity, which for larger enterprises translated to six cents per gallon. Thus, the tax favored large eastern distilleries over small western distilleries. Clearly, Hamilton’s oppressive and regressive tax extracted money away from poor westerners and redistributed it to rich easterners who held government debt—a clear instance of cronyism.

To the formerly Antifederalist West, the tax embodied eastern dominance. Since the Confederation days, the West frequently complained of unfair taxes, inadequate help with Indians, speculative land grants, and lack of eastern concern for securing navigation on the Mississippi River. The tax aggravated their secessionism, since they saw no reason to continue the present arrangement. In the words of the Mingo Creek Society of western Pennsylvania in 1794: “To be subject to all the burdens and enjoy none of the benefits arising from government is what we will never submit to.”

In the summer of 1791, resistors in western Pennsylvania organized a Pittsburgh meeting. At the conference, the libertarian reformers criticized the assumption of state debts, the national bank, and the high salaries of government officials. They urged popular nullification of the whiskey tax by urging citizens to not become tax collectors. Former Pennsylvania Antifederals John Smilie, Albert Gallatin, and William Findley attended a second Pittsburgh meeting in 1792 and urged further protests. Similar discontent occurred in other states, and by the summer the tax remained unpaid. Irate at such recalcitrance, the reactionary Hamilton banged the war drums and urged military force to suppress some tax resistors, choosing North Carolina. Hamilton had previous experience using military threats, such as the Newburgh Conspiracy of 1783. Fortunately, Washington demurred.

But resistance continued through the summer of 1794, with sporadic instances of disobedience and violence turning more organized. Hamilton believed that Gallatin, a frequent Republican critic of his fiscal policies, masterminded everything. The Pennsylvanian had good reason to be upset: he briefly served as a US senator earlier in the year, before the Federalists expelled him on citizenship grounds. A ragtag band of seven thousand rebels started harassing Pittsburgh, and similar discontent appeared in central Pennsylvania and the western regions of many southern states. Resistance mounted, secession threatened, and Hamilton and Washington realized that open rebellion in the entire West stared them in the face. Power needed to make an example of liberty.

Since 1789, the Federalists itched for a European standing army. After all, the Constitution empowered the federal government with the unambiguous ability to create a strong military and nationalize state militias. Secretary of War Henry Knox’s grand plan for military greatness was to create a Roman army composed of three “corps” (Advanced, Main, and Reserved), all subdivided into legions. Congress would force men in the youngest corps (the Advanced) out of their occupations for one month a year for training in Spartan-style camps. After their inculcation, they would graduate to the Main corps, the first line of defense.

Against such flagrant militarism, a furious public shot down Knox’s ridiculous proposal, a program projected to require enormous appropriations—the annual cost for the Advanced corps alone was $400,000. The public understood the Antifederal argument that standing armies lead to greater government tyranny and suppression of resistance. DeWitt Clinton, nephew of the New York governor, considered Knox’s plan “so palpably absurd and impolitic.” Defeated, the Federalists still managed to pass the Uniform Militia Act of 1792, requiring middle-aged men to enroll in their state’s militia or pay a large fine if they failed to report for national service. If the president wanted to call forth the militias, a justice of the Supreme Court had to approve. Congress had created its first peacetime army.

With the emerging “Whiskey Rebellion,” Hamiltonian Federalists urged for an army to suppress the hissing goose, and the state militias the president could call forth looked suitable. In August 1794, ultra-reactionary Supreme Court justice James Wilson rose to the task. Consequently, Washington dragooned a massive thirteen thousand–man army to suppress the delinquent taxpayers. In the words of Harlow Giles Unger, this “was Patrick Henry’s worst nightmare.”Like Henry, other Antifederalists had previously raised concerns about the Constitution’s potential to create a militaristic Old Order Empire. The Pennsylvanian Antifederalists made particularly prescient remarks in 1787, when they warned of a “standing army,” supported by “tax-gatherers” and “revenue officers,” that could “swarm over the land . . . impoverishing and desolating all before them.”

