HISTORY: THE HAMILTON CROWD | nationalsalvation.net
"In the end, failing to deal effectively with the Hamilton crowd led to Lincoln's War, the loss of freedom, and the death of the Old Republic."
Peter, would you expand on this? I've never run across this line of reasoning before (I went to public school).
Comment by Mark
ME:
This entry does not let Peter out of making his own reply, because this is an important subject.
Sam Dickson, as usual, delivered a brilliant speech at the Council of Conservative Citizens. One of his major points was that Lincoln was elected by people who had no roots here. He talked about some of Lincoln's hate speeches in Chicago during the Lincoln-Douglas Debates when he appealed to German immigrants by saying he hated the established American Anglos who looked down on the new Germans, just as he, a poor boy from Kentucky, did.
Sam talked about the immigrants who had come to the United States, not to ***A*** state, and who thought this states rights business was absurd. To them America was a foreign country they had come to, and all they knew about it was the words it used. Their ROOTS were back in Europe. Their family did not have any roots in any particular state.
Hamilton was another resentful man who arrived in America from the West Indies in 1773. To him, America was an instrument he felt could be used to reach High Ideals. He wanted to use it to build a big standing army and a continental power. He was obsessed by America's Principles, its WORDS.
In the Civil War, Lincoln's and Hamilton's Wordism won out over Jefferson's and Jefferson Davis' IDENTITY with America as a people and a race.
Pain:
The problem is that the people who take the swords at Yorktown shouldn't. The war is won by the guerillas, and the ones who win it are the leaders. Give credit where credit is due or face trouble later.
Comment by Pain
ME:
If the enemy was the British, it may make sense to send those who have been working closely with them "to take the swords." But that says wrongly that these people - and not the guerillas - won the war.
Before American independence, the group that became the Hamiltonians were half-Tories. They were half-respectable and did not fully support independence until late in the game. They had some connections and they were able to bring ideas of independence past the radicals into the mainstream.
But if they were not full revolutionaries before the war, they were not full revolutionaries after it either.
They had other intentions.
The Jeffersonians were the real revolutionaries, and acknowledged as the true guerillas, they held power in the old republic for the next 80 years.
The Hamiltonians were the aides-de-camp, the people who occupied the "IMPORTANT" POSITIONS during the war. The "swords of battle" were surrendered to them and so they were treated with respect for those same 80 years.
Until their other intentions hatched in 1861.