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The Cultural Offensive Behind Alexander Hamilton’s ‘Entschlossenheit’
— Or, Is American Culture Capable of Our Historic Role?

by David Shavin
June 2017

Preface


Wikipedia user BayCrest
The domestically engineered and manufactured maglev train in Changsha, China, has been in operation since 2016.

China’s recent miraculous accomplishment—bringing 600-700 million people out of poverty over the last couple of decades—was born out of a sense of mission, forged out of the horrors of the “Cultural Revolution”. Chinese leaders held themselves to a standard whereby they would have to master whatever it took to avoid the ideological traps—including both imperialism and feudalistic peasant-worship—that had wreaked such damage.

Recently, Russia had cause to regret the good faith that they had extended in 2011 to the British, the French, and the United States, when they suspended their judgment on the “right to protect” mission in Libya. There, Tony Blair had his own ‘ally’, Qaddafi, thrown to the mobs, and a nation-state assassinated. In the face of forces in the West building for first-strike, ‘winnable’ thermonuclear war, Russia made it very, very clear that they would not make that mistake again in Syria or anywhere else of yielding to such diseased thinking.

In both cases, leaders of sovereign nation-states looked into the face of a level of evil almost unimaginable and did not flinch. Rather, they accepted a mission from history, not one chosen for purposes of ‘career management’. History might appear harsh to those who accept a mission, but, actually, history has a way of not treating very kindly with those who flinch. Of note is the unforgettable example of Hillary Clinton’s disgusting cackle: When recalling the butchery of Qaddafi, as part of her abject submission to the Blair/Obama policy of destroying nation-states, she emits, “We came, we saw, he died! Cackle!”[footnote 1]

The “Bernard Lewis” plan of driving whole regions of the world back into the dark ages is not the type of evil that Americans like to consider. Habitually, Americans would rather babble about some greedy grab for oil or some other mundane evil. That a Malthusian ‘strategist’ would take the ‘larger’ view—that with only so much to go around, “We truly far-sighted ones must, regrettably, impose a culling of the human herd”—this level of evil induces outbreaks of blinking denial.

The world is fortunate that Lyndon and Helga LaRouche never blinked. That they asserted a requisite level of statecraft, that they planted their guidon—this has now borne fruit, with the resolute leadership of both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Were President Trump to rise above decades of gamesmanship and silly habits, and wrap his identity around what it would actually take to make America great again, it might appear miraculous—but, gentle reader, it would not be any more miraculous than you, every single day rising above the media-frenzy, and sustaining an intelligent and considered dialogue with your neighbor, your congressman, or even your family.

Now in 2017, it is presently a life-or-death issue as to whether the United States finds it within itself to recognize the essence of China’s offer to the United States for collaboration on the massive scientific and economic development projects, already begun with the ‘Belt and Road’. That policy has its roots in America’s Alexander Hamilton (and its continuation in the policies and actions of Lincoln and Roosevelt). This story concerns how Hamilton did not flinch; and how his collaborator, the American author Charles Brockden Brown, fashioned the most explicit cultural offensive for Hamilton’s mission—one modeled directly upon that of Brown’s contemporary, Friedrich Schiller— to conquer the disease of ‘flinching-before-unimaginable-evil’.

Hamilton smells Bonapartist fascism


Alexander Hamilton, 1755-1804

During Alexander Hamilton’s last seven years, a new level of evil was deployed against the American experiment—one that culminated, in 1804, in his assassination. Hamilton’s political collaborators, by and large, shrunk in the face of a level of evil that they didn’t properly understand or confront.

In the summer of 1797, the quartet of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Aaron Burr and James Monroe collaborated in a scurrilous attack against Hamilton, one that they personally knew to be false. They deployed their underling, Thomas Callender, to publish the charge that Hamilton, while Treasury Secretary, dealt in insider trading for his personal profit. The integrity of Hamilton’s actions, as the first U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1789 to 1795, was an issue way beyond a matter of so-called personal reputation. For the young republic, Hamilton’s demonstrated integrity constituted the prime delineation of the concept of “general welfare”: that leaders’ decisions in a republic could rise above matters of personal gain, and, rather, be made upon the basis of the general welfare of the population. To re-institute the cynical and greedy ‘dog-eat-dog’ behavior of prior (British Empire) times required the destruction of Hamilton’s character, and eventually, of Hamilton himself.

