Money by David McWilliams

Author:David McWilliams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2024-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

13 MONEY AND THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

A bullet to the gullet

Talleyrand, despite his manoeuvrings and manipulations, died peacefully in his own bed. The same pleasure was not afforded to his American hero, the brilliant revolutionary and financial wizard, Alexander Hamilton.1 Talleyrand may have been a man without a moral compass, whom the left saw as betraying the revolution and the right condemned as betraying God, but by weaving his way through the different administrations, occupying key positions and helping stabilise France at critical moments in the post-revolutionary period, he was clearly a good judge of character. He’d seen the greats up close and of Hamilton, Talleyrand remarked, ‘I consider Napoleon, [British Whig statesman Charles James] Fox, and Hamilton the three greatest men of our epoch and, if I were forced to decide between the three, I would give without hesitation the first place to Hamilton.’2

When we think of revolutionaries, we tend to have in mind the romantic figure of the daring rebel. But following convulsions, revolutions need stabilisers, those who consolidate and bring order, including accountants and financiers. Talleyrand was such a man. So too was Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, who played a key role in supporting George Washington in the creation of the United States.

According to Duff Cooper, Talleyrand’s biographer, Talleyrand and Hamilton were both realist politicians who ‘despised sentimental twaddle whether it poured from the lips of a Robespierre or a Jefferson’.3 During Talleyrand’s exile in America between 1794 and 1796, these two stabilisers became friends – and, when setting up the US dollar and the new financial architecture of the American republic, Hamilton would learn from the French Republic’s mistakes.

On a cool July morning of 1804 in Weehawken, New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River, Hamilton found himself in a duel with the vice president, Aaron Burr. As they’d say in prison, both men had a bit of ‘previous’ – in fact they could not stand each other – but it is hard to fathom how a former Treasury Secretary and the standing vice president came to be facing each other, locked and loaded. In the end, Hamilton aimed to miss – or so we assume – allowing Burr to extract life-long vengeance on his more brilliant adversary. Alexander Hamilton, the man who introduced the dollar, and through this probably did more than any of the Founding Fathers to create a federal United States of America, took a bullet to the gullet. He died a few days later.

On a subsequent visit to Napoleonic France, Burr sought a meeting with the then omnipotent Talleyrand, foreign minister of America’s revolutionary ally. Talleyrand’s secretary relayed Talleyrand’s withering message: ‘I shall be glad to see Colonel Burr but please tell him that a portrait of Alexander Hamilton always hangs in my study where all may see it.’4 They didn’t meet.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.