Note

Public Reason: Alexander Hamilton talks his book. George Washington had thrown his authority behind the constitutional convention of 1787, and Hamilton was 100% Washington’s lieutenant:

Alexander Hamilton (1788): The Federalist 9: ‘It is impossible to read the history of… [ancient and mediæval] petty Republics… without… horror and disgust at… [their] perpetual vibration between… tyranny and anarchy…. From the[se] disorders… advocates of despotism have drawn arguments… against… republican government… [and] the very principles of civil liberty… as inconsistent with the order of society…. It is not to be denied that the portraits they have sketched… were too just copies of the originals…. The science of politics, however… has received great improvement…. Distribution of power into distinct departments… legislative ballances and checks… courts composed of judges, holding their offices during good behaviour… representation… in the legislature… are either wholly new… or have made… principal progress… [and] are means, and powerful means, by which the excellencies of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided… <founders.archives.gov/d…>

Did Hamilton believe it? Or did he believe America likely destined—even with the Fantastickal Eighteenth-Century Orrerry of Constitutional Machinery that was the work of the Men of 1787—for perpetual vibration between tyranny and anarchy, until something put the American Republic out of its misery?

There is, I think, very good reason to think that Hamilton was less optimistic about the American Republic than Washington. And Jefferson believed that Washington was not optimistic:

Thomas Jefferson (1814): “Letter to Walter Jones, 2 January”: ‘I do believe that Gen[era]l Washington had not a firm confidence in the durability of our government. he was naturally distrustful of men, and inclined to gloomy apprehensions; and I was ever persuaded that a belief that we must at length end in something like a British constitution had some weight in his adoption of the ceremonies of levees, birth-days, pompous meetings with Congress, and other forms of the same character, calculated to prepare us gradually for a change which he believed possible, and to let it come on with as little shock as might be to the public mind… <founders.archives.gov/d…>

====

References:

• Hamilton, Alexander. 1788. "The Federalist No. 9." In The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as Agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787, vol. 1, ed. by John and Archibald McLean, 72–80. New York: J. & A. McLean. <archive.org/details/fed…

• Jefferson, Thomas. 1904 [1814]. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb a&nd Albert E. Bergh. Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association. <