How best to handle a Hamilton presidency?
- Thread starter oshron
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Well, you have a stronger banking sector, a stronger North, faster industrialization and probably earlier emancipation due to the last two. OTOH you also have a larger wealth differential, a weaker agricultural sector and the "Gilded Age" arrives sooner.
MAlexMatt
Banned
On-going depression in non-coastal urban areas, increasing poverty, lesser population of the interior, still-born internationalist liberalism, increasing concentration of power in a wealthy plutocracy, and the occasional flaring up of revolts and rebellions on rural areas across the North and South.
But no, seriously, after the 1790's there isn't going to be the legislative will for Hamilton to get what Hamilton wants. If he is ever, by some fluke, elected to the Presidency he becomes Andrew Johnson half a century early.
But no, seriously, after the 1790's there isn't going to be the legislative will for Hamilton to get what Hamilton wants. If he is ever, by some fluke, elected to the Presidency he becomes Andrew Johnson half a century early.
I doubt a stronger banking sector and faster industrialization is going to result in an ongoing depression. If anything it makes it less likely.
MAlexMatt
Banned
Manufacturing equipment and the capital for a strong banking sector have to come from somewhere. In early American history, these things came from the rural areas. The monopoly banks created in the era operated by concentrating liquidity in the hands of wealthy urban merchants and (as time goes by) industrialists. These depresses wages, creating poverty, draws money and capital out of rural areas, creating regional depression, and aggravates any existing real shocks, making both problems worse.
Hamilton's program was an intensely sectional, intensely sectoral pursuit of interest. If you weren't a major merchant, financier, or manufacturer (or an ideological nationalist, but that was a class of people limited mostly to veterans, especially former officers), it wasn't what you wanted. That's why the Federalist party died so quickly as the franchise expanded.
Where the money comes from is increased monetary stability. Central banks such the Bank of the US would be tends to reduce apparent risk. They tend to put stricter limits on the money you can lend which reduces volatility which tends to lower interest rates in the long run. You tend to have fewer bank panics when you have a central bank of some sort looking after things. Fewer bank panics means more people will tend to put more money in the bank for longer periods of time which reduces the interest rate. With reduced interest rates both farmers and manufacturers are throwing away less money on interest.
one other thing i'd like to clarify is what year would be the most plausible for hamilton to be elected. the earliest, of course, would be in 1796 as essentially a replacement of adams, but i cant help but think that right then would be relatively implausible. maybe filling in jefferson's OTL presidency instead? i have heard people here say that jefferson is an overrated president while hamilton was really underrated. thoughts?
I don't know what kind of president Hamilton would have been, but Jefferson sabotaged the US military, especially the navy.
The Federalists were generally the ones in favor of a military of some actual significance, especially the navy.
You probably don't see as much enthusiasm for the Louisiana purchase - that was definitely a product of Jeffersonian ideas, although it isn't impossible to see it happen with a Hamilton presidency. Probably won't see the Lewis and Clark expedition (Lewis being close to Jefferson). Some other guys, sure, but not that - with any impact on them probably not being as suited to it as Lewis and Clark were being an interesting question.
Off base what iff: Farmers used the canals he planned to construct, and settle the frontier a strong army would tame.
I know people hate the fact that Hamilton was right about everything.
Considering he didn't want to antagonize Britain last I checked, Hamilton might make a secret agreement with Britain when offered Louisiana by France to, upon taking ownership, sell part of it to Britain to offset the damage done by putting American capital into the French war machine.
British New Orleans in a timeline where later Anglo-American relations go sour in a major way would certainly be a hotpoint for conflict and intrigue.
British New Orleans in a timeline where later Anglo-American relations go sour in a major way would certainly be a hotpoint for conflict and intrigue.
Given that the entire point of taking Louisiana is New Orleans, why would he offer that?
Over the long run they get more and better loans from a more stable banking sector. As you said the canals that were built were a godsend to farmers (Particularly the Erie Canal) and there would be more of them. There would have probably been more roads built as well which helps farmers as well as craftsmen. This would strengthen the tendency for internal improvements when railroads start being built.
Why on God's Earth would he do that? Not wanting to antagonize GB is one thing but he wasn't a traitor who would try to sell out the country the moment he could.
ive decided that, due to butterflies, Hamilton kills Burr in their duel instead of the reverse and (currently barring butterflies of him killing the vice-president) is elected in 1808 due to butterflies. what does everyone think would be the effects of Hamilton becoming president at this specific time? (i was also thinking of making him a one-term president)
Well, for one thing the US Bank will continue after 1811 and if war still breaks out financing is much easier. Also the army and navy are likely to be stronger under a Hamilton administration.
MAlexMatt
Banned
Unfortunately, that's not the way things work out in practice.
The Bank of North America, the very first of the US' monopoly banks, tended to promote the centralization of money and credit into the hands of wealthy Philadelphia merchants at the expense of the Pennsylvania hinterland. Terry Bouton has a wonderful little essay in The Economy of Early America on the subject called 'Moneyless in Pennsylvania: Privatization and the 1780's Depression'. You see, what the monopoly banks (this is more than a century before any concept of real 'central banking' emerged in the US) really represented was the partial privatization of what was once a purely public power: The origination of paper money bills.
Whereas, in PA at least, this power was originally used to establish public land banks throughout the state that lent to farmers using their land as security, the Bank of North America aggregated this power into one bank which then lent almost exclusively to wealthy Philadelphia merchants and financiers. This had the exact effects I described before. The effects you're looking for are curiously absent.
Monopoly banks are half-measures: They're the same sort of ugly private-public partnership that so besmirches public policy today, where a private party is given all the advantages and privileges of a public operation without any of the public duties or burdens to bear. This combination ends up giving us the worst of both worlds: Privilege and power in the hands of greed and avarice.
Hamilton represented the same faction Robert Morris did, but in New York State and at the national level. If he gets his way, we see what happened with the Bank of North America on a national scale: The aggregation of wealth and power into the coastal trading cities, and especially into the hands of the wealthy few who run those cities, at the expense of the vast majority of the country.
This is extremely mean-spirited.
Do you think...what, exactly? Do you think I'm just making these claims because I want to? I've spent the time, effort, and money doing real research on the economy of this period, and into the political economy of banking, money, and credit in general.
All Hamilton was 'right' about was the pursuit of the interests of a narrow section of society that he happened to identify with. The extent of his 'public mindedness' was an almost single-minded drive to make sure the public credit was established so that he and his could turn around and use it to their benefit. Had Hamilton gotten his way, the US would have turned out more like Imperial Germany or Britain: A society with increasingly rigid class structures that depends on the exploitation of an increasingly impoverished lower class of landless laborers at home and an oppressive, autocratic empire abroad. Even if Hamilton did not intend for that to happen, necessarily, it would have been the outcome of creating the sort of unassailable power base for America's first generation state-capitalists he was trying to create.
You really want America to be a good place? Find some way to have the agrarians compromise with the nationalists so we get a free banking system similar to the one Scotland had at the time. You get all the benefits of a strong, stable system of credit without the drawbacks of concentrating all of the power over that system into very few hands. People in the US were clamoring for paper money at the time because there was no specie to be had. The problem wasn't banking and paper money, the problem was this immense growth market was handed over exclusively to the contemporary super-rich and denied to everybody else.