PC: Could Hamilton beat Jackson?

hey, all. i just wanted to get this part of my train of thought out of the way.

short version: Burr and Hamilton don't have their duel so Hamilton lives another thirty years. assuming the TL is mostly the same as IOTL, 1828 election comes around and Hamilton runs as a Federalist against Jackson. does he have a chance?

barring that, when do y'all think Hamilton would/could be elected if he didn't die when he did IOTL, or else which elections would he run in?
 
What's the POD? Hamilton was already basically ruined politically by the time of his death
there i go again, thinking of an event much later in a TL without looking further into it :p i'll definitely have to look into the exact causes of his political fall, but the earliest relevant POD i have in the current version is that Aaron Burr's father and grandfather don't die while he's still very young, leading to a butterfly effect where he doesn't go into politics and instead becomes a preacher (i have some further ideas related to that, but they're irrelevant to the discussion) so the circumstances of their duel never come to be
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
I don't see how Hamilton could ever win an election if free male suffrage was enacted, especially against Jackson. He was basically a cartoon character of elitism, even if he was fiscally wise. There is no fucking way that he would be okay with soft money, however, and that would cause even more problems in the growing west, even among landholders.

That being said, if Hamilton was given another 20 years to reinvigorate his reputation and update his politics for the time period, perhaps keeping the Federalists relevant for longer because he could steer them away from borderline treasonous conduct during the War of 1812 (and as a jingoistic nationalist, Hamilton would not shy away from a fight that could net the US more territory, even against Britain), with the right luck he might have a chance.
 
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that actually fits rather well into what i have in mind for the narrative--now i'm envisioning that Hamilton would probably try to beat Jackson to the White House even if he didn't succeed

just to try and cover all my bases, assuming Hamilton were to get elected and have at least half of Jackson's OTL term, d'you think he'd sign the Indian Removal Act? since, at least by your reckoning, he was a quasi-imperialist, it seems to me like he probably would
 

Minty_Fresh

Banned
that actually fits rather well into what i have in mind for the narrative--now i'm envisioning that Hamilton would probably try to beat Jackson to the White House even if he didn't succeed

just to try and cover all my bases, assuming Hamilton were to get elected and have at least half of Jackson's OTL term, d'you think he'd sign the Indian Removal Act? since, at least by your reckoning, he was a quasi-imperialist, it seems to me like he probably would
I think he wouldn't try to fight the Supreme Court ruling that led to Jackson overriding them and enacting Indian Removal anyways. Hamilton for all is brashness was a Constitutionalist and respected the separation of powers.

Also, Jackson's entire life made him a man of the frontier with the attitudes about Indians that came with that. He personally visited Fort Mims during the Red Stick War and saw the hundreds of women and children killed in the most gruesome of ways possible after the Creeks had broken through. Indian Removal was something heartily cheered by the mostly Scotch-Irish back country settlers who made up the Southwest in the 1820s-30s while something that was reviled by the New England Whigs who were formally Federalists as inhumane and a dark stain on the country's honor. The more likely someone was to have met an Indian, the more likely they were to back removal. Exceptions to this like Davy Crockett were rare. Hamilton would be more likely to be of the New England persuasion.

Indian Removal wasn't as much an acquisition of foreign lands that would engender the kind of glory and prestige for democracy that Hamilton was after in terms of his imperialist views. Nor was it something enormously helpful for the mercantile classes that Hamilton was such a fan of. It was instead a boon for southern landholders. The land was technically American claimed anyways and was being encroached upon more and more by the waves of westward bound settlers. Jackson claimed humanitarian reasons for the act, of which there is reason to both believe and be skeptical about, but Hamilton really had little interest in the issues of agrarian small farmers and wouldn't have much of an issue letting the states handle their own Indian problems.
 
I think a 71 year old Hamilton is unlikely to run for President in 1828. Hamilton may have clawed his way into one of the New York Senators and have nipped the Hartford Convention in the bud, but President? Nah, not after his idiotic Reynolds Pamphlet.
 
He was basically useless without Washington on his side, simply because most everybody hated him for his elitism. At best, he's an éminence grise.
 
This is the guy that responded to a protesting crowd by giving a speech on how the crowd has no right to protest. The man wasn't going to be winning any national election.
 
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