Alexander Hamilton

He arrives precisely on time, in a plain dark coat, and takes in the Pusch Ridge through the window before he says a word. “Astonishing,” he says. “A nation this large, this far from the sea, and still governed as one union. We debated whether such a thing was even possible.”

You came to this country with nothing. What did that experience teach you about America?

Everything, sir. I was born on Nevis, an island in the British West Indies, in 1755, the son of a woman the law would not fully recognize and a father who abandoned us both. I clerked in a counting house on St. Croix before I could yet call myself a man. When a hurricane leveled the island in 1772, I wrote an account of it that a clergyman thought too good for a boy of my station to have written — and a subscription was raised to send me to the mainland for an education. I arrived in New York owning almost nothing but my own capacity for work.

That is the American promise as I understood it: not that a man begins equal in property, but that he is not condemned to remain where he began. I built a financial system on that same conviction — that credit, well managed, could turn a nation’s poverty into its strength, just as ambition turned an orphaned clerk into a Secretary of the Treasury.

You are remembered as the architect of the American financial system. Why did that matter so much to you?

Because a government that cannot pay its debts is not sovereign — it is a beggar with a flag. When I took up the Treasury in 1789, the United States owed enormous sums to foreign creditors and to our own soldiers, and its paper was worth pennies on the dollar. I proposed that the federal government assume the states’ war debts and fund them at full value, and I was called every manner of schemer for it. But I held then, as I hold now: a national debt, if it is not excessive, will be a national blessing, for it binds a people to its government through the ordinary self-interest of every man who holds its bonds.

I chartered the Bank of the United States over Mr. Jefferson’s fierce objection that no such power was written in the Constitution. I answered him that a government vested with great ends must be allowed the ordinary means to attain them — what your courts, I am told, now call implied powers. President Washington read both our opinions side by side before he signed the bank into law, which I still consider one of the great compliments of my career: that he judged my reasoning against Mr. Jefferson’s and found mine the sturdier. I did not win that argument by shouting louder. I won it by writing longer and better, in the Treasury reports and everywhere else.

You and Thomas Jefferson clashed constantly. What was that disagreement really about?

Everything, and nothing, and the entire future of the country, depending on the hour you asked us. He trusted the farmer and feared the bank. I trusted the merchant, the manufacturer, and the energetic state, and I feared a confederacy too weak to defend itself. He wanted an agrarian republic scattered across the countryside. I wanted a commercial nation that could build ships, raise armies, and command the respect of Europe’s powers, none of whom took a beggarly confederation seriously.

We were both partly right, which is a bitter thing to admit in a newspaper essay but an easy thing to admit at eighty years’ remove. Your country became both — a nation of farms and factories, of Jefferson’s yeomen and my counting houses. I would only observe that you cannot have Mr. Jefferson’s liberty without my Treasury standing behind it. Liberty unfunded is liberty at the mercy of whichever creditor calls the note first.

In Federalist 70, you argued for “energy in the executive.” What did you mean, and does it still apply?

I meant that a government too timid to act is no protection at all against the dangers a people actually face — foreign war, faction, disorder. Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government, I wrote, because a feeble execution is but another name for a bad one. I did not mean a king. I meant a single, accountable officer who could act with dispatch when the Congress, by its nature deliberative and divided, could not.

I confess I watch your present government with some dismay on this point — not for want of energy, but for the opposite complaint I did not anticipate: an executive so contested, so litigated, so second-guessed by every branch and every faction, that even the plainly necessary becomes a yearlong battle. I wanted checks. I did not intend paralysis dressed up as caution.

What troubles you most about American politics today?

That your factions have become tribes, and your tribes have forgotten they belong to the same union. I wrote the first Federalist essay warning that a nation weakened by internal jealousy becomes a nation despised abroad. I fought Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Burr and half the Congress of my day with real ferocity — but I never doubted we shared a country. I am told your disputes now proceed as though the other side were not merely wrong but foreign to the republic itself. That, more than any deficit or tariff, is the ruin I warned against.

What would you say to Oro Valley, a town of some fifty thousand people at the edge of the Sonoran Desert, managing its own affairs beneath Pusch Ridge?

You are practicing the thing I spent my life arguing for at the national scale, but at the scale where it is easiest to get right. A town council of seven, four of them women who would have been barred from any such chamber in my day, meeting where any citizen may walk in and watch them govern — that is self-government as I imagined it, not as abstraction but as habit. I spent years persuading skeptical men that a distant federal ledger could be trusted; you have the easier task of keeping an honest ledger where every resident can see it, and every meeting is open to whoever wishes to attend. Manage your credit honestly, keep your public business visible to the people who fund it, and do not let faction curdle into contempt for your neighbors. A union is built one well-run town at a time. I did not have the privilege of seeing that from the Treasury building. I am glad to see it now.

If you could leave the country with one instruction, what would it be?

Build your credit and guard your union, in that order, because the second depends on the first. And do not mistake energy for recklessness, nor caution for wisdom — the whole art of governing, I found, is knowing which the moment requires. I did not live to see fifty. I would ask you not to waste the two hundred and fifty years I did not get.

He stands, straightens his coat, and glances once more at the mountains. “A remarkable vista,” he says, “for a Treasury man who never saw a desert in his life.” And then he is gone.

Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) was born on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. He rose from poverty to become George Washington’s chief aide during the Revolutionary War, a principal author of the Federalist Papers, and the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States. He founded the nation’s financial system, including the first national bank and the policy of federal assumption of state debts, and helped establish what became the New York Post. He was killed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804, and died the following day at age 49. This interview draws on his letters, Treasury reports, and Federalist essays, imaginatively projected into a conversation set in present-day Oro Valley.