Washington and Hamilton traveled with the army as it trudged westward. The Federalist swarm encountered no resistance and realized the tax protestors had scattered. Washington left for Philadelphia and placed General Henry Lee of Virginia in charge. In reality, Hamilton called the shots, itching to make an example of the delinquent taxpayers. In his words, “the insurrection will do us a great deal of good and add to the solidity of every thing in this country.” The Treasurer, who admitted that he had “long since . . . learnt to hold popular opinion of no value,” pushed the army through the Appalachian Mountains, reminding some disgruntled soldiers of Hannibal of Carthage traveling through the Alps. The lavish living quarters and food supplies of the Treasurer further upset them. But the Federalists bribed soldiers with whiskey to drunkenly stumble along, harassing and intimidating all in their wake while they sniffed out rebels. In the most prominent roundup, troops kidnapped one hundred and fifty half-dressed men in the middle of the night and dragged them into a forced march, starving, humiliating, and assaulting them along the way.

The Hamiltonian dragnet interrogated the roundups to find prominent rebels, try them for treason, and execute them. The Treasurer ranked Gallatin and Findley high on his list, wanting to make examples for everyone to see. Unfortunately for Hamilton, after the investigations ended there remained only about twenty obscure men to imprison. Most of the army left while the remaining contingent continued to harass and steal from the local populace. Hamilton preferred to station a standing army until westerners’ loyalty increased, but Washington wisely realized the political ramifications and eventually disbanded the troops.

However, with Hamilton’s prodding, Washington blamed the uprising on the new democratic societies, the voluntary organizations that had recently formed and associated with the Republican Party. Pro-British Federalists accused the organizations of allying with the French revolutionaries sparking European discontent, but in reality “their objective was simply to conduct a constitutional opposition to Hamiltonianism in the name of liberty and democracy.” Furthermore, Washington conveniently neglected his participation in the Society of the Cincinnati, an elitist organization he and his Treasurer rewarded with patronage in the bloated Federalist bureaucracy: of their roughly five hundred federal appointees old enough to have fought in the Revolutionary War, 28 percent served as officers, and 15 percent affiliated with the aristocratic Society. Put another way, Hamilton and Washington thought that only societies supporting statism and militarism, not liberty and low taxes, promoted the public interest. Of course, Hamilton also pinned blame on Jefferson and Madison even though the two remained neutral to the democratic societies and unsympathetic to the rebellion (though against how Federalists suppressed it).

Significantly, Gallatin emerged unscathed. He publicly denounced the rebellion, but this only earned him the suspicion of Treasury Comptroller Oliver Wolcott, who believed that Gallatin had done so to avoid punishment. Pennsylvanians rewarded the Republican with a House seat in the fall 1794 elections, and the free market Gallatin soon turned into Hamilton’s worst nightmare.

The Whiskey Rebellion highlights Hamilton’s penchant for power. Unlike the more hesitant Washington or Knox, Hamilton fixated on the military and its ability to coerce the public into doing his bidding. Richard Kohn perceptively remarks:

To [Hamilton] force was a positive tool. The display of military power in the Whiskey Rebellion made the government a grander machine, more impressive and more permanent. Force . . . spoke a language of its own, imparting confidence to friends and threatening punishment to enemies, endowing its wielders with prestige and with respect. The threat of force could be used, as he had used it [at Newburgh] in 1783, to frighten men into agreeing to specific policies.

Historians sympathetic to Hamilton argue that his tax program actually decreased burdens because Congress now collected most revenue from tariffs, allowing states to drastically reduce internal taxes after their spending declined from debt assumption. However, Congress still needed regressive internal taxes to fund largesse to speculators, and these taxes provoked intense hostility. The Whiskey Rebellion was not an isolated occurrence, if Washington and Hamilton had not sent a massive army to western Pennsylvania, the entire West would have revolted. Furthermore, the subsequent lack of taxpayer resistance compared to what occurred in the Confederation Era—aside from the important Fries Rebellion in 1799—does not mean that tax-payers rested easy. In reality, the federal government’s ability to raise a large army intimidated them. This hardly demonstrates the public’s agreement with the tax structure.

Unfortunately for the taxpaying public, the Whiskey Rebellion only inaugurated Hamilton’s military cronyism. He now set his sights on foreign policy.