James Madison
 
Aaron Burr
James Monroe in 1817, the year of his inauguration.
 
Thomas Jefferson, portrait by Rembrandt Peale, 1805.

Earlier, in 1792, Jefferson, Madison, Burr and James Monroe had attempted to end Hamilton’s career, using the same corrupt ‘intelligence’—that Hamilton had practiced ‘insider trading’, secretly giving monies to one James Reynolds[footnote 2] to speculate on Hamilton’s behalf. Hamilton produced for them the letters from Reynolds and his wife, proving that Mary Reynolds had seduced him, and that James Reynolds had extorted the monies from him. At the time, Hamilton was assured by his accusers that they were mistaken and that, indeed, he has shown them it had been a private failing on Hamilton’s part. However, without Hamilton’s knowledge or approval, Jefferson had those private letters copied for his files for future use. Five years later, in 1797, when Jefferson had Callender publish the discredited ‘insider trading’ story, Hamilton didn’t simply congratulate himself for having a stupid enemy, one that had gone public with an easily discredited story. Rather, he highlighted the question as to what was behind such a reckless disregard for the truth. His public pamphlet, “The Charge of Speculation Against Alexander Hamilton, Late Secretary of the Treasury, is Fully Refuted”—though much maligned by ‘historians’ for Hamilton’s prizing truth over ‘career management’—opens with a completely clear, and shocking, answer to the question:

"The spirit of jacobinism, if not entirely a new spirit, has at least been cloathed with a more gigantic body and armed with more powerful weapons that it ever before possessed. It is perhaps not too much to say, that it threatens more extensive and complicated mischiefs to the world than have hitherto flowed from the three great scourges of mankind, War, Pestilence and Famine. To what point it will ultimately lead society, it is impossible for human foresight to pronounce; but there is just ground to apprehend that its progress may be marked with calamities of which the dreadful incidents of the French revolution afford a very faint image. Incessantly busied in undermining all the props of public security and private happiness, it seems to threaten the political and moral world with a complete overthrow. A principal engine, by which this spirit endeavours to accomplish its purposes is that of calumny. It is essential to its success that the influence of men of upright principles, disposed and able to resist its enterprises, shall be at all events destroyed. Not content with traducing their best efforts for the public good, with misrepresenting their purest motives, with inferring criminality from actions innocent or laudable, the most direct falsehoods are invented and propagated, with undaunted effrontery and unrelenting perseverance…"[footnote 3]

Think about what Hamilton’s opened with. The bloodlust of Jacobinism in France had peaked and, apparently, ended 2-3 years earlier. However, Hamilton, in 1797, cites it as “a very faint image” of a new Jacobinism, a transmogrified version of what people had hoped had faded away—but now, much bigger and much better armed. (Hamilton had identified this “Bonapartism”—or what later would be called “fascism”—perhaps before even Napoleon himself understood what was afoot.) Hamilton identified a deliberate sort of evil, one that, beyond banal greed or unorganized rage, chooses to organize genocide—rejecting the mobilization of the higher skills of mankind for their general welfare. This evil “threatens more extensive and complicated mischiefs” than “War, Pestilence and Famine.”

Neither Hamilton’s biographers nor his detractors wish to address, or even admit, Hamilton’s central point: He knows why such reckless behavior has broken out against him, and he finds it ‘of a piece’ with imperial, all-out war against the nation-state. The clearest ideological statement, at that time, of this evil was articulated in Parson Malthus’ 1798 production, “Essay on Population”.[footnote 4] Hamilton, above all others, knew what had changed about the world in the calling into creation of an actual republic, and he was not blind to the danger of the new strategic situation. Either the world would go forward (with Europe taking up some version of the United States’ policies) or the oligarchy would react by ratcheting up a level of evil designed to overcome this threat to their way of running things.


Schiller’s “Ghost-Seer” Comes to America—
Or, If Evil Threatens to Beat Good,
Do Good People Have to Become Better than Good?


Friedrich Schiller, 1759-1805

Friedrich Schiller’s “Ghost-Seer” was studied by a group of Federalist intellectuals in New York City in the 1790’s. Calling themselves the “Friendly Club”, they arranged for an English translation of the “Ghost-Seer” to be published in 1796. Their relationship to Hamilton’s targeting of the new level of evil is developed below; but first, the pertinent background on Schiller’s work.

