Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government by Karl-Friedrich Walling

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Reviewed by Mackubin Thomas Owens professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, RI.

Throughout history, war has been the great destroyer of free government. It seems always to have been the case that the necessities, accidents, and passions of war undermine liberty. The forces that contributed to the collapse of free government in Germany, Russia, China, and Japan in our century are the same ones that destroyed the possibility of free government among the ancient Greeks, as catalogued by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian war. Why has the United States, in contrast, remained free while fighting numerous wars, both major and minor, both declared and undeclared, both hot and cold, during the Republic's 200 years?

In his remarkable new book, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Free Government, Karl-Friedrich Walling, an exceptional young political philosopher, offers an answer that contradicts the conventional wisdom. Mr. Walling contends that although the unprecedented ability of the United States to wage war while still preserving liberty is the legacy of the American Founders as a whole, it is especially the work of Alexander Hamilton. It was Hamilton, argues Mr. Walling, who deserves credit for the institutions that have enabled the United States to minimize the inevitable tension between the necessities of war and the requirements of free government, a considerable achievement, especially during the twentieth century, one dominated by the totalitarian threat to liberty.

This, of course, is not the conventional view of Hamilton. Contemporaries such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams saw Hamilton as a Caesar or a Bonaparte, bent on tyranny at home and conquest abroad. Many of today's historians accept this view. A case in point is Richard Kohn in his book, Eagle and the Sword: The Federalists and the Origins of the American Military Establishment, 1783-1802. According to Mr. Kohn, Hamilton was the most dangerous man of the founding era, the leader of an extreme faction of American militarists who rejected public opinion in favor of fear as the foundation of the new government.

In Mr. Kohn's view, Hamilton was the “personification of American militarism,” who exploited concerns about security for political gain. In the final year of the Revolution, he stimulated a mutiny and conspired to launch a coup against the Continental Congress. As Washington's Secretary of the Treasury in the 1790s, he used force to impose the law and build up the federal government. Finally, as inspector general under President John Adams, he tried to use the army to advance his own power and dream of greatness. This threat was unrivaled in American history until “the Reconstruction years and the era of the Cold War.” Only the vigilance of the Jeffersonians and the firmness of President Adams saved the infant republic from Hamilton's militarism. It was a close thing.

Mr. Walling rejects Mr. Kohn's view, painting a portrait of Hamilton as a soldier-statesman who deserved to be trusted with the sword of his country. For Mr. Walling, the unprecedented ability of the United States to combined great power and liberty owes much to the strategic sobriety of Alexander Hamilton. Contrary to the utopian vision of Thomas Jefferson and many of his allies, Hamilton understood that war was a fact of international life, and that the survival of the infant republic depended on developing and maintaining the potential to make war. He was, in other words, a strategist before the word was coined.

But Hamilton was not a mere militaristic state-builder along the lines of Frederick the Great or Bismarck. He was an 18th century liberal and therefore always understood the necessity of remaining within the bounds established by the Constitution. “Let us not establish a tyranny,” he wrote in 1798. “Energy is a very different thing from violence.” Nonetheless he recognized that war is the great destroyer of free government and that liberty is endangered by too little as well as too much power. His goal was to establish a republican regime both fit for war and safe for liberty.

To do so, Hamilton believed it was necessary to create a “republican empire,” something most of his contemporaries considered an oxymoron. The prevailing political tradition held that republics and empires were incompatible. Republics were free but short-lived because of instability arising from the presence of factions. Empires were secure, but security was achieved at the cost of freedom.

It was Machiavelli who suggested that security required republics to transform themselves into empires, as Rome had done. Hamilton agreed, but unlike the Florentine, he sought to achieve this transformation by consent rather than force or fraud. Such a republican empire, in the form of a powerful indissoluble Union, would keep war at a distance, thus avoiding the militarization that had led to the downfall of earlier free governments.

Mr. Kohn defines militarism as the predisposition to settle political disputes, both at home and abroad, by “force alone.” But Mr. Walling argues that what Mr. Kohn sees as militarism was strategic sobriety. The former is a character trait that republics must discourage as much as possible. The latter is a mode of thought that republics require as much as any other regime.