Taking the Frontier

Throughout the 1790s Hamilton clandestinely conducted relations with British officials and expanded the western domain to benefit commercial interests. The pro-British Jay’s Treaty, or what one historian called “Hamilton’s Treaty,” especially raised a firestorm of criticism that induced Washington to retire from office, allowing Hamilton to increase his power after John Adams assumed the presidency.

Since Hamilton modeled his economic program along the lines of Great Britain, in matters of foreign policy he predictably supported the British. He deeply admired their monarchical government and wanted a partnership to increase government revenue from tariffs for his debt assumption largesse. The pro-British High Federalists, the extreme reactionaries connected with Hamilton and the Massachusetts-based Essex Junto, vigorously supported him. After all, these men, during the American Revolution, only begrudgingly supported independence. In stark contrast, the anti-British Republicans supported the worldwide adoption of free market policies, championed isolationism and noninterventionism, and desired Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty. However, the free trade Republicans, under the sway of Adam Smith’s deviations into mercantilism, occasionally supported commercial sanctions to break down trade barriers and weaken Old World institutions. Their retaliation derived from the colonial era boycotts, only now backed by the coercive force of a central government.

Hamiltonian doctrine dominated the government from the out-set. In 1789, before Jefferson became secretary of state, Hamilton clandestinely conducted diplomatic relations with Major Gordon Beckwith, an unofficial British ambassador. Beckwith soon realized that Hamilton desired to preserve the revenue stream at all costs, which naturally strengthened Great Britain’s hand in future negotiations. Diplomatic relations worsened when France, in the midst of a deteriorating revolution, declared preemptive war on Britain in February 1793, causing both nations to seize American ships destined for enemy ports. Hamilton and Jefferson wisely advocated neutrality, and President Washington issued his Proclamation of Neutrality in April. However, under the sway of Hamiltonianism, the president did so without Congress’ consent. Jefferson and Madison considered this executive aggrandizement, and Hamilton defended Washington through his broad constructionism. By the end of the year Jefferson had resigned.

Without Jefferson, Hamilton’s grip strengthened. In early 1794, when the US heard of the new British policy to seize American ships trading with the French West Indies, the infuriated Hamilton advocated an armed force of fifteen to twenty thousand troops, harbor defenses, and a naval force. Republicans opposed these measures because they threatened freedom and instead advocated the use of militias and privateers. Fortunately, the British changed their policy and an opening for diplomatic negotiations emerged. For advice, the president spoke with the omnipresent Senator Morris. Washington proposed Vice President John Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, or Chief Justice John Jay. Morris quickly dismissed Adams and Jefferson to recommend Hamilton, but Washington realized the potential backlash and settled on Jay. As a close friend of Hamilton, Jay did not differ too much from Morris’ first choice—Hamilton even drew up his instructions.

The result was Jay’s Treaty, which benefited American expansionists and Great Britain. Northwestern land speculators and other affiliated interests received what they long desired: the evacuation of the British forts in the Northwest. But to get this land, Jay completely acquiesced to Britain’s version of “neutrality,” leading to greater French seizures of American ships. After Republican senator Stevens T. Mason of Virginia, a former Antifederalist and nephew of George Mason, leaked the treaty, the public nearly revolted and critics threatened secession. Despite the intense controversy, Washington signed the treaty in August 1795 and in the following March refused to let the House see documents relevant for appropriating funds.

The pro-British treaty caused Spain to fear an outright alliance between the two countries, and the Federalists moved in for the kill. They handed the intimidation job to the wealthy planter Thomas Pinckney, the brother of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and a former South Carolina governor. Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795 allowed the US to transport goods on the Mississippi with the right of deposit (the ability to transfer goods from one ship to another without paying port fees) for three years, renewable after unless a party rejected. This pleased Morris, the inveterate land speculator, who recognized the treaty “doubles or trebles the value of the lands bordering upon the Western Waters of the Ohio.”