Schiller’s 1787/8 serialization of his “Geister-seher” series gripped Prussia. King Frederick Wilhelm II, in 1786, had just succeeded the long reign of his uncle, Frederick the Great, and the new king appeared to be under the control of a couple of mystics (his Chief Minister, Woellner, and his Privy Counselor Bischoffswerder). Schiller’s audience was gripped and horrified, as they followed an aristocrat who seemingly defeats a series of intricate ‘mind-games’. However, precisely because of his newly-established (and completely-misplaced) confidence in his demonstrated rational prowess, he succumbs all that more overwhelmingly to manipulation and control!


Elisa von der Recke, 1754-1833

Schiller had been influenced by a widely-circulated and debated exposé of the premiere mystic of that time, Cagliostro.[footnote 5] In 1786, one of Cagliostro’s victims, Elisa van der Recke, of the Court of Courland[footnote 6], wrote both of her victimization, and of her breaking free from the brainwashing, due to the healing power of the Leibnizian optimism of Gottlieb Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn. Schiller then posed the necessity of a revolutionary transformation of the population’s aesthetic sensibilities, one that would root out the psychological weaknesses that such as Cagliostro would play upon. Evil might be more bold and extensive than imagined or desired, but the full powers of mankind were sufficient for the job, if the requisite optimism and passion for the future could be brought into play.


William Dunlap, 1766-1839

A talented young American, Charles Brockden Brown[footnote 7], recognized in the unprecedented assault upon Hamilton, the need to root out of American culture any “good ole’ boy” practicality that constantly flinched on the unique mission embedded in the founding of the republic. It was his closest friend and collaborator, Elihu Hubbard Smith, who brought an English translation of Schiller’s work to the printer—the copy borrowed from a third member of the “Friendly Club”, the theatre manager William Dunlap. Within months of Hamilton’s bold naming of the enemy, Smith became the Secretary of Hamilton’s New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and the 27-year-old Brown launched into what would be a vast literary offensive over 1798 and 1799. His first major novel, Wieland—Or, An American Tale, recast Schiller’s “Ghost-Seer” from Venice to Philadelphia.


Brown’s Knowledge of Hamilton’s War with Wall Street—
and of Wall Street’s ‘Phony Intelligence’ Operation


Charles Brockden Brown, 1771-1810

Brown had spent the previous decade in search of a mission. As a teenager, between 1785 and 1790, he participated in a Philadelphia literary club, meeting primarily in Ben Franklin’s home during his last years. Brown’s initial literary efforts were minor experiments, mostly left unfinished. Dunlap, and especially Smith, had to challenge him repeatedly, between 1793 and 1797, to take himself seriously and to live up to his talent.[footnote 8] However, it were likely that the bizarre attack upon Hamilton in 1797, and Hamilton’s unswerving stance, triggered Brown into his Shelley-esque “sacred rage”,[footnote 9] in defense of Hamilton—and on the offense for a republican cultural aesthetic.

Brown had a special insight into what Hamilton was facing. Two of Brown’s brothers worked underneath Hamilton at the Treasury Department from 1791-94. In particular, Hamilton assigned a very sensitive project to Armitt Brown in 1791. His responsibility was to examine the books of the U.S. government from 1786-89, the period of Hamilton’s predecessor, William Duer. Armitt Brown found what Hamilton suspected was there—fraud against the government.[footnote 10]

William Duer (1747-1799), contemporary portrait. Engraving by Max Rosenthal.

Duer served under Hamilton during the transition, but Hamilton had to dismiss him in early 1790, after only seven months. At the time, Duer was, indeed, practicing insider trading (feeding private investors with inside information in exchange for considerations). Further, Hamilton had suspected that Duer, during his 1786-89 management of the government’s finances, had commingled national interests with his own private interests. Then, on July 4, 1791, when Hamilton opened up the National Bank of the United States, the battle with the speculators was openly engaged. Hamilton assigned Armitt Brown the project of investigating Duer’s handling of the country’s financial affairs. The financial speculation reached a fevered pitch in January-March, 1792—a fever that Hamilton labeled “bancomania”.[footnote 11] Hamilton arrested Duer—not on the basis of his most recent (1791/2) behavior, but based upon the already prepared dossier on Duer’s 1786-89 misdeeds, research prepared by Armitt Brown, ready at hand. With the March, 1792 jailing of Duer (shortly followed by that of a couple of Duer’s colleagues), Hamilton popped the bubble, killing the first major assault upon the infant National Bank. Brockden Brown would, undoubtedly, have been intimately familiar with Hamilton’s generalship in these matters; and, also, very likely was privy to the speculators’ related attempt to blackmail and control Hamilton via the “Reynolds Affair”.