Hamilton realistically assumed that force ruled relations among nations. This was as true in the New World as it was in the Old. He hoped that if America could survive as an independent nation, consent would replace force in the New World. In the meantime, the volatile and uncertain geopolitical situation required that America take the steps necessary to defend its rights and honor. These included the establishment of credit and a national bank, the encouragement of manufactures, the creation of an expansible standing army and an ocean-going navy.

The essence of strategic thinking is the recognition that one must prepare not only for the expected, but also for the unexpected. As inspector general during the Adams administration, Hamilton prepared for the worst case, a land war against Revolutionary France. He was especially fearful of France because he believed that the French Revolution had spawned a type of war for which the United States was ill-prepared. Hamilton was not the only member of the founding generation who believed that American independence could be secured fully only if European influence was ultimately expelled from the region. But the steps he took to ensure this outcome caused Adams to label him a potential dictator and military adventurer, a judgment that Mr. Kohn seems to share.

In fact the war Hamilton feared did not materialize. While many credit Adams’ diplomacy for establishing peace, there is substantial evidence to suggest that a Franco-American war did not occur mainly due to the role of chance in preventing Napoleon from carrying out his grand plan to occupy Louisiana. It could have occurred later but for the slave revolt in Haiti that diverted the army destined for New Orleans. It was Jefferson's good fortune that Napoleon subsequently needed hard cash and was willing to sell Louisiana to the United States.

But chance is a slender reed upon which to base a nation's strategy. Indeed, “by the end of the War of 1812, Jefferson and Madison had learned the hard way, at the cost of several humiliating defeats, that Hamilton generally had been right—those policies that had seemed instruments of corruption in the hands of Hamilton now seemed the essence of prudence.”

The debate between Jefferson and Hamilton is usually portrayed as a Manichean struggle between “republican virtue” (Jefferson) and “monarchical ambition” (Hamilton). Mr. Walling shows instead that the real argument was between different modern conceptions of political virtue—“vigilance” and “responsibility.”

Vigilance is a jealousy on the part of the people that constitutes a necessary check on those who hold power lest they abuse it. As Jefferson wrote, “it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those whom we are obliged to trust with power.” While vigilance is a necessary virtue, unchecked it may lead to an extremism that incapacitates a government in carrying out even its most necessary and legitimate purposes, e.g. providing for the common defense. “Jealousy,” wrote Hamilton, often infects the “noble enthusiasm for liberty” with “a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust.”

Responsibility is the statesmanlike virtue necessary to moderate the excesses of political jealousy, thereby permitting limited government to carry fulfil its purposes. Thus in Federalist 23, Hamilton writes that those responsible for the nation's defense must be granted the powers necessary to achieve that end. The debate between vigilance and responsibility is manifest in the controversies between a weak confederation vs. a stronger national government; strict vs. broad construction of the Constitution; a weak vs. a strong executive; the militia vs. a standing army; judicial review vs. popular sovereignty; and even agriculture vs. commerce and manufactures.

Understanding the controversies between Hamilton and Jefferson as a quarrel between different virtues rather than between virtue and vice enables us to recognize that both sides were partly right. The United States is most successful when it establishes a balance between the twin virtues of vigilance and responsibility. As Mr. Walling observes, Hamilton certainly stretched republican principles as far as he believed they could be stretched in defense of republican government, but he was no monarchist bent on corrupting the American Republic. He was instead an advocate of the rule of law over the passions of the many and energetic government as the “surest guardian of liberty.”

Mr. Walling brings a tremendous degree of learning to this study of Hamilton and the problem of national security in a liberal republic. As a political philosopher, he demonstrates a unique grasp of not only the political thought of the modern and Founding eras but also classical political thought. Thus, he is equally at home with Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hamilton, Jefferson, Thucydides, Aristotle, and Shakespeare.

This is a book that Hamilton deserves. As Mr. Walling points out, Americans are still free for reasons that Hamilton explained. “More than anyone of his time, [Hamilton] envisioned and set in process the chain of events that would enable the United States to lead the free world against twentieth-century regimes far more militaristic and dangerous to the rights of man than Revolutionary France.” It is unthinkable that the United States could have triumphed in this century without having become Hamilton's republican empire.