Significantly, Jay’s Treaty provided an opening for Hamilton to tighten his power. The intense backlash induced Washington to retire and Hamilton set upon a new front man for his empire building, choosing the ever-pliable Thomas Pinckney over the stubborn Vice President Adams. However, his plan failed and in 1796 Adams barely defeated the Republican Jefferson, who became vice president. Although Adams despised Hamilton and the Treasurer no longer served in the federal government, Hamilton controlled the administration. This was due to two reasons. First, Adams decided to retain Washington’s cabinet: Treasurer Wolcott, Hamilton’s former subordinate; Secretary of War James McHenry, the best man at Hamilton’s wedding; Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, a Hamiltonian businessman of the Essex Junto; and British Ambassador Rufus King, a Hamiltonian lawyer and former director at the Bank of New York and the Bank of the United States. Second, Adams frequently left Philadelphia for Massachusetts. While Washington was away during his eight years for 181 days, the single-term Adams worked from home for 385 days. This clearly opened a power vacuum, with Hamilton now “the recognized leader of the Federalist party . . . there were no secrets from him.”

Even better for Hamilton, the Panic of 1797 financially devastated Morris, sending him to prison. Justice Wilson also followed. Previously, Hamilton worked for Morris and helped him earn money in return for sharing power. Now, with Morris out of the picture, Hamilton could control all the power himself. He enlisted new subordinate allies, the High Federalist Essex Junto merchants, and embarked on building an international empire.

Hamiltonian Militarism

When Adams became president, Hamilton utilized a foreign crisis to advocate a military buildup. By the end of the decade he favored a vast expansion into Louisiana and South America, an invasion that would augment the commercial fortunes of internationalist New England merchants. Hamilton even secured command of the new empire’s military. Republicans resisted the measures but lacked the strength to stop Hamilton’s machinations.

After the presidential election of 1796, France announced the seizure of all American ships carrying British cargo. While Jefferson and the Republicans stressed peace, Adams urged a military expansion, particularly in the navy, and Congress authorized the president to call forth eight thousand militiamen if necessary. In mid-1798 the public learned that the peace commission had spectacularly failed: Foreign Minister Charles Talleyrand tried to extort a bribe and a loan prior to negotiations—the infamous XYZ Affair. The Federalists exploited the Republicans’ embarrassment and commenced the unofficial naval “Quasi-War” with France.

If the goal is to create an Old Order Empire, the first step is to enlarge the army. Hamilton called for regular and provisional armies of fifty thousand, the construction of a formal navy, and imprisoning recalcitrant militiamen or subjecting them to forced labor on public works. To his chagrin, Congress only raised a smaller regular army of twelve thousand (the “New Army”) and a provisional army of ten thousand. But Congress also created the Navy Department for the ensuing conflict on the high seas. Republicans, including Senator Andrew Jackson of Tennessee (which that entered the Union in 1796) and Congressmen John Williams of New York, Gallatin, and Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina, bitterly resisted. They rightfully argued that the navy subsidized Federalist merchants and standing armies crippled the economy. However, Republicans lacked the political numbers to block the legislation, and the budget exploded. From 1795 to 1800, spending in the Departments of War and Navy increased by 108 percent (16 percent per year), pushing up federal spending by 43 percent (7.5 percent per year). Military spending as a percent of spending grew from 38 percent to a bloated 56 percent.

The second step is to pay for the bloated army expenditures. Federalists levied taxes on houses, land, slaves, and even stamps, eerily reminding the country of former British taxes. Even worse, Federalists created a swollen bureaucracy to assess property values and collect revenue. For example, in Pennsylvania they employed a suffocating nine commissioners, forty-one principal assessors, four hundred and twenty assistant assessors, four inspectors of revenue, thirty-nine supervisors of the collection, fourteen surveyors of revenue, and twenty-five collectors. Americans resented the depredations. The funding measures even caused the Fries Rebellion in early 1799, led by John Fries and German immigrants in southeastern Pennsylvania. From 1795 to 1800, government revenue surged by a crippling 77 percent, but the national debt remained at $83 million.

