Free The American Future by Simon Schama

of drill and exercises for American troops. At Yorktown—the battle that ended the war—Hamilton knew from personal experience how much was owed to the excavation of mines and tunnels drawn straight from Old World texts and which had allowed American troops to move in close to the besieged British. “War,” he wrote in the same Federalist Paper, “is a science.” It would not be un-American to go to school to learn it.
    Even some of those personally cool to Hamilton agreed with him about this. As early as 1776, a more unlikely warrior, John Adams—who, however, could see in his native Massachusetts how tough a fight the war for independence would be—made a proposal to establish a military academy, meant to train officers who might be called on in times of emergency. No one—at least no one in Congress in a position to fund the idea—paid much attention, and some attackedit as incompatible with American liberties. After the war was over, in 1783, Hamilton chaired a committee to study the new republic’s military establishment in peacetime but knew that he would always run up against solid congressional opposition for anything ambitious. The volunteer army was stripped back to barely a thousand. But President Washington and more his brigadier general of artillery and first Secretary of War, the sometime Boston bookstore owner Henry Knox, continued to brood darkly on what the country might need for future preparedness. And much as they hated to admit it, American security began to face domestic as well as foreign challenges. The next five years put the reality of American federal government to the test by attacking its tax collectors and arsenals—in Daniel Shays’s 1786 rebellion in western Massachusetts, and in 1791 in the Whiskey Rebellion west of the Alleghenies where excisemen attempting to collect taxes on spirits were the target. Washington called out the militia to put them down but was not very confident about the loyalty of troops from the disaffected regions. It took militia from other states to deal decisively with the rebels. The president gloomily recognized the ironic parallel with what had happened before the revolution, with his bluecoats now playing the role of oppressor. The difference, he assured himself and the country, was that this time the taxes were being levied in the name of an elected government. (But of course the same thing was being said by British parliaments in the 1760s and 1770s.)
    Washington had no intention of using American soldiers against their own fellow citizens unless they had cast off their allegiance to the elected government of the United States. And he was sufficiently exercised about the threat to liberty posed by “standing armies” to hope that the foreign policy of the United States would stay aloof from Europe’s wars, so that the temptation to create a large army would forever be avoided. This instinct was Jeffersonian: the belief that if somehow Americans could turn west and mind their own farms, they would forever enjoy uninterrupted blessings of peace and liberty. But the pragmatic, Hamiltonian side of Washington knew this was just a pious hope, for the Machiavellianism of the European powers was unlikely to abate just because the United States had grandly declared a Novus Ordo Seclorum (a New Order of the Centuries) on the Great Seal. Nor were the Europeans likelyto confine their machinations to the old continent since there was too much at stake in the way of money in the new, where they were firmly lodged in Canada, Mexico, Florida, and Louisiana, not to mention the sugar-rich Caribbean. Even supposing the United States remained for a while in a purely defensive posture (and there were many, including Henry Knox, who felt that, ultimately, British and American co-occupancy of the land mass was unrealistic), the natural demographic increase of the country was bound to provoke friction with the other powers on