Indeed, there were plentiful links between Brown and Hamilton. One example: It is known that Brown was greatly impressed with Hamilton’s public intervention into a mob in 1795. The mob had been whipped up into a violent rage against George Washington and John Jay over their treaty with England. Hamilton boldly intervened into the mob, highlighted with his appeal, ‘we must respect ourselves’. Brown, obviously struck by Hamilton’s bold handling of the mob, then adopted as his own personal motto,“Respect ourselves!” Further, it was at this same time that James Lind (Brown’s future brother-in-law) was studying law under Hamilton. (It is very likely that they jointly witnessed Hamilton’s intervention into the mob.) Lind was another of the dozen or so members of the “Friendly Club”.[footnote 12] Again, in 1800, when Hamilton, as lead defense attorney, won a controversial murder case for his client, Levi Weeks, Brown immediately used it as the basis of a short story. However, these various links aside, the real, causal link between Brown and Hamilton involves Brown’s unique 1798/9 cultural offensive, prompted by Hamilton’s unique stance.


Brown’s Wieland, the Transformation, or, An American Tale
The Aesthetic Education of America


Christoph Martin Wieland 1733-1813

In 1798, Christoph Wieland was a well-known German author, one whose German translations of the collected Shakespeare had done much, along with Gottfried Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, to enrich the common language and to pull Germany out of the Middle Ages. Brown’s novel notes in passing that his fictional Wieland family of Philadelphia has some family connection with the famous author, Christoph Wieland. Around seventy years earlier, a young Wieland was orphaned in Germany, and, around 1730 or so, became an apprentice to a London merchant. Deprived of any systematic or rigorous study, he happens upon a Camisard tract left in his rented apartment.[footnote 13] Desirous of locating his role in God’s plan, he absorbs a personal link with his God. He becomes a farmer on the banks of the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia, has two kids, and does missionary work with the Indians for months at a time. Then, while communing with his God, he is, quite mysteriously, mortally wounded and dies. Brown suggests that, lacking a proper aesthetic education, man’s relationship with God is fundamentally mysterious.

The story primarily concerns Wieland’s two children, Theodore and Clara, when they are adults in the 1760’s. They are as desirous of doing good as was their father—but they are more literate, seemingly more educated. They have enjoyed the leisure to delve further into music and literature. However, the question is whether their increased studies have equipped them to deal with a mysterious evil. The evil takes the form of a manipulator of souls, one Carwin[footnote 14] He is described as one “engaged in schemes, reasonably suspected to be, in the highest degree, criminal, but such as no human intelligence is able to unravel: that his ends are pursued by means which leave it in doubt whether he be not in league with some infernal spirit; that his crimes have hitherto been perpetrated with the aid of some unknown but desperate accomplices; that he wages a perpetual war against the happiness of mankind, and sets his engines of destruction at work against every object that presents itself.” Quite a description! Isn’t conquering such evil characters enough to establish and secure the Republic?

However, this is the beginning of the deeper mystery. As in Schiller’s “Ghost-Seer”, Brown does not leave it there. It turns out that this very description of Carwin is provided by one Ludloe, the manipulator of the manipulator! Brown describes Carwin’s recruitment by Ludloe into a secret society, with strong suggestions of Jesuit and “Illuminati” conspiracies.[footnote 15] The evil of the seemingly all-powerful Carwin was a mask for something worse. As in the Schiller, the reader’s hard-won confidence in his own ability to unravel mysteries, is suddenly overthrown. How are these two well-meaning Americans, Theodore and Clara Wieland, to unscramble the web of manipulations into which they’ve been ensnared? Or, for that matter, how are present-day Americans, including the President, to get out from underneath ‘deep-state’ manipulations?


