Alexander Hamilton and the Anti-Slavery Roots of the American Revolution

It was once better understood that the precondition for any nation’s durable survival resides in each passing generation’s capacity to recreate within their hearts and minds, the passion and ideas which birthed the institutions upon which said nation was brought into being. To the degree that the sacrifices, passion and ideals for a better world that animated an earlier generation, are no longer appreciated by future ages, that society loses the creative vitality and moral compass requisite to meet challenges both from without and within which may beset its path.

Such is the problem at the heart of the multifaceted crises befalling the USA today, as both the population and the leadership display very little semblance to those moral, and intellectual characteristics of its leading founding fathers- especially one most special and extraordinarily slandered leading figure without whose tireless efforts, the young republic would certainly not have survived its early years. If you haven’t guessed that figure’s name, it is Alexander Hamilton (1st Treasury Secretary) whose birthday we celebrate on January 11.

In this Rising Tide Foundation lecture, Nancy Spannaus (author of Hamilton vs Wall Street and President of American System Now) introduces the scientific revolution in political economy that Hamilton created in the wake of the revolution that has largely been erased from history books. This was a revolution involving a new paradigm of economic thinking never before seen in human history and yet which had vital precedents to the greatest traditions of Colbertist Dirigisme as well as earlier Cameralist schools that emerged out of the Golden Renaissance.

In his four groundbreaking reports to Congress in 1790-91, Hamilton argued that if the young republic would endure beyond its first decades, then certain sovereign rights of national banking, productive credit and full spectrum agro-industrial economic growth would be necessary to give the nation both economic as well as political sovereignty in the face of the globally extended British Empire.

In her class, Nancy debunks the popular oft-repeated slander that Hamilton’s ideals, life and heart were nothing more than veiled hypocrisy hiding just another pro-slavery aristocrat passing himself off as a revolutionary. Using rigorous first hand sources, Nancy demonstrates that this accusation is a false mythology cooked up by forces who have much to loose should the USA rediscover even at this late stage, its proud humanist traditions and constitutional system of economic thinking that would bring it into alignment with Natural Law and today’s multipolar alliance now shaping the New Silk Road.

Feature Image: The inscription ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother? ‘ produced by Josiah Wedgewood (member of Franklin’s Lunar Society of Britain) became the catchphrase of British and American abolitionists. Medallions (designed and commissioned by Ben Franklin) were sent to him in 1788 for circulation by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, of which Franklin was the president and Alexander Hamilton a leading member.