Free The American Future by Simon Schama Page A

the continent. Sizable French and British armies were already invested in their West Indies, attempting to put down slave rebellions and Creole discontent; their navies were still formidable presences on the oceans, capable of locking down American trade and blockading harbors should they choose.
    Though financially shackled by Congress, Henry Knox was all in favor of military readiness, starting with a school that would make future generations of skilled artillerymen, engineers, and officers of horse and foot. The two colonels—Hamilton and Knox—indulged in petty rows about ranking order, but they both thought that their personal military experience made them better judges of what was needed for America’s survival than the penny-pinchers of Congress. Hamilton and Washington worked together on the last speech that the president delivered to Congress in December 1796, which included his wish that both a national university and a national military academy be established. Privately Washington doubted Congress would ever fund it.
    He was right. But the idea didn’t vanish altogether. Already, in the early 1790s, West Point was being mentioned as a possible site for such a school. Knox had commanded the artillery bastion there, and Alexander Hamilton had actually been at the fort when Benedict Arnold’s conspiracy had been thwarted. For Hamilton, then, it was entirely right that this should be the place where generations of American cadets would be instilled with the imperative of vigilance. Where better to professionalize the need for military readiness, the virtue without which Hamilton feared the republic’s independence would be little more than a paper declaration? Should Congress ban the establishment and training of a peacetime army, Hamilton wrote, the United States “would then exhibit the most extraordinary spectaclethe world has yet seen, that of a nation incapacitated by its Constitution to prepare for defense before it was actually invaded.” He had a point, but it’s also true that temperamentally Hamilton was trigger-happy. As a boy in the West Indies, he had dreamed of soldiering for the empire and throughout his life had the impulsive streak that made his eventual death in a duel not altogether surprising. The avuncular Washington was not blind to Hamilton’s tripwire devilry, but it was hard for him to take against the lieutenant colonel who, bayonet in hand, had led the storming of the British redoubt at Yorktown, a maneuver that arguably ended the war.
    Alexander Hamilton was not just dash and danger. His postwar career, whether in office as Washington’s secretary of the treasury, or out of it, was spent thinking what kind of figure the United States (the two words of which for Hamilton were problematically weighted) would cut in the world. For Jefferson, the republic was supposed to be a marvelous new organism utterly unpolluted by the atavistic habits and warped customs of the old. It would resist the tendency that states, even those boasting parliamentary pedigree like Britain, had of sliding inexorably into oligarchic corruption and tyranny. And that meant it would have no need for professional armies of any size and should indeed always suspect their potential for political mischief. Pay no heed to jaded lessons from the past that insisted that states, like men, could never wean themselves from their habitual savagery. The United States had been born to refute the cynicism that a fresh start was not utopian, and to prove that it was entirely possible to live as a republic of free men and yet be a moral force in the world. War was at once the functional need and customary habit of aristocracies and despots. Do away with the latter, and you did away with the former. The coming of the French Revolution and Jefferson’s own witness of it in Paris only confirmed his belief that the mighty shift from despots to democracies would obviate the habitual need for