Adams vs. the ‘Deep-State’

On July 27, 1798, a week before Brown completed Wieland, he went to see President John Adams at the Battery, in New York City. (There is no record as to whether Brown was able to speak with him directly.) The ‘phony intelligence’ assault upon Hamilton in 1797 had crippled the new administration of John Adams. Indeed, though Hamilton’s strategic insights were solicited by Adams’ Cabinet, Adams himself seems to have retreated into a priggish reaction against Hamilton. Even Adams’ son, Charles, who had been a member of the Friendly Club, apparently distanced himself from his best colleagues.[footnote 16]


Moses Mendelssohn,
1729-1786
 
Gottfried Lessing,
1729-1781
Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, 1733-1811.
 
William Dunlap, 1766-1839

Two weeks earlier, in an increasingly factionalized Congress, the Alien and Sedition Acts had been passed. Adams’ administration was unable to fight their way through a British intelligence ‘disinformation’ operation, centered around the Edinburgh agent John Robeson’s work, “Proofs of a Conspiracy”.[footnote 17] Robeson’s argument, simply put, is that all sorts of occultist, secret societies were to be tolerated, and even employed; however, anything connected with the American Revolution, or with the supporters of that Revolution in Europe, was to be castigated and destroyed. In particular, the grouping around Moses Mendelssohn, Gottfried Lessing and Friedrich Nicolai were targeted for their efforts to raise cultural levels, as the key for building republics—exactly what Brown was involved in.[footnote 18] Americans were to forget what they fought for, to forget whom and what they had fought against, and, instead, get caught up in Napoleonic action vs. British reaction. Indeed, the Friendly Club had studied Robeson’s fraud (what Dunlap kindly described as, “at least a curious book”). Brown, in personal meetings, unsuccessfully tried to re-orient a couple of Robeson’s American victims, Jedidiah Morse and Senator Uriah Tracy. Morse (the father of Samuel Morse), who would become Robeson’s chief American proponent, simply would not be dissuaded. Tracy, a collaborator of Hamilton, showed no evidence of rising to a higher level.[footnote 19]

In 1798, the Friendly Club deliberated over Robeson’s “curious” work; held readings over Brown’s compositions, including Wieland; and studied various Schiller works, including “Cabale und Liebe” and “Fiesco”. Over the next year-plus, Brown would publish three more major novels, all worthy of examinations too lengthy for present purposes. However, mention might be made of one of Brown’s common themes of his works that echoed Hamilton: “Opinions, relative to property, are the immediate source of nearly all the happiness and misery that exist among mankind. If men were guided by justice in the acquisition and disbursement, the brood of private and public evils would be extinguished.”

We conclude with Brown’s seriously playful short story, entitled “Professor Walstein’s School of History”, published in “The Monthly Magazine and American Review” in 1799.

Schiller’s American Student

Brown playfully revealed himself as Schiller’s best American student! He composed a story, where his fictional Professor Walstein was given Schiller’s actual job title, Professor of History and Philosophy at Jena University. Brown chose the professor’s name, Walstein, invoking the historical Wallenstein, a famous Schillerian subject. Then, Brown’s opening paragraph suggests his own Friendly Club and their study of Schiller: “Walstein was professor of history at Jena, and, of course, had several pupils. Nine of them were more assiduous in their attention to their tutor than the others. This circumstance came at length to be noticed by each other, as well as by Walstein, and naturally produced good-will and fellowship among them. They gradually separated themselves from the negligent and heedless crowd, cleaved to each other, and frequently met to exchange and compare ideas.”

Then comes Brown’s sketch of Schiller: “Walstein desired the happiness of mankind. He imagined that the exhibition of virtue and talents, forcing its way to sovereign power, and employing that power for the national good, was highly conducive to their happiness. By exhibiting a virtuous being in opposite conditions, and pursuing his end by the means suited to his own condition, he believes himself displaying a model of right conduct, and furnishing incitements to imitate that conduct, supplying men not only with knowledge of just ends and just means, but with the love and the zeal of virtue. How men might best promote the happiness of mankind in given situations, was the problem that he desired to solve.”

In analogy with Schiller’s role for drama (e.g., “Joan of Arc” or “Mary Stuart”), Brown has Professor Walstein pose that novels, done properly, are superior to historiography, whereby artistic methods must move the readership beyond their destiny, to make history. Brown thought that America needed novels, on the model of plays—as the American republic required the development not of a handful, but of many, many statesmen and generals. Hence, for Brown, “a mode by which truth could be conveyed to a great number” was needed.