The third, and most important step, is to appoint someone to lead the army. As Richard Kohn explains, Hamilton wanted to rule the intimidating military from a position that “did not have to be elected” while continuing “to pull the strings of power, influencing key Federalists, plotting strategy with the congressional leadership, manipulating the cabinet—without the slightest personal worry about public opinion.” Hamilton wrote to the retired Washington, exhorting the Virginian to accept nominal command while recommending second-in-command for himself. After some additional exhortations by Hamilton’s de facto cabinet, Washington agreed that Hamilton should receive second-in-command. President Adams resisted, but Washington and the cabinet refused to have it any other way. In the words of Secretary Pickering to Washington, Adams did not realize that Hamilton had to be “the Second to you—and the Chief in your absence.” By October 1798 Adams had capitulated and Inspector General Hamilton was “second”-in-command. To any objective observer, Hamilton’s self-serving overtures came dangerously close to bringing about his preferred monarchical government and smacked of personal cronyism.

Now that Hamilton and the Essex Junto had implemented their military machinery, funding, and hierarchy, they dreamed grandiose ideas of empire, or at least apologetically of “defensive” empire. A war with France would allow the Federalists to work with Britain, possibly in a formal alliance, and seize Spanish Florida (West Florida and East Florida), Louisiana, and South America—to prevent the French from laying their lands on them. The conquest of Louisiana would also crush secessionist plans and reduce western support for the Jeffersonian Republicans.

Of course, for the Essex Junto, naval aggression would prod open foreign markets, subsidizing trading interests and bringing new natural resources under US control. As early as July 1797, a Federalist gazetteer wrote that both France and Spain had to be “driven into the Gulf of Mexico” and the wealth gained from this plundering “would be the cream of the War.” George Cabot of Massachusetts, member of the Essex Junto, agreed, “fully persuaded” that Great Britain and the United States should “enjoy exclusively the commerce of all Americas & Africa & the best part of Asia & Europe.” Perhaps the frankest statement came from the High Federalist Gazette of the United States, which frequently advocated suppression of Republican opposition, war with France, and an alliance with Great Britain. The periodical “demand[ed]” war “against France” and Spain, belligerently proclaiming:

It is in vain to disguise the truth that America is essentially and naturally a commercial nation; and that from her location on the map of the world she must ever remain so. It ought therefore to be the undeviating care of the Government . . . to procure admission to our flag, in ports whence it is now excluded; to obtain it by right where it now rests on the ground of sufferance; and to establish it on a regular and permanent footing.

Translation: Congress must subsidize commerce by strengthening the navy, prying open the ports of resistant countries, and securing discriminatory trade deals.

Hamilton eagerly looked forward to participating in the new imperial conquests. When it came to South America and the “riches of Mexico and Peru,” he frankly declared, “[T]he command in this case would very naturally fall upon me.” By January 1799 Hamilton itched for war with France. He wrote to Massachusetts Congressman Harrison Gray Otis and demanded Congress guarantee war by the end of July if France did not get negotiations moving. At the same time, Hamilton made sure the empire crushed civilian uprisings at home. During Pennsylvania’s anti-tax Fries Rebellion, he advised McHenry to use excessive troops and “appear like Hercules” without any “consideration of expense.” Hamilton wanted Fries and other leaders to be convicted of treason and executed, but to his dismay Adams ended up pardoning them.

Some historians have argued that Hamilton did not actually want to lead the country’s military in an elitist fashion and differed from the High Federalists. In reality, Hamilton, in both writing and action, excelled at personal appearances. He shrewdly tried to avoid military escalations over trifling issues, official alliances with Great Britain, or blatantly offensive military measures. The Inspector General recognized that such actions reduced public support for war and strengthened Republican opposition. In other words, he was covert. Ames of the Essex Junto, while favoring an outright alliance with Great Britain, exhorted a similar strategy: “Wage war and call it self defense . . . tell the citizens of danger & bring them to war gradually.”

The Antifederalists’ fears about the Constitution rapidly materialized. After first establishing a mercantilist system, Hamilton stifled taxpayer resistance and pushed the country closer to a belligerent Old Order Empire. The forces of power achieved success after success, because the Republican Party lacked political strength and the Federalists easily capitalized on a purported military crisis. There seemed to be nothing that could stop the Hamiltonian juggernaut.

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Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 97.

Murray N. Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute 2006), pp. 246.

Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, p. 99.

Ibid., p. 101.

Ibid., pp. 95–105.

Ibid., pp. 71–73, 131–49.

