Books: A Prophet Revisited

ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND THE CONSTITUTION by Clinton Rossiter. 372 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.75.

Perhaps the strongest passion that can drive a historian to his typewriter is the urge to make amends to some great figure of the past who seems to have been unfairly denigrated. If the historian has himself helped previously to perpetuate the injustice, his new advocacy takes on the drama of a public conversion. These are the intellectual tensions that led to this reappraisal of Alexander Hamilton, and they make for unusually stimulating history.

In Conservatism in America, published in 1955, and in subsequent writings, Clinton Rossiter described Hamilton as "reactionary," and characterized his basic ideas voiced on the floor of the Constitutional Convention as "certainly not those of a man who knew and cherished the American tradition."

Hamilton's reports and speeches as Treasury Secretary, Rossiter once wrote, expressed a "rightism run riot."

Now Rossiter argues urbanely but urgently that the earlier Rossiter—with a host of other U.S. scholars—was wrong. It is a "myth," says the Cornell University historian, that Hamilton was a "fabulous reactionary" with views alien to the U.S. environment. Indeed, his "works and words have been more consequential than those of any other American in shaping the Constitution under which we live." Every schoolboy knows that Hamilton was the archfoe of the democratic Jefferson and the archfriend of aristocracy. But few Americans today realize that it was Hamilton who first elaborated the doctrine of judicial review, pointing up the power of the courts to nullify all laws that, in his words, were "contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution."

Toughness & Charm. Rossiter concedes Hamilton's long distrust of democracy; he does not try to justify Hamilton's disturbingly petty role at the Constitutional Convention (though he reminds readers that one famed snarl attributed to Hamilton—"Your people, sir, is a great beast"—is apocryphal). Rossiter concentrates instead on Hamilton's role in the ratification and first implementation of the Constitution.

Hamilton's best-known contribution to the ratification struggle, of course, was his authorship of most of The Federalist. Rossiter perceptively points out that there was surprisingly little disagreement between Hamilton and his coauthors, Madison and Jay. He writes: "The tough yet not despairing political theory that runs through Hamilton's 50-odd contributions is the same that carried him through his mature life." At New York's ratification con vention, it was Hamilton's charming, persuasive leadership that guided a pro-constitutional minority (19 of 46 delegates) "from the likelihood of defeat through the near certainty of stalemate to the actuality of victory."