Brown proceeds to his playful invitation to consider his novels as an extension of Schiller’s plays. A ‘Brown’ character, named Engel, is introduced as Walstein’s best student, one who had best assimilated Walstein’s method of higher history. The description of Engel more and more approximates Brown himself. Engel composes his work on the Thirty Years War, based upon Walstein’s approach, “that the narration of public events, with a certain license of invention, was the most efficacious of moral instruments… Mere reasoning is cold and unattractive. Injury rather than benefit proceeds from convictions that are transient and faint; their tendency is not to reform and enlighten, but merely to produce disquiet and remorse. They are not strong enough to resist temptation and to change the conduct, but merely to pester the offender with dissatisfaction and regret. The detail of actions is productive of different effects. The affections are engaged, the reason is won by incessant attacks…”

Continuing, Brown summarizes the fictional Engel’s work on Weimar in the Thirty Years War—but his description is simply that of Brown’s own 1799 work of fiction, based upon the actual plague in Philadelphia, Arthur Mervyn; or, A Memoir of the Year 1793. The fictional Engel’s work (or Schiller’s actual work) on the 1618-48 debacle in Europe is re-cast in America, but now with an ‘American’ dynamic. Brown’s naively heroic character, Arthur Mervyn, is a young rural soul, who early in life comes to terms with his own mortality, arming him with a kind of fearlessness. When the horror of the plague turns neighbor against neighbor, family member against family member, Arthur’s honesty and courage creates an ironical, yet agonizing, contrast with the epidemic breakdown of social ties and morality. But, out of the horror, still, basic goodness triumphs.

After arguing for how his novels are the proper American continuation of Schiller’s plays, Brown characterizes his ‘division of labor’ with Hamilton: “There are two ways in which genius and virtue may labour for the public good…” One (Hamilton’s) is through noble and artistic methods of governing.[footnote 20] The other (Brown’s), “[B]y assailing popular errors and vices, argumentatively and through the medium of books… a change of national opinion is the necessary prerequisite of revolutions.”

Students of Hamilton and Brown

An example of “chutzpah” is said to be, the kid who murders his parents, and then tells the judge, “I deserve clemency, for I’m an orphan.” In 1799, Aaron Burr’s “chutzpah” would outpace Hamilton and Brown, with tragic consequences from which the nation has not yet fully recovered. Does this mean, somehow, that Hamilton’s leadership and Brown’s cultural mobilization were not capable of the breakthrough?

Hamilton acted on the basis that the formation of our republic on the basis of the general welfare principle provided the country a more than sufficient basis to develop our infrastructure and our population, bringing into play the latest scientific breakthroughs and inventions. However, until the oligarchical faction in Europe—centered around the “Venetian” faction in the City of London, particularly the East India Company—were put out of their misery, the entrance of the U.S. republic onto the world stage would provoke a nasty reaction. He would name it, “Jacobinism… cloathed with a more gigantic body and armed with more powerful weapons that it ever before possessed.”

What outpaced Hamilton and Brown? In January, 1799, Hamilton initiated one particular public infrastructure, a water project to wipe out the yellow fever epidemics that plagued New York City.[footnote 21] He consulted engineers on the design and parameters of a project to bring Bronx River water all the way down to lower Manhattan, leading him to estimate a capital project of $1 million figure. By April, 1799, Burr had hijacked Hamilton’s new Manhattan Company. In the New York State Assembly, he proceeded to: change the charter to divert funds from water projects to speculation (his infamous “surplus” clause); double the capitalization (completely independent of the needs of the actual water project); and then channel 90% of the doubled amount away from the infrastructure project and into Ponzi schemes. (The Bronx River water was left untouched; and the 10% spent on digging more wells in the same constricted area solved nothing, except to serve as window-dressing to buy time for the scheme.) On the whiff of fast riches, New York and New England Federalists were seduced away from Hamilton.


