A Prophet Revisited

ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND THE CONSTITUTION by Clinton Rossiter. 372 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.75.

Perhaps the strongest passion that can drive a historian to his typewriter is the urge to make amends to some great figure of the past who seems to have been unfairly denigrated. If the historian has himself helped previously to perpetuate the injustice, his new advocacy takes on the drama of a public conversion. These are the intellectual tensions that led to this reappraisal of Alexander Hamilton, and they make for unusually stimulating history.

In Conservatism in America, published in 1955, and in subsequent writings, Clinton Rossiter described Hamilton as "reactionary," and characterized his basic ideas voiced on the floor of the Constitutional Convention as "certainly not those of a man who knew and cherished the American tradition."

Hamilton's reports and speeches as Treasury Secretary, Rossiter once wrote, expressed a "rightism run riot."

Now Rossiter argues urbanely but urgently that the earlier Rossiter--with a host of other U.S. scholars--was wrong. It is a "myth," says the Cornell University historian, that Hamilton was a "fabulous reactionary" with views alien to the U.S. environment. Indeed, his "works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live." Every schoolboy knows that Hamilton was the archfoe of the democratic Jefferson and the archfriend of aristocracy. But few Americans today realize that it was Hamilton who first elaborated the doctrine of judicial review, pointing up the power of the courts to nullify all laws that, in his words, were "contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution."

Toughness & Charm. Rossiter concedes Hamilton's long distrust of democracy; he does not try to justify Hamilton's disturbingly petty role at the Constitutional Convention (though he reminds readers that one famed snarl attributed to Hamilton--"Your people, sir, is a great beast"--is apocryphal). Rossiter concentrates instead on Hamilton's role in the ratification and first implementation of the Constitution.

Hamilton's best-known contribution to the ratification struggle, of course, was his authorship of most of The Federalist. Rossiter perceptively points out that there was surprisingly little disagreement between Hamilton and his coauthors, Madison and Jay. He writes: "The tough yet not despairing political theory that runs through Hamilton's 50-odd contributions is the same that carried him through his mature life." At New York's ratification con vention, it was Hamilton's charming, persuasive leadership that guided a pro-constitutional minority (19 of 46 delegates) "from the likelihood of defeat through the near certainty of stalemate to the actuality of victory."

The Only American. The Constitution as ratified was no more than the spare bones of Government, to be fleshed out and brought to life by Washington's first Administration. It is here that Rossiter makes his most convincing case for the cogency of Hamilton's constitutional theory and the brilliance of his administrative practice. As the most continentally minded, least parochial of the founders, Hamilton was arguably "the leading, because in an important sense the only, American of the 1790s."

In the battles that the first Treasury Secretary fought with Jefferson and Madison, "Hamilton's enlarged views of the purposes of the Constitution prevailed." A major move was the establishment of the first Bank of the United States, which occasioned Hamilton's 15,000-word opinion on its constitutionality; in Rossiter's view, this was "perhaps the most brilliant and influential one-man effort in the long history of American constitutional law." The measure of Hamilton's victory is that the Jeffersonians who won the election of 1800, "like the Republicans who came after Franklin D. Roosevelt, might curse the memory of the archfoe, but they could not or would not undo the work he had done."

One reason why Hamilton has sometimes seemed so out of place in his own century, Rossiter believes, is that he was uniquely prescient in his notion of the nation's future needs. Hamilton was "the prophet of industrial America." He foresaw the reach of the Constitution's interstate commerce clause; and "aware that America might live forever in a world at war," Hamilton created "a theory of the war power that has never been matched for grandeur and realism."

Carried too far, such arguments could prove self-defeating: when Rossiter speculates that Hamilton's constitutional theory might have foreseen with approval such latter-day demonstrations of federal power as President Truman's seizure of the steel industry, the book begins to look like an attempt to capture Hamilton for modern big-Government liberalism. Fortunately,

Rossiter draws back in time, for as he points out, Hamilton's "growing reputation is due in no small part to his ability to defy classification." The import of Rossiter's revaluation is that Hamilton was a teacher of the whole nation, one of a handful of famous men in U.S. history with whom liberals and conservatives alike must make their peace.

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