Actually, the question posed by our pompous friend was this:
I repeat my previous question to you:
Please list for me:
a) the "big bureaucracy" that Alexander Hamilton advocated and established...
I presented an excerpt from John Taylor’s New Views of the Constitution of the United States (1823), quoting Mr. Hamilton’s plan for a national government based upon the British model. Would you suggest that an American national government as proposed by Mr. Hamilton would NOT be a “big bureaucracy,” as compared to the specifically-limited federal government actually adopted?
On the whole he performed admirably, taking steps to put the country's financial house in order and building a sound basis for future development.
I would not suggest otherwise. And as Mr. Taylor observed:
“The frankness of [Mr. Hamilton’s] undisguised proposition was honourable, and illustrates the character of an attempt to obtain a power for the federal government, substantially the same, not by plain and candid language, like Colonel Hamilton's, but by equivocal and abstruse inferences from language as plain, used with the intention of excluding his plan of government entirely...”
I quoted this entire statement in Post #77, with the comments complimentary to Mr. Hamilton highlighted - something else our egotistical friend chose to ignore.
Politics in the early days of the Republic required the balancing of centralizing and decentralizing tendencies. A statesman would recognize this. An ideologue does not. Jefferson was a statesman in office and an ideologue in opposition and retirement.
Perhaps I can change your opinion:
“Whether we remain in one confederacy or form into Atlantic and Mississippi confederations, I believe not very important to the happiness of either part.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1804
Note the date - perhaps you will eventually come to view Mr. Jefferson as an ‘ideologue in office.’ Obviously, many Americans preferred (and continue to prefer ;>) Mr. Jefferson the “ideologue” to the nationalist alternatives...
The model presented by so many here of libertarian Jeffersonians and statist Hamiltonians does ignore the repression exercised by slaveholders. To be sure, such slaveowners could be Federalists or Jeffersonians, Whigs or Democrats...
And many here ignore the elitist tendencies of certain Federalists: allow me to post a few of Chancellor Kent’s comments in that regard, dated 1835:
“There never was such misrule. Our Tory rich men are becoming startled and alarmed at our downhill course. My opinion is that the admission of universal suffrage and a licentious press are incompatible with government and security to property...”
Apparently not all Federalists thought “universal suffrage” and freedom of the press a good idea.
;>)
...libertarians and capitalists fail to recognize their own fathers when they attack men like Hamilton, Clay and Lincoln.
Actually, what I recognize is something akin to ‘emperor worship,’ when self-described ‘freedom loving’ Americans ‘gloss over’ the unconstitutional excesses of any President – whether it be Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Clinton. Personally, I would suggest that ‘zero tolerance’ is an appropriate standard...
;>)
In the 1860s things looked differently. The results were still up for grabs. Certainly there was some talk of Lincoln the tyrant then as well, but one could also see the rebellion as the destruction of the nation and the Constitution, and the Confederate leaders as military expansionists seeking to create their own empire. It was their defeat that enabled apologists to portray them as libertarians and victims of government, rather than simply as another elite seeking their own state to rule over.
Zero tolerance? Lincoln used the methods the officials of any government use when they are direly threatened by rebellion. Davis made use of such methods, and so would any leader who wanted to suceed in a climate of Civil War. A Gandhian or Tolstoyan pacifist might have reason to reproach Lincoln, but Confederate partisans were as implicated in the state system as Lincoln. What makes so much of the anti-Lincoln talk so unconvincing is the insinuation that the methods of self-preservation that the Union -- like the Confederacy -- resorted to were the essence of Lincoln's philosophy and career, rather than the expedients governments use in extreme situations.
Things might be different if the rebels had taken another path to independence or if there had been agreed upon procedures for the dissolution of the union, but I don't see that as having been the case.
If I'd been alive in 1860, I don't know what I would have done. I suspect that where one lived had much more to do with what one decided than any logical arguments or documentary evidence. Had I lived in the Deep South I might well have joined my neighbors to fight the Confederacy. What I object to is not to the claim that the rebels had reasons for acting as they did and thought they were doing right. It's the repeated insistence that those who fought against them didn't have their own grounds for fighting which bear closer examination.