Thomas Robert Malthus,
1766-1834
 

For years, as lawyers in the same city, Hamilton had known Burr to be greedy and unprincipled in all sorts of shady land deals. However, in 1799, this was a new level of evil from Burr—wittingly sabotaging the city’s public health, knowingly sending citizens to their death. Burr was acting out the previous year’s ideological tract, Malthus’ Essay on Population, which had argued for swamps and mosquitos! (Malthus thought that settling the Irish near swamps would allow insects and disease to keep down the population.) Burr's money-making machine provided his and Jefferson's insurgent party the means of ousting the Federalists. Burr then attempted to leverage his bold scheme by displacing his partner, Jefferson. When Hamilton successfully intervened upon his Federalists in the 1800 Presidential election to refuse Burr’s scheme to steal the election, he argued that, however wrong-headed Jefferson was, Burr was a “myrmidon”! (That is, Burr was a “bee-person”, of a mindless and slavish species, selected by Zeus to repopulate the world, after the extinguishment of the human species. Burr would obey orders from the British Empire to extinguish the U.S. republic.) From 1800 to 1801, Hamilton’s ruthless characterization of the situation prevailed amongst just enough Federalists to stop Burr. The nation would earn the right to survive the small-minded evil of Jefferson. Hamilton, though, would never fully regain control over the Federalists or of the country’s direction.

Brown maintained his fever pitch of activity throughout 1799. Though his works were well received, it would seem that the Burr-centered insanity outpaced his cultural offensive. In 1799, had Federalists, and American citizens in general, sufficiently taken up Hamilton’s and Brown’s challenge on the type of evil facing the young republic, we wouldn’t have to face “Jacobinism clothed with nuclear weapons” today.

In 1804, Burr murdered Hamilton, then forty-seven years old. Within a year, Schiller died, only forty-four. Brown never gave up, but his last eleven years was never as intense as his 1798-99 burst. He was thirty-nine when he died in 1810. Burr pursued the British plan for a secession of New England plus New York, and then a Western secession ruled by Emperor Burr. When caught, he fled to Britain in 1807. His speculation vehicle, the Manhattan Company, would become Chase-Manhattan Bank, today’s Morgan-Chase conglomerate.

A national project to provide clean water for generations to come, with NAWAPA, as part of a worldwide co-operation to turn deserts into gardens and to earth-form the moon and Mars, may put Burr’s monster out of its misery, but it would bring a smile to the lips of Schiller, Hamilton and Brown.

Footnotes

back to text [1]. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/ ... _died.html

back to text [2]. Prior to sending his wife to seduce Hamilton, James Reynolds was a low-level operative in the speculation against the debts owed to veterans of the Revolutionary War. This involved convincing veterans that the government-issued promissory notes for their service were in jeopardy, whence he would buy the note for $0.20-0.30 on the dollar. In 1790, he was sent to Virginia and North Carolina by the New York City speculator, William J Vriedenburg. (How so-called historians miss identifying James Reynolds, prior to his wife’s 1791 appearance at Hamilton’s door, as an established operative for Hamilton’s opponents, is a mystery to this author.)

back to text [3]. It continues: “Lies often detected and refuted are still revived and repeated, in the hope that the refutation may have been forgotten or that the frequency and boldness of accusation may supply the place of truth and proof. The most profligate men are encouraged, probably bribed, certainly with patronage if not with money, to become informers and accusers. And when tales, which their characters alone ought to discredit, are refuted by evidence and facts which oblige the patrons of them to abandon their support, they still continue in corroding whispers to wear away the reputations which they could not directly subvert..."

back to text [4]. The work earned the good Parson employment as professor of political economics with the British East India Company.

back to text [5]. At the time of the expose’, Cagliostro was working to bring down the nation of France, via his manipulations of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, in what is labeled “The Necklace Affair”.

back to text [6]. Schiller’s story has multiple allusions to the court of Courland (on the coast of Latvia), thereby underlining for his readers the reference to the Cagliostro/Elisa case. Curiously, Elisa’s actual half-sister, Dorothea, the reigning Countess of Courland, became the mistress of Talleyrand - who, from his 1794-97 period in Philadelphia, was a profiler and opponent of Hamilton. In 1797, Talleyrand joined up with Napoleon, in what Hamilton described as the “more gigantic body” of Jacobinism. (Talleyrand would also share his favors with his mistress’ daughter—and yet another daughter of Dorothea became the mistress of Metternich. There was, indeed, something rotten in Courland.)

