Free The American Future by Simon Schama Page B

war—except as a last resort to defend liberty.
    Hamilton heard what he considered all this naive Jeffersonian optimism and rolled his eyes. Let Jefferson indulge himself in philosophical entertainment if it amused him, but let him not do so, Hamilton thought, at the expense of American security. It was childish folly to pretend that the political virginity of the United States would be sufficient protection against the predators who prowled the oceansand swarmed across continents with armies numbering tens, hundreds, of thousands. Had not Jefferson and the gentlemen who thought in his fashion observed what had become of the professedly peaceful pretensions of the revolutionary “ République une et indivisible ,” the “ grande nation ” that, while disclaiming conquest as the obsolete sport of tyrants, somehow had managed to occupy—and plunder—most of western Europe. Their war to “defend liberty” had become a transparent pretext for empire.
    Hamilton urgently wanted his nation to grow up. Unlike his reluctant co-Federalist John Adams and his bitter political foe Jefferson, he had no qualms about looking to the biggest success story of all, the British Empire, as an exemplary model of power. What—other than its unfortunate moment of American coercion and the tendency of its ruler to lose his wits now and then—was actually wrong with the British state? The answer was nothing! Britain had had the wisdom to accept its defeat and concentrate on consolidating its power where it mattered—against the French in Canada and India, on the oceans. Good for Mr Pitt! For Hamilton, it went without saying that there were certain instruments of economic and military heft without which a stance as a great power was unthinkable or at any rate unfeasible: a national debt and a bank of issue, which, as Washington’s secretary of the treasury, he resolved to establish in the United States. Hamilton noticed as well that although many commentators characterized old-regime France as top-heavy, the real machine of pure state power was in Britain. Its officers of revenue and excise—resources without which even the most virtuous of republics could not survive—swarmed over the country, virtually an army unto themselves.
    And then there was the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich—a mean and skimpy thing as military schools went and nothing at all to give the impression of a Britannic Prussia. But Woolwich still offered the rudiments of instruction in the military sciences, and it may be that Hamilton had heard of steps afoot to expand the education of arms more systematically. Or perhaps Hamilton looked at the breathtaking aggression of the French Republic and knew that it had nothing to do with the republican élan (as Thomas Jefferson, who had never fired a gun in anger, fondly imagined) and a lot more to do with the incentive of loot and power that Bonaparte nakedly held out to his soldiers. At least, he might have said, there is one citizengeneral who doesn’t speak humbug. But from his French friends in the Revolutionary War, he would also have known that none of the spectacular successes of the French Republic in the field could have happened without a prerevolutionary officer class intensively educated in military technology. Why should the United States, blessed as it was with all manner of such practical learning, deny itself a college where young men of aptitude could create a comparable elite of scientifically minded officers? Meritocracy was power. On that, at least, Jefferson and Hamilton could agree.
    But Congress continued to rule that such places were inconsistent with the “principles of republican government.” (And they would cost the nation money it could ill afford.) Instead of being an academy of virtuous, democratically minded citizen-soldiers, such a school was far more likely to breed a military caste, aristocratic in demeanor, separate from,