Ibid., p. 164. See also pp. 36–74, 163–64.

Gregory May, Jefferson’s Treasure (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2018), pp. 35–37, 44–52; Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, pp. 117–20, 186–89.

Fergus Bordewich, The First Congress (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), p. 195.

Richard Kohn, Eagle and Sword (New York: The Free Press, 1975), p. 130.

Bordewich, First Congress, p. 195; Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “The American Militia and the Origin of Conscription,” Journal of Libertarian Studies (Fall 2001): 45–46; Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 128–38; Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5, The New Republic: 1784–1791, ed. Patrick Newman (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2019), p. 269; Slaughter, Rebellion Whiskey, pp. 192–93.

Harlow Giles Unger, Lion of Liberty: Patrick Henry and the Call to a New Nation (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2010), p. 263.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 5, p. 229.

Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 138.

Kohn, Eagle and Sword, p. 172.

May, Jefferson’s Treasure, p. 55; Brion McClanahan, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2017), pp. 57–72; John Miller, Alexander Hamilton and the Growth of the New Nation (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), pp. 408–11; Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, pp. 190–220.

Miller, Alexander Hamilton, p. 412.

Richard Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 273; Miller, Alexander Hamilton, pp. 411–14; Murray N. Rothbard, “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States,” Journal of Libertarian Studies (Summer 1995): 24–28; Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, p. 221; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005), pp. 40–71; Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 108.

Kohn, Eagle and Sword, pp. 201–02; May, Jefferson’s Treasure, pp. 55–59.

Kohn, Eagle and Sword, p. 171.

Max Edling and Mark Kaplanoff, “Alexander Hamilton’s Fiscal Reform,” William and Mary Quarterly (October 2004): 713–44.

Samuel Bemis, Jay’s Treaty (New York: Macmillan, 1923), p. 271.

Philip Burch, Elites in American History, vol. 1 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981), p. 49; Manning Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins Press, 1953), p. 62; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, vol. 1 (New York: Viking Press, 1946), pp. 286–87, 304–06; John Nelson, Liberty and Property (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 119–21; Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 92–93.

Julian Boyd, Number 7 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 21–33; Burch, Elites in America, I, pp. 49, 252; McClanahan, Hamilton Screwed Up America, pp. 73–87; Curtis Nettels, The Emergence of a National Economy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), pp. 324–25; Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 181–83, 204, 239.

Burch, Elites in American History, 1, pp. 59–60, 78; Norman Risjord, Chesapeake Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 449, 454; Miller, Alexander Hamilton, pp. 390, 415–22; Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 192–99, 239.

Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 201. See also Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 52; Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), pp. 61–62.

Dauer, The Adams Federalists, p. 122.

Burch, Elites in American History, 1, pp. 49–52, 65–66, 74; John Miller, The Federalist Era (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 256; Miller, Alexander Hamilton, pp. 447–48, 516; Leonard White, The Federalists (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 42–43, 237–41; Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 206.

Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 245. See also pp. 239–45.

Ibid., p. 263.

Historical Statistics of the United States, vol. 5, ed. Richard Sutch and Susan Carter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 80, 91; Miller, Alexander Hamilton, pp. 467–68; Norman Risjord, The Old Republicans (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 13–14; Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 245–46, 262–64, 701.

Historical Statistics, 5, p. 82; Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy, (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), p. 64; Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 283–86; Wood, Empire of Liberty, p. 265.

Kohn, Eagle and Sword, p. 254.

Ibid., p. 232.

Ibid., pp. 230–38; White, Federalists, pp. 243–47; Wood, Empire of Liberty, pp. 264–67.

DeConde, Affair of Louisiana, p. 69.

Dauer, Adams Federalists, p. 191.

Ibid., p. 194.

Ibid., pp. 188, 196.

Miller, Alexander Hamilton, p. 505.

Dauer, Adams Federalists, pp. 172–97; Miller, Alexander Hamilton, pp. 495–98, 505–07.

Aaron Coleman, “‘A Second Bounaparty?’” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 2008): 183–214.

Dauer, Adams Federalists, p. 195. See also Miller, Alexander Hamilton, p. 470; Roth-bard, Conceived in Liberty, 5, p. 241.