back to text [7]. Brown (1770-1819) was well-known and appreciated by Percy Shelley, John Keats, James Fenimore Cooper and Edgar Allen Poe – though almost completely unknown presently. Shelley read Brown’s novel, {Edgar Huntley}, aloud to his gathering in 1814. (Mary Shelley also listed two other of Brown’s novels as having been read.) Keats compared Brown with Schiller, ranking him above Godwin and below Schiller. Cooper remembered Wieland all his life. Poe rated Brown as one of the two best American authors.

back to text [8]. Brown had no problems thinking big. In 1796, the precocious Brown attempted to organize the Friendly Club around the United States staking its future on the mutual development of Russia and China!

back to text [9]. Percy Bysshe Shelley famously wrote that Peacock’s “anathemas against poetry itself excited me to a sacred rage”, provoking Shelley’s inspired “Defense of Poetry.”

back to text [10]. Duer was sort of a special ‘family’ problem for Hamilton, as Duer had married into the family of Hamilton’s wife, the Schuyler family.

back to text [11]. The more complete story is given at: http://www.schillerinstitute.org/educ/h ... 111/a.html

back to text [12]. Lind’s father, a collaborator of Hamilton, was the first Chaplain of the Congress and would later deliver the “Sermon on the Death of Alexander Hamilton”. In 1796/7, Brown and Dunlap helped Lind, the young law student, revise a play he had composed (subtitled “The Gallic Orphans”). After Linn died in 1804, Brown composed his biography, including in it Lind’s delightful work, “Powers of Genius”.

back to text [13]. Most likely, this is the 1707 “Prophetical Warnings” of Elias Marion—a British intelligence ‘fundamentalist’ manipulation of ‘oppressed minorities’—whereby France’s Louis XIV is cast as the ‘anti-Christ’.

back to text [14]. From Keats’ 9/21/1819 letter to Richard Woodhouse: “I have read one call’d Wieland—very powerful—something like Godwin. Between Schiller and Godwin. A Domestic prototype of Shiller’s Armenian. More clever in plot and incident than Godwin. A strange American scion of the German trunk. Powerful genius. Accomplish’d horrors.”

back to text [15]. Brown references the Jesuit role in Paraguay, very likely following Schiller’s lead. Schiller had edited J. C. Harenberg’s 1788 “The Rule of the Jesuits in Paraguay”, which appeared in Wieland’s “Der Teutsche Merkur”. It included a description of the abuse of religious power in the indoctrination and exploitation of the natives.

back to text [16]. Of some note, within a year or two, the more famous Adams’ son, John Quincy, would attempt his own translation of Schiller’s “Ghost-Seer”—though, curiously, he abandoned the project right before the critical transformation. Instead, Adams turned to translating Wieland’s Oberon. John Quincy Adams was quite a leader in many ways, but in this period, he did not master Wieland, the “Ghost-Seer”, or Hamilton’s “entschlossenheit” leadership. However, this is another story.

back to text [17]. Robeson’s construct, in essence, was itself merely an English-language derivation from the prior bogus report of Count Anton Pergen—the head of police and spy operations for the Hapsburg Empire. (Pergen was the man who targeted Mozart for elimination, and the man who concocted the ‘Illuminati’ boogey-man from the tales of the Bavarian Thurn und Taxis family’s secret police.)

back to text [18]. Besides the publishing of Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Elisa van der Recke, one of Nicolai’s landmark efforts was the publication of Wieland’s translation of the collected works of Shakespeare, the first ever translated into German.

back to text [19]. However, an examination of Tracy’s critical and contemporaneous “Monroe’s View of the Conduct of the Executive on the Foreign Affairs of the United States” might shed further light on Tracy’s acumen, and the level of his collaboration with Hamilton.

back to text [20]. Brown cites Walstein’s historical studies of two governors whose goal was “the general happiness”, Cicero and Pombal. (The latter was the Portugal’s prime minister, 1750-1777.) Brown relates that Walstein makes a study of Pombal’s struggle with the Jesuits, leading to the 1773 Papal ban on the Jesuits.

back to text [21]. Brown’s closest collaborator, E H Smith, the man who arranged for the publication of Schiller’s “Ghost-Seer”, had died, treating patients in the 1798 epidemic that hit New York City. (Brown also contracted the yellow fever, that September, but he recovered – and all this, as his Wieland went to publication.) That winter, Hamilton moved for public works to eliminate the recurring epidemics.