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Boardside: Alexander Hamilton: Blogger |
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"More than any of his peers, Hamilton shaped and prefigured the America we now live
in. When you cash a paycheck or vote for president, follow the war against terrorism or criticize the government, read a newspaper, or sit next to someone of a different race on a subway, you are doing something that he foresaw and helped make happen."
Richard Brookhiser |
In late September of 1787, after months of debate and political wrangling, the Constitution was forwarded to the states for ratification. Immediately, the anti-Federalists started to campaign against it. Hamilton, along with James Madison and John Jay, began publishing their response, and the debate ensued. Commonly known as The Federalist Papers, the work is a series of 85 essays, 77 of which were published in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between the fall of 1787 and the summer of 1788. Hamilton was the most forward-thinking of the Founders, and because of his talent as a visionary, he was, at times, considered the most annoying. He was among the first Americans to recognize the value of hydropower to business, and he helped to found the U.S. Mint, the U.S. Bank, and the Bank of New York. He was the driving force behind what would become the U.S. Coast Guard, and he also saved the nation from its first fiscal crisis, the Panic of 1792. Yet in October of 1787 Hamilton was intent on pressing for ratification of the Constitution, and he believed that New Yorkers required a report from the front lines, as it were, a stream of information. It was one of the reasons he recruited Madison to write some of the essays: Madison had attended the entire three-and-a-half month Convention and knew the workings from the inside out. Hamilton, though a delegate, had only spent about six weeks in Philadelphia, and he thought that readers needed the feel of what actually occurred, an understanding of the people behind the ideas of the Constitution. The Federalist Papers were written under tremendous deadline pressure, and according to Hamilton biographer, Ron Chernow, "tradition claims that Hamilton wrote the first installment. . . in the cabin of a Hudson river sloop as he and [his wife] returned to New York from Albany." Hamilton understood the necessity of public debate, and as a visionary he helped to set up a network of papers that agreed with his point of view and later assisted in raising money to start The New-York Evening Post. I often wonder what Hamilton would have thought of the modern world's opinion network, the blogosphere. I suspect he would have loved it, especially because the lag between writing and publishing is reduced from days to minutes. No one can say for certain, but I also suspect he would have used it to put forth his ideas. As someone who understood money, Hamilton would have recognized how those without the capital to found their own media outlet are frequently barred from joining the public discussion, a discussion to which he, and the other Founders, dedicated much of their remarkable lives. To me, that's the beauty of the Web. The writer, A. J. Liebling, once observed that “Freedom of the Press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Now we can all